Stamina

Tendonitis continues to be the one factor that limits me. A few weeks ago, I finally put a coat of prime on the outside of the boat. I had never used the type of paint that I chose. So the first coat had some issues. So instead of a quick sanding between coats of prime, I had to perform a major sanding. A few hours into that job, and I had to stop. I could no longer use any pressure without my elbow screaming. But I didn't stop. I switched to my electric, orbital sander.

Pushing myself too far is my continuing, obstinate stupidity. I should have just stopped. By the end of the day, my elbow was even worse. I decided to take a couple of days off. But here's the thing: If one has tendonitis in the elbow, one tends to start favoring and using one's arm in a weird way. Soon, my wrist tendonitis flared up. And then my shoulder tendonitis made its first appearance in 12 months.

Of course, I had to stop rowing. I thought I could do some very light work on my rowing machine. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. I had to stop that, too. For the past week, I haven't done any activity that's stressed my arms or shoulder. But If I'm going to stay somewhat on track to row from Martha's Vineyard to Mattapoisett, I have to keep my stamina. And the effort required of sliding-seat rowing is 80% legs, so I've been biking a lot.

A week ago Thursday, I rode down to New London to catch the train home to New York. 108 miles. On Sunday, I participated in the Transportation Alternatives NYC Century. 117 miles. On Tuesday, I got up early and rode out to Orient Point at the end of Long Island. 108 miles. And I took the ferry across to New London, then rode up to Providence. 60 miles. I taught my first classes of the semester; then, yesterday, I rode back to Mattapoisett. 44 miles. 437 miles in all. My leg stamina is doing fine.

Riders at the starting line of the NYC Century.

Stopping for a break along the Coventry Bike Path (RI).

Biking has been a passion of mine for at least 25 years. I wouldn't be surprised if I find a way to directly insert cycling into my work. The time I've spent with the Buzzards Bay Coalition and the New Bedford Rowing Center gives me some notion of how to bring something like cycling directly in sync with my artistic practice.

Already there is some synchronizing (or synchronicity?) going on. One of the Buzzards Bay Coalition's main fundraisers is a cycling event that takes cyclists through the watershed that feeds the bay. I've done this ride twice already, and I'm doing it again this year. Of course, this means that I have agreed to raise at least $300.00 as part of my Watershed Ride. As an incentive for people to donate to my ride, I am putting one small artwork in as a raffle item. One person who donates to my ride will win this artwork. My next project will involve making large watercolors combined with text-image works (like those that I have been producing for the last ten years). I've been doing some small watercolors as tests. The small work (pictured below) uses text from the introduction (written by Amos Elon) to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and presents the image of mayflies. You could win the work pictured.

The Buzzards Bay Coalition has helped me learn a lot about Buzzards Bay. But, more importantly, the organization does a great job at advocating for water resources, monitoring water quality, and preserving key resources throughout the watershed. And it's incredibly well-run. Not all non-profits can claim that. If you donate to my ride, your money will be used wisely and well. And you could win this artwork. Meanwhile, I'll be on my bike preparing for this ride -- and for my row -- and preparing for the thousands of hours of artmaking that, oddly enough, take more stamina than riding my bike 437 miles.

The Banality of Evil, Introduction (part 1.0).  2014. Watercolor and acrylic with pigment print on paper. 7"x9" (print #4).

The Boat Comes Together

As the summer progressed and the daylight decreased, my work hours increased. I was spending up to 14 hours a day with the wood-burning pen clutched in my hand, copying text onto the wood that would become my boat. I couldn't work fewer hours because I was scheduled to go up to Brooklin, Maine and work with master boatbuilder Geoff Kerr and my next opportunity to work with him wouldn't be until April. I finished burning the text with one day to spare (which I used to ride in the Transportation Alternatives NYC Century -- I really know how to relax).

The boat that I'm building for my voyage across Buzzards Bay is an Annapolis Wherry. Its design calls for planks of okoume plywood. It's lighter and stronger than using traditional planks. And part of my decision making process for this project is to use all the technical innovations available to ensure that I don't share the fate of my great-great-great-great grandfather, who died in a rowboat in the middle of the bay.

Plywood is not the most receptive of surfaces for wood-burning. In all, I spent four and a half months copying text onto the wood. As the hours of labor added up, my anxiety mounted as well. I knew that the boat's design called for sections of the hull to be reinforced with fiberglass. In other words, I would be covering my tiny, handwritten text. Before I started the project, I spoke with Geoff, who assured me that the layer of fiberglass would be absolutely transparent. But my text is so small that it's barely readable to begin with. Even the slightest blurring of the text could ruin the effect, my efforts, and the boat as a conceptual object.

I arrived in Brooklin on Sunday, September 15. I was able to afford working with Geoff because he was simultaneously helping ten other people who were also building Annapolis Wherries at the Wooden Boat School. And the entire process of building the boat was squeezed into a single week. On Sunday, Geoff got a head start on the undertaking, by doing the first step on everybody else's boats -- which was to glue the shorter lengths of planks together into the seventeen and a half foot lenghts necessary for the boat. I met him there and watched him glue together the first couple of planks -- and then glued mine together. Here's a picture of the building where we worked.

