M.Ganzglass_Writing_Press_Interview

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Inventory
Marc Ganzglass
Door-knocker earrings are a type of hollow-form jewelry
that first became popular in New York in the late 1970s.
They are made in gold and silver and come in a broad
array of finishes and styles, including hearts, stars, trapezoids, kissing dolphins, and Nefertiti heads. The most
popular, however, are bamboo hoops.
Today, you can still find bamboo hoops in jewelry
shops and department stores around the city, and for
sale on television channels such as the Home Shopping
Network and QVC . The earrings are manufactured in
small factories and sold by the pound to jewelry wholesalers, who resell them to retailers, street vendors, and
larger chain stores. Unlike fashion apparel, in which
new designs are developed for each season, designs in
the wholesale jewelry market are constantly evolving,
driven as much by the cost of gold and silver as they are
by consumers’ tastes.
Hollow-form jewelry is made by stamping very thin
gold or silver sheet metal into two symmetrical shells
that are then soldered together to create a volumetric
form, giving it the appearance of expensive solid gold
jewelry but at a fraction of the cost. This technique, as
well as its use in mass production, dates back to the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the development of high-speed punch presses that could stamp
out large quantities of parts with great precision. The
manufacturing process led to a whole new class of consumer goods that approximated high-style luxury items,
even as the ease and speed of production allowed for
popular imagery to be quickly incorporated into their
designs. The job of rendering the panoply of forms fell
on the shoulders of the tool- and diemaker. Part sculptor,
part technician, the tool- and diemaker was responsible
for turning each new design into an accurate threedimensional engraving that could be used to stamp out
as many units as the market could bear.
The process begins with a design on paper. The
toolmaker translates this sketch into a working drawing describing the exact shape, profile, and elevation
of the piece. The working drawing is transferred to a
block of steel, which is then carved by hand into a threedimensional form, after which fine details are engraved
into the surface. The steel block is then hardened; this is
the master model called a hub. Next, the hub is pushed
into a heated steel block using a hydraulic press. This
negative image of the hub is called the die. With the die
opposite: Image from jewelry catalogue depicting a variety of bamboo hoops.
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completed, the toolmaker pushes yet another block of
steel into the negative form to produce a second master
model called a forcer—the positive form used in the
actual stamping of the jewelry. The pair of forcer and die
is called a die-set and is sent to the manufacturer for use
in production. The original hub is kept by the toolmaker
in case the die-set needs to be replaced.
Many of the bamboo hoops sold in New York were
made from die-sets produced at Matthew Tool and
Die Co., a small machine shop in Brooklyn founded by
a Polish immigrant named Matthew Lewandowski.
Originally trained as an economist in Poland during
the communist regime, Lewandowski began tool- and
diemaking as a second career when he and his family
emigrated to New York in the early 1970s. On the following pages are images of just a few of the nearly ten
thousand hubs made by Lewandowski between 1978
and 2011; all of those pictured here were used to make
bamboo hoops, though Matthew Tool and Die Co. produced die-sets for a wide variety of earrings, bracelets,
and charms.
Figure 1 is an early example of a bamboo hoop
from the 1970s. It is relatively small, about 1 3/8 inches
across. As bamboo hoops became more popular, manufacturers demanded larger and larger versions while
stamping the shells out of increasingly thinner material.
When Lewandowski opened his shop in 1978, he was
making dies for stamping ten-karat gold six-thousandths
of an inch thick; by the mid-1980s, it was half that, just
three-thousandths of an inch thick for a three-inch-wide
bamboo hoop. These incredibly thin shells easily dented
and crumpled, and the failure of the metal was so
common that women often flattened the earrings themselves as soon as they bought them.
Figures 2, 3, and 4 are examples of the extremely
large bamboo hoops that were popular in the early
1980s. Because different wholesalers offered nearly
identical products and because Lewandowski supplied
production tools to competing manufacturers, he made
the ethical decision early on never to give identical tools
to different clients. Rather, he would recreate the hubs
from scratch each time, resulting in the slight differences seen in these three hoops, which range in size from
2 3/4 inches to 3 1/2 inches in diameter.
