Pushing Granite

By staff reporter PENELOPE COLVILLE

Yellowstone by Daniel Henderson. He doesn't want people to just use technology to talk, he wants them to talk about technology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you want to look at what it means to be transformed by technology, what better fast-track, hot house case to consider than China, a society that has morphed itself in an alarmingly compressed window of time. That's what inventor and stone sculptor Daniel Henderson concluded. You likely use a piece of Henderson's work regularly; he holds the patent for wireless transmission of photos and video from cell phones. Having made a solid fortune manipulating the ethereal, it's not so surprising that he then gravitated towards stone.

Technology remains the obsession of his second career: he renders larger than life versions of iconic Western devices: the Princess phone, the Viewmaster, or the early, clunky mobile phone - all in smooth, luxurious granite, warm bronze and molded glass. No one alive when the Princess phone came on the market can forget it – it is the first instance of technology naming and branding. “The notion that we make temporal technology with man made materials – this is what drives me to memorialize it with more permanent materials.”

Intimations of technological mortality notwithstanding, Henderson isn't engaged in reproducing the quaint and cute, or catering to a shallow nostalgia in people with deep pockets. The long-term impact of technology on humanity is the turf of his forms and their memes; his sculptures insinuate “we should be careful what we make, how we make it, and with what – basically dig a little deeper into our decision-making process and think through the outcomes as much as we can. China, the West, everybody needs to ask themselves these questions.”

Inventor Daniel Henderson isn't resting on his laurels.

Henderson came here as one of the collective of digital sculptors invested in Beijing Tomorrow Gallery. He had an epiphany: “I have to make Chinese products in stone because there's a different technological language for people in China – objects have different meanings.” He plans to do Beijing TV, a stone recreation of a black and white analogue television manufactured in China in the late 50's. This one will be “airing” Chairman Mao's image, Andy Warhol style. “One of my favorite literary items is a children's series on Tom Swift and his wireless telephone, nuclear submarine and other ideas about the future of our world … What I want people to think about when they look at my stone technologies is where we came from technologically, where we are headed, what the good things are, the bad things, and the unintended consequences that its use and development have thrown up.”

 

used my invention to video the moment, which now

can be found by my children on the internet. A very unsavory consequence.”

This unintended consequence of technology challenged him to think beyond his own ego and of his drive to be creative. The “side effects” of transforming technologies sometimes just present themselves. Henderson’s roles on the boards of educational institutions revealed some fallout: the instantaneous environment communications technology creates, and the consequently short attention span of youth. Among these educational colleagues conversations still rage about how to communicate with people who can’t maintain eye contact. This suggests technology and its impacts will be around while its discarded husks languish at garage sales.

Despite the flash-in-the-pan nature of his muse, or perhaps because of it, his irresistible sculptures are sensual, and speak to permanence. The carving of technology in stone is saying what Henderson wants to say about the erosion of tactility in our world. Henderson went to Stonehenge and notes that while some of his sculptures are 5000 tons, the largest trilathon at Stonehenge, that ancient Western technology, is 40,000 pounds; it's been around for a long time and continues to be a magnet for speculation and mystery. By contrast, Henderson shrugs, “My 10 year old and my 14 year old have completely different experiences. The cultural language of objects is different between 10 and 14 years of age! There is no unifying force of objects around us because they are always changing”. Looking from the outside, today's youth are fragmented, even youth who are technically of the same generation.

“Stone is stored feeling capital it will be around for thousands

of years.” A very Chinese condition.

Our temporary manmade plastic gadgets, Henderson's work suggests, are, in some unseen dimensions, ubiquitous and enormously influential. There are social consequences. “The cell phone has become the remote control for our lives – we use it for electronic banking, purchases, mail and many other applications. Thanks to this convenience we do much less face to face, and have much less contact, especially with the common person on the street.”

He reflects on China's challenges through the lens of his own history. Tashi Hashimoto, a Japanese inventor and Henderson's mentor until he died in 1995, was responsible for bringing the answer phone and Caller ID to the world in the late 1950s. “Japan was not really inventive, Henderson notes, but brilliant at realizing other people's ideas. The situation not the same for China; China invented many things a long time ago that we take for granted. As China becomes more dependent on trading relationships it will care more about intellectual property rights. But it started out counterfeiting, copying and importing like Japan; I believe they will become innovators in their own right.” The beauty of this work in stone as versus his work in software, is that it doesn't spawn intellectual property right law suits.

In the meantime he feels what we really to work out now are the ethics, because “once it's out there, we are all affected much the same way by technology. The challenge is great for China as a nation, and this elbows down to us individually when we consider the changes wrought by technology that are completely out of our control.”

The ethics we develop to guide the use of technologies and

how we resolve the problems they create will determine their

ultimate value to civilization.

This is Daniels first trip here but won't be his last. “China has a wonderful rich history of stone work, some of it quite astonishing”: he is referring the Hui'an culture of women stone carvers. “That was a surprise to me – being a man I think of stone carving as a macho thing, a man's art.”