On Monday, I drilled holes in my planks at six inch intervals (nobody else working with Geoff had to do this because their planks had been pre-drilled), and then I tied the planks together with copper wire.

On Tuesday, I was really grateful to have ten other people in the shop. We all paired up and had a partner gather together the front of our boat, wiring the bow together. I drilled holes in the transom (the board across the back of the boat, and I was again grateful to have help holding the springy, unwieldy boards together while I wired it into place too. What's interesting is that all the wire is just there temporarily. It holds everything in place wile the boat is glued together with epoxy. The rest of the day was spent mixing small batches of epoxy and using a pastry bag to squeeze it in between the planks.

Wednesday, we removed all the wires and cleaned up some of the epoxy that dripped and squeezed out to places where it didn't belong. Then came the moment I'd been dreading: The fiberglass. Fiberglass comes in sheets that look like heavy white cloth. It is opaque. But once saturated with epoxy, it disappears. Imagine a microscopic glass fiber suspended in clear plastic. This is what my boat looked like by the end of the day wednesday:

You can still see the white edges of the fiberglass cloth that needed to be trimmed. But the text was visually unhindered. I had been worrying about this moment since I had decided to use the design for the Annapolis Wherry in the Spring of 2012. I left the shop giddy with relief. Though I did sneak back in right before going to bed to check that it really did look okay.

On Thursday we trimmed the edges of the cloth, continued to epoxy, and glued the rails onto the boat -- another job for which I was grateful to have help. I suppose one could rig up some system of clips to get the rails on with just one other person helping, But, really, three people are necessary to avoid unreasonable stress. With so many people in the shop, we used five people to carefully glue, hold, and clamp the rails into place. And five people did not feel excessive for the job -- especially when the epoxy started to cure mid-install and we had to put twice as many clamps (and a few strategic c-clamps) on my boat.

On Friday, we installed the decks over the air-chambers (which prevent the boat from sinking if it over-turns) and continued to epoxy. A lot of the work we did on Thursday and Friday would have been best spread out over four or five days so that epoxy could have cured between steps. And I was often dragging through gummy, partially-cured epoxy. The epoxy job is really rough as a result. But by the end of the day Friday, the boat was assembled. If I'd tried to build this boat without Geoff's expertise, I would have taken months. It will take me months to sand, re-sand, re-sand, and re-sand the ten coats of epoxy, paint, and varnish that I need for the finished boat. But I have a boat. And my months of labor putting text onto the wood worked just as I'd hoped. I am still experiencing aftershocks of relief and joy.

Prequel Images

I finally have professional images of the drawings that will be part of my upcoming show. I've posted the whole series on my web site. The largest drawing, a triptych, is 84" tall and each panel is 42" wide. When framed and hanging, it spans about 12' of wall. As with my other large drawings, it is overwhelming in person, but the detail gets lost in a JPG. Here's a detail:

The first ten drawings in this series, portraits of Ivy League rowers, were part of my 2011 show at Schroeder Romero. I followed those portraits by making seven modestly-sized landscapes, the triptych, and then two more portraits. All of the drawings use rowing as subject matter. Like my previous drawings, these pieces use micrographic text to compose the images. The series uses the entirety of Adam Smith's *The Wealth of Nations.* All told, I copied by hand 507 pages of text. The largest, the triptych, used 265 pages of text:

I think of this large work as the anchor of the series. It shows the image of a steamship getting subsumed by a storm at sea. A single passenger, a woman, stands on deck, hands clasped, looking out for rescue. A single sculler rows towards the doomed ship.

Adam Smith's book is something of a Bible for economic conservatives. Smith famously refers to the economy as being guided by an "invisible hand." However, like the Bible, the text is vast -- so vast that it seems, at times, to contradict itself. In addition to arguing for the virtues of self-interest, Smith also notes that governments should probably not allow businessmen to guide legislation. Although he hails the division of labor as the cause of wealth, he also notes that it has dehumanized workers and led to moral degradation. His book is speculative, not necessarily prescriptive.

I have engaged with rowing imagery for a number of reasons. One of the most basic is that crew, in addition to being a favorite art historical subject, also brings with it an undeniable mark of class privilege. In 1776, when Smith published the book, notions of class were unformed. And crew isn't the only sport that announces the privilege of its participants; all sport takes skills developed for the purpose of survival and transforms those skills into autonomous activity. The first marathoner, Pheidippides, ran 26 miles to announce to Athens that the Persians had been defeated -- not to achieve a personal best.

The transition of boating from a necessary skill for fishing and transportation into a sport is neither simple nor is it clearly an evolutionary improvement. Sport in itself calls into question the idea of progress. The Wealth of Nations continually makes the case for modern economic systems being more evolved than what came before, even though Smith cites problems with that narrative.

