I've taken a little break from the HQ build and thought I'd have a go at Bachmann's Plasticville Contemporary House kit I bought earlier in the spring.
I guess it's something of a build-it-yourself toy masquerading as a model kit, but I rather like it and thought it might be good for getting my mojo back. I decided to do minimal improvements and just concentrate on painting and assembly. The walls are almost done and waiting for window installation. More details once it's a bit further along.
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| Ivor the Inquirer comes knocking; Eagle Annual #8 |
Going on hiatus for a little while.
With summer weather beaming down I don't want it to go to waste.
Now where's my bug spray and suntan lotion?
The Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition from 26 May 2018 to 1 January 2019 of a large collection of Bodys Isek Kingelez’s miniature buildings and layouts. Apparently it was the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Kingelez’s work to date. I recently read about his work, as well as the MOMA exhibition, and had to get a copy of the exhibition’s catalogue. It’s an excellent book: hardcover; full colour; 144 pages, 77 of which are high quality photos of his models and layouts; 5 essays on his work; comprehensive references; and some writings by Kingelez himself top it off. I’m quite impressed by the book’s design and organization, and I’m thinking some variation on it would be good to use for the E. L. Moore book.
I found the book’s most striking aspects are the collection of model photos, and the lead essay by the exhibition’s curator, Sarah Suzuki, the MOMA’s curator of drawings and prints. Suzuki’s essay gives an excellent overview of Kingelez’s life and work, although one statement gave me a little concern:
Kingelez’s practice, though unquestionably appealing to curators, critics, and art historians, has presented them a maddening challenge. In collapsing the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, and design, it eludes the categorization and classification on which institutional collections rely, and in its lack of known art historical precedents it evades the genealogy that we love to document and trace.
When I first saw Kingelez’s miniature buildings they immediately struck me as being well within the long folk art tradition of miniature building construction. I’m not saying any of the analysis in the catalogue is wrong, only that the practice of folk art miniature buildings is another lens through which Kingelez’s work can be viewed. It helps resolve the categorization issue Suzuki raises, and places Kingelez’s work in what I think is a global art.
Long time readers of the blog will know that I think E. L. Moore is a figure in that tradition, and that my thoughts on this coalesced when I read a 2014 New York Times article on the American folk art buildings collection of Steven Burke and Randy Campbell. Burke and Campbell have also documented their collection in their own catalogue, which when viewed in parallel with Kingelez’s makes for an interesting bit of comparative reading.
Ok, so why do I think Kingelez’s work can be viewed as part of the folk art miniature buildings tradition? First, let’s look at some of the characteristics of work in this field and their creators.
1. The models are made from fairly simple materials and tools that are readily found around the home. Cardboard, wood, paper, foam board, and paint are mainstays. Cast-offs, junk, and recycled materials are also often incorporated. Chosen materials usually evolve with the artist, but don’t stray too far from their roots. Simple tools are used. Modern craft and hobby lingo would call this a basic form of scratchbuilding.
2. This is often a lifetime activity, or one that has been part of the artist’s life for decades and only ends when the artist dies. It’s not unusual for the artist to start as a child, but coming to the art when older isn’t unheard of - for a few it’s started in middle age. It’s generally not something an artist picks up for a commission or two and then moves on to something else as if it were just another assignment in the corporate world.
3. It’s a compulsion. A compulsion to create something that expresses something important to them, and that something has buildings as its core means of expression. This doesn’t mean the works ignore the market and the artists live in poverty, only that the work isn’t created solely based on market demands. Commissions, sales of works, articles and stories, even at times commodification, and so on, aren’t unusual. The artists haven’t taken vows of poverty or exclusion from the world, it’s just that the work, to a large degree, is self-propelled.
4. I don’t like the term ‘folk art miniature buildings’ as it carries all sorts of unconscious associations about the works and their creators. It’s easy to find pieces that have been cunningly created to cash in on subconscious assumptions about folk art buildings; these are imposter works. For example, one stereotypical aspect is that of crude construction. Just because the materials are unassuming, cast-offs, or junk, doesn’t mean they’ll be used without skill in a clumsy and unthoughtful manner. Manufacturers of knock-offs will often focus on what they think is folksy crudity to signal to uninformed buyers that they’re getting real folk art.
5. The artists in this field tend not to be professionally trained in the arts. This doesn’t exclude those with arts training, it just means that it’s an activity that’s usually undertaken by non-professionals, which may have lead to the categorization problem Suzuki alludes to.
I’ve written about a few people I consider to be in the tradition, but Burke and Campbell note in their book that many works from past ages are anonymous, so historical documentation is often almost impossible to find. They also speculate that the art in America more-or-less died out after World War II, thereby ending a long run that possibly started sometime after the Civil War. I think in the post-WWII era it was subsumed into other arts, crafts, and hobbies, although many of its characteristics did die away in the process. It’s indeed a rare thing to see today, and I think the internet will speed the demise of whatever is left.
Here’s a list of a few artists I’ve written about that I think can be argued to be in the field, or did some work in it.
1. Laurence T. Gieringer. His work and origin story is a classic.
2. E. L. Moore. Most of my writing at this blog has been about his work. He’s also a good example of a person who had he lived his entire life in the pre-WWII era, might have been thought of as a true folk art building artist, but it turns out he’s one who’s work has all the characteristics of folk art, but was subsumed into post WWII model railroading, which I think he did so he could earn some money in the industry’s publications.
3. Roye England. He’s Pendon’s founder. I haven’t written about him here, but his story and work in the creation of the Pendon Museum is squarely in the wheelhouse.
4. Michael Paul Smith. He had arts training and worked in some arts related jobs, but his personal work is purely in the field. I highly recommend the 2015 book, Elgin Park: Visual Memories of Midcentury America at 1/24th scale, about about his projects that was written with Gail K. Ellison.
5. Mark Hogancamp. I’d say his work and personal history skirts the field, but I’d feel remiss about not mentioning him. One thing I’d recommend is watching Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary about him, Marwencol, and then watching the 2018 Robert Zemeckis film, Welcome to Marwen, based on Hogancamp’s experiences and world. Pay special attention to how Zemeckis and team have reimagined Hogancamp’s miniature city for purposes of the movie against Hogancamp’s orginal.
6. Seth. The famous cartoonist is clearly a mainstream artist; however, his personal long-term project of making buildings for his imaginary city of Dominion is definitely in the field. Surprisingly, when I saw Kingelez’s vibrantly coloured buildings I immediately thought of how they contrasted with Seth’s rather grey and monochromatic ones. Although, both Seth and Kingelez only use real buildings as starting points, if at all, and don’t concentrate on creating replicas.
7. Kim Adams. I much admire his work, but it’s another that skirts the field. When it comes to exuberance, his work is certainly up there with Kingelez’s, but Adams’ work is based on kitbashing as opposed to scratchbuilding, which I think is modern craft lingo for what happens in folk art miniature buildings. This opens up questions about how far a folk artist can go with using found objects and still be called a scratchbuilder instead of a kitbasher. Kingelez wasn’t a kitbasher.
8. George Iliffe Stokes. Although ostensively in the model railway field, his miniature buildings transcend it and document a serious love of English architecture.
No doubt there’re more. This is all a work-in-progress and I’ll write about those I find.
From Suzuki’s essay and the model photos Kingelez’s work checks the field’s major boxes, but like all the field’s practitioners he brings things to the table that are uniquely his own. Kingelez, unlike most, didn’t make replicas of existing buildings, even though as Suzuki points out, a few of Kinshasa’s buildings may have influenced his early work. And as his work developed, it grew in expressiveness and complexity. His work was about ideas and designs that were uniquely his own. Often artists in the field stick with replicating, to various degrees, things that are meaningful to them that already exist in the world. That wasn’t Kingelez’s style. The thing to remember is that doesn’t exclude him from the field.
