MFA Thesis
by, Mike Rathbun

I used to have a recurring dream. It went like this: I did something that wrecked the entire world and everyone knew that I did it.

• • •

I am trying to find Epiphanies. These are moments when for reasons that I can not explain, I seem to be connected to something outside of myself. This happens when a set of circumstances arise and are triggered by something: a song, a view, an idea. I then feel an emotional swell that is so profound that it becomes physical. I experience a moment of clarity; clarity about what I don't know. Perhaps it is what C.S. Lewis calls a desire for heaven. (1) It is a glimpse of something that seems to be the most important thing! It is like something that is up and just to the right of my vision and when I turn in that direction it seems to move and keep pace with my turning. Then another set of circumstances cloud it and it is gone. The feeling lingers and leaves me with a hope and a feeling that it is something bigger than I am. It is like waking from a dream. The longer I am awake the less I remember, and the more I try to remember the less sense it makes. But, even after the specifics of the dream are gone, the way it made me feel can last for a very long time. What is that thing, that clarity? I find that I am driven to find out.

• • •

When I started in school I wanted to be a biologist or a scientist because it seems that my earliest and most profound experiences happened when I was swimming in the ocean or walking alone in the desert. I found that the protocols in these disciplines were too rigid. I found that I needed something more flexible. I needed to find a different way of asking questions and doing experiments. For this reason I became a builder. The switch from science to art was a very easy one to make. I see them as very similar. In science you have a certain amount of information to start with, you form a theory based on that information and then do experiments to assess the validity of your theory. Art is like this. I am searching for a thing -Epiphanies. I have some information based on experience, I do experiments, and I channel this information through my hands. I see these Epiphanies as spiritual experiences. But they always happen as the result of some physical trigger. This is why the use of building has become so important to me.

I wonder, “Can I recreate these situations?” So I began to make things. I don't look for any specific meaning or try to put forward an agenda in the objects that I make. I am instead searching for some element of that thing that I can not explain. As I build I think in terms of a gesture. The forms start with something I have seen: a machine part, a wind generator, a boat, ect., and I set about making this thing. I don't draw it, for this allows me to keep the piece fluid and flexible to the material and whatever else might influence it. Hopefully I will recognize in the work, a curve, a twist, or an overall gesture that will give me a clue as to which direction to take next. Many times I don't see it. That's all right because the building is a big part of it. Every so often when my hands, my head, and the material come together, I see it. It is in the way something is connected, or a cut in a piece of wood, or the curve of a rod.

I think the success or failure of these sculptures has to do with their relationship and relevance to something I have seen that exist in the world. Forms and their effectiveness aesthetically and spiritually have their root in a kind of practicality. I love wind generators. Their forms are dynamic and exciting, yet everything about them is made to function in a practical way. The thing that makes them so amazing is that the shape of the blades enables them to recover a natural and powerful force. It then changes that force into another type of energy. When I think about this I can hardly control my mind. It jumps in many directions at once. This process of taking one type of energy and changing in to another is a universal thing.

Does everyone see this relationship? I know some people do. VanGogh was a maniac for this. He would go without food and sleep to search for it with paint and pencil. It killed him. What is it that drove him? He ended one of his letters: "I am risking my life in my work and my reason is half gone." (2) He never made any money, but look at his search, his journey. A trail of paintings and drawings that tell of his need to understand people and the world they were placed in, and to understand his place in that world.

•••

I want to be in the Olympics. Sometimes if I think about it enough, I need to be in the Olympics. When I was in high school I ran good enough that it seemed possible that it could be a reality. And for some reason, when I discovered this I started smoking, or rather continued to smoke. I still talked about it a lot. I talked until the words change to "I could have been in the Olympics.” I will never be in the Olympics. When I watch them I still feel the need. It's like the ocean; if I think about it deeply enough, I need to be in it or before it! I can get something like a physical pain. Sometimes I cry. There is something about a level of personal achievement that is almost spiritual. Potential, it is about potential and fulfillment of potential and a level of personal achievement. Why do I get this same feeling of heightened emotion and intense longing from thoughts of the ocean? Is the ocean the same as the Olympics? I think it's funny that all of the things that I want to achieve or be, are preempted by the person that I am. That is to say that I need to be in the Olympics but I continued to smoke.

