I have thought about ladders, and over the last four or five years I have made some.
The whole thing may have arisen from cleaning the gutters or some other patchwork chore related to holding the house together. What emerged from my ascents and descents, bruises and strains was an awareness of the ladder as a sculptural framework that regulates motion, and to some extent, emotion. I might have felt aspiration as I toed tentatively yet deliberately upward, toward the peeling patch of paint under the eaves. I might then have felt exasperation as I discovered that I hadn’t brought the scraper with me and now had to gingerly make my way back to the ground.
There’s nothing like having one’s nose up against a rung to encourage contemplation, especially when it’s going to be there for a while. I pondered ladder-ness as a sculptural premise. Big, little, red, green, yellow? How much detail? Would a ladder sculpture be enhanced by the inclusion of cleats, rods and other such? Was there an acceptable level of abstraction? What would be the point?
The aspirational caught my attention first. I had wandered through a business accessory store and noticed all the gold plated knick-knacks. Perhaps there was a market for little gilded ladders celebrating the corporate climb. Not my persona. But an idea did emerge: organizational or social climbing tends to be an uneven affair and the rungs could be spaced to reflect that. Now things were free to float.
The level of abstraction was set at simple stiles (love that term) with rectangular cross sections, and dowels. Then it was time to deal with the proportions. I wanted the viewer to respond to the ladder in a visceral and empathetic way. Size and rung spacing were vital as an excess of variation could cause the ladder identity to fall apart. Small ladders are simply something to look at. Rung spacing spells the difference between significant and merely decorative. I ended up making an eleven-foot ladder in white for a group show and it was clear that these objects needed to be at a human scale.
Image captions: 1. A golden ladder model; 2. Ladder at group show; 3. Ladder that fell into decorative category; 4. Ladder with two interconnected rhythms
Since then I have pushed the theme around a little, looking for an opening to something new. One can vary how the ladder is affixed or upon what it is leaning. The ladder could be extended to some improbable degree. A concept would be to make one five hundred feet high. A person needs to remember that a ladder in a public space would likely constitute an attractive nuisance. To counter that I pasted together a proposal to affix a ladder high on the side of a downtown building. The ladder would begin and end in thin air. I do know that I want to make one of steel and paint it some institutional color.
The ladder fits into the overall theme of linkage and there are possibilities in that direction. I would like to know what your thoughts and ideas are on this matter.
Jay,
I love how you bring artistic attention to these functional objects like chains and ladders.
What I’m thinking is along the lines of what someone pointed out with chains: that they imply linking two things, or possibly restraining one thing. A ladder is for getting somewhere (usually up, unless you’re crossing crevasses on a glacier). How does the destination influence the ladder? Do your ladders imply destinations? The golden one makes me think of having to climb up to the cloud where the pearly gates are (damn, I thought I’d just kind of float up — oops, probably just killed my chances).
There’s also the nature of the journey up. To use the brown one I’m really going to have to strecth myself at a few points in order to make it. The last white one will involve a lot of annoying small steps at different heights as I make my way.
By what they say about journey and destination, your ladders create a world.
Steve:
Thanks for the kind words. Frankly the ladders create a world of storage issues.
I had measured the height of the wall at the gallery before making the white ladder to order. The idea, which does not come across in the photo, was to have the ladder bump into the ceiling in a go-no-further fashion. The where from and whereto that you bring up are really the future of the mode for me. I like to imagine a ladder set against an outsized and otherwise featureless wall and photographed in that Italianate manner that I remember from old photo magazines. Just it and it and maybe a street mutt raising its leg to pee.
A ladder with just one rung…
Steve:
Forgot to mention…the pearly gates await you. Is that not what was appearing over the Bridger Mountains?
To hang a gleaming steel ladder high up on a tall building – inaccessible from the ground and reaching nowhere – is a great idea.
A ladder lacquered in shiny red may be fun.
Of the selection shown here, I favor the golden, spiritual and the 2-rhythm ladders.
