Black & White

Michael Amsler

Shadows and Light: The static kinesis of filmmaker Michael Rudnick’s sculptures resonate with the vintage hand-cranked work of the Lumière brothers.

Artist Michael Rudnick goes back to future

By Gretchen Giles

THE CONTRAPTION that filmmaker and sculptor Michael Rudnick is standing next to doesn’t reveal itself easily. A cylinder constructed of hardware cloth–that fencing most commonly seen around bug lights and saplings in city parks–is set atop a horizontal bicycle tire that turns when the motor to which it is wired is switched on. Cut from the square frames of the hardware cloth are little figures that lean and leap and leer from their individual cells, each caught in a different and minutely separate moment of movement.

But when, in this darkened room of Santa Rosa’s California Museum of Art, Rudnick switches on the “contraption,” there is more to look at than the eye can literally hold. Casting swift shadows on the walls, the cylinder turns rapidly, the figures appearing to bend, twirl a circle on a pole, or jump rope. The light trained on the images flicker 24 times each second, adding a giddy hallucinatory quality to the show. Well, actually, to the film.

Because in this age of new media squawk boxes–when video screens atop white pedestals show tape loops made with the rarefied technology of the late 20th century–what this sculptor-turned-filmmaker-turned-sculptor-again does is to deconstruct the whole notion of what a film is, until we’re back with the Lumière brothers in the stone age of cinema.

Hand-cranked movies, anyone? Rudnick’s made three such looping devices.

Examining the driving qualities of motion, narrative, and the relationships of image to viewer, Rudnick–with East Bay sculptor Lucy Puls, whose exhibit “Diction” captures thrift-store girlhood in resin and tulle–shows his “Wire Works” through March 1 at the museum.

“I think that taking my films out of the small venue, the traditional venue, and putting them in non-traditional venues is why I’ve decided to go beyond film,” says Rudnick, a San Francisco-based artist who has taught at UC Davis and who has run the alternative cinema NoNothing in the city for the past 15 years. “I thought that it would be nice to see light and expose my work to a lot broader audience other than at just art houses.”

Enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute as a sculptor because he spied a good-looking woodshop through the window of the school, Rudnick transferred to filmmaking when he learned that the only working woodsaw in the institute belonged to the maintenance crew. In spending years making experimental works, each of them dealing more abstractly with the traditions of cinema, Rudnick dismantled both the equipment and his notions of film in the process.

“I was attempting to make films that were sculptures, to make films that had a three-dimensional quality to them. Basically, what I did was to take apart projectors and make them into sculptures. And through doing that, I learned a little bit about electricity and lights. But,” he chuckles, “I don’t own any tools and am really scared of them–I’d get shocked all the time. The technology aspect wasn’t the driving force at all. It got in the way and I had to overcome it. I continued to just try to strip away at all of that technology,” he says, pointing to his hardware cloth constructions, built in 1992. “I wanted to actually get to the point where I could make a sculpture that works as a sculpture or that has that aspect of working in motion, other than just sitting there not doing anything.”

Rudnick hasn’t been just sitting there not doing anything, either. His three hand-motored film loop machines are being used by visitors at San Francisco’s Valhalla of art and science, the Exploratorium, and at two other institutions. “I simplified [film] so much,” he says, “slowed the mechanics, demystified, and showed the relationship between individual frames, which has really become my interest. It’s something you can’t do when you’re watching a [traditional] film, but it’s the way I go about filmmaking now.

“To put things together image by image, and to think that the cutting doesn’t happen at cuts–it happens at every frame. Every frame is distinct. So in these loops that I made, every image is different, but there is an overall similarity. They work on both levels: frame-to-frame or as a story.

“Some people spend only two to three minutes with it,” he says, noting that others spend up to an hour. “Everybody who interacts with it is going to have a different experience, and I like that idea. It’s OK if you want to go through it fast or if you want to go through it slow. That’s not important to me. I like that fact that it has a tactile quality, whereas if you’re working with video or the electronic mediums, you have to use this machine, and I don’t feel that you have the same kind of control. I like the idea of getting in there with my hands.”

RUDNICK IS ALSO AWAITING final word on a patent application for an animation device he constructed “for pennies,” using materials found in most home kitchens. Because of the pending patent, he declines to specifically reveal his invention, saying simply that “it doesn’t involve motors. … It’s something that I knew deep down existed. In the end, I knew that it was something I was looking for.”

Once the visitor grasps that the three twirling, light-driven, animated cylinders whirling away in the museum’s black back room are intended to be sculptural films, ones whose stories are trapped in the cylinders, forever repeating the same actions, one begins to wonder what the rules are. What qualifies as a film; what as a sculpture? Does a story need be told–and indeed are three plotted stories playing themselves out in the shadows and light on the wall?

“I have no notions about what the limits are,” Rudnick replies. “I know that I have to make sure that I’m not slipping backwards. You can look back and see how some work reflects earlier thinking, and that to me is a starting point. But there are,” he repeats, “no limits.”

“Wire Works” and “Diction” are celebrated with an opening reception on Friday, Jan. 16, from 5 to 8 p.m. at the California Museum of Art. At the Luther Burbank Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Lucy Puls gives a gallery talk Jan. 30 at 8 p.m.; Michael Rudnick speaks Feb. 7 at 2 p.m. Admission is $2 for non-members. 527-0297.

From the January 15-21, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Buddhist Beauty

Michael Amsler

Sandbox: Visitors marvel at the nitty gritty work of sand-painting monks.

