A kinetic sculptural installation work

By Albert Chong
With Technical Assistance by Daniel Gilsdorf

Curator, Amy Kurlander
Allen Memorial Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, March 1998
Web Design, Deirdre Scott for Design Police, NY.

This work seems long overdue, due to the fact that I have envisioned the work in one form or another for about seven years now. Winged Evocations is inspired by a vision I had that clearly described the form of the piece. Over the years self portraiture has been a persistent genre in my photographic work. It has allowed me the space to examine issues of personal identity as they relate to issues of race, ethnicity, nationality and spirituality. Winged Evocations is in fact a three dimensional self portrait that explores the mythology and iconography of birdlike flight. The myths and iconography of winged or birdlike flight has been a persistent dream of humankind since our consciousness as living beings could be defined.

Every child has been awe struck when observing for the first time the flight of birds. I would dare say that every human alive who has ever observed birds in flight has experienced a deep envy of these creatures . The miracle of the motion they perform in often exuberant defiance of the laws and notions of gravity. From the hummingbird to the albatross, the finch to the pterodactyl, the sparrow to the now extinct flightless Moa of New Zealand. Being the naked helpless animals that we are , we were not blessed with the gift of flight, but with an imagination so vast we require the heavens but instead are bound to a crowded and unholy firmament. Enslaved to the laws of physics we would not achieve flight until the early twentieth century and then only by mechanical means.

Standing on the cliffs of the glider port in La Jolla California watching hang gliders walk off the edge of a cliff face with a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet. It is that final step over the edge that is the most wondrous, the most courageous, that trust in the known laws of aerodynamics that seems so instinctually unknown in that final leap of faith. That leap of faith is then rewarded with the warm rush of thermals rising to give buoyancy to our trust and kitelike wings. This I thought was the closest we have come to achieving the myth of Icarus.

Winged evocations is the coalescing of several impulses in my art, combined with a vision of a winged presence. This presence is suggested by the garments. These are men’s suits, leather coats and jackets that are all covered in a skin of pine cone petals that create a prickly armor like garment. This work includes five suits or garments of the kind stated above. These will be supported by an armature that as indicated by the sketches have birdlike feet. The long rod of the armature connects to the cast head of aluminum. The head has dreadlocks growing from it and is cast from the face of the artist.

Connected to the other armatures is a pair of wings. Each garment is accompanied by its own armature of beating wings, that are fabricated from rawhide. These wings will operate independently from the garments and from behind each one. The wings are set in motion by Japanese made windshield wiper motors, specifically from the Datsun 210 automobile. Each pair of beating wings is set in motion by the triggering of a motion sensor by the viewer as they move through the work. The walls of the space will have approximately 10 pairs of wing that are mounted to the walls and that are also triggered by the motion sensors.

The five winged presence’s are set in the dice pattern for the numeral five. These are also inscribed in a tight circle consisting of one hundred pounds of feathers.

Of all animals, the birds have most persistently been associated with divinity. Their beauty and melodious songs and above all their ability to soar upwards at will, towards heaven which have given them a central place in the iconography of spiritual life. In Western thought the tradition goes back as far as Plato, who writes of bird wings and bird flight in a passage of the Phaedrus:

The Natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of the gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine. But the diviner is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and all such qualities; by these then the wings of the soul are nourished and grow...

The linkage of birds with divinity has consequently created the iconography of divine intermediaries. These celestial beings we tend to refer as angels and who are depicted in the image of man and woman always white and of course with large white wings. These angels we suppose to be the saints of earth who have entered the kingdom of heaven. The painted, sculpted and graven image of angels have helped to reinforce a Christian/Catholic religious view of an afterlife replete with a pantheon of characters. Each person’s idea of and mental picture of angels, saints, heaven and hell could be said to change from individual to individual depending on each persons familiarity with images of Christian religious imagery, in effect the style of the painting or chromolithograph of the religious scene that they experienced in this way. How radically different our interpretation, codification and expressions of religious ideas would be if we had no images with which to express the narratives of creation and morality.

