c a quarterly of art and cultureIssue 47 logIstIcsus $12 canada $12 uK £7

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invenTory MArC GANzGLAss

Door-knocker earrings are a type of hollow-form jewelry that first became popular in New york in the late 1970s. They are made in gold and silver and come in a broad array of finishes and styles, including hearts, stars, trap-ezoids, kissing dolphins, and Nefertiti heads. The most popular, however, are bamboo hoops. Today, you can still find bamboo hoops in jewelry shops and department stores around the city, and for sale on television channels such as the Home shopping Network and QVC. The earrings are manufactured in small factories and sold by the pound to jewelry whole-salers, who resell them to retailers, street vendors, and larger chain stores. unlike fashion apparel, in which new designs are developed for each season, designs in the wholesale jewelry market are constantly evolving, driven as much by the cost of gold and silver as they are by consumers’ tastes. Hollow-form jewelry is made by stamping very thin gold or silver sheet metal into two symmetrical shells that are then soldered together to create a volumetric form, giving it the appearance of expensive solid gold jewelry but at a fraction of the cost. This technique, as well as its use in mass production, dates back to the beginning of the industrial revolution and the develop-ment of high-speed punch presses that could stamp out large quantities of parts with great precision. The manufacturing process led to a whole new class of con-sumer goods that approximated high-style luxury items, even as the ease and speed of production allowed for popular imagery to be quickly incorporated into their designs. The job of rendering the panoply of forms fell on the shoulders of the tool- and diemaker. Part sculptor, part technician, the tool- and diemaker was responsible for turning each new design into an accurate three-dimensional engraving that could be used to stamp out as many units as the market could bear. The process begins with a design on paper. The toolmaker translates this sketch into a working draw-ing describing the exact shape, profile, and elevation of the piece. The working drawing is transferred to a block of steel, which is then carved by hand into a three-dimensional form, after which fine details are engraved into the surface. The steel block is then hardened; this is the master model called a hub. Next, the hub is pushed into a heated steel block using a hydraulic press. This negative image of the hub is called the die. With the die

completed, the toolmaker pushes yet another block of steel into the negative form to produce a second master model called a forcer—the positive form used in the actual stamping of the jewelry. The pair of forcer and die is called a die-set and is sent to the manufacturer for use in production. The original hub is kept by the toolmaker in case the die-set needs to be replaced. Many of the bamboo hoops sold in New york were made from die-sets produced at Matthew Tool and Die Co., a small machine shop in Brooklyn founded by a Polish immigrant named Matthew Lewandowski. Originally trained as an economist in Poland during the communist regime, Lewandowski began tool- and diemaking as a second career when he and his family emigrated to New york in the early 1970s. On the fol-lowing pages are images of just a few of the nearly ten thousand hubs made by Lewandowski between 1978 and 2011; all of those pictured here were used to make bamboo hoops, though Matthew Tool and Die Co. pro-duced die-sets for a wide variety of earrings, bracelets, and charms. Figure 1 is an early example of a bamboo hoop from the 1970s. it is relatively small, about 1 3/8 inches across. As bamboo hoops became more popular, manu-facturers demanded larger and larger versions while stamping the shells out of increasingly thinner material. When Lewandowski opened his shop in 1978, he was making dies for stamping ten-karat gold six-thousandths of an inch thick; by the mid-1980s, it was half that, just three-thousandths of an inch thick for a three-inch-wide bamboo hoop. These incredibly thin shells easily dented and crumpled, and the failure of the metal was so common that women often flattened the earrings them-selves as soon as they bought them. Figures 2, 3, and 4 are examples of the extremely large bamboo hoops that were popular in the early 1980s. Because different wholesalers offered nearly identical products and because Lewandowski supplied production tools to competing manufacturers, he made the ethical decision early on never to give identical tools to different clients. rather, he would recreate the hubs from scratch each time, resulting in the slight differenc-es seen in these three hoops, which range in size from 2 3/4 inches to 3 1/2 inches in diameter. sometimes earring designs were modified extem-poraneously, either with the manufacturer requesting something over the phone or because Lewandowski was trying out a new idea. in part because of the speed with which these tools were being produced, no detailed records exist of who initiated these changes in design. Within a specific style, there could be countless opposite: Image from jewelry catalogue depicting a variety of bamboo hoops.