• • •

Walker Percy in his book "The Last Gentleman", talks about an engineer looking at a Velasques painting in a museum in New York. He stood at the correct distance and the painting was properly lit, in the warm dry and quiet museum. All this had rendered the painting invisible and he could not see it any more. However, above him a man was working on a skylight and came crashing through to the ground just a foot away from him. All of a sudden everything was in question: his life, the workers injuries, tomorrow...and in the height of this excitement when he was helping the worker up, he caught a glimpse of the painting and "it was glowing like a jewel". The painter must have just stepped out of his studio and the engineer, passing on the street had stopped to look through the open door and the painting could be seen! (3) Another time in this book, the engineer bought a powerful telescope and focused it on a section of brick on a building about a mile away. He saw a disc of bricks eight feet across and he stared at the bricks and "He slapped his leg. It was as he had hoped: not only were the bricks seen as if they were ten feet away; they were better than having the bricks there before him. They gained in value. Every grain and crack and excrescence became available. Beyond any doubt, he said to himself, this proves that bricks as well as other things, are not as accessible as they used to be. Special measures were needed to recover them. The telescope recovered them." (4)

• • •

How can I see the world again? In amongst the day to day stresses, the need for money, fear has made the world empty and invisible. How do I recover my place in the world? How can I recover my sight when I sit in my studio in an academic environment. My work has been energy that I have gained from sources, (i.e. books and experience) and poured out in physical form (i.e. space and material).

• • •

I must find a way to make what I am doing relevant. I have no real interest in making work that only artists will understand. I need to find that connection to the world in which everyone lives. I want to make forms that evoke a sense of wonder in anyone who happens to see them. The Architect Louis Kahn said "I want my work to be about a time before knowledge, about a time when there was pure wonder." (5) I find this a very intriguing statement. I do think knowledge is a very good thing. I can use knowledge to stoke my sense of wonder. However, I have found that intellectual knowledge taken directly to the studio can produce over-thought and therefore over-worked art. The intellect must be tempered with wonder or magic.

• • •

Jacques Cousteau is one of my heroes. Can you imagine doing the things that he has done? How would it feel to swim with a whale shark that is fifty feet long? What incredible wonder that would produce. The fear...how could you possibly look at the world the same again? You would have knowledge, but it would be knowledge that would be an infectious type. Wouldn't it draw you in? Wouldn't it reinspire a sense of awe? This is the type of knowledge I need to make my work.

I had an experience recently of picking up 1500 feet of wood to be used in my M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition. It was cold and the wood was very heavy. It was more money than I wanted to pay. My M.F.A. show was plodding toward me. I also had a great deal of stress and fear at the prospect of writing this paper. In short, I was in a place that felt that it wasn't possible to do the things that I had laid out for myself to do in the time that I had to do it. My view of the world was one of fear and inadequacy. On the ride home with the wood, a friend of mine and I talked about the wood and the project. The end product, a sculpture, will owe everything to the process of hundred year old trees, the growth of these trees, and the resources it took to grow them. Somehow these trees where planted, they grew, someone cut them, they were milled, and finally there was the physical effort of loading them and hauling them. As we continued to talk, I could picture building the piece. As I build with my hands this reminds me of my responsibility to the material. Then when finished, exhausted, I will sit, leaning against it, drinking, maybe smoking, feeling the pains of building and remembering the trials of the task. Many times I didn't think I could do it. It will be, because, I have seen it.

As we talked it seems to be less about a piece of art and more about the building with hands. Taking all of our knowledge and experience, the wood and its history, the knowledge and wonder of seeing Jacques and the whale shark and passing this knowledge not through our heads and mouths but through our hands. This is why all of the aches and pains of moving and building, the cuts and bruises are as necessary as any art protocols. Our hands can filter out the superfluous and get to a piece that can produce an emotional and therefore spiritual response. As we talked, it began to seem that the load we were carrying was no longer a burden but a truck full of potential. The show was no longer a requirement to complete my academic career, but instead had become an opportunity to build something wonderful. The physical rigors of moving it and forming it are a joyful and necessary part of the end product. Can this be pure wonder; sitting in the truck driving to my studio with a load of magic? I was thinking that at that point, There is no one that I envy. I have been given a gift and a challenge to do something that makes me feel whole.

Is this an Epiphany? It is like a recovery of my own potential. It coalesced into an understanding, brief though it was, that each thing that I do owes itself to everything that I have done before.