Angelic depiction’s and imagery in popular culture is presently at its height. For those who have never seen an old master painting of the Arch Angel Michael, battling the angel Lucifer to expel him from the kingdom of heaven to the depths of hell. There is always the Hollywood reference with John Travolta as Michael. The Biblical tale of Lucifer’s expulsion is depicted in the contrasts of European conception and idealization of representative notions of beauty and divinity and its contrast of ugliness and revulsion that is accorded the fallen status of the angel Lucifer. He becomes various representative notions of animal kind, i.e. antelope or goat like, reptilian, or bat like and nocturnal, a creature of the night.

Lucifer is henceforth regarded as the devil and is depicted like an animal like creature. One either with horns and with a tail or bat like with the wings of a bat.. The vilification of the bat like the divinity of the dove would become ready metaphors and symbols for the conceptualization of the divine and the diabolical. These duality’s and their contrast continue, St. Michael is depicted as the Greek or Roman ideal of masculine beauty, he is radiant and resplendent in his beauty and is a creature of the day.

It was precisely because of these conceptual ramification that the bat as the only flying mammal was ignored and feared as a model for the medieval pursuit of flight.

*"It was recognized that although feathered wings were the norm, flight could be achieved without them, as the example of the bat clearly demonstrates. That nocturnal creature, always associated with the strange and the sinister was considered a freak of nature, almost universally despised. To imitate such a distasteful anomaly was dangerous, and almost no one thought to have tried it. Men with bat wings are seen in illuminated manuscripts, but it is significant that while bird wings commonly adorn angels, bat wings are usually reserved for the devil."

* from The Dream of Flight by Clive Hart, pg. 25, Chap. 1, Winchester Press, NY

This fascination with feathers and birds in general entered my work and expressed itself in still life images and installation works. When I moved into the top floor of a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn from 1980 to 1988, my love for flight was sparked by the Birdmen of Brooklyn who raised, raced and tried to increase their flocks of pigeons by luring birds from others flocks to join their own. This sub culture of birds, flight, avian husbandry and the unspoken fantasy of flight, experienced vicariously took place on the roofs of buildings in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. This sub culture of homing pigeons is one of the few precious expression of freedom in the stifling and crowed urban environments. My roof in Brooklyn supported two old white guys who raised pigeons. The one I knew best was called Joe, he would let this huge flock of about two hundred and fifty pigeons out and they would soar first around and around the building. I recall loving sitting on my window facing the manhattan skyline as the birds would circle the building almost blotting out the light from the large windows. When they reached a maximum soaring height the flock would sometimes disappear for a moment as they turned simultaneously in flight revealing their white underbelly and blending with the light sky.

Their ability to soar to the heavens has conferred the bird with divine characteristics. A white dove with an olive branch is the symbol for peace, and this same white dove is also a favorite sacrificial animal . A 1990 installation that featured 100 pounds of duck feathers was based on the religious ritual of sacrifice and offering in thanks for spiritual and earthly well being. This work titled a Substitute Sacrifice offered up as remnant evidence the feathers of the infinite numbers of sacrificial fowl that would be required to redeem the crucifix of the evils that have been perpetuated in the name of Christianity.

A second installation featured feathers in a circular field in which was centered a dinner table set for four to host the Ancestral spirits. This work was titled ‘Sunday Dinner for the Ancestors’. The motif of the bird is a frequent icon in my creative work. With Winged Evocations I hope to continue the exploration I started almost 20 years ago, the very human fantasy, soaring unfettered through the heavens, a new divinity, innocent of the misery and desires of the terrestrial world , like Icarus and Dedalus, Mercury, the god with winged feet, harpies, griffins and the winged steed Pegasus, we are all earthbound creatures craving for flight, craving for a glimpse if not experience of heaven.

A Wailers song from the early sixties in Jamaica sublimates it in song

" If I had a wings of a dove
If I had the wings of a Dove
I would fly, fly away, fly away
and be at rest But since I have no wings
Since I have no wings
Since I have no wings I have to sit, sit, sit"

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