E. Bagatelles
As a small child, I was familiar with at least some of the piano bagatelles by Beethoven from my mother’s playing. I had no knowledge until very much later of other composers who wrote pieces of the same general name. The term has been used in music for centuries to denote a ‘trifle’ – a slight and insignificant piece with a certain innocence. The title should not always be considered guileless.
Around 2009 I discovered the bagatelles of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. Two years later, I decided to make twelve much smaller and simpler models than I had formerly; my friend and collaborator the late Andrea Mina – maker of very small powerful models – was gravely ill, and I felt a need to reduce the size of my models even if I could not approach his. My exploratory makings finally commenced in April 2012. In each model, the effort would be to deal with a constrained array of ideas. What evolved were two sets, each of six models. Set one explores means of shaping Six Places for Considered Reading, while set two gives form to Six Places for Moments of Optimism. Most places in the first set are stable and calm with an obvious reader’s seat. Optimism is required in the places of the second set, as they are variously unstable, dangerous, threatening, or flighty; a visitor requires optimism to remain, sometimes even to enter.
What follows is an account of the ideas and concerns in each of them, and something of their generation and construction.
To begin, a dozen bases were cut from a piece of wood rescued from a timber yard off-cut bin. All my saw cuts (both horizontal and vertical) were at small angles. No base is the same as any other. Predominantly, they are within three millimetres of being 75mm by 70mm, but there are two about 64mm on one side, and one is only 59mm. The heights diverge only a millimetre from 50mm. There was overlap in the construction of models within set 1, but little with the set 2 models. Throughout, they were considered as two divisions of the one whole set and informed one another. My intention was to make these smaller models simpler than their predecessors. In fact, many of them appear simpler, or at least easier, to construct than was the case.
Set 1: Six Places for Considered Reading
24 A Place for Considered Reading 6
A thoracic metal frame supports perforated screens sheltering a tall Charles Rennie Macintosh-derived chair for the reader. There are spinal vertebrae with curving ribs made of tubes gifted by Tania Splawa-Neyman. A cable running up to the second rib, if slackened, may allow this frame to tilt forward. The screens supported by the frame could collapse forward too. (This possibility is the first hint of something less than stoic stability in this set of places and presages what is to come in the next set.) Potentially the rib and screen combinations breathe – lungs inflating the reading. More likely, they are sheltering mesh Magnolia petals around the reader perched on the elegant but austere seat sitting atop a precise mound. The shroud of protective mesh, the frame, the mound and the chair conspire to convey that significant reading must be undertaken here.
Base: 77mm x 71mm. Model: 77mm x 71mm. Height: 162mm.
Initiated: December 2012. Constructed: 1 February 2013 – 11 August 2013.