In remembrance of Roger Ackling (1947-2014)

 

The eminent Italian Renaissance architect and theorist, Leon Battista Alberti, stated that the artist should attend to beauty and learn from nature. Alberti did not mean this in a purely imitative way, but that the artist should recognise harmony, underscored by geometry, in the natural world. From the Quattrocento onwards we see ‘nature’, in the form of landscape, represented in the fine arts. Jumping ahead to the 1970s, the landscape as artwork itself emerges in contemporary art in the UK as Land Art (Earth Art in the USA) – a related field to Minimalism. In Britain the two great exponents of this conceptual trend in sculpture are Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. Both artists are associated with St Martin’s School of Art in London, which is where fellow sculptor, Roger Ackling, who died recently, met his life-long friends.

 

Ackling’s approach to making art was very ‘Zen’. He harnessed the powers of nature, in the form of the sun, and invited the chance finding of wood-detritus in his working methodology. The Japanese aesthetic of Wabi Sabi acknowledges the recognition of the imperfect, but beautiful, forms often found in nature. The recognition of a form of ‘beauty’ in un-designed objects, or patterns in nature, is universal. Our homes can be full of mementos – even the most minimalist dweller can fall prey to picking up a pebble and place it carefully on a shelf somewhere in the home.

 

This brings us to a small treasure featured here that has the status of both ‘found object’ and work of art. It seems quite fragile as it very light and small (9X3X1cm) and is formed of a piece of driftwood that was once part of a larger structure as it had previously been cut into shape and still retains a nail that threatens to split the piece in two. Ackling collected this object from a beach in Japan in 1990. What makes this fragment of ‘jetsam’ extra interesting is that, typically, Ackling had intervened with the section of wood by burning 20 parallel lines across one surface. These lines of equal length are made by using a magnifying glass as if he were drawing, and he directed the concentrated rays of the sun onto the flammable surface over several hours. This must have demanded great patience and, perhaps, a Zen-like state of concentration.

 

What Alberti would have made of Ackling’s burnt geometric interventions we shall never know, but a debt to being informed by nature is certainly celebrated in Ackling’s oeuvre. Whether Land Art is categorised as essentially ‘conceptual’ or not is debatable. It is interesting that physical material, form and arrangement/installation, rather than idea, can dominate an understanding of a work of art. Ackling’s work is both fascinating in being, somehow, ‘real’ and understandable – yet bordering on the unfathomable. Ackling’s works were often constituted of simple and unassuming pieces of wooden debris, marked by him in a gesture of witness and responsiveness. It may not have been selected with any conscious sense or recognition of beauty; it was simply ‘found’ and offered a possibility. One has to accept its material ‘poverty’, and the minimalistic sequence of almost identical lines in a very literal way. There is process at work here; a sense of time as experienced in nature (not from the clock or watch); and a lesson learned that not all treasure is made from precious stones or gold.

 

Like Zen Buddhism, Ackling’s objects are indefinable. The artist would have liked that.

September 7, 2014