•••

Flanery O'Conner said that if you want to write about universal truths you must look for the specifics. I have not been able to get to the answers to giant spiritual questions. Maybe there is one giant answer, but it is revealed in many different parts. (6)

•••

Where is wonder contained? It is contained in the details of life, in specific moments. My life is not what it will be when I finish college and get a good job. My life is what I am now. I know that I must prepare for the future but my energy comes from now. It comes from my God, my wife, my daughter, and my work. Not these things in the larger esoteric sense, but experientially in daily encounters. Hearing my daughter call me "Dad" or moving a load of wood can be a mystical experience.
In my faith tradition the most important aspect is that bridge between the physical and the spiritual. Christ is God and a person at the same time. This recognizes my physicalness and my need for spirit. It is reiterated many times. Baptism is an act that allows me to close my eyes in a place where I can see my potential, but leaves my inadequacy standing in the path of that potential. When I open them again the perspective has changed. Potential is recovered. Christ laid his body over the gap between me and God. This is a bridge that allows me to see challenges from a place in which I have a chance of over coming them. It connects me with the eternal. I think that Epiphanies are hints of the eternal.
I once heard of a tribe in New Guinea which is very primitive and only has stone tools. They are dependent on a nearby river for their livelihood. In the river are very large crocodiles. These people have no weapons that are adequate to affect the crocodile. The crocodile are to them beyond their control, so they think of them as gods and below the waters surface as the spiritual realm. They must daily traverse this realm. The very act of bathing or getting something to eat involves being on the edge of heaven. The very magic nature of everyday needs is not lost on them. Their way of relating to god is with their dugout canoes. These are a magic craft because they are a bridge from the physical to the spiritual. (7) This is a type of bridge that interests me very much. It is very important that the intermediary be a physical thing like a canoe. In Christianity it is the body of Christ or the water in baptism. Because, after all, we are physical and any spirituality that doesn't recognize this would be irrelevant to me. Any spiritual experience that we are involved in must be experienced from a physical point of view.

• • •

"There have been times when I think we do not desire Heaven. but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else...Are not all life long friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We can not tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing that we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are this is. If we lose this we lose all."
C.S. Lewis (8)

• • •

How do I recognize these bridge experiences? The only indicator I have is my emotions. It is something that is very hard to control. Even if I can control it outwardly, I can never deny it to myself. The best aesthetic experiences I have had are what I would consider to be emotional. I think that an aesthetic experience can be an Epiphany. I don't see it as something that is inherent in a work of art. Nor is it something that a connoisseur knows. I see it as something that happens between the thing and the viewer. The work can not in itself have an experience, but it can store the experience of the maker. In this way I hope my work is a bridge, from me to the viewer. Again if I can fill myself with knowledge and experience and work intuitively filtering that knowledge through my hands, it is sometimes translated. In the best or worst of circumstances it is translated into something that someone can relate to their own experience.

• • •

In going through my journal I find that these are important questions that I ask myself. Why does potential go unfulfilled? How do I approach spirituality as a physical being? Is my physicalness part of my spirituality? How do my abilities and my place in the world effect how I see and what I aspire to? How do I, as someone who builds, place myself in the world? They are questions that I don’t yet have the answers for. They seem to be tied up in what I consider to be the heroic/pathetic irony.

• • •

I remember when I was in fifth grade. The most important thing I remember about the fifth grade was that it was my first encounter with the metric system. The way in which it was presented to us made it seem very important. It seemed like special knowledge that would someday enable us to be part of a system that gave us something in common with the rest of the world. I remember being very excited about the prospect of getting to learn this special knowledge. The sad fact is that beyond that initial introduction there was no real follow-up. As a result, it seems that the United States is about the only country in the world that can not think in metric.

Similarly, I think we all remember when there was much talk and excitement about alternative energy. Wind generators and solar collectors were the answer to our energy problems. The scale on which these technologies have been implemented is pathetic. Along these same lines I think that we need to applaud ourselves for implementing and following through with the sorting and collecting of recyclable materials. By the same token we should also look at the fact that the majority of this renewable energy is being hauled to the landfill.

In a seemingly unrelated vein I would like to add the Electoral College to this list of unresolved situations. Observe the Democratic Ideal, one person one vote. Well kind of. The Electoral College is how the president is elected. The popular vote is the real definition of one person one vote, but the way the system is set up it is possible to get the popular vote and still lose the election.
These ideas may seem unrelated, but their way of canceling themselves out is one of the things that got me thinking about spirituality and art. For the sake of sculpture and three dimensional form I think of these situations as machines that act as metaphors. The Ideas that they embody are dynamic and heroic, i.e. the global village, saving the planet and true democracy. They are all Ideas that in theory are bigger than the individuals that conceived them. However, something seems to happen between aspiration and action. It is almost as if they have something built into them that renders them nearly ineffective. I began by wondering why we as people and as artist make plans and set goals for ourselves that we can not or will not let ourselves attain.

These heroic/pathetic ironies seem to almost be the definition of human spirituality. I say this because I see people as having a tremendous capacity to aspire to and conceive of things and ideas greater than themselves, i.e. spiritual things, Yet they are also physical and human beings. Thus their spirituality must be defined not only by their spiritual capacity but also by their state of being physical.

Through the connectedness I began to see between Ideas, the physical world and human emotion, I made a leap and asserted to myself that there must be a type of spirituality inherent in physical forms. I began to see Art in some sense as a physical way of working through spiritual questions and ideas. I wonder how, for instance, things and places can have emotional power over me. Why can some music or a certain work of art, or for that matter, even the ocean or being alone in the desert, miles from another person, effect me emotionally? What do I have in common with these things that ties me to them spiritually? It makes me think that there are universal themes that I am part of, and involved with.

In reading a book of Japanese sculptors, I came across a quote by the Japanese Artist Shigeo Toya. He made the statement that, “I want my work to be a place of encounter with something that is greater than I am". (9) In a similar vein sculptor David Nash said that his sculptures were vessels where human presence is in harmony with nature. (10) The work and Ideas of these two artists excites me a great deal. Because it seems to me that they are asking the same essential questions with their work as I would like to be asking with mine. I see these two artists and many others as being involved in the heroic/pathetic irony. I don't mean that their work is not highly spiritual or that I do not enjoy it a great deal, but I do see a contradiction in someone imposing their will to create harmony. The irony for Nash is that he uses a chain saw to shape wood. I do not feel that this negates the work or the ideas, it merely illustrates that human spirituality begins with the physical. This is what allows works of art to evoke an emotional/spiritual response: Epiphany.

I remember when I was in fifth grade. I remember needing to be part of something that was greater than myself.

• • •

I see my work in terms of relationships. First and foremost as a physical relationship between materials and space. I am very interested in the process of creating the work. I am fascinated by the idea that I can make something that has previously not existed. I use tools, materials, and space to hopefully create something that has its own inherent worth and excuse for being.

I try to see a connection between physical and spiritual. I want to see spirituality in things or people's relationship to things. Building is a way in which I can investigate these relationships. I see Art in some sense as a physical way of working through spiritual questions and ideas.

When I work I try to remember and forget this at the same time. I find that my work can get lost if I concentrate to much on these themes. So I keep all of this in mind and try too work intuitively. I go back to material and making.

• • •

TV: I hate TV. I look to it, I'm scared of it, it teaches me. It manipulates the way I relate to things. Even my good feelings, my heroes, come to me through TV and movies. I have tried to emulate them and I find that they cannot exist in real time. As I began to realize this I wondered about the heroes who lost in the first, second, or third battle of their career; are they heroes? Here is another problem. James Bond is one of my heroes. I learned about James Bond from watching TV and going to movies. You would never catch James Bond watching TV. My hero mocks me. I must find a way to be a hero, to be fearless in the face of my life. I am a father. This allows me to step outside of my fears. It helps me to see something that scares me coming and know that I am the one who must bear its impact. If I close my eyes I can see myself rushing forward to face it. It looks like I am leaning into the wind. I might even be smiling. This is how I imagine myself as a hero.

• • •

I want to write a paper that is a loop, or better yet a spiral. The ideas here are circular and inform each other. They spiral because each new experience or idea moves them forward. When I discover new elements they seem to have no particular order. Talking about these ideas and more importantly building sculpture, sends them spinning and they fall in a different configuration draped on a new idea. Some of the images that have stayed with me the longest are wind and water, journey and redemption, and most of all the heroic/pathetic irony. I have a place I need to find. I know I am not up to the task, but that never stopped anybody before.

• • •

What about you, boy ?
Is your work coming along?
Are you still making candles
Against darkness and wrong?
The whole thing is to blast.
Blast and blast again. To fill the black
With songs, poems, temples, paintings,
Anything at all. Attack. Attack.
Open up and let go.
Even if it’s only blowing. But blast.
And I say this loving my God.
Because we are all He has at last.
So what about it, boy?
Is your work going well?
Are you still lighting lamps
Against darkness and Hell?

-from the movie “American Grizzly”, portrait of Fredrick Manfred

• • •

I built a boat. I built it with my hands. Building it was like a ritual. It was like making a magical spell as a preparation. I am going to sail it across Lake Michigan. I will be out in the middle by myself being supported by something I made. Hopefully I will be at a place that is both joyful and fearful at the same time. In any case I will have built something that will enable me to move another step forward.

• • •

1. Lewis, ch. 10

2. Roskill, pg. 340

3. Percy, pg. 19

4. Percy, pg. 23

5. Kahn, video

6. O'connor, pg. 39

7. Cousteau, video

8. Lewis, ch. 10

9. Fox, pg. 101

10. Nash, introduction

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