Category: In General

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. The deposit of a stream of sensory material edging on trauma, compacted over time into an 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. Here, a discovery with cascading repercussions 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 solution. Butter wrappers from the market, when wiped, turned to instant art paper vellum. 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 rocks. The sight had the unfortunate result of infecting the memory of my wiggly hotel window sill markings, innocent as they had been. When we moved to a farm on the Norwegian border, I had enough encounters with the Scandinavian adder to consider the place infested.

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 the Laocoön and His Sons sculpture 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. At thirty years of age, he had already completed the David the previous year, and was a celebrated sculptor. The Laocoön‘s twisted, muscular forms are reflected in his Dying Slave sculpture and the treatment of Christ in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment. Marco Dente’s engraving is an early record of the sculpture as it looked after the 1506 excavation, still missing its right arm.

The weather forecast part of my exhibition had involved taking the stairs to the roof of our studio building and surveying the visible horizon that day. With a light pencil scribble, I would transcribe the sky onto a legal size paper from top to bottom filling it. Subsequently, at my desk on the second floor, a brush dipped in blue-black ink would act as a seismograph needle, further interpreting the pencil hatches into a slow deliberate downward stroke from top to bottom through the center of the page. This way a studio workweek from Monday to Friday might be compressed into five lines.

I had been directly inspired by Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (Chapel of the Rosary). Designing every element of the space, from the architecture to the priest’s vestments, the artist declared the project the ultimate culmination of his life. Line elements from Matisse’s Stations of the Cross had a particular impact. While my first window sill scratches in Gothenburg hotel room were made in 1951, the year Matisse completed his life work, then as a 25-year-old fumbling about, my attention was rather fixed to the future than my own distant past.

How Rome and Gothenburg are connected is historically interesting. Gothenburg in English means literally “Fortress of the Goths.” While the city itself was only founded in 1621 by King Gustavus Adolphus, its naming is symbolic of the area from which the Goths began their migration, first to what is now Poland, then making their way to Spain as Visigoths and to Rome as Ostrogoths, sacking the city, and instigating the collapse of its infrastructure. It took the Laocoön and His Sons sculpture a thousand years to be buried in soil, but it seems that someone from Goth-land may have thrown the first spadeful.

It had been Laocoön that struck the Trojan Horse with a spear, angering the gods, and Athena in particular. Giant sea serpents were sent to silence him, the two sons just collateral damage. The effect of the tragedy on the Trojans was to deem the horse sacred, a mistake that sealed their doom. Once the horse was dragged within the walls of the city, the Greeks poured out, and the rest is history. Laocoön had warned them, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

The Viking Age officially began on June 8, 793 at Lindisfarne (Holy Island), off the coast of Northumberland, England. These wooden sea serpents, out which warriors poured out, had been perfected in their mobile marine efficiency. While there had been pirate raids before, Christian Europe viewed this new Viking threat as punishment from God – and they had arrived bearing no gifts.

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.

by Steve Rockwell

I travelled with my family to Gothenburg, Sweden in 1951, leaving Espoo, Finland, which had been home to my father’s side of the family for at least four generations. My grandfather had been part of a movement to adopt Finnish names, legally shedding his Kristiansson identity for Salomaa. Steve Rockwell, on the other hand, is a creative persona. My mother had believed that Salomaa was entirely the outcome of the 1918 conflict between the Bolshevik Reds and White Finns, where Johan Nestor Kristiansson defected to the Whites. “He rammed his rifle barrel into ground at the base of a tree, and bolted,” my mother recounted.

Kuusta Rovio, the Helsinki police chief, figures into the story here. Rovio not only sheltered Vladimir Lenin in his Helsinki apartment in August of 1917, but supplied him with Russian newspapers and passed on secrets to his party comrades.

As it turned out, the anti-socialist White forces under Carl Gustaf Mannerheim won a decisive victory in May 1918. Rovio fled to Soviet Russia, becoming a Communist Party official. A victim of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, he was arrested in 1937 and executed the following year. Meanwhile in Helsinki, the police department bleached its Reds. The armored cruiser Sisu “Black Maria” rolled out in the year of his arrest. After the war in 1945, my father had a job painting “Black Marias” at the Helsinki Police Department. He would have been familiar with the armored Sisu since it served until 1951, the year we left for Sweden.

My father found employment at SKF ball bearing factory in Gothenburg, an obvious choice, as SKF parts would have regularly been shipped to the Helsinki Police Department, civilian cars being retrofitted as police cruisers. To a five-year-old, the sound of a ball bearing smacking and rolling across the floor had been memorable. Swedish engineer Sven Wingquist’s 1907 invention of the modern self-aligning ball bearing had solved shaft misalignment and machine overheating. It resulted in the foundation of Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF), paving the way for a new car company, Volvo (Latin for “I roll”).

In 1913 it had been the churning and friction of the chocolate grinder that erotically overheated Marcel Duchamp’s imagination. In Paris that year he produced the first “readymade,” Bicycle Wheel. The term described works that were selected rather than crafted, although the word did not come into use for another two years. Sven Wingquist’s self-aligning ball bearing was featured at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s 1934 Machine Art exhibition in New York City, not as readymade, but a “crafted” object. Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel didn’t appear at the MoMA until 1951, the original wheel not having survived. You can still find Wingquist’s ball bearing piece on display in the David Geffen Wing today.

Between 1592 and 1610, during his tenure in Padua, Galileo Galilei used ramps to study falling objects, since the high speed of a free-falling entity proved impossible to accurately time. With his “decelerated” brass balls, for instance, observations and measurements were quite feasible. Galileo found that a body fell at the approximate rate of 32 feet per second.

In the case of Vladimir Lenin’s 32 “sealed car” passengers who left Zurich railway station on April 9, 1917 for St. Petersburg, the rate of a falling body is measured in historic terms. The Germans permitted the “sealed train” to cross its territory tactically to destabilize Russia. Within months of arrival at Finland Station, the 1917 October Revolution was successfully staged, giving birth to the Soviet state. Out of the 32 passengers who essentially shaped 20th century as we came to know it, most had by the late 1930s been made enemies of the people, tortured, executed, or been worked to death in the Gulag.

Lenin on the Train had been passed on to me by a couple at the Crane Beach Resort in Barbados some eight years ago. After a poolside chat about reading, I had expressed an interest in the subject. Julia then suggested I pick up the book from the lobby library where they had left it, as it had failed to hold husband David’s interest. It surprised me at the time. Learning that David had just previously been the publisher of Toronto Life Magazine, I had assumed a degree of curiosity in the topic. I now see that it had rather been my own tangled family history which had brought the pertinent immediacy to Lenin’s train ride.

Christmas 1954 we travelled back to Espoo to visit my grandmother on her death bed. Emilia Karolina Salomaa passed away shortly into the new year at the age of 91. The visit entailed a 25-mile train ride through Porkkala, a Soviet naval base. At the western Espoo checkpoint, armed Soviet soldiers boarded the train for document inspection. Heavy shutters were fastened over all carriage windows from the outside. The Finnish steam engine was uncoupled and replaced by a Soviet one, which guided the train through the military zone. Memorable to a nine-year-old was the complete darkness and strict instructions to not look outside or move about the train for the next hour. This had been my own “sealed car” passenger train experience, separated by the one by Vladimir Lenin by just 37 years.