Before wrapping up, I should note there does seem to be a little railwaying in Kingelez’s work. Take a look again at the book’s cover. I spread it open for a reason: front and centre is a railway station with tracks entering on the right and leaving out the back on the left, that then rise up to meet some elevated track. The cover photo is one of a section of an approximately 19’ x 8’ layout called Ville Fantome, presented in plate 28 on page 116, which shows the elevated track, once down range from the station, making a hard 90-degree turn, and then dropping down to ground level to run parallel to what looks like a canal. It appears the layout is built from side-by-side placed modules, although personal inspection would be needed to confirm this. Scale? Hard to tell if there is one, but I’d hazard to guess if there was any explicit scaling it wouldn’t be larger than Z. Ville Fantome is a layout, a non-functioning one by the standards of the model railway hobby, but a layout nevertheless.
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| No, that's not an LP, it's a helipad |
I was rooting around old family photos and found that one of the helipad on my layout from the ‘70s. Surprisingly, unlike most of my old photos, this one has a date stamped on the back: May 1976. These days I’m thinking about things to include either on the current layout’s ocean park module or on a new layout. I’ve been playing with the helipad idea.
Or maybe it should be an airship aerodrome. Or maybe it’s just May weather that gets me thinking about flying machines. Back in May 2019 in one of the From the Time Machine’s Glovebox posts I pulled out the E. L. Moore-esque setup story from a fictional project called Al’s Airship Aerodrome. If you don’t like clicking links, here’s the setup:
I was renewing my liability insurance this afternoon and started to wonder if I had ever told you about the time I built the airship hanger.
Well, one day a couple of years back this Brazilian gentleman called me up from Paris – Paris, France that is – and asked if I could build him a hanger down in the County for an airship. I was glad to hear that my reputation for frugality was known in some quarters of the City of Light. This fellow – I never could pronounce his name properly, so we agreed I’d just call him Al, which it turns out he rather liked, and he’d call me Monsieur M, which Cousin Cal thought was hilarious, but I was partial to the sound of it, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Al was a ‘Personal Blimp’ builder. I hadn’t heard of such an occupation, but I figured there are personal computers, personal trainers, even personal pan pizzas, so why not personal blimps.
Anyway, he was coming over to the County for a few months to get this financier-turned-gentleman-farmer fitted out with a personal blimp, and all the things needed to own and operate one. That included a hanger to park it in. That’s where I came in. You might ask, why was a railroad man like myself called up for this project? Like I said, there’s frugality, but it did involve a considerable amount of railroad gear.
For one thing, there’s the doors. A blimp, even a personal-sized one, is mighty big. The doors on the garage needed to park this beast are 50 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Now, Al is one smart cookie and on the hanger his guys built in Monaco, he figured out how to make the doors ride on rails so that even a 10-year-old kid could push them open. Given that Cousin Cal is the spittin’ image of the ‘before’ guy in those Charles Atlas ads, this was just his speed.
But, as things turned out, it wasn’t Cousin Cal’s lack of muscle power that tripped up this project, it was his lack of brain power. A blimp garage is more-or-less one gigantic loco shed, so the other railroad thing you need, is some track for hauling in blimp parts, and for bringin’ in helium tanks if hydrogen just won’t do. Al’s one of those renegades who swears by hydrogen for these things – none of that expensive helium for him. No sir. He makes it – hydrogen that is – himself right there in the shed. According to Al, hydrogen is like a woman – if they are treated with care and respect, then all will be well. Unfortunately for him he never met Cousin Cal and his ancient loco. Track, an old sparking loco, lots of hydrogen nearby: you can see where this is going. Well, more on this later. Here’s what you’ll need to build a blimp aerodrome to service the more responsible personal airship aficionados on your pike...
Luckily there’s a balsa shortage or I might give this a try :-)
Back when I built Mr. Scott’s Dilithium Crystal Factory I included a shuttle craft landing pad on the roof, but I don’t think roof-top landing is what I have in mind these days. It’s got to be at ground level.
Hmm. Blimp handling likely requires too much real estate. A heliport can likely be made more compact than my youthful attempt in the ‘70s. I need to look around for HO scale helicopters.