The parts that aren’t in the sculpture are most important for Andrew Logan, one of five sculptors in the outdoor exhibit at Princeton Day School.
By: Ilene Dube
Although the sign at Princeton Day School’s outdoor sculpture show says "Please do not touch the sculptures," touching the sculpture is exactly what you want to do when you see the piece titled "Sky" by Andrew Logan: To run your hand along the smooth polished curves of the cold stone, to feel the roughness in the parallel grooves that horizontally cut through the flat surface, to touch that irregular mass of marble at the pedestal.
Same thing when you look at "Vionna" by Mr. Logan: it stirs a desire to rub your palm along the shiny white marble, to run your fingers inside the oval cutout.
If Mr. Logan’s artwork incites you to break the rules, it could be his rebellious spirit coming through the rock.
On an October-like day in mid-December, the morning fog rises as Mr. Logan carefully lowers a stone figure on a crane into the former corn crib on his Doylestown, Pa., retreat. Seen from a distance, the silhouette of the human-shaped form lying horizontally on the floor, with light pouring in from doorways on both ends and a view to the land beyond, has all the makings of a multi-dimensional photograph. The stone had been cut in another building up the hill, then brought here, the first sculpture to inhabit this space Mr. Logan plans to turn into the "casting crib."
"When I have the outline I like, I’ll go into it and through it, blowing light into it until it becomes a light magnet, like the magnifying glass at the PDS show," he says. "The parts that aren’t there are the most important parts. It’s a new direction for me I didn’t used to put holes in my sculpture. It used to be more like an obelisk, resistant to holes."
The sculptor says he doesn’t have preconceived ideas. "I just let the shapes happen and then catch up to them. In the end it looks like I knew what I was doing, but I don’t, I’m just digging around. It’s just a dialogue with me, the stone and what it’s supposed to be."
The native of Australia bought the eight-and-one-half acre former orchard and dairy farm four months ago, and his excitement is evident when asked how many buildings there are on the property: "One, two, three… this is fun," he says, counting his way to 12, including several silos.
"This property is perfect for me," he says, describing his plans to build an "art farm." Four sculptor friends will be given studios in exchange for working on his sculpture, and he hopes to have poetry readings in the barn. When compared to J. Seward Johnson Jr. (who enabled sculpting apprentices to work in the former Johnson Atelier in Hamilton in exchange for working on his pieces), Mr. Logan says "but without all the money."
Looking around at all this Bucks County soil, one wonders.
Opening the doors to the 12,000-square-foot barn and hayloft, he talks about plans to turn it into a gallery and painting studio for his wife, Lexi Lowe Logan, who grew up in Solebury, Pa., on the farm of famed Bucks County Impressionist Daniel Garber. For now, it houses some of his work, including "1933," a female torso with one arm stretched upward. He says this piece was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, holding up the torch with one arm. The title comes from "the fact that my style, modern not contemporary, came between the wars, and during those years New York was raging stylistically." To achieve its weathered patina, he applied acid to make it black, then whipped it with bike chains and beat it with a hammer ouch! "to give it life, as measured by scars," he says. "She needs (this treatment) or she’d be a pristine semblance rather than a real being."
The farm on this land was established in 1750, and the stone foundation of the barn, built in 1770, still stands, although a fire burned the rest of the building. The barn was rebuilt in 1976, but the hayloft had been boarded up for many years. In the four short months he’s been here, Mr. Logan has had to open it up, remove the old hay and dead birds, and add doors and windows. He broke through the stone wall, creating a doorway with an arched top framed by an old wooden wheel. As he opens all the doors to let in light, the spirit of the old wood echoes something sacred. A room at the back of the barn harbors Mr. Logan’s vast collection of pews, and with light shafts illuminating the space, it feels like a Quaker meetinghouse.
He uses the pews to cast molds, and even cuts them up and reuses the wood in sculpture. "Churches don’t want the pews because they don’t inspire congregating," he says. "They’re regimented seating and detrimental to turnout." He has made plastic casts of a pew for a private collector. This is the part of his line he refers to as "meta sculpture," or "supra sculpture" "It’s extreme sculpture because it’s so playful." Inspired by Nam June Paik’s Fluxus sensibility dragging a violin down a street by a string and filming it, for example Mr. Logan is seeking to bring more enjoyment into his work.
