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).

Tennis Elbow

After I've built my boat, after I've drifted with the currents of Buzzards Bay, after I've tested water and pumped out poop and greeted visitors for the Buzzards Bay Coalition, and after I've spent two years rowing with the New Bedford Community Rowers -- Then I will go to the spot where my great-great-great-great grandfather's body was found and row across Buzzards Bay to his home town.

This will be a huge undertaking. And one of the biggest challenges is building the physicality necessary. It has been and continues to be a very slow process. Last fall, I dealt with tendonitis in my right elbow. Now it's struck in my left. I slowed down my rowing work-outs to twice a week. Then, last week, I reduced them to zero. Again, this week, I can not row.

Unfortunately, my bargain health insurance does not cover physical therapy. So I am using internet research to find exercises that will get me back on track. I have less than a year until my big row. So I am feeling some urgency. These look good:
Rehab For Tennis Elbow: The Super 7 The "super 7” exercises are an important part of treatment for tennis elbow. They are designed to strengthen the muscles in the forearm and increase flexibility through stretching. In most cases te these exercises will help relieve elbow pain in about 4 to 6 week Each stretching exercise is held for 15 seconds and repeated 2 or 3 times. This pattern is repeated 5 times a day.
Exercise 1. Stretching the muscles that extend the wrist (extensor muscles): Straighten the arm out fully and push the palm of the hand down so you feel a stretch across the top of the forearm.
Exercise 2. Stretching the muscles that flex the wrist (flexor muscles): straighten the arm out fully (palm side up), and push the palm downward to stretch. Strengthening exercises are performed twice a day following the stretching exercises. To perform these exercises, the patient sits in a chair with the elbow supported on the edge of a table or on the arm of the chair the wrist hanging over the edge. Use a light weight such as a hammer or soup can when performing the strengthening exercises. Repeat the exercises 30 to 50 times, twice a day, but do not push yourself beyond the point of pain.
Exercise 3. Strengthening wrist extensor muscles: Hold the weight in the hand with the palm facing down. Extend the wrist upward so that it is pulled back. Hold this position for 2 seconds and then lower slowly.
Exercise 4. Strengthening wrist flexor muscles: Hold the weight in the hand with the palm up. Pull the wrist up, hold for 2 seconds and lower slowly.
Exercise 5. Strengthening the muscles that move the wrist from side to side (deviator muscles): Hold the weight in the hand with the thumb pointing up. Move the wrist up and down, much like hammering a nail. All motion should occur at the wrist.
Exercise 6. Strengthening the muscles that twist the wrist (pronator and supinator muscles): Hold the weight in the hand with the thumb pointing up. Turn the wrist inward as far as possible and then outward as far as possible. Hold for 2 seconds and repeat as much as pain allows, up to 50 repetitions.
Exercise 7. Massage is performed over the area of soreness. Apply firm pressure using 2 fingers on the area of pain and rub for 5 minutes. 
If exercise aggravates any of your symptoms, contact a physician or physical therapist These exercises can be used to prevent or rehabilitate injuries in people who play sports or in those who do repetitive forearm work.
Tim L. Uhl, P.T., A.T.,C.

ARTnews

I got a copy of the May issue of ARTnews today. I've been excitedly waiting for the issue because it has a review of my January show. The show presented work that is a prequel to my 2014 row. The writer, Elisabeth Kley, did a great job explaining the show and its relationship to the larger project -- not an easy task. I won't try to put into words how supported I feel when reading a (good) review of my work. All I will say is thank you Ms. Kley and ARTnews.

ARTnews MAY 2013, page 100.

reviews: new york 

Michael Waugh

Winkleman

     Michael Waugh's dense and absorbing exhibition was dominated by a delicate series of representational drawings created entirely out of tiny flowing texts copied from Adam Smith's 1776 The Wealth of Nations. The largest, a triptych, featuring a sinking steamboat engulfed by enormous waves, took nearly 1,200 hours to complete. Other images here included idyllic scenes of rowers in front of country mansions and portraits of handsome young oarsmen. All were visually airy and evanescent in spite of the labor they required. 

     The show was intended as a fundraising prequel to Rowing Back, a future performance inspired by the 1827 death of Waugh's ancestor Gideon Dexter, who froze in a rowboat while attempting to recover his employer's drifting sloop. Waugh plans to hand-build a boat he will row from the place where Dexter died to the site from which he departed, reversing the journey to symbolically recuperate his life. 

     The Invisible Hands (2012), a video documenting Waugh's preparations for this project, was projected on a wall monitor hung over a pair of handmade oars. Shot from a camera attached to the handle of a rowing machine, the film shows Waugh's body moving toward and away from the lens as he trains, with an almost uncomfortable intimacy. Footage of the oars' creation is also included, along with documentation of the unsuccessful maiden voyage in a [racing shell] that immediately capsized, plunging [Waugh] into the water. 

     Another video records one of Waugh's eight-hour readings of Smith's book. Audible fragments of economic theories float in and out of the viewers' consciousness while they look at the rest of the work, enabling Waugh's romanticized Arcadias to dissolve into Smith's impersonal phrases. The arbitrary masochism of Waugh's entire artistic enterprise underscores capitalism's human cost.

- Elisabeth Kley

Michael Waugh, Money as a Particular Branch of Society (The Wealth of Nations, part 17). 2012, ink on mylar, 22" x 28". Winkleman.

Anniversary

On February 1st, 1827, My great-great-great-great gransfather's body was found off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. He died in a working-class rowing accident having rowed himself to exhaustion against an unexpected storm.

To mark the anniversary, I stayed outside yesterday in freezing temperatures for an eight-hour work day without taking any breaks for any reason. I set myself up on the street outside the gallery where my solo show is being hosted (Winkleman gallery in collaboration with Schroeder Romero). The first half-hour of that time was consumed setting up a camera -- then I began reading aloud from Adam Smith's seminal book about capitalism, The Wealth of Nations. I thought that I might read for eight hours beyond the 30 minutes I spent setting up. But after being outside for eight hours, hoarse, sore, and cold, I read these words, "In the public deliberations, therefore, his voice is little heard, and less regarded; except upon particular occasions, when his clamour is animated, set on, and supported by his employers, not for his, but their own particular purposes." And I knew that this was the perfect line on which to end.

By the six-hour mark, I had to start doing three to six squats about every five minutes. Activating the large muscles of the legs burned enough calories to keep me from getting hypothermia. I was sure that I looked like an idiot. But even with doing the squats, by the end, I was totally chilled. I couldn't stop shaking for about an hour afterwards. Staying outside longer would have been bad, and I knew that, too. I would have had to have been continually exercising to generate enough heat to stay warm --and if I'd done that, I couldn't have gotten enough breath to read aloud. Panting would have made it hard to be stentorian. Adhering to the eight-hour work day allowed me to get the job done and not need medical intervention.



Thanks are due to my cameraman Christopher Cruzcosa who braved the cold with me.

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.