Turning craft into art

Bringing the hammer: HCCC's Soundforge forges metal into artsy music

Creative inspiration can manifest from the most unexpected of sources. For metalsmith, writer and craft activist Gabriel Craig, it came from the humdrum sound of his everyday physical activity: Forging metal.

Metalsmithing involves tuning into the sound produced while pounding away at the raw material in an effort to gauge progress to the desired result. While an artist-in-residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC), Craig was consumed with bringing such process into focus for those who may not be familiar with the craft.

And so he became fixated on the precise moment of contact between tool and element.

"Makers are constantly talking about the process of making their work," Craig explains. "Despite this broad focus on process, the end result is nearly always a formal sculptural object. I am very invested in craft as a living thing — craft as a verb.

"There's something taboo about touching and playing with an art work, there's a sense of playfulness and abandon when realizing there isn't a right nor wrong."

"Forging is an act of fabrication but also an act of percussion. From there I elected to seek out a music composer in order to help me breathe life into this project."

That was Houston-based composer Michael Remson, also the executive director for American Festival for the Arts. The result of their collaboration is Soundforge, an interactive installation on display at HCCC through Jan. 8.

Early on, the duo thought of many designs including a "xylobooth" where participants would enter a semi-closed device.

It took two years for Soundforge to emerge as a collection of large gate-like structures with a nod to antique wrought iron design. Large armatures function as a frame from which bars — tuned to an F pentatonic scale — are suspended.

Remson used Soundforge as a mallet musical instrument to craft a 15-minute soundscape that melded a persistent rhythmical pulse evoked by the physical act of forging with allusions to Balinese Gamelan and the music of minimalist composers — like John Adams, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. The composition begins simply, develops in complexity and shifts through different tonalities within the five-note scale.

A video of forging encourages passersby to grab one of the several handcrafted mallets arranged on the wall and play Soundforge along with Remson's opus on loop. In essence, by interacting with the work, the visitor becomes a part of the process which completes the cycle of Soundforge.

"We wanted to create a situation where non musicians would not be intimidated to come in and make a 'mistake,'"Remson notes. "The composition isn't meant to occupy center stage. I wanted to write something to encourage people to get involved."

Playing Soundforge elicits many reactions.

There's something taboo about touching and playing with an art work, there's a sense of playfulness and abandon when realizing there isn't a right nor wrong, and one also reaches a Zen state when tuning into the juxtaposition of Remson's music with impromptu improvisation.

HCCC curator Anna Walker links engagement in social media with an increasing desire for viewers to be engaged with art at higher levels.

"There's a trend of artists exploring interactivity," Walker says. "For this piece, the idea of interactivity took on an educational role to help people bridge the gap between hammering, making music and making the piece."

It comments on the concept of craft, on the act of crafting an object and the craft of composing a musical score. In many ways, like a Rubik's cube, it deciphers the many meanings of craft.

"I had professor who said it best: Craft is part of a Venn diagram," Walker explains. "There's craft, there's design and there's art. Each field has its own unique history but there are ways the three disciplines overlap.

"[At the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft], we loosely define craft when materials like metal wood, glass, fiber and clay are part of the work, while taking into account the history of how the object was made and importance of the act of making.

"These characteristics sets craft apart from art and design, but I would encourage people to keep in mind that there are many ways these fields overlap, like a Venn diagram suggests.”

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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