Mr. Logan got his first big break apprenticing to Nam June Paik, building sculpture for the Korean-born artist’s final retrospective at the New York Guggenheim Museum in 2000. "Nam June Paik taught me that art can be startling in an uproarious way," he says.
Before that, Mr. Logan was mostly self taught.
He grew up on a sheep farm in central Australia, between the desert and the outback. "It was dead flat with lots of flies and gnarly little creeks that were like gullies when it rained," he recounts. "Everything was brown, bearded and wizened. The hills were like old animal carcasses. It was fantastic rough and wild."
His father was a founding member of the Australian wheat board, selling grain internationally, which afforded him the opportunity to travel to Brazil, China, Argentina and all over the world. "He was a happy collector who would bring things home," says Mr. Logan, who found inspiration in these international trinkets and carved his own imaginings into wood.
His father influenced his peripatetic spirit. "I was a big reader of adventure stories from England from the ’40s and ’50s, as well as Conrad, Hemingway and travel stories these were my father’s books.
"My mother pushed me to go (and travel the world)," he continues. He left home at age 18 and embarked on a seven-year adventure, beginning with two years hitchhiking around Australia, working on cattle farms and living on the beach. When he was 21, his grandfather left him $5,000, with which he flew to Indonesia and then continued his adventure with surface transportation: boats, ferries, trains and trucks, traveling to Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Tibet, Turkey, India and beyond. He lived on $5/day, he says, until his inheritance ran out, and then "I made a lot of money on the black market in currency exchange that kept me going."
In Europe, he took whatever work he could find telemarketing, fixing mopeds, tourist hustling "and I slept outside a lot." In the mid 1980s, he found a flight from Athens to New York City for $115, but once he arrived, "It was the biggest culture shock I ever had since Calcutta the ferocious cold, poverty, hunger, 42nd Street. Tompkins Square Park was burning anarchists had set it on fire." (The park in New York’s Alphabet City was a haven for the homeless and in 1988, during an attempt to clear the park, a police riot erupted during which 44 were injured.) So Mr. Logan took a Greyhound bus to Miami and bought a three-wheel hot dog machine. "I made so much money selling hot dogs to car dealers," he boasts. OK, well, perhaps not so much a J. Seward Johnson Jr. clone after all.
His adventure ended with a cross-country drive to L.A., then a return flight to Australia. At that point he was 25 and "I’d circumnavigated the glove and hadn’t discovered what I wanted to do with my life." In Sydney, he went to the beach to make sand sculptures. "I was so blown away by what I did, I swore to the moon this was what I had to do. It was my epiphany, and in Australia, when you make an oath, it should be to the moon. I shaved my head to prove I was serious."
He bought stone and started carving until he met a woman in a bar who offered him an exhibition. People began buying his work, and the momentum built.
"This was innate stuff. I had no training, all my information came from reading the classics: poetry, philosophy, religion and the ramblings of lunatics," he says. "I was a hungry, mixed-up kid trying to get to the bottom of it all." During his travels, he had carried a backpack and wheeled a suitcase full of books, he says, reading Confucius, the Tao of Lao Tzu, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bhagavata, the Bible, Homer, Ayn Rand, Carlos Castenada.
In 1996, Mr. Logan returned to Manhattan, this time to set up a studio on the Lower East Side. "I came to New York to experience the explosion of ideas and opportunities," he says. By 2000, he set up Canal Street Studio in Trenton, where he apprenticed at a foundry to learn bronze casting. His works in wood, marble and bronze have been exhibited in New York and internationally; he will have an exhibit in Dubai in February.
For all his success, he is grateful to his grandfather and his mother for enabling him to see the world: "What mother would encourage her son to hitchhike around the world? I’d never let my kid walk to the end of the road."
Other sculptors in the PDS outdoor sculpture show include Gunnar Theel, whose work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection; Kevin Forest, whose works in metal and wood reflect the relationships and themes of man’s domination of nature; Harry Gordon, who was department head of sculpture installations at the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture until 1998; and Rory Mahon, who has led sculpture workshops and demonstrations in the U.S. and abroad.
"Through the sculpture park at PDS, we can help students develop a higher understanding of large-scale, three-dimensional public art," says PDS curator Jody Erdman.
Princeton Day School’s outdoor sculpture show is on view at the center of the
campus, 650 The Great Road, Princeton, through June 15. The exhibit is open Mon.-Fri.
during daylight hours. For information, call (609) 624-6700. On the Web: www.pds.org