Sometimes earring designs were modified extemporaneously, either with the manufacturer requesting
something over the phone or because Lewandowski
was trying out a new idea. In part because of the
speed with which these tools were being produced, no
detailed records exist of who initiated these changes in
design. Within a specific style, there could be countless
1
2
4
3
5
Hubs by Matthew Lewandowski for producing bamboo hoop earrings.
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7
8
10
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11
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variations and this is especially evident in the morphology of the bamboo hoops.
In the pair of mini-hoops in figure 5, the bamboo
is rendered in the same naturalistic style as the larger
models, but the hoops are so compressed that the motif
is almost lost. These hubs are also a good example of
one of the technical idiosyncracies of stamping hollowform jewelry. Any design that is symmetrical along its
central axis only requires one hub, as seen in the classic
bamboo hoop. But designs asymmetrical along their
central axis—such as these smaller earrings—require
two mirrored hubs. If the design calls for asymmetrical
patterns that are different for each ear, four hubs would
be needed.
The hub in figure 6 deviates from the hoop form
altogether. In this star-shaped earring, the bamboo motif
is abbreviated—the segments are straight and the joints
are mitered. The vocabulary changes again in figure 7.
Its segmented shape and detailing along the sides are
definitely bamboo-like, but the cross-hatching on the
top surface approximates the type of knurling found on
machinery handles.
While the trapezoidal hoops in figures 8 and 9
appear similar, there is an important modification. In figure 8, the bamboo segments are rendered in the standard
way, while in figure 9 they appear to be held together
with rivets. This is an illustration of a construction detail
typically used for fastening sheet metal, not bamboo.
Another notable departure can be seen in figures 11 and
12. Rivets again appear in these heart-shaped hoops,
but in figure 12 the bamboo segments alternate with
segments composed of geometric nuggets on a field of
stippling. This type of detail is reminiscent of repoussé
panels found on traditional metal hollowware, such as
Stickley-style copper vessels. In figure 10, the bamboo
has all but disappeared, and the hub is composed only of
alternating smooth and nugget-infill segments.
Because of the lack of detailed records, it is hard to
chart how and under what conditions the bamboo hoop
changed over time. The production of tooling for the
wholesale jewelry market was fast-paced and fluid, with
designs evolving at multiple levels of production simultaneously. In these circumstances, the toolmaker was
afforded exceptional latitude when it came to rendering
forms for production—a latitude that is clearly evident
in this selection of hubs by Matthew Lewandowski.
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Nguyen, Trong Gia, “Interview with Marc Ganzglass,” ArtSlant, December 1, 2008.
http://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/3155
Interview with Marc
Ganzglass
by Trong Gia Nguyen
Artslant New York Editor Trong Gia Nguyen chats with artist Marc Ganzglass about
meteorites, UFO engines, and Edward Hopper. The Brooklyn-based artist is currently
in South Beach taking in Art Basel Miami week.
Trong Gia Nguyen: There is a Hopperesque banality to some of your works, such as
Castro's, with its kitchen light, formal vantage point, and simple everyday actions,
though in video from. Do you relate your work to painting at all?
Marc Ganzglass: Not directly to painting, I relate to photography as far as procedure
goes, so maybe Hopper is a good example. In a photograph you have an interval
separated from the timeline and a lot of my work tends to function like that, a
quotient separated from the rest of the equation.
With Castro’s, I was struck by how all the formal elements were implicit in the
situation at the bodega, the lighting and the way the screen is split into quadrants by
the deli counter. Because of these strong formal elements the event of the guy making
tortas became separated from its context very easily. The video I shot in China Liu
Thinks Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is Innocent is like that also, it’s a tunnel, that looks
straight out of Battlestar Galactica, but in the end there is this guy with a rickshaw,
the two archetypes are in confrontation and that’s unsettling, but because the
situation was found and not fabricated it is also familiar.
