7 Levels For Truth & Balance

My MFA thesis installation, shown 2 to 19 December 2010 at the UTSA Satellite Space at 115 Blue Star in San Antonio. The exhibition was *We Are Not The Only Ones*, two MFA theses in one building, mine and Bora Lee's. The title on my wall label was longer: *Your Phantom Captain's Seven Level Quest For Truth & Balance Through Understanding of Phi*.

Nothing in the room was lit from outside it. Every object carried its own light, and the darkness between them was part of the work.

A room with no gallery lighting

The ordinary move is to light the objects. I did the opposite: the sculptures were lit from inside, so the room stayed dark and the darkness became the medium rather than the absence of one.

Darkness is where things begin. It is the origin of thought and of creation, ethereal and powerful, capable of engulfing a space and then vanishing instantly at the flick of a switch. All of it is born in the dark of a womb or a seed.

The figures were life sized plastic anatomical skeletons with their musculature rebuilt out of plastic bags. Bones from a biology supply catalog, muscle from a grocery store.

Where the title comes from

Buckminster Fuller used the phrase *phantom captain* for the thing that operates the physical body and is not the body. The seven levels are the chakras, a much older account of the same question, staged as a climb rather than a presence. Joseph Campbell's hero travels through stages of initiation toward balance, which is the same ladder told as a story, and Maslow built one more in the language of twentieth century psychology.

Four accounts of one climb, from four traditions that do not speak to each other, and the installation sets them in the same room to see whether they are describing the same thing. Phi, in the title, is the golden ratio: balance and proportion, pursued in nature and in art.

Natural, synthetic, and the division between them

Underneath the consciousness material is the argument I am still making. Plastic bags, electrical sockets, lights and bone are mixed until it stops being obvious which side of the line a thing is on.

Our bodies are forged on this world. The things we make are made from the earth of this world. The divisions are artificial.

That is from the 2010 statement, and it is the thesis the practice runs on sixteen years later, written before I had the vocabulary for it.

The cords were not hidden. An electrical cord running across a concrete floor is as much a natural object as a femur, and tucking it away would have conceded the point the room was arguing.

What it did

This is where the work left the wall. After this the question needed a room, then a building, then a civic site, and the line runs from this installation to the public commissions. The rows of black human silhouettes along the walls here are also the first appearance of a device that comes back nine years later in *A Place For Our Thoughts*, where the silhouettes belong to named volunteers and are cut into the sculpture itself.

What is left

Nothing in that room had its own title. It was one experience under one title, and the discs were stations in it rather than separate works.

Most of it is gone. I did not tour the installation, which I would do differently now. After the show the discs were taken apart and the material went into new work. Some of the skeletons and some of the discs still exist, but not in the form they had in that room.

So the documentation is the work now. Given what the piece was arguing, that is not the wrong outcome. A thing made to say that nothing stands apart, that matter keeps reorganizing and the divisions we draw across it are ours rather than the world's, did exactly that: it came apart and became the next thing.

Lights, motors, plastic skeletons, fabric, plastic bags. Dimensions variable, life sized figures. Shown in *We Are Not The Only Ones*, a two person MFA thesis exhibition with Bora Lee, UTSA Satellite Space, 115 Blue Star, San Antonio, 2 to 19 December 2010. Sponsored in part by the Texas Commission on the Arts and the Elizabeth Huth Coates Charitable Foundation of 1992.