MEDIUM: Wood.
DIMENSIONS: Height 37 1/2" , width 5 1/4" , depth 3 1/2"
REMARKS:
This piece grew out of its material in a strange way. The wood is strongly grained: bands of normal looking wood alternate with iron-hard striations that are virtually impervious to a knife. Embedded here and there are veins of liquid pitch. It is almost as if these were squeezed out of the once-live wood as the graining turned to stone under geological pressure. Like oil deposits.
I think of something to break up and counterbalance the dominant linear flow of this grain. Something round.
Round things in a hard, stringy medium. Of course -- Ray Olson's knobby knees! I hadn't thought of these knees for years.
In my highschool gym class, where there were no last names beginning with P or Q, Ruyle sat next to Olson, a long-distance runner a few years older than I. Every day at some point during roll call I would look past my pink, rounded, quasi-pubescent legs to the scrawny, iron-sinewed knees of this running machine. In particular I would focus on the lateral condyle of the tibia, where a slip from the tendon of the biceps femoris is inserted. On Olson, this was a ball and tendon arrangement that hung outboard like a crane in the wind.
Was this destined for me as I got older, I wondered -- a separation of my tissues into an articulated deconstruction like Olson's? I had read Poe's "Telltale Heart", and thought I could be easily hamstrung or otherwise betrayed by such "Telltale Knees".
Mad, you say? Not as mad as that certifiably insane Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who describes a kindred interest:
"Another of my passions was for collecting trouser-brace fasteners, something subconsciously connected to my loathing for worms and snakes. Trousers were held up at the back by two buttons in the middle and, at the front, by two buttons on the left and right of the stomach. The objects of my obsession were the silk-bound rubber loops, available in all colours and sizes, which fastened the brace-straps to the trousers. For me, however, they had to be damaged. Most exciting of all were the ones where the silk covering had already worn through, leaving the trousers hanging by just one or two rubber strands -- in other words, just about to snap, which would mean the trousers fell down. I myself had to wear leather, tear-resistant types which left me cold. I bartered for these semi-perished straps with my poorer fellow students by buying them new ones. The items in my collection had a certain similarity with squashed worms, slowworms and snakes attempting, half-dead and without success, to drag their flattened bodies to safety."
I proceed to carve out of this refractory material a bird-satyr. His long, smooth, graceful neck goes along with the ever-present grain, while contrasting gnarly underpinnings fight the difficult material through such sculptural features as balls and legs heavily imbricated with feathers. But the material will have its way, expressed through those prominent Ray-Olson-inspired hocks.
PROVENANCE: Collection the artist.
PURCHASE: