When the museums began to sponsor street works I thought that ironically the character of the work had come full circle. What had begun as a personal means to show outside the establishment had become institutionalized. And with that came the loss of the precious anonymity which had given the work such mystery and even worse, that loss had removed the psychological barrier that had hidden the Fine Art nature of what was being seen. This knowledge made certain that it was art that they were viewing, and therefore no longer confronting.

For the institutional Street Works I decided to craft careful lies describing what I might have done had street works remained free of definition. Though I participated in Street Works one, two, three, and four, I never took any action other than telling my stories. I will be in a Street Works show in New York later this year which will have some of the non-existent works in it. Forty-five years later they are still being shown.

These art ‘inactions’ led to the secret pieces and the works that resulted in no change. In the group show in Burnaby I asked Simon Frazer University to put an ad in the paper advertising a local ditch digging company for the month of the show. When that was to happen I asked my brother who owned the business to withdraw his identical ad. I let the university know what was happening and they became quite upset, suspecting me of simply trying to save my brother a few bucks. So I explained Avant-Garde Contemporary Art to them; which comforted them not at all.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  When invited to show in the Konzeption - Conception exhibition in fall of 1969, I agreed to participate. What I kept to myself was that my involvement would consist of my repeated refusal to make any information available. Every time I received a letter requesting my piece I answered back that there was no information available at this time. This communication continued back and forth until the show opened. The result was that although I was listed as an exhibiter there was no sign of my work. That remains true; there is still no evidence of my work for that show and that reality will continue in perpetuity.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  It's not unusual for the title of a work to come to me before the details of the piece. I liked the oxymoron sense that this name provides: Structured vs. Nebulous. This is a project to arrange the stars, gas, and dust of a nebula into the form of a torus. This piece is me wreaking wanton environmental destruction. I think of it as a metaphor for everything excessive that we do. Luckily this work will remain impossible because it certainly shouldn't be done; on a cosmic scale even interesting ideas become bad. This is what we do to nature as soon as we learn how and the more powerful we become the bigger we do it. I see these works as satiric commentary on the world-destroying actions of the Military - Industrial Complex. This is my rationale for having fun with my inner Walter Mitty.

This project to restructure the cosmos into a photo-realistic image began in 1978 with the 'Crystal Ought', a painting on black velour craft paper of a star cluster with nebular gas and dust arranged to give the appearance of a crystal torus lit by a light of divine brilliance. I have painted numerous versions of this piece over the years.

In this series I often work on archival surfaces but I am drawn to working on paper that has a clearly limited life span.  This is partially due to my strategy to direct my art expression toward professionals who are working in adjacent disciplines, in this case preservation. Most central to this interest though, are the poetic and philosophic aspects of the temporal nature of art. and the artist.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This soap bubble represents the fragility of our oceans, land, and atmosphere - the habitable zone on Earth; which has been compared to the thin skin of an apple. We screw it up in multiple ways and then depend on science to get us out of the jam.

I see the Military-Industrial complex as the big culprit although it is partly just human nature. I was born at the start of WWII and as a 4 year old I thought the whole thing was pretty cool, especially the fighter planes and bombers. In second grade after the war had been over for several years I was drawing tanks so well that I had more orders from my fellow students than I could fill. In movies it still retains a mysterious cache. Keeping it in the realm of art, even bad political art, seems the way to go. Otherwise this scale of conflict is just too destructive on the population and the environment. Even worse, it gives us bigger and better weapons that have reached the point where ultimately they can make our biosphere permanently uninhabitable.

Even without tools of war, we cause severe damage to the planet through destructive industrial practices; which are allowed and even encouraged by governments that are subservient to corporate entities. Environmental damage is clearly out of control but there are still spokespersons representing corporations who deny that there's anything wrong.

We finally admit that we are in trouble but the solutions that are being studied often bear potential dangers of their own which can't be adequately studied in the lab. That poses the problem: if they are tested in the field, what happens when things go wrong and a more dangerous threat is released into the world. I am made apprehensive by our habit of creating environmental crises and then trying to fix them with the same science through which they came into being.

FLAMING EIGHT BALL, 2002

22" x 30", charcoal, acrylic on paper - $7,500

 

 

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  We are behind "the eight ball". This term refers to a situation in the game of pool in which a player is trapped with very few options. The hope in this situation is that with enough skill a shot can be made. With these Nuclear Space Works I feel like the guy walking around with a sandwich board yelling, "The end is near."

Once you grow up under "The Bomb" you are left with a certain amount of pessimism. In grammar school I remember the atomic attack drills when we got under our desks, curled up in a ball and with our face to the floor waited to be vaporized from back to front. I never saw much advantage to that. Then when the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated to the ultimate confrontation, I begged my brother to not go to work in San Francisco because the city was targeted by Russian ICBM's. The world did not end in fire that day; the U.S. Navy played chicken with the Russian Navy and they came to a mutual decision to postpone Armageddon. Later, I was told that if San Francisco had been nuked, the temperature would have reached 375 degrees where we lived 50 miles north. With these nuclear projects in which I use fission and fusion bombs as media, my goal is to use it all up: no more media, no more problem.

I like to think about the influence that art has on my work. In these terms, one of the most important art experiences I have ever had was seeing the film, Dr. Strangelove. In the theater I found myself, incredibly, laughing at the horror of the destruction of the world. That was one of my earliest and most clear encounters with irony.

IN MEMORIAM

    In shock we inhale,
Breathing the innocent ash
   That rains on New York.
 
 

FURNACE, 2007

acrylic, graphite on paper - $7,500 

 

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This represents an absurd solution to our need to turn down the world's thermostat. In the annotations for 'Biosphere' I spoke of our repeated creation of environmental situations which threaten the livability of our Planet Earth. The situation is complicated by the fact that there are 'natural', that is to say non-manmade causes for some of these things. The problem is that people want to argue that we don't have to be concerned about things like Global Warming because it may be the result of natural phenomena. Why this makes some of us comfortable doing nothing is a mystery. It seems also excessively dangerous. If there are indeed increases in the amount of solar energy we are receiving, it's even more crucial that we do everything to minimize our habits that exacerbate the situation. The solution represented by 'Furnace' is actually closely allied with some strategies that have been put forward as ways to mitigate the situation created by our excessive use of fossil fuels.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This work is a steel sphere six feet in diameter. The narrative is that this container has a vacuum drawn in it. The reference is to fear as that hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach. To represent this extreme emptiness in the sphere I used the sounds of steel being compressed and crushed by the pressure differential as heard on the soundtracks of countless submarine movies. This vast emptiness is an actual sensation that fear causes. I have experienced it so clearly that I have even had adequate thought space to notice it and think about it as it was happening.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This work is from a series started in 1968. They are project drawings for projections of film or slides. They were mostly designed as museum pieces to be projected on walls. In this work I was interested in the shift of the horizontal plane of water 90 degrees to the vertical. 

The maelstrom, from Dutch for 'whirling stream,' actually exists in many places in the oceans of the planet. I've loved this idea since I was a child. I have a faint memory of a story illustration of a giant one with a sailing ship going down in it. The image seems a great metaphor for the bad times in life when things are spinning out of control like a run-away train. Then there is the positive side, the roller coaster or the silent movie baby buggy that gets away from the mom on a steep hill and goes flying down the street through intersections, barely missing cars while the baby screams not in fear but with delight.

Fire on Ice is the one of this series of projections that was not intended to be on a wall. It is the only one that has been realized, a happy event for me which is obvious from the rather big grin on my face during the construction of the ice cube. This piece is in the Marzona sculpture park in Versegnis, Italy. Egidio Marzona owns the work so whenever he decides to show it he hires stone carvers to make it out of blocks of ice using chainsaws. This event happened in November, 2007 which was cold enough so that it lasted until it rained a few days later.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  I became interested in a blacker black when I started painting the Chrystal Ought. That black velvet was a step darker than black paint and as a corollary the whites were a step brighter. The idea of a hole into the museum wall opening into a black velvet lined box began as a concept of a mirror into darkness where not only was there no reflection, but there was no light at all coming back out.