Monks create mutable mandala

By Gretchen Giles

WITH A CHOCOLATE CHIP cookie stuck solidly out of his mouth like an elongated third lip, a young boy of about 10 with sandy-colored hair and a freckled face stretches his hands out over a clear sheet of Plexiglas, momentarily oblivious to the steamy press of the crowd or the sweatshirted friend standing beside him.

Protected below the sheet is a religious icon, a sacred mandala made completely of colored sand, on which two Tibetan monks have labored at Santa Rosa’s California Museum of Art five days a week, eight hours a day, for over a month, using small brushes and slender metal tubes to gentle their materials into place.

Resting on a raised platform some four feet above the ground, atop a six-by-six-foot red pedestal built by local painter Alv Wilenius, the circular mandala features reproductions of skulls, tigers, flames, billowy white scalloping, rainbowed gradations of color, and mysterious images relevant to Buddhism. At opposed corners of the square pedestal are Tibetan words elegantly scripted in black sand on the red surface.

In the mandala’s center is a small square blue box, rising some three inches from the work’s surface. The grit of the sand glitters under the strong focus of the museum’s track lighting, giving the mandala an appealing sugary quality. In fact, seen from a step back, the piece has the sweet-toothed beauty of a gorgeous topping to a party cake.

“Cool,” says the boy, as he points down to the Plexiglas. “No glue, no nothing. Just sand.”

Taking a sip of sparkling apple cider from a paper cup, his friend nods, their two blonde heads close together for a second. “Cool,” he echoes solemnly.

ACTUALLY, it was anything but cool Jan. 5 in the museum’s main gallery as hundreds of people hotly pressed in to view the two monks from Kathmandu destroy the work that they had so painstakingly created.

As a tribute to the members of Sebastopol’s Healing Buddha Foundation–a local sangha devoted to Lama Shakya Zhangto’s integration of ancient tantric principles and healing techniques–who have raised some $100,000 to help the monks of the Segyu order purchase the land on which their languishing monastery is situated, the mandala was erected and destroyed in the name of beauty.

Established in 1419, the Segyu monastery was ravaged in 1959 when the Chinese invaded Tibet. Forty monks survived the razing and fled on foot across the Himalayas to India. Eight of those monks are alive today, able to accommodate only a few novices in their cramped and reduced quarters in Kathmandu, their lineage of learning endangered. When Lama Zhangto learned of their plight, he helped two of the order travel here to raise funds.

The fleeting glory of the mandala is their thanks.

Suddenly the monks, clad in red and gold robes, appear alongside their creation. Speaking no English, they firmly rub the cheeks of the “Cool” kids, moving the children gently aside to get close to the mandala. Zhangto motions the men to join him in the center of the room, and after a brief introduction he begins to speak of the importance of recognizing the small brilliant beauty of each and every moment. The crowd, peopled with children, seekers, older folks, and local artists, quiets down on the floor or leans against the walls.

“To be human is not to just carry a head or hair or clothes,” Zhangto says, “but to have a mind and to see. You can see in various ways: You can see with a mind full of afflictions or you can see in a state of joy. If you see with your mind afflicted, you see nothing, just distraction.

“America is the most wonderful country in the world, but we are not happy. Maybe we can be happy for a couple of hours–maybe,” he says with a mischievous grin, adjusting his red- and saffron-colored robes, “when we have a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream–but the rest of the time, we are seeking more.

“All of this work,” he says, gesturing toward the mandala, “was done with joy and happiness, with love and care. In a few minutes it will be gone with love and care. But the experience will remain.”

Exhorting the listeners to absorb the “seeds of beauty” planted in the mind by viewing the mandala, Zhangto motions the monks to the pedestal to begin the destruction. The Plexiglas lid is removed, and the younger of the two carefully works at a smudge of black sand left near the Tibetan writing, honing it down as though the whole piece weren’t poised for erasure.

The older monk rings a bell and begins pinching off small piles of sand, taking from each side with geometric precision. He places these small grains onto a slender silver disc now held by the younger man. Next, holding a silver globe reminiscent of an incense dispenser used in the Russian Orthodox tradition, the older monk begins to score the mandala. The grit grinds loudly against the table.

The crowd, heretofore so silent and respectful, grows oddly restive as the sand images are ground down. Perhaps it is the horrible thrill of seeing something of such rarity and time being literally rubbed out.

“Down in front!” a woman demands. “Can you please move somewhere else?” another asks a video camera operator. “I can’t see!” someone complains from the back.

On grinds the sand, raising a fine powdery dust from the table as the monk vigorously scrapes each scallop, each tiger, each brilliantly wrought flame down into a fine grey mass.

Fireplace tools are brought to the pedestal. All three monks, Zhangto included, sweep and fine down the sand, piling it up like a homemade crematory for deposit in an ordinary florist’s vase. The vase is wrapped in white silk, tied, and double tied–Zhangto pulling scarves from his sleeves like a magician. Thus shrouded, the vase is placed back upon the blue box, the lone surviving artifact of the mandala. Tradition dictates that the sand be returned to the sea.

Zhangto turns to the crowd. “Those beautiful colors when mixed together are grey,” he observes. “If we cloud our mind with conflicted emotions, it is grey. But,” he pauses to smile at the hundreds of faces looking expectantly at him, “if we allow ourselves to think clearly, we can see all of those beautiful colors.”

All in the mind.

From the January 8-14, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.