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Hubs by Matthew Lewandowski for producing bamboo hoop earrings.

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variations and this is especially evident in the morphol-ogy of the bamboo hoops. in the pair of mini-hoops in figure 5, the bamboo is rendered in the same naturalistic style as the larger models, but the hoops are so compressed that the motif is almost lost. These hubs are also a good example of one of the technical idiosyncracies of stamping hollow-form jewelry. Any design that is symmetrical along its central axis only requires one hub, as seen in the classic bamboo hoop. But designs asymmetrical along their central axis—such as these smaller earrings—require two mirrored hubs. if the design calls for asymmetrical patterns that are different for each ear, four hubs would be needed. The hub in figure 6 deviates from the hoop form altogether. in this star-shaped earring, the bamboo motif is abbreviated—the segments are straight and the joints are mitered. The vocabulary changes again in figure 7. its segmented shape and detailing along the sides are definitely bamboo-like, but the cross-hatching on the top surface approximates the type of knurling found on machinery handles. While the trapezoidal hoops in figures 8 and 9 appear similar, there is an important modification. in fig-ure 8, the bamboo segments are rendered in the standard way, while in figure 9 they appear to be held together with rivets. This is an illustration of a construction detail typically used for fastening sheet metal, not bamboo. Another notable departure can be seen in figures 11 and 12. rivets again appear in these heart-shaped hoops, but in figure 12 the bamboo segments alternate with segments composed of geometric nuggets on a field of stippling. This type of detail is reminiscent of repoussé panels found on traditional metal hollowware, such as stickley-style copper vessels. in figure 10, the bamboo has all but disappeared, and the hub is composed only of alternating smooth and nugget-infill segments. Because of the lack of detailed records, it is hard to chart how and under what conditions the bamboo hoop changed over time. The production of tooling for the wholesale jewelry market was fast-paced and fluid, with designs evolving at multiple levels of production simul-taneously. in these circumstances, the toolmaker was afforded exceptional latitude when it came to rendering forms for production—a latitude that is clearly evident in this selection of hubs by Matthew Lewandowski.

Nguyen, Trong Gia, “Interview with Marc Ganzglass,” ArtSlant, December 1, 2008. http://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/3155

Interview with Marc Ganzglass by Trong Gia Nguyen

Artslant New York Editor Trong Gia Nguyen chats with artist Marc Ganzglass about meteorites, UFO engines, and Edward Hopper. The Brooklyn-based artist is currently in South Beach taking in Art Basel Miami week.

Trong Gia Nguyen: There is a Hopperesque banality to some of your works, such as Castro's, with its kitchen light, formal vantage point, and simple everyday actions, though in video from. Do you relate your work to painting at all?

Marc Ganzglass: Not directly to painting, I relate to photography as far as procedure goes, so maybe Hopper is a good example. In a photograph you have an interval separated from the timeline and a lot of my work tends to function like that, a quotient separated from the rest of the equation.

With Castro’s, I was struck by how all the formal elements were implicit in the situation at the bodega, the lighting and the way the screen is split into quadrants by the deli counter. Because of these strong formal elements the event of the guy making tortas became separated from its context very easily. The video I shot in China Liu Thinks Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is Innocent is like that also, it’s a tunnel, that looks straight out of Battlestar Galactica, but in the end there is this guy with a rickshaw, the two archetypes are in confrontation and that’s unsettling, but because the situation was found and not fabricated it is also familiar.