I have been interested in the mirror as an entry into making installation work since the early seventies. The piece that was at the center of this thinking was an installation called The Window. This is a room with objects in it including a mirror that reflects everything in the room except the people. This work is very complicated, requiring ten pairs of objects that are exact mirror images. This work was built by my sculpture class in 1982.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  When I made this piece I was thinking that this was not a prophecy of a dire future but a dire present. Even for people blessed by life in a country with a stable government and sufficient resources to provide the basic necessities, life is sometimes hard. For people living in failed states that don't have adequate food and shelter and have no prospects of seeing things improve, life is really hard. In a world where people became unselfish and kind things could be better. I live with this feeling that I could do more to help.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This is a time capsule, a stainless steel container at least 12 feet in diameter. It is to contain the annual commentary of the people of Earth that has been collected selected by a series of curators for one thousand years. After a millennium it is to be opened and the contents made available to scholars. I am interested in creating a running commentary on the times that our civilization experiences. This is what happens anyway as events and the evolution of consciousness flow down the time stream and the interests and imperatives of the human family evolve. I would however like to see the effects on the historical record of a purposeful accumulation of the thoughts of people from all walks of life who are interested in speaking to their posterity.

This work in my mind is a most positive take on the future of our civilization, a culture which is educated and retains scholarly pursuits such as history. The options are, a thousand years of peace or the recovery from the ravages of limited war. This will be meaningless if we descend into another Dark Age by nuclear holocaust or world conquest of an adequately repressive dictatorial state that disallows freedom of thought.

The KLEINES KLOSTER Time Capsule is not a container but rather a pin-hole camera, so that if you face it, your image is projected on the back wall inside. This represents the path of inaction as a response to difficult times, a retreat. The possibility of withdrawing into a monk's cell-like space facilitates the turning inward to seek answers, that quiet communion with the soul and spirit. This is old knowledge.

6" (diam) x 16",  Steel,                                                         6" (diam) x 16",  Steel                                               6" (diam) x 16",  Steel  

Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands                                   Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands                         Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This sculpture work is about modifying the visibility of a three dimensional object. This is work directly connected to my Minimalist Strategies. A way to reduce the release of information is to make it less visible. This low visibility work is an extension of the Minimalism of the Time Capsules as well as the secret pieces which function on the same principle; that of keeping the nature and substance of the art expression in the dark. With the Time Capsules, the work inside is ostensibly only hidden for a period of time; which gives the sense that the contents may only be available to a future generation. In actuality the secrets enclosed may be hidden for much longer. As fine art owned by private collectors or institutions, these works become somewhat invulnerable to the saw. It's frowned upon to cut fine art in two. But then if this thought is extended far enough into the future the art becomes artifact which is much less safe from the depredations of more thorough investigation.

The strategy of hiding information combined conceptually with the pieces in which I attempted to work within myself in some way. With the 'Wound Prints' I began to use my blood as medium. The 'Personal Appearance Manipulations' were works directly using myself. Both of these were the precursors to the Life Dramas.

These thoughts of hiding combined conceptually with the 'Self' works to suggest the 'Life Dramas', the last of which is the ('Regional Artist'). This project took a lot of thought and required me to strongly hold to my strategies. I decided to disappear as a contemporary artist and to become a regional artist by withdrawing from the international art scene and by finding a small city where I could pursue my painting and sculpture while making conceptual art privately.

I worked in the city, Sacramento, but I also moved to a barn in the country which had no address. People who were associates could write me there care of my land lady. I had no phone, no bathroom, and no hot water. I worked there free from the flow of public production and criticism. My motivations were partly to see what would happen to my contemporary art. I wondered how much it needed me to be there backing it up with continual new projects? In New York my art had consisted of manifestos and work that was intended to create influence. I had found that discerning the effect of my 'Causal' art was impossible, an aspect of my work that was pleasing to my sensibilities. It met my need for minimalism perfectly: art work that was not only invisible but that was impossible to determine if it even existed. I did think that my absence might clarify the effect on art that my conceptual processes might have had.  For more information, see the Artforum article, Alter Ego by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer in the September, 2010 issue.

Portrait of My Father, 1972 - 1979                                                                                                           Detail

10' x 15',  Acrylic on Canvas, Collection - Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

 
Time to Cast Away Stones, 1998

7' x 6.5' x 65', concrete composite, public art installation in Sacramento, CA

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This painting is a plan for a wall installation which is an arrangement of 'book grained' fluorescing minerals that are enhanced with fluorescent paint. These projects are an outgrowth of my Interest in radial and bisymmetry; which was a development of my psychedelic experience. This hallucinogenic vision I received during a Mescaline trip is also the inspiration for the design of the paintings for 'The Window' installation in 1982, the bisymmetrical cloud photos that were done from 1969 to 1972, and the pattern paintings done from 1970 to 1979. (see Sept.18 link for Portrait of my Father.)

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This installation is half of a two piece work titled 'Brother Sun – Sister Moon' that is to be set into a museum wall on each side of an entrance into the room. This installation consists of a 9" circular opening that is made of insulating brick that replaces the door of a ceramic kiln. During the hours that the museum is open the kiln is kept at 2100 degrees Fahrenheit which is an extremely brilliant orange color. The piece, (obviously), will have to be guarded and eye protection may be necessary.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This work is a circular hole set in the museum wall; which opens into an ultraviolet lit space. The fluorescing material visible through the hole may be white cotton cloth or a plastic that shines equally as bright. There is a concealed source of extremely cold air that flows from the opening. This may be accomplished by an industrial air conditioner or by the installation of a physics research refrigerator that can reach at least minus 87 degrees Fahrenheit.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This work is made by imbedding strobe lights in a wall. They should be arranged in a disc shaped pattern three feet across. The array is to be set behind red Plexiglas. The room should be moderately dimly lit. The strobes are timed to flash at irregular intervals approximately every thirty seconds. The firing of the strobes will generate an afterimage of the complementary color.

I became interested in putting things into the wall that looked like they were on the wall. Dimensional Mirror, which was made in 1970, was a mirror that was nine panes of glass layered. It was about two inches thick. I set it into the wall and framed it so that it looked as though it was hanging. The only image that I have is of me making a scary face in it. It gives me the creeps now but then I was still immune to the creeps.

This work operates on the principle that one trusts the nature of what is seen to be what it appears to be.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This ambitious Lunar Work is to be created by huge 'earth' moving equipment, bulldozing the moon's surface into this geometric form: a stellated polyhedron. This is clearly a problematic project in any number of ways; not the least of which is the budget that will be so great as to require the diversion of the entire Earth's military defense budget for the next few thousand years.

The facets of this sculptural work should be carefully rendered and colored as shown. This transformation may be considered to be too hard-edge contemporary to kindle much romantic moonlight dalliance but that is not an immediate concern; it is, after all, quite difficult to get these big projects funded.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This piece is not only bad but it is ridiculously bad. As the Big Bang theory represents the beginning and evolution of physical nature, there existed nothing before it. Just plain no matter. This makes materials to fashion a mold hard to come by. Being before time, there is also no time to make it no matter how fast one might work, making it impossible no matter how you view it. The scale isn’t necessarily a problem, as the container could be very small if it were in place early enough (during the first fraction of a millisecond), but whatever the size it would have to be very strong.

This impossibility is the best part of this really terrible idea because the balance of the nature of existence is so finely tuned that changing its shape would have inevitably altered the physical character of the universe, probably rendering it uninhabitable. It would have made life and therefore also biology, chemistry, and astrophysics, impossible. This observation that the universe is perfect for us was realized in two phases. The first was that the way our Earth and its immediate environment are laid out is supportive to human life. Many things had to be just as they are for this to be, and  therefor for us to be.

