Leonardo

Ice HouseAuthor(s): Peter RichardsSource: Leonardo, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1992), pp. 167-168Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1575707 .

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ARTIST'S NOTE

Ice House

Peter Richards

I have fond childhood memories of watching my dad and some neighbors harvesting ice from the lake on our ranch in southern Colorado. I couldn't have been more than three years old at the time. I remember being watched

carefully by my older brother and the adults so that I wouldn't fall in the angular opening that the men were

creating. Some were cutting along carefully scribed lines on the ice with large ice saws, while others were pulling freshly cut blocks from the water with tongs and stacking them onto a hay sled. Periodically, the team of horses would pull the sled to the icehouse where the ice was carefully placed and covered with sawdust. The lake provided a year's supply for us and for all who helped with the harvest.

I have more vivid memories of going with my father to get ice in the summer. As we entered the icehouse, we were

enveloped by the cool, damp, woodsy smell. I would sit and watch as my father uncovered a block, and I would invariably receive a chip of ice to suck on for my patience. We would take the ice up to the house where Dad would hose off the sawdust and then put the block into the icebox. Sometimes

my brother and I would go to the icehouse by ourselves, uncover the corner of a block, break it off, and share it as we rested in the cool refuge.

Years later, while I was working for the Exploratorium, it was one of myjobs to pick up a 200-pound block of ice from a local ice company every Wednesday and bring it to the museum, where the ice became part of an exhibit on heating and cooling. Going into the warehouse where the ice was stored brought back my memories about ice. Learning to maneuver a 200-pound block of ice into the back of my car reminded me of how easily my father could load and unload

huge chunks that were at least a third heavier than he was. As I considered the process of harvesting and making ice, I came to think of the ice that we had stored in our icehouse as time capsules, frozen time that had been captured from winter and then slowly released during the summer. The ice that was manufactured and sold to me in San Francisco seemed artificial and soulless in comparison.

During the time that I was hauling ice for the Explorator- ium, I heard of a competition that was calling for proposals for art installations at artist-chosen sites in the city of Oak- land. Through a convoluted thought process, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to do a piece about ice that would be installed at a home for the elderly. After doing some experiments in my basement with ice, sawdust, and

grass seed, I proposed stacking 13 1-x-2-x-3-ft blocks of ice to form a wall and covering the wall with a pile of sawdust so that only the outside corners of the ice would be visible. Then I would seed the mound with grass seed. I envisioned the ice slowly melting, the sawdust absorbing the moisture, and the seeds sprouting over a period of time. Unfor-

tunately, the proposal was not chosen by the selection com- mittee, so I relegated it to my idea file.

1992 ISAST Pergamon Press pic. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/92 $5.00+0.00

A couple of years ago, an old friend, Ted Prescott, who is chair of the Art Department of Messiah College in Pennsyl- vania, asked me if I was inter- ested in doing an installation of some sort at his school. After some thought, I emembered the Ice House idea and sent him the old proposal. He liked it, and we agreed that I would go out there in March 1988 to set it up.

I sent Ted a list of things that I would need and made ar- ABS

rangements to give myself plenty The author discusses the of time once I was there to take h rs development of his art installation care of any glitches that might Ice House, which is based on his ex- occur. I did miscalculate on how periences with ice and his interest much sawdust I would need, in exploring change over time. and had to make a 50-mile run in the rain to get more. We had a flat, there was no jack, the

spare was flat, and so on. (Ted and I have done many projects together over the years, and it seems that we always end up at one point or another, lying under a car in the rain alongside a freeway.)

Once everything was assembled and the choreography for the actual installation was established, the piece went in

quite nicely. Ted and a colleague ran interference; their students helped lay the ice and shovel the sawdust. Within a couple of hours, a weird looking pile confronted visitors to a small gallery in the school's Fine Arts building.

Described by some as looking like an unrestored Mayan temple that had been cleared out of the surrounding jungle, Ice House definitely had a mysterious presence (Fig. 1). Because oak sawdust was the only kind available, the build-

ing lacked the musty pine smell of my childhood memories. Instead, it had a slightly sour smell that seemed to evoke similar memories for people who grew up in Pennsylvania. During the opening, several people came up to me and told me about their childhood memories of icehouses, which the smell of my piece brought back to them.

I met with several classes while I was at the college and talked with them about Ice House, describing the work as

being part of my investigative process, rather than beingjust a physical entity like a sculpture. I was interested in investi-

Peter Richards (artist), 1507 Diamond St., San Francisco, CA 94114, U.SA.

Received 20 September 1989.

Manuscript solicited by Roger F. Malina.

This article is reprinted from the Exploratorium Quarterly (Summer 1989) pp. 28-29. Exploratorium Quarterly, 3601 Lyon St., San Francisco, CA 94123.

LEONARDO, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 167-168, 1992 167

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ig. 1. Ice House, installation with ice, sawdust, grass seed, 25 x 8 ft, 1988. Ice House was an investigation into organic transformation. (Photo: Peter Rekus)

gating the process of change over time. In an ideal situation, this work would not be complete until there was no more change. When there was no more

change, there would no longer be evi- dence of an art piece. Knowing that the ice would be in the gallery for only 30

days, I suggested that the students visit it regularly, note its physical evolution, and compare that with how they felt about the work.

As it turned out, Ice House was not

entirely benign. The oak sawdust was not as absorptive as the pine sawdust that I had experimented with. The ice melted faster than the sawdust could absorb the water. Black pools of water

resembling oil leaking under a car be-

gan to creep across the floor, enhanc-

ing the feeling that an organic transfor- mation was taking place. The sawdust that had become moist sprouted thin, hair-like grass. In their struggle for life, the plants seemed to be pleading for more light and less acid. The mound itself gradually shrunk and shriveled, but by the end of the month there were still six or seven blocks in the bottom of the pile.

Several weeks after the piece had been removed, Cathy Prescott, who

teaches at Messiah College, wrote me a letter to relay some of the responses that her students had to the work. 'Two of my favorite discussions were about time and change," she wrote. "They [the students] thought that it was won- derful that something significant hap- pened so slowly. They said they are used to so much instant gratification and

'getting' things right away. And also, they said that the expectation of radical

change is so high." Some students crit- icized the piece, saying that if the work was about change, then the change should have been more easily discern- ible. But according to Cathy, they kept returning day after day, looking for

changes, and began to enjoy noting the subtle evolution that was discernible only with careful observation. One man, an industrial designer who had heard about the piece, visited it every two days for the whole period.

In reflecting on how the piece turned out, I return to the rather romantic

images that I have of my father har-

vesting and using ice. Those images provided a basis for something that, in

actuality, did not return me to my child- hood at all. The ingredients were there, and they certainly struck a nostalgic

note with other people. But what I got was something with its own personality and a mind of its own.

But my romantic images did provide a base for further investigations of my interest in time systems, how time sys- tems interact, and how they go in and out of phase with each other. Some systems mesh nicely, like the movement of the earth around the sun or the

relationship of the earth's movement to the movement of the moon. Other sys- tems, particularly systems involving people, can sometimes get out of bal- ance. I have had the experience of sit- ting on a bus and feeling the tension in the air as bus riders with places to go and

things to do watched and waited for a very old person to slowly climb aboard.

If I had stayed and watched Ice House evolve, I think that I might have felt a similar tension, watching the black oily pool slowly spread across the gallery floor. Obviously, the sawdust was out of

phase with the melting ice. I had

planned for the system to be in balance and what I got was dissonance. I like the feeling of being in control and being able to predict, but I find it more inter-

esting when the pieces that I create assume personalities of their own.

168 Richards, Ice House

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