TGN: Your most recent work, The Flight of Orgueil, is a film produced using an electron microscope at the Laboratory for the Study of Extraterrestrial Material in Paris, but transforms this scientific experience into something even more basic, sort of like a photogram in relation to photography, the elementary writing of light. Is part of your work about romanticizing science?

MG: Science as a pursuit is definitely romantic, in a way that’s what allows it to be picked up and used as an analogue in art. They

share the same impulses, but in science I think it’s easier to establish a baseline, to figure out where you are at a given time. In material sciences you have this ability to calibrate your observations, and measurement is the first step in both construction and

description. In art you are left to find different tools and that’s where structural tactics like the photogram come in to play.

Vol D’Orgueil is about this condition of measurement, and understanding what you are looking at. On the one hand the film is a throwback to structural filmmaking and defers a lot of the aesthetic decisions to the mechanical limits of the microscope. On the other hand, as a subject it uses a material with a significant social and chemical history. The meteorite that we used in the film, (the Orgueil) is chemically analogous to the sun and has been central to the debate about the birth of the solar system. Working on that microscope, we had the ability to go deep into the structure of the meteorite, down to 10 microns, but I kept it at very low magnification and wanted to maintain that inability to penetrate through.

TGN: You did a residency at the Kohler manufacturing facility in Wisconsin, where you produced a series of drinking fountains that combine iron from earth and iron from another meteorite found in Siberia. You also work often with alloys and the shaping of these manufactured materials. Is chemistry one and the same as concept and philosophy within your work?

MG: I don’t look to the language of chemistry or engineering to describe a philosophical stance metaphorically. Alloys made here on earth are social materials and are engineered to fulfill desires that are often expressed through metaphor. So a study of alloys allows me to flip back and forth between something empirical and something subjective - how the physical state of a material is articulated in culture, and this points back to that problem of measurement - what’s the distance between the observed thing and its mediated image, and how is this distance described?

This is why meteorites are interesting, because they carry both signatures. They are alloys from space, which is outside our history, but they embody narratives of real importance to us once their structures are read in a social context and the chemistry examined in terms of our needs. The study of meteoritic iron led to the discovery of steel as an alloy, before that people believed that iron meteorites were important as celestial objects and there was an understanding that the material performed in useful ways but it wasn’t until after the discovery of steel that the meteorite embodied both the technical and the celestial.

TGN: Have you ever seen a UFO?

MG: Have we talked about this before? Because I have a good story.

I was living in Northampton Mass, in a house with about five other people. My friend Dylan would occasionally go out to California and buy a classic car or hot rod in decent shape, drive it back east and sell it. At the time he had a very cool black 1970 Dodge Charger that he was trying to sell. He had parked it in front

of our house in the gravel driveway and had a sign on it. One day this guy drives up in a

really beat up 1971 Charger painted metallic blue. I remember seeing garden hoses hanging out of the grill when he pulls up next to Dylan’s 1970. The guy gets out and he looks alright, overweight and long hair.

We go over and he’s already under the car looking for rust. Pretty soon both the hoods are open and we are all standing around the cars, Dylan’s had a 440 Magnum, which is a great motor and should be interesting to this guy. The first thing you see under this guy’s hood are two coke cans all cut up and screwed to the top of the carburetor, he says he has made some modifications and the car is getting thirty something miles to the gallon. We could get about eight. So anyway the guy is asking about the condition of the car, what the frame is like and all that, and Dylan is going off on the motor. This guy says he doesn’t care about the motor, that he is going to put something else in it, so we ask what.

A UFO motor. He says that his dad worked at Andover AFB and had reversed engineered a UFO engine and that they had one built and he was just looking for the right model Charger to drop it in and he liked the 1971. He then proceeded to draw a diagram in the sand explaining how the motor works. It’s got three poles that can be either neutral, positive or negatively charged. When one pole is negative the one adjacent to it is neutral having just been positive, the negative pole is attracted to the after image of the one that was just positive. Once the thing gets going the cylinders oscillate back and forth, always attracted to each other's previous charge. It’s a perpetual motion machine. The guy then goes on to tell us about photographing lightning with a guy who had been struck so many times he could tell where lightning would hit. It was very far out, but the guy came back later and bought the car for 4 grand.