An abbreviated list of the requirements for life on our world includes: a suitable solvent (water), a pleasant climate (a Goldilocks Orbit), energy (the sun and some chemicals), time (to get our cellular organization together - unless you are a creationist as I am), CO2 recycling via plate tectonics to support global warming (yes, we need a certain level of it to keep us thawed), a civilized sun that gives us a nice steady level of solar radiation, plus our magnetic field which further shelters us from our star’s occasional bursts of extra energy. For more detail see internet.

To those who want this to all be an effect of chance, this serendipity has been explained by assuming that the universe was so large that it was inevitable that a friendly environment would happen somewhere and we, as luck would have it, live there. If you want to avoid faith this is not a bad excuse. But then…

Then the second phase where a much bigger problem arose, that of the Higgs boson. This is a situation which requires an even bigger coincidence. Apparently its tiny mass which allows big, complex structures like the galaxies and us to form is quite a bit too small. I admit that I don’t have the understanding to explain this, but I read that the energy required to create the things that we need like solar systems and galaxies is 100 quadrillion times short of what is necessary. 100 quadrillion times less. That’s one in 100,000,000,000,000,000. That’s seventeen zeros. Not a good bet.

This may be where the religion or hypothesis of the Multiverse was born. There had to be so many chances for this perfect balance of energy to happen that not only did we have to be in the select neighborhood in the universe, but we had to have an infinity of universes from which to choose that sweet spot, due to the long odds. The Multiverse is an idea that requires a lot of faith to elevate it from hypothesis to theory because applying the empirical method to the problem is not currently possible and may never be.

To believe or not to believe, that is the question, and it comes down to a choice. For Christians it seems that the answer is to go for it no matter what people think. For atheists the answer seems to be avoiding it at all costs, which I believe are considerable.

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This is an alternate plan to collect solar energy. Solar panels would work constantly beaming electrical energy to the Earth. Because this is also an art work for the evening sky, the orbit should be such that the scale would be large enough to appear at least twice the lunar diameter.

There has been a study indicating that we have, (mostly within the last couple centuries,) burnt approximately one half of our underground biomass, the bequest of the dinosaurs and the plants they ate and snoozed under. As they won't be giving us any more, the plan we need is one to convince Big Oil that there is a great deal of money to be made in producing solar power and other alternative sources of energy. 

This work is a good but funny example of how my artist's ego works. When this piece came to mind, I was well satisfied that it was a product of my imagination. I call this the pride of origination. Then one day I was rereading a favorite science fiction book titled Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold. I had first read it maybe three decades before. In it is an orbital power station called a Starflake - so much for my originality.  I comfort myself, "Oh well, everything finally becomes anonymous anyway."

EVERYTHING IS FINALLY ANONYMOUS, 1995

KALTENBACH ANNOTATIONS:  This cenotaph is a large black helium balloon that is at least twenty feet in diameter. It has on it the entire night sky with all of the visible stars represented with twinkle lights. The lights should be of appropriate size to match the stars they represent. It should be unobtrusively tethered with a black line.

My relationship with balloons began when I was three when I had to pop my brother's balloon because I accidentally popped mine. I'm sorry for that, David and sorry that it's 72 years after the fact.

I was next attracted to balloons when I was in the US Navy. The aerographers would be lofting weather balloons off the fantail while I was swabbing the deck. Their job looked much more fun than mine so I asked about it and found that my G.C.T. test, (aptitude test.) qualified me for weatherman school. When I learned that I had to sign for a longer enlistment I was torn but then I decided that I really wasn't; there was no way I wanted more of the Navy than I was already committed to.

Then in 1969 came Balloon Fooey. It was an exercise I devised for artists. All that was required was a large studio and a supply of balloons. And, I should add, a high threshold of embarrassment. It is a pseudo martial art in which you kick balloons around trying to keep them up in the air. I liked that I didn't have to go to the gym. Doing that over the years, I kept quite fit.