TGN: Your most recent work, The Flight of
Orgueil, is a film produced using an electron
microscope at the Laboratory for the Study of
Extraterrestrial Material in Paris, but
transforms this scientific experience into
something even more basic, sort of like a
photogram in relation to photography, the
elementary writing of light. Is part of your
work about romanticizing science?
MG: Science as a pursuit is definitely
romantic, in a way that’s what allows it to be
picked up and used as an analogue in art. They
share the same impulses, but in science I think it’s easier to establish a baseline, to
figure out where you are at a given time. In material sciences you have this ability to
calibrate your observations, and measurement is the first step in both construction and
description. In art you are left to find different tools and that’s where structural
tactics like the photogram come in to play.
Vol D’Orgueil is about this condition of measurement, and understanding what you are
looking at. On the one hand the film is a throwback to structural filmmaking and defers
a lot of the aesthetic decisions to the mechanical limits of the microscope. On the
other hand, as a subject it uses a material with a significant social and chemical
history. The meteorite that we used in the film, (the Orgueil) is chemically analogous
to the sun and has been central to the debate about the birth of the solar system.
Working on that microscope, we had the ability to go deep into the structure of the
meteorite, down to 10 microns, but I kept it at very low magnification and wanted to
maintain that inability to penetrate through.
TGN: You did a residency at the Kohler manufacturing facility in Wisconsin, where you
produced a series of drinking fountains that combine iron from earth and iron from
another meteorite found in Siberia. You also work often with alloys and the shaping of
these manufactured materials. Is chemistry one and the same as concept and
philosophy within your work?
MG: I don’t look to the language of chemistry or engineering to describe a
philosophical stance metaphorically. Alloys made here on earth are social materials
and are engineered to fulfill desires that are often expressed through metaphor. So a
study of alloys allows me to flip back and forth between something empirical and
something subjective - how the physical state of a material is articulated in culture,
and this points back to that problem of measurement - what’s the distance between
the observed thing and its mediated image, and how is this distance described?
This is why meteorites are interesting, because they carry both signatures. They are
alloys from space, which is outside our history, but they embody narratives of real
importance to us once their structures are read in a social context and the chemistry
examined in terms of our needs. The study of meteoritic iron led to the discovery of
steel as an alloy, before that people believed that iron meteorites were important as
celestial objects and there was an understanding that the material performed in useful
ways but it wasn’t until after the discovery of steel that the meteorite embodied both
the technical and the celestial.
TGN: Have you ever seen a UFO?
MG: Have we talked about
Because I have a good story.
this
before?
I was living in Northampton Mass, in a house
with about five other people. My friend Dylan
would occasionally go out to California and
buy a classic car or hot rod in decent shape,
drive it back east and sell it. At the time he
had a very cool black 1970 Dodge Charger that
he was trying to sell. He had parked it in front
of our house in the gravel driveway and had a sign on it. One day this guy drives up in a
really beat up 1971 Charger painted metallic blue. I remember seeing garden hoses
hanging out of the grill when he pulls up next to Dylan’s 1970. The guy gets out and he
looks alright, overweight and long hair.
We go over and he’s already under the car looking for rust. Pretty soon both the hoods
are open and we are all standing around the cars, Dylan’s had a 440 Magnum, which is
a great motor and should be interesting to this guy. The first thing you see under this
guy’s hood are two coke cans all cut up and screwed to the top of the carburetor, he
says he has made some modifications and the car is getting thirty something miles to
the gallon. We could get about eight. So anyway the guy is asking about the condition
of the car, what the frame is like and all that, and Dylan is going off on the motor. This
guy says he doesn’t care about the motor, that he is going to put something else in it,
so we ask what.
A UFO motor. He says that his dad worked at Andover AFB and had reversed
engineered a UFO engine and that they had one built and he was just looking for the
right model Charger to drop it in and he liked the 1971. He then proceeded to draw a
diagram in the sand explaining how the motor works. It’s got three poles that can be
either neutral, positive or negatively charged. When one pole is negative the one
adjacent to it is neutral having just been positive, the negative pole is attracted to the
after image of the one that was just positive. Once the thing gets going the cylinders
oscillate back and forth, always attracted to each other's previous charge. It’s a
perpetual motion machine. The guy then goes on to tell us about photographing
lightning with a guy who had been struck so many times he could tell where lightning
would hit. It was very far out, but the guy came back later and bought the car for 4
grand.
