dArt International Magazine

by Steve Rockwell

I threw away my work from the fall 1970 group exhibition at 567 Queen Street West in Toronto. After ten years in apartment storage, it was a quick toss into the bin outside. The nineteen cardboard and paper works, variously touched up with ink and pencil, had been glued onto hand-sawed wood frames, and bundled with twine into roughly a 2 x 3 x 4 foot package.

The show concept had been simple: reading the morning paper, while having a cup of coffee. Three sets of five collages used Toronto Star’s daily weather forecasts, The Heart of Juliet Jones comic strips, and cards with a cup of coffee image (a CBC Radio promo, as I recall). The four trees on nearby Brandt Street? All had been sublimated through applications of pencil and ink to paper. Seen now in retrospect, they may be traced to the experiences of a five-year-old adjusting to his move from Espoo, Finland to Gothenburg, Sweden. Then, open countryside had suddenly flipped into the restrictive, urban confinement of a hotel. A stream of sensory material edging on trauma deposited over time as expressive resource.

The second floor suite of our Gothenburg hotel overlooked a cobblestone courtyard. Having spent hours at the window, I can say conclusively that nothing much happened in it. Our rooms were white, vividly so. A discovery with cascading repercussions now took place. The scratch of a coin on the window sill could produce a rich pewter line, almost black. To keep me from defacing the hotel room, my mother came up with a quick solution. Butter wrappers from the market, when wiped, turned into an instant paper readymade. A pencil tracing of Tarzan in profile from a Borden milk ad in a Gothenberg newspaper was my first stab at art. By eleven, I had a respectable comics collection with Tarzan as my main title.

Within a month we were living in a Gothenburg suburb apartment, not far from a farm. On one occasion, I witnessed a curious spectacle. Invisible to me, but the focus of a group of men in agitated conversation, was something on the ground. I had to have a closer look. What I glimpsed, after poking my head into the circle, was horrific but mesmerizing. Two enormous snakes were writhing on the ground with their heads having been crushed by stones. The sight had the unfortunate result of infecting the memory of my wiggly hotel window sill markings, innocent as they had been. Soon we were living on a farm by the Norwegian border that was infested with the venomous Scandinavian adder.

I could understand how experiences like these might seep into the cultural imagination across generations. The Vikings carved serpent imagery into the heads and tails of their long boats, their aim – to magnify the terror in their opponent during an attack.

The discovery of Laocoön and His Sons on January 14, 1506 in the vineyard of Felice de Fredis was explosive. Pope Julius II purchased it almost immediately, having it moved from its Esquiline Hill site to the Vatican across the Tiber. It energized the High Renaissance masters in its dynamism, anatomical detail, and psychological impact. The ancient masterpiece depicts a Trojan priest and his children being strangled by writhing sea serpents.

There is a written record of Michelangelo Bounarroti’s presence at the Laocoön unearthing. Papal architect Giuliano da Sangallo had grabbed Michelangelo and hurried him to the excavation site the moment the vineyard find was announced. Now 30 years of age, he had already completed the David the previous year, and a celebrated sculptor, yet he was fundamentally changed by the experience. Marco Dente’s engraving (c. 1515) is a remarkable early visual record of the sculpture as it looked after the 1506 excavation, before later restorations, the Laocoön still missing its right arm.

(to be continued)

by Steve Rockwell

Atlas Film Studios in Morocco is the largest film studio in the world by land area, spanning over 322,000 square feet. Morocco has a thriving movie industry, and Atlas Film Studios is at its center. Variations on the image of Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders has proliferated over the centuries. Its depiction has stuck with me for as long as I can remember, Atlas having graced the cover of a Finnish encyclopedia called, Pikku Jattilainen (The Little Giant), a book that we owned.

The circle of my five-year-old world was tiny. I knew just three of its four quarters. To the north behind our house was a community center with an outdoor stage that put on a production of Hansel and Gretel. Across the road on the south side was a house with a coffee grinder, clearly visible through its kitchen window. Downhill to the road east lay the city – just a bicycle ride to the Helsinki Police Department for my father.

The road westward, however, was ripe for discovery, and its opportunity arose with a convenient distraction. On this particular day, my mother was hosting a hen party. A discrete slip, followed by a quick walk, for what seemed like forever, took me to a crossroads. When the evergreen horizon of teeth began morphing into silhouetted scarecrows, I knew it was journey’s end. Somewhat winded upon my return, I was pleased with my mother’s steamy chicory coffee – milky with a side of “korppu” (coffee bread rusk). With a dunk and rotation of the crisp around the rim of the cup came a sense of completion and satisfaction – an adventure private to myself. The background chatter and laughter of the hen party supplied its soundtrack.

Shooting for Scorsese’s Kundun began at Atlas Corporation Studios on August 26, 1996, finishing on December 20. The Atlas Mountains and desert landscape stood in for the Tibetan “Roof of the World.” Other Moroccan locations were used, but Atlas Studios was the main base. Still there, are the massive Tibetan palace sets and gates that were built for the biopic by Dante Ferretti, a production designer known for constructing historical worlds that are as much psychological spaces. He created a Tibetan world within Morocco.