You inspired me to translate maintenance jobs into something that intrigues me.
Jay,
It’s good to see the gathering of your ladders. I like the tricks they play on my mind.
I’m thinking about step ladders with variable supports as well as rungs. A step ladder that has only one back leg instead of two — the sense of dis-balance gives me shivers.
Hauling around ladders becomes a big deal when you have a small car. What if your ladder was wider than it is long — only perhaps two feet long, mounted at a ten foot height. Ladders of impossibilities.
I’m reading Sean Scully and looking at some of his stripe paintings. His insistence that his brush strokes and painterly surfaces humanize his work makes me think of your horizontal rungs with their uneven (and humanizing) spacing.
I have trouble with certain kinds of regularity — I can’t master measuring and regular intervals without a great deal of sweat and tears; if I were to make a ladder, it would have rungs that angled up or down, sending my foot into impossible contortions and perhaps flinging the user off into space.
I am bemused that your ladders could set up such a foolish train of thoughts as I’m having. What about a train of ladders — or ladders on wheels/train tracks — forced horizontal.
As I have gotten older I’ve gotten more acquainted with ladders. I used to pull up a chair or footstool and reach up high to do the chores of height. But now I’m a bit too fragile to risk having the chair tip over with me, so I try to work properly, with a correctly sized ladder. But my new studio has a height that makes standard sized ladders worthless — too high or too low. We squeezed in a cherry picking ladder to put up some lights, but it bruised the ceiling.
Right now roofers are working on our hundred year old house, a 3-story building with a steep hip roof, set very close to the neighbor’s house and surrounded by dense thickets of trees. The roofers literally scamper up and down the ladders, sometimes carrying sheets of plywood. Their agility and strength astonishes me, as do the ladders themselves, which seem to bow a bit under the weight and movement. Very different from the measured heavy tread of the guy who insulated the attic –we thought he might break the attic stairs (as well as himself) as he heaved himself up them, slowly, painfully, heavily. Ladders seem to take on something of the character of their users — which makes me wonder about yours….. (insert snort, please)
Forgive the stream of consciousness.
Birgit:
For some reason the red lacquered ladder sounds like something that Oldenburg might do or that could be devised as a Brobdingnagian sucker, taking years to devour, one disappearing rung after another.
That’s what I love about this: so much to do and so little time.
which makes me think of a ladder that rises straight out of a dug grave.
June:
Glad you approve.
The one-legged step ladder would have to be very narrow overall and the back leg bowed a little by its own weight. There would be a palpable precariousness about it that would render its potential utility preposterous.
There were those in grad school who liked to make somewhat improbable objects: a hunters bow drawn back taut with the bowstring held together in the middle by a feeble safety pin, etc. Your idea could be massive rung and stile just held from crashing by that skinny little stick like a Wiley Coyote trick set for the Road Runner.
This post is doing exactly what I hoped, as the ladder thing was languishing a little. Now I can see a vertical xylophone with tubes as rungs. The player would have to climb up and down the “rungs” to get at the next one to hit. And then the rung would be rung I guess.
speaking of the railroad idea: there’s a sculpture over at Oberlin, O. where a set of railroad tracks rise out of the ground in memory of the Underground Railroad – Oberlin being one of it’s major stops.
As your imagination wanders afield here, you may notice forks in the road: one ladder concept being sufficiently different from another to warrant a separate sort of category for it.