I was working at a welding shop called Elmer’s Welding in Amherst at the time and the
next day at work I asked this guy Jim Loomis if he’d ever seen a UFO. I didn’t mention
the guy and the Charger. And Jim tells me this story. When he was a kid growing up in
South Hadley (next town over) he used to go driving down in the cornfields. We all did
this. So he was driving in the cornfields one night and was parked up on a low rise
when he saw another car coming through the field. Jim said he could tell it was a
Chrysler Imperial because of the bullet shaped taillights on the high fins. This must
have been the late 1960’s, Jim was about 50 when I knew him. He said the car was
going pretty fast and looked like it was caught in a rut. It leaned over on its side and
he thought it was rolling into a ditch, but then the car rose up, still on its side, and
took off. He said it lifted off the ground and took off into the sky.
TGN: There is this subtle melancholy that seems to creep into your works. Newsworthy
but quickly forgotten histories come into play in certain pieces, such as the sinking of
the Tricolor carrier. Even though you revitalize these events in your art, do you feel
that ultimately art is underpinned by the same sense of fate?
MG: There is something tragic in a few of the works, though I’m not sure if it’s because
the subject has receded from view. I think the melancholy, and the banality you spoke
of in the first question is more a symptom of how some events aren’t easily reconciled
with the structures we have built around them, and this situation definitely has a
corollary in art.
I forget the name of the theorem but there is one that suggests that in a solvable
equation there can be contained an un-solvable subset, that something will always be
inconclusive. I’m particularly interested in situations like this that take place within
the structures you find in manufacturing, science and engineering, the slip is
pronounced and comedic.
In Tricolor/BothSidesNow you have the story of a shipwreck that takes place in the
middle of the English Channel, the Tricolor sinks with 3000 new cars on board. The ship
was a key player in an intricate system of exchanges that involved international trade
and logistics and complex economic structures. At the time of the wreck these
relations become suspended and present an opportunity for assessment and
renegotiation, and I think that you find very similar situations in art. I think what we
see as comic/tragic is the recurring desire to reframe.
TGN: In Bridge of Gold, you reshoot a famous chase scene from the James Bond
Goldfinger novel by Ian Fleming. Tell us a little bit about this re-enactment.
MG: This project retraces a car chase in which Bond pursues Goldfinger across France
to a refinery outside of Geneva. He uses a homing device to track Goldfinger’s
movements, and Bond never really sees the gold Rolls Royce, so it’s not a car chase so
much as a slow pursuit. Most people know the sequence from the movie, where there
is some action and gunplay. In the book it is different, it takes two days for them to
reach Goldfinger’s refinery. Using only this homing device, Bond speculates on
Goldfinger’s destination, he makes wrong turns, gets frustrated and has to retrace his
steps. Eventually they end up at the refinery where Goldfinger melts down his car in a
very cool gesture of unmaking a thing. In the book Fleming describes the chase
sequence in great detail, giving all the place names and roads taken. It’s a very
technical description.
What I found exciting was that contained in the text are real directions to a place we
know is fictional. There is no refinery and no Goldfinger but we have a viable set of
instructions. And there was the correlation to the film and the entire Bond narrative as
well, so there was the potential to move within these different schemes, between the
technical and the metaphorical.
So myself and a cinematographer rented a car and camera and filmed for four days in
the Jura mountains, using just the Ian Fleming book and a map from 1954. The text
lent us access to film making without a script, screenplay or location scouting. Back in
New York I edited the film for continuity, focusing on color and movement, trying to
re-establish it formally and then did a dissonant soundtrack with two musicians from
the band the Obits. The finished product isn’t really a film it’s more of an artifact of
what happens when decisions that are normally central to production are deferred.
This goes back to that desire to measure, make something different and compare it to
what came before it.
~ Trong Gia Nguyen
Images: Still from Castro's; Still from Flight of Orgueil.