Kundun screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, not only based it on the life of the 14th Dalai Lama, but cooperated with him and members of his family during its development. A crucial scene has a 19-year-old Dalai Lama travelling to Beijing in 1954-55 to meet with Mao Tse-Tung. Written into the script is his recollection of their exchange word for word: “Your attitude is good, you know. I understand you well. But you need to learn this: religion is poison. It undermines the race and it retards the progress of the people. Tibet has been poisoned by religion.”

Mao’s phrase “religion is poison” becomes the hinge of the entire film. What follows is the destruction of Tibetan religious culture, the violence, and the Dalai Lama’s ultimate flight into exile. The young Dalai Lama had arrived optimistic and hopeful, even having considered reconciling some Marxist ideas with Buddhism, but the meeting was a train wreck.

The Atlas of Greek mythology, a second-generation Titan, had unparalleled physical strength. He was the battlefield commander for the older generation of Titan gods, who ultimately failed in their rebellion against Zeus and the Olympians. His punishment was harsh and highly visible, Zeus condemning him to stand at the western edge of the world to hold up the celestial sphere on his shoulders for all eternity. Geographically, his shoulders would have covered what is now the Atlas Mountain Range. While contemporaries render him holding up the world, in Greek antiquity it was the sky that he held up.

Titan Road is a street in west-end Toronto. On Wednesday, October 31, 2007, the 14th Dalai Lama visited the Tibetan-Canadian Cultural Centre which had just opened there. He blessed the facility and greeted hundreds of people, with crowds reportedly lining up around the block for hours. I can attest to that since I was there. The printing company that employed me was at 30 Titan Road, the Dalai Lama’s visit taking place at number 40, just next door.

All morning, that day Tibetan monks made their way by foot, single file, down the street eventually encircling the Titan Road buildings at 30 and 40. We listened to continuous reports on the radio as the car with the Dalai Lama progressed to its destination here. When he did arrive, I felt that I needed to witness the event, like many others. It seemed odd to have been close enough to the Dalai Lama to have shaken his hand and said hello, had I wished to.

More significantly, as I reflect now, is the Dalai Lama’s stopping by the entrance of our building on Titan, less than 30 feet from the carpentry shop that had fabricated my Meditations on Space panels. (The current occupant at 30 Titan Rd., Unit #1 is MedPure, a medical supply facility). The book work was printed December, 1996. Shooting for Scorsese’s Kundun at Atlas Corporation Studios in Morocco finished on December 20, 1996. My own construction, painting, and publication had synchronized with Ferretti’s set design and Scorsese’s filming of Kundun to the same month and year.

by Steve Rockwell

I was introduced to Ramesses I, the founder of Egypt’s 19th Dynasty, in his then Wellington Street West residence in Toronto in the late 1990’s by Bill Jamieson. It is difficult to describe my sense of excitement, as the identity of the mummy was just in the process of being confirmed. Egyptologist Gayle Gibson had made evaluations. There had been discussions with the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta for a possible sale. After scans, anatomical analyses, and comparisons with royal mummies Jamieson’s Egyptian collection went to Atlanta in 1999. Then in 2003, Ramesses I received a ceremonial state welcome and was placed on display in Egypt’s Luxor Museum, barely two miles from where Ramesses I ruled just over 3,200 years ago.

Socially, it had been the shrunken heads that broke the ice. Jamieson’s purchase of the Niagara Falls Museum collection, however, was the big story. The timing mattered. He came across as a grand curiosity-cabinet figure at a time when museums were beginning to reconsider the ethics of collecting. Essentially, he had been a Toronto contractor whose loft became a museum, and who now holds a place in history for discovering a lost Egyptian pharaoh.

Jamieson’s loft was his business headquarters, his client list including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s. Objects came and went as he bought, researched, authenticated, and sold. His 6,000-square-foot home with 14-foot ceilings held thousands of objects; Egyptian mummies, one of the world’s largest private collection of shrunken heads (about a dozen), South America, Africa, and Oceania tribal art, electric chairs and Medieval torture devices, coffins, anatomical specimens, and curiosities from around the world. His Halloween parties became legendary. A sweeping curved staircase cut through the loft’s three floors making the panorama equal parts Madame Tussauds and Twilight Zone. Visiting guests reportedly included Tim Burton, Steve Tyler, and Mick Jagger.

Historically, Ramesses I ruled a mere two years, leaving little dramatic material for filmmakers. The reign of his grandson, Ramesses II (“Ramesses the Great”), on the other hand, stretched 66 years, with a trail of monumental temples. While traditionally identified as the pharaoh of the Exodus story, scholarship renders this less than definitive. Ramesses I came to the throne around 1292 BC, as Egypt reached the height of New Kingdom power, placing him at the beginning of the last great flowering of Bronze Age civilization, before its collapse a century later.