Jay,
Fascinating – when you manage to find artistic concepts in mundane objects – you manage to project the whole concept into a new level of objectivity. I do not think I would be looking at a ladder in the same way anymore – after reading your post… The decorative ladder is a good one – mainly because of the deep dark veneer. The golden one bespeaks wealth and social climbing. How about a ladder made of different materials – starting with rope braids at the bottom, graduate to wooden rungs, then plastic, then bakelite, then metal, then carbon composite, then something else (maybe nanotubes joined together) – the list could go on – it then could be an allegory to our progress and a salute to our march over the world of material science that provides so much of our creature comforts… One of the greatest functions of modern art was to show the presence of art in everyday things and you have managed to accomplish that very well with this concept. I hope you continue your explorations in this theme or should I say continue climbing…
Sunil:
And here I thought I might get away with making these things on the cheap. Was merrily checking off the list of ingredients for your suggested unit until I got to the carbon composite. How does a burnt sausage sound? And it’s the nano- part of the nanotube that might pose difficulties. I would opt for an identifying sign pointing in the general direction of the putative entity.
Your concept of progressive embellishment puts me in mind of some Mogul paintings that I may just imagine that I saw. I tend to remember renderings of bejeweled ladders employed to help the rajahs mount their hunting elephants. Utility rendered sumptuous is its own raison d’etre.
In terms of red-lacquered, I had something more delicate in mind – Asian.
I was born in the city Oldenburg in the district Oldenburg.
Birgit:
Now that I can visualize the red lacquer better, would it be embellished in some way?
For some reason I tend to encompass red lacquer and rampant dragon designs in a single thought.
I believe that you had mentioned your affinity for the dunes of Michigan as being related to your youth along the North Sea. Claes, however, is maybe Swedish.
Chinese dragons would make the ladder too gaudy. Let keep it in Japanese simplicity.
Ladders turned 90 degrees could become windows for ‘self caricatures’.
C. Oldenburg was born in Stockholm. Oldenburg in Oldenburg is 35 miles south of the North Sea Harbor Wilhelmshaven where I grew up.
Birgit:
Lotus designs then?
That will be beautiful.
Looking over the comments, I may have another.
The combination of Sunil’s comments and an earlier post about craft vs. art put me in mind of that file of creatures, man at the head and some slouch bringing up the rear, so often shown to illustrate evolution. In this case the progress of handiwork from mere craft to fine art would be shown in a sequence that might start on the left with something humble and covered in that low-fired confetti glaze, and conclude on the right in a dazzling demonstration of Pollockian drizzle. Or we might have some stitch-by-number number on the left with an Underwoodian synthesis on the right. Not to offend: just trying out some linkages.
Actually, it is my devout thesis that art is a bridge, however flimsy or stout, between this question mark of an existence and some other, more aesthetically-resolved, realm. Would it not be grand to do a ladder, Jacobian in its ability to get you from here to there?
And yes, June, my rungs, too, are staggered – less so daily by my own volition.
I like them, Jay. I think you get a good balance between the conceptual and the physical. What about a ladder that lacks the vertical support on one side? . . . Yes, I can see a lot of exciting possibilities here. That’s part of what makes it a cool project, the viewer can in a sense participate in the thought aspect of the experiment.
Karl:
Which I am finding very stimulating.
Your suggestion makes me think of those ladders used by the pueblo people that consist of a central pole with staggered projections out each side. In your case, I imagine that you are imagining the scenario in which one’s conditioned response to a ladder format is modified. Do you see the rungs as broken off, or simple cantilevered out?
Wow. It’s so interesting that one object can bring up so many associations and ideas. As I read this, I thought of the story in the Old Testament about Jacob’s dream of the angels going up and down the ladder (I guess the ladder’s been around a long time!). Also, the superstition that it’s bad luck to walk under a ladder which then made me think of an exhibit of a ladder that looks like it goes through the wall and leans out far enough that people can walk under it. How many would do so?
Ladder as biography…very cool.
New inspiration for you, Jay: Helmut Smits. Perhaps brilliant, but not very functional.
Steve:
My thanks. It’s fun to see somebody mix themes as does our Helmut Smits. I certainly like his multicolor flag – it works on a lot of levels. Charles Ray came up in my mind for some reason, even though his and Helmut’s work is not that parallel.
Smits might be a good subject for a post, as his shown work raises a number of issues.
It would be helpful if there were some links as to where to buy them. I’m looking for a decorative ladder now.