ClenDening's conceptual contraptions

Will ClenDening, a member of Watkins College’s recent graduating class, is an artist at his best when he creates contraptions that combine form and concept. At the recent Secret Show exhibit at Ruby Green, his take on book art (after a winter and spring overrun with the stuff at almost every venue in town) involved encasing books inside a mold and pouring in molten metal which scorched them and evaporated forming materials, combining an act of book burning with a process that combined textures and forms from the book remains and the crusty metal elements. The pieces on exhibit were static sculptures, but they retained clear traces of mechanics through which they were produced.

Some of his best pieces rely on minimal gestures elaborately executed. In his senior show at Watkins, he created a machine that takes a background noise, the sound of a floor fan, and converts it to the bare minimum of markings. A microphone picks up the sound of the fan, transfers it into an 8-track mixing board stripped of its housing, which in turn feeds the signal out into a set of small speakers (also without housing). The speakers emit a barely audible sound, but it is enough to vibrate a filament strung across a roll of adding machine taping. A pen suspended from the filament scratches out a continuous series of marks on the adding machine tape. The mark is not much of anything, just an uneven series of lines that could be the readout from some sort of medical monitoring device. The adding machine tape rolls through the housing of the adding machine – I think it is an adding machine, again the housing has been stripped away, including the keys – and into a big pile on the floor.

This machine enacts a series of state changes: from sound, into the kinetic visual realm of mechanical motion, ending up with a pile of marks. It starts out with a sound that isn’t much, and through a series of transfers ends up with marks that aren’t much. It represents a sort of difficult alchemy, in which lead is turned into something different but not notably more valuable than lead. It also made me think of bureaucratic processes, in which great resources are put into effecting results than seem much less than you might expect. In this piece, the stuff of the physical world, in this case sound, can be taken by the artist and transformed, but only with great effort. It shows technology as an enterprise filled with frustration.

Stripping away the housing of the components takes away the bulk and the identity bestowed by the machine exteriors, which brings the machinery down to the level of minimal gesture embodied in the process itself. The adding machine barely registers as an adding machine. The numbers have been erased. Exposing the innards of the machines makes the process more mysterious because you are confronted by wires and circuits whose exact purpose most of us probably don’t know. However, taking away the casing trades relatively simple shapes for more complex patterns and colors of wires and circuitry. There is also a larger gestures in the way the sequence of minimal gesture transfers results in an extravagant, messy pile of paper as the ultimate product.

ClenDening has another piece in the show that uses similar transfer principles, with a flashlight and a revolving slide that turn on and off a pump that pushes water into a glass holding a plastic flower. It has a similar tone of frustrated expression, as the technology goes through a complicated process to try to create an artificial substitute for the natural phenomenon of a flower blowing in the wind or bobbing on water.

There is a poignancy to the constrained self-sufficiency of both ClenDening’s machines, which are surprisingly rich in interpretive implications for works that at first glance might seem like a bunch of gadgets strung together.