It struck me while reading The Wealth of Nations that so much of what is foundational for modern economic theory is also foundational for scientific theory and for art theory -- and are recurring questions in our own lives. Finding meaning is never as straightforward as it first appears. How can one summarize the visceral experience of making these drawings, of copying a 507 page book, of standing in front of the record of that much labour.

rowing back

I started this blog today to record the progress of a project that I've been thinking about for a couple of years -- and I've finally gotten to the point of action. The name of the blog is "rowing back," not because that will be the name of the work when it’s done, but because the core performative act around which everything else depends will consist of me rowing back from Martha’s Vineyard to my family's home town of Mattapoisett, MA, a distance of about 20 miles.

In 1827, my great-great-great-great grandfather Gideon Dexter, who worked in the shipbuilding industry of Mattapoisett, was killed. Here’s how it happened as reported in a clipping from a New Bedford newspaper of 1827 and reprinted in The Dexter Family in America:

"On January  31, 1827, the sloop Betsey of Wareham came into Mattapoisett Harbor and hauled in as near the shore as  was practicable on account of the ice; soon after she was seen to be drifting toward the bay and several persons from the shore went to her assistance. About 7 o'clock in the evening they lost the small skiff overboard and Mr. Gideon Dexter and Mr. Caleb Dexter, Jr. of Mattapoisett, took a boat and went to recover the skiff. The wind being strong at north and the weather extremely cold, they were unable to return to the sloop, which was run ashore, and the persons on board landed with difficulty, wet and much exhausted. The next morning, the men and boats not having returned, search was made and the skiff was found on Goat Island, about half a mile distant, and the body of Caleb Dexter was found lying on the marsh frozen. The other boat drifted out of the bay and was picked up near East Chop, off Holmes Hole, with the body of Gideon Dexter, which was also frozen. His hands were much lacerated and the oar battered to pieces, from which it  appears he exerted himself to return until exhausted. Mr. Gideon Dexter was 46 years old, and left wife and nine children. Mr. Caleb Dexter, Jr. was 34 years of age, and left a wife and an aged father and mother to lament their loss."

I’ve set myself a little over two years to get the project done. Gideon was blown eastward about 20 miles from Mattapoisett to “Holmes Hole,” now known as Vineyard Haven on the island of  Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. For me to row the 20 miles from Martha's Vineyard to Mattapoisett, most likely against the prevailing winds, will be a huge undertaking, especially for someone who has never rowed, who has very little upper body strength, and who suffers from chronic tendonitis of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder from drawing too much.

My previous projects (drawings and performance-based work) are self-consciously masochistic. My right arm’s tendons will most likely never fully heal from what I continue to put them through. But the reason that I make work like this is not that I like pain. Really, what I’m concerned with is labor -- and especially the relationship of the labor of working people to capital. Artists' labor is not that different in the larger sense -- except that artists’ work is fetishized to the point of aestheticization. The extreme quality of my work means that its labors can not be ignored, and that is unsettling because the aesthetic experience of the viewer is interrupted.

I am continually looking for ways to prevent aetheticization, to make the world, to make labor, to make the extremity of my labor break the experience. That desire motivates me to spend the next year doing physical therapy and fundraising. I also plan to present, in early 2013, a solo show (at Schroeder Romero & Shredder) that is a prequel to this rowing project. This show will have plenty of labor-intensive micrographic drawings. For these drawings I have copied out, word for word, the entirety of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which weighs in at over 500 pages. I also plan to make (by my own hand) the oars that I will use for my rowing project, and I plan to show those oars (again, as prequel) in this 2013 show. They will sit at the center of the show as totemic objects of power; they, too, will be covered in Adam Smith's text.

The following summer (2013) I will build (again, by hand) the boat that I will row those 20 miles. And over the whole two years, I will be working on drawings with rowing imagery composed out of text that delves into theories of history, class, and labor. I plan to edit those same texts as voiceover into the video piece composed of footage shot during my whole project. Drawings, video, performative rowing, and in-gallery performances will all bleed into each other and inform each other.

What happened to Gideon was thoughtlessly negligent. Was it worth it for two men to risk their lives to fetch a skiff from the harbor -- as a storm was bearing down -- with the harbor so dangerously full of ice that a ship couldn’t get to the wharf? Why didn't someone stop them? 

By contrast, my two year project will be methodical, calculated. The haste of Gideon’s decision will be replaced by the care of my own. I will build the best boat for the situation. I will get in the best shape for the challenge. I will have a coach. I will have a master builder guiding me. I will gather a cohort of boaters and rowers to safeguard my journey. Unlike the working class men, Gideon and Caleb, whose lives weren’t worth as much as a skiff, I will build a network of friends, colleagues, and sponsors who will be by my side both figuratively and literally. And through this process, I will rewind the cynical accounting that led to Gideon's solitary and fatal exertions. I will not just row back in the opposite direction, I will reverse all the decisions, all the aesthetics that devalue labor. I will refuse the tragic end of one person by returning him to the interconnected and continuing histories of many.

Here's the source of the picture of Gideon's grave.