I was working at a welding shop called Elmer’s Welding in Amherst at the time and the next day at work I asked this guy Jim Loomis if he’d ever seen a UFO. I didn’t mention the guy and the Charger. And Jim tells me this story. When he was a kid growing up in South Hadley (next town over) he used to go driving down in the cornfields. We all did this. So he was driving in the cornfields one night and was parked up on a low rise when he saw another car coming through the field. Jim said he could tell it was a Chrysler Imperial because of the bullet shaped taillights on the high fins. This must have been the late 1960’s, Jim was about 50 when I knew him. He said the car was going pretty fast and looked like it was caught in a rut. It leaned over on its side and he thought it was rolling into a ditch, but then the car rose up, still on its side, and took off. He said it lifted off the ground and took off into the sky.

TGN: There is this subtle melancholy that seems to creep into your works. Newsworthy but quickly forgotten histories come into play in certain pieces, such as the sinking of the Tricolor carrier. Even though you revitalize these events in your art, do you feel that ultimately art is underpinned by the same sense of fate?

MG: There is something tragic in a few of the works, though I’m not sure if it’s because the subject has receded from view. I think the melancholy, and the banality you spoke of in the first question is more a symptom of how some events aren’t easily reconciled with the structures we have built around them, and this situation definitely has a corollary in art.

I forget the name of the theorem but there is one that suggests that in a solvable equation there can be contained an un-solvable subset, that something will always be inconclusive. I’m particularly interested in situations like this that take place within the structures you find in manufacturing, science and engineering, the slip is pronounced and comedic.

In Tricolor/BothSidesNow you have the story of a shipwreck that takes place in the middle of the English Channel, the Tricolor sinks with 3000 new cars on board. The ship was a key player in an intricate system of exchanges that involved international trade and logistics and complex economic structures. At the time of the wreck these relations become suspended and present an opportunity for assessment and renegotiation, and I think that you find very similar situations in art. I think what we see as comic/tragic is the recurring desire to reframe.

TGN: In Bridge of Gold, you reshoot a famous chase scene from the James Bond Goldfinger novel by Ian Fleming. Tell us a little bit about this re-enactment.

MG: This project retraces a car chase in which Bond pursues Goldfinger across France to a refinery outside of Geneva. He uses a homing device to track Goldfinger’s movements, and Bond never really sees the gold Rolls Royce, so it’s not a car chase so much as a slow pursuit. Most people know the sequence from the movie, where there is some action and gunplay. In the book it is different, it takes two days for them to reach Goldfinger’s refinery. Using only this homing device, Bond speculates on Goldfinger’s destination, he makes wrong turns, gets frustrated and has to retrace his steps. Eventually they end up at the refinery where Goldfinger melts down his car in a very cool gesture of unmaking a thing. In the book Fleming describes the chase sequence in great detail, giving all the place names and roads taken. It’s a very technical description.

What I found exciting was that contained in the text are real directions to a place we know is fictional. There is no refinery and no Goldfinger but we have a viable set of instructions. And there was the correlation to the film and the entire Bond narrative as well, so there was the potential to move within these different schemes, between the technical and the metaphorical.

So myself and a cinematographer rented a car and camera and filmed for four days in the Jura mountains, using just the Ian Fleming book and a map from 1954. The text lent us access to film making without a script, screenplay or location scouting. Back in New York I edited the film for continuity, focusing on color and movement, trying to re-establish it formally and then did a dissonant soundtrack with two musicians from the band the Obits. The finished product isn’t really a film it’s more of an artifact of what happens when decisions that are normally central to production are deferred. This goes back to that desire to measure, make something different and compare it to what came before it.

~ Trong Gia Nguyen

Images: Still from Castro's; Still from Flight of Orgueil.