Robert Michael Smith is Henderson's link to China. Smith was one of four sculptors behind the Digital Stone Exhibition that toured four Chinese cities between the fall of 2008 and the winter of 2009, and spawned a gallery collective in Beijing this year. He arrived in China a month after his friend Bruce Beasley, whose sculpture Gathering of the Moons is permanently installed in Beijing's Olympic Park. They were checking out dozens of large scale stone carving facilities in and near Chongwu just north of Xiamen that might be able to produce his huge outdoor sculptures. The facility they selected would work from the products of a “3D printer” – a machine that looks a little like a prop from a low budget sci-fi movie; it takes the artists computer-generated designs and delivers a small scale model in plastic, meaning that designs can be done anywhere in the world, then rendered in miniature for shipping. Carvers anywhere in the world then take the model, or rapid prototype, and produce in granite the final piece at the scale specified by the artist.

China's artisans promised to be a great alternative production method for the sculptors, because the CAM technology Smith was using in New Jersey, he explains, “was costing about as much as if I had gone to Italy and paid some carvers to do it. One day these technologies will become cheaper – that's how technology works, but right now they are prohibitive for many sculptors.” Most of us are familiar with CAD (computer-assisted design) but CAM refers to computer-assisted manufacturing where computers running tools actually carve the stone. Dingli Stone Carving Co., Ltd. offered the perfect solution as far as Smith and Beasley were concerned, “ they offer a robust pallet of stone, the quality of their work was very high, and the intricacy of what they were achieving in granite was very impressive. I realized I could design sculptures that were more and more complex, pushing granite to the point where most people wouldn't expect it to be able to go.” Smith knew that when he used a machine to carve, that like any machine it has a slight vibration and he would risk breaking some of the finer design details he planned for a piece – a hazard far less likely with hand carving. Of their collaboration with Dingli, Smith notes that he and Bruce Beasley were the first western artists to work with the company.

Then their activities scaled up in a big way, becoming the Digital Stone Exhibition. The sculptors met Carl Bass, the CEO of the world's largest computer-assisted design company Autodesk Inc., and he was just as fired up as they were about the possibilities lurking in the merger of thousands of years of interaction with stone that China's culture offered, with the advanced design and manufacturing technologies of the West. Two more pioneers in digital sculpture, Jon Isherwood and Kenneth Snelson, rounded out the quartet of granite pushers, and Autodesk funded a documentary of the production work in Chongwu and exhibits in Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing and Wenzhou. Digital Stone Exhibition: The Intersection of Art and Technology is a book commemorating their four-city tour and works.

“The influences in painting have gone back and forth

for some time, but I see the influences of the East even in our first show,

specifically the influence of Chinese culture.”

Now in the permanent collection of China's National Museum of Fine Art: Paradise Bird Burlesque by Robert Michael Smith shown in Chongqing;

	Moon Shot by Kenneth Snelson shown in Beijing (above left);Fish Out of Water by Jon Isherwood shown in Wenzhou (above right); Challenge by Bruce Beasley shown in Shanghai.

Another triumph - they each sold a piece to China National Museum of Fine Art, of which Smith says “that's a first really, for Western sculptors to each sell a piece into the museum's permanent collection from a single exhibition”. The show was intended to go around the world, then the financial crisis hit, and Smith speculates “If we had started the Digital Stone Exhibition even two months later than we did, it would never had happened. Autodesk suffered like everyone else, and even though they are surviving this thing, they are doing it with their shares at half the value, so corporate sponsorship isn't there for now.”

Smith is a calm, compact man who exudes a certain strength, and like the stone he shapes to his dreams and desires, he looks like he'll weather a lot of change. The sculptor, who already has multiple responsibilities, went on to open the Beijing Tomorrow Gallery in the Pingod complex in Beijing's south east quarter. Beijing Tomorrow is a gallery with a timeshare apartment that the artists he represents carry the cost of, plus a social center. When he is out of Beijing the gallery and its promotional activities are run by two arts-educated and capable Chinese managers. His tenured professorship at the New York Institute of Technology, and a family plot in Sonoma County in California where he grows lavender and keeps bees to make lavender honey, are two other things that keep the energetic sculptor busy. Then there is his sculpting, inspired by computer-manipulations of images driven by mathematical principles. What he is working on now is scaling down his meditations on the wonder of manifest and inherent organic forms into jewelry-sized pieces.

The influences unleashed by the Digital Arts Exhibition he views as a phenomenon that has just begun. Of the prospects for Western artists in China he notes “There are a lot of public buildings in China and of course public art is in demand”. But beyond that, Beijing Tomorrow represents artists that Smith knows and has worked with, all of whom are “interested in this great marriage of art and science. We are engaged in discussion about how and where to make CAM technology available here. China is very interested in this whole notion of design by computer and computer-driven manufacturing.” Presumably it fits with economic necessity - meeting China's challenge to scale the value-chain in mass or multiple production services. What started with personal introductions of sculptor friends to Dingli has mothered more than mere economic back-scratching. “We broke in at a time when the interest in Western art was just starting. Of course the influences in painting have gone back and forth for some time, but I see the influences of the East even in our first show, specifically the influence of Chinese culture.”