30: Concept Gallery
Piles of Bones Set Against the Vast Blue Sky:
William Earl Kofmehl, III and Michael Morrill as Arbiters of Chaos and Control
Eric Shiner President of Powerhouse Arts | Gowanus, Brooklyn
When Bill and Mike approached me about writing this essay for their Concept Art Gallery exhibition, I assume they did so because we have several things in common, namely: Art, Pittsburgh and Yale. Growing up in Western Pennsylvania and eventually making my way to graduate school in Art History in New Haven, it helped that I too had passed through the vast studios of Yale’s Hammond Hall, the then home to the school’s MFA Sculpture program, on my frequent visits there to see what my friends were working on. I was thus perfectly aligned with Bill and Mike’s discovery that they shared the same studio space in this now extinct building exactly 30 years apart from one another, and as I’m familiar with both of their work, I was honored to be asked to write this essay.
I met with the pair twice over the past months to discuss the exhibition and their intentions. The last visit included a trip out to Bill’s new horse farm on the outskirts of Zelienople, not too horribly far from my own hometown of New Castle, just to the north. After zooming across the large property on Bill’s ATV and traversing his garage filled with bronze body parts and many other future sculpture components, we landed in the tv room of the main house and started to discuss the show which would feature, in no order of import: a 30-foot-long whaling boat; the sculpture, Tide Plane, that Mike made in his studio in 1975; photographs of Bill’s horses wearing pool floaties and cardboard boxes; Mike’s gorgeous ultramarine and gold leaf works; and new sculptures that Bill would make for the show. Upon first hearing of the breadth of works to be included, I struggled to latch onto what the central element of this essay could be, until all of a sudden, it hit me: this was going to be about chaos and control.
The juxtaposition of these two themes is certainly relatable to most of us, as it seems that just when our lives seem to be perfectly in order, chaos appears onto the scene, throwing everything into disarray. Soon enough, order pushes its way back into control, clearing out the mess and bringing us back into equilibrium. It is the ebb and flow of life, in so many ways. And yet, I couldn’t help but realize in conceptualizing this piece that the farm, too, is a space where chaos and control reign supreme. In many ways, the farm is the symbol of humankind attempting to control nature, to bring it into a state of order and to revel in and profit from its bounty. It is a site of production and creation: crops are grown; calves are reared; horses are trained and eggs are laid. It is also a site of labor dependent on muscle, machines and tools to help conquer the land, indeed, to bring control to chaos. Or, is it not, the other way around?
As I pondered further on this fundamental battle between nature and culture that plays out on every farm in the world, I could not help but to recall my own teenage years, growing up on a farm in Volant, Pennsylvania. My stepmother, in fact, was a horse trainer and competitive horse person, just like Bill’s wife Elizabeth. In addition to the eleven horses that lived on the farm, we had rabbits, dogs and barn cats galore. The first time I ever climbed up onto a horse to begin to learn how to ride, control quickly descended into chaos. Riding at a trot around the ring, I didn’t realize that I was kicking Teddy the horse in the flanks, which of course makes the horse run faster. Soon enough, my little body was waving to and fro like a wet noodle, with me grasping onto the saddle horn for dear life. My stepmother was screaming, “Let go!” After calculating the pros and cons of letting go versus being stuck on a raging horse, I did indeed let go, crashing to the ground, and not first without Teddy landing a powerful kick on my inner thigh. Luckily, nothing broke, but the horseshoe-shaped bruise became the most intense blue days later. It was my first and last time riding a horse: “Get back on again, or you never will,” I was told. And that’s probably the day that I decided to become an art historian.
At this point, you may ask, what does any of this have to do with Bill and Mike’s work? And here I will answer that art, much like a farm, is also a site of never-ending battle between control and chaos, nature and culture. It is also a site of production, where innovative ideas are generated, new forms are introduced and old ones refined. Art nourishes and refreshes, just as it pains and provokes. All of this became clear to me once I saw Bill’s new sculptures for the show: gleaming aluminum constructions of contorted animal bones, skulls and vertebrae; massive bronze fish suspended in air; a DNA helix that could be worms or horns locked together for infinity; a disembodied horse head atop a plinth grazing on the very pedestal upon which high art is usually placed. In so many ways, this is nature as chaos, raw in its power and bold in its material.
Surrounding these sculptures are Mike’s powerful and formal studies in form and color in the aforementioned ultramarine and gold leaf. They are magical and ethereal in their powerful presence, harkening back to ancient Greece, referring to medieval Japanese screens and hinting at geometry and architecture. In so many ways, they embody culture as control, perfectly aligned and Zen-like in their calm essence. Together, I imagine, these two artists’ works represent life. Bringing order and chaos together here, the installation becomes a hybrid natural history museum and art museum, a space where histories and bodies collide on the one hand, but also a place where unity is achieved through materiality under the shared moniker of ART. And much like life on the farm, I posit to guess that it will be a place of wonder, of joy and of perfectly controlled chaos.