Robert Stackhouse:
Kansas City Art Institute
A DREAM BOAT AT KCAI
by ROBERTA LORD
Robert Stackhouse is a watercolorist-turned-sculptor with a passion for the skeletal substructure of archetypal forms. Over the course of a long and esteemed career, through both painting and site-specific sculpture, he has pursued an investigation of animals and objects with bony underpinnings, among them whales, snakes, bridges, and ships.
In March 1996, he constructed the smooth, pale, towering form of a ship's prow on one of Kansas City Art Institute's most unanchored sites. Titled K.C. Way, the sculpture is a temporary (one-year) installation created in conjunction with a workshop the artist conducted for first-year students in KCAI's Foundation Department.
Stackhouse selected the confined, asymmetrical area bordered by Vanderslice Hall, Epperson Auditorium, and the East Building to illustrate for his students a number of lessons about the relationship of sculpture to site. In an early phase of his design, Stackhouse described the work as a "skeletal structure, wedge-shaped, open at the wide end with an interior deck... designed to relate to the Vanderslice building's architectural features specifically and to the rest of the adjacent buildings generally . . . a ship-like shape in a small courtyard."
Stackhouse recognized that confinement of a large form in a small area would automatically trigger visual excitement, and that the conceptual clarity of his work would sense as a clean, single-note counterpoint to the surrounding jumble of architectural style and surface.
The prow-shaped form is 16 feet high by 30 feet long, tapering forward to a point from a width of 16 feet at the open, "stern" end. It is constructed of cedar 2x4s (the underdeck and the vertical ribbing). 2x2s (the deck surface), and 1x2s (the horizontal hull lathing) all coated with a translucent wash of white latex paint. The banded pattern of lath and light, along with the wood's watery surface, combine to create a rhythmical moire, contributing to the impression that the form has only just slid into this berth.
Like a ladder to a treehouse, the slightly elevated deck platform entices passers-by to stop and climb aboard for the vicarious dual experience of travel and shelter. The strips of deck planking arc from the rear to the front, following the bull's curve, and meet in a mitered seam that runs the form's full length. The vertical supports loom high above, patterns of dappled light dance among the hull walls, and the intoxicating smell of cedar permeates the air.
The sculpture's construction, seemingly simplistic, is master-crafted. The curves are smooth and controlled: the wood screws and machine bolts are evenly aligned: the lathing is perfectly spaced and level. It is, in fact, the professionalism of Stackhouse's building technique, and the solidity of his construction that allows viewers to engage seriously with the work.
As imposing as the sculpture is in this cramped space, it doesn't inhibit foot traffic. Paradoxically, by quieting and dignifying the chaotic courtyard, the sculpture makes passage through it seem more secure. The entire area is now alee--sheltered by the ship's looming presence.
Drawing is not merely an aid to visualizing and building sculpture for Stackhouse: it is a component of the sculpture itself. You see clear evidence of this in K.C. Way, where the sculpture provides its own break-away views. Just as a draftsman renders partial areas of surface texture to represent the texture of the whole, so Stackhouse has constructed partial segments to suggest the full expanse of three concentric hulls--outer, middle, and inner. He stops the outer hull with a diagonal break that reveals a partial section of the middle hull that in turn breaks to reveal a partial section of the inner hull. The viewer moves in and out of the shelter of these ghostly forms, as though behind the scenes of a theatrical set, deducing the full drama from fragments of its scenes. As early as February 1971, in a review for Arts Magazine, Douglas Davis identified Stackhouse as among those sculptors who "preferred the raw unfinished look of art in the process of creation to the completely executed act."
Stackhouse emerged as a young artist amidst the Minimalist movement of the early 60s. He believed in the power of pure color and form, but couldn't wholly accept Minimalism's taboo against real-world reference, though among the artists with whom he might be grouped--Siah Armajani, Alice Aycock. Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, Robert Morris--Stackhouse's work is relatively reserved in its narrative reference.
He is an accomplished painter--Kansas City's Morgan Gallery staged an exhibition of his large, ship-related watercolors in 1995--and his sensitivity to the subtle means by which metaphor is conveyed in two-dimensions pervades his sculptural work. Like the distilled simplicity of a haiku poem, or an isolated, deeply considered, calligraphic brush stroke, each of Stackhouse's sculptures can be read as a single gesture, encompassing a world of complexity but thoroughly edited and refined so as to allude with dream-like delicacy to just the essence of "shelter," "fence," "bridge," or "ship."
The allusion to ships has come to dominate his work in recent years. If Emily Dickenson's "The soul selects its own society" were paraphrased to "The soul selects its own mode of transport," that mode, it seems, for Stackhouse, would be a ship.
Ships connote levitation, frictionless travel, silent passage through darkness. Though the ship is man's invention, its form is lodged in prehistoric memory. Perhaps because to stay afloat (alive), a ship must conform to organic construction principles: it must have a spine and ribs. It must be streamlined for speed and agility. To withstand buffeting seas, it must be strong yet flexible. Ships are kin to salmon and swans, and so are we. Ships---to take this analogy, about as far as it will go---are among "the lost tribes." They bear a family resemblance. It is this welcome, but surprising, familiarity that Stackhouse's sculptures so effectively play upon.
K.C. Way is particularly well-suited to the campus of the Kansas City Art Institute, where each student, while working in a communal setting, must strive toward the construction of an interior, private world. Stackhouse's ship fragment becomes a marvelous metaphor for the "vessel" that each artist aims to become streamlined, composed, purposeful, open and closed simultaneously.
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