4.13-4.15

Holy cow, I'm exhausted right now. It's very springy here in minnesota. I'm currently sunburned a little bit, really starting to feel the rigorous schedule that comes with Franconia. 

The intern residents here all must participate in a daily 4-5 hours of "Park Work," Mon-Fri.  Monday was cleaning day and by 9am we were all assigned cleaning tasks around the house.  Later in the morning we loaded a dumpster with a bunch of hardened sand (a by-product of pouring metal) and a few hundred pounds of plastic sheeting that had previously been someone's sculpture.  

After a good lunch we made our trip to Tractor Supply and Menard's and got all of our hardware and the jig blade. With the new jig blade Alisa could make the decorative cuts into the diagonal support beams for the gas tank.  They turned out absolutely lovely.  Once the cuts were made and the holes drilled, it was a long afternoon of remounting the diagonal supports and hoisting the tank back in place.  Almost all of our counter sinks for the bearing bracket needed some cleaning up to accept the washers.  

Alisa was particularly tired that night and cut out around supper time. The day was cool and the night was cooler and I didn't feel like going in so I stayed out and got all those counter sinks cleaned up.  It was dark by now and I had the entire work yard all to my self listening to Munly and the Harlots as loud as the little boom box would go.  It was nice to be out there all alone for whatever reason. With the countersinks cleaned up, I tightened the bolts and gave the tank a spin.  

It moved beautifully, smoothly.  I spent some time to get some video of the tank spinning but the footage came out way too dark, so here it is instead in the daylight of the next day:

It's still not geared up (that will take a while yet, but this gives you an idea of it's spinning motion. 

Having gotten the tank mounted and the bearings et al working just as they should we cut off from the work site a little early (though it was still 11pm!) and had a few drinks to celebrate.  

The next morning at 9 again we were shoveling dirt into the Cushman, a golf cart equivalent to a dump truck. We c

arted the dirt to the other side of the park and leveled out the ground under a piece of work.  This took all morning and was tiring.  I think we loaded / unloaded and smoothed out some 6 or 7 loads of dirt.  

The day could not have been better to be working outside.  It was an absolutely gorgeous morning.  Felt so good to just wear a T-shirt and be comfortable.  Spring is hitting the North for sure.  After lunch Alisa and I went on a bike ride on some paved and unpaved trails just across the St. Croix river in Wisconsin.  It was the perfect temperature out.  Just amazing.  We broke a sweat, but were never too hot.  Spring in the midwest is certainly a fragile and short time.  It was nice to really take it all in on two wheels and shift into high gear and just fly across the pavement.  

          

Our afternoon of work involved mostly some more tedious work.  More countersinking, mostly.  Around 4 I was feeling the shoveling and the bike ride and had to take some time off and sit on a park bench on the river and eat a DQ ice cream cone.  

After dinner there was more tedious odds and ends for me to hammer out while Alisa started prepping her metal elements so she could fabricate brackets the next morning.  

This is wednesday now.  This morning was more shoveling, wheelbarrows and rakes. I had to go to Walmart to replace our boom box that died the other night.  We only lasted a few hours with only the radio and completely warbly played out cassette copy of REM's "Out of Time." I was afraid I was going to be arrested.  I had Alisa's credit card at Walmart and I signed her name and the clerk at wally world insisted on checking the signature.  Luckily I had studied her signature and I'd say I did a damn good job at replicating it.  

Alisa is currently fabricating metal brackets to fit the "spine" of her contraption.  I had to take most of the afternoon off to catch up on this here blog, really feeling the late nights, early mornings, manual labor and 12 hours of art making assistance.  Hopefully tonight I'll make it to bed at a decent time.  I could use the sleep for sure.  

Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  If you go here you will find a flickr set with more pics of the park and our work :  

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/typicaldesign/sets/72157616784609228/    

until next time...

 

Day 2

Happy belated easter!  At left is the easter dinner we made for the house. The residents have to take turns making dinner for each other.  On occasion of the holiday most of the house went out for a chinese dinner. Alisa, Patrick from Maine, and I opted out of the chinese food.  Patrick put it best when he said something like "if we don't spend money on chinese food, then we have more money to spend on beer." Exactly.  

You're looking at a plate of lentils, this amazing curried cabbage dish that Alisa and I have been making twice a day, and in the bowl is Beth Barden's tomato bisque recipe. It was a big hit and I made way too much for three people and continued to eat it the next day too.

Easter Sunday was hugely productive for us.  Most of saturday was spent re-arranging the mechanics of the piece to fit Wizard John's ideas.  He was right on.  One of his ideas concerned two holes in the diesel tank.  Apparently the tank, though empty, contained quite a bit of diesel fuel residue on the inside.  In order to contain that sludge for the sake of this lovely plot on land on which the piece is to stand, it was necessary to plug the holes.  Alisa's original plan was to weld covers on the holes.  This was potentially extremely dangerous as open flame and fuel fumes equals kaboom.  The Wizard had suggested that we simply fabricate wooden plugs.  It was ingeniously simple.  

Alisa made a very nice and clean one 

very quickly with power tools from some scrap oak.  I was really amazed by her ability to so effortlessly make something so accurately round and clean cut.  On the other hand, I was becoming painfully aware that it has been some 6 or 7 years since my foundations year of art school, which was the last time I used power tools to do anything other than cut a 2x4 in half or drive a screw to hang a picture.  Afraid to potentially destroy her nice power tools or my beautiful, beautiful hands, I stuck to a chisel and rasp and took an incredibly long time to make this funky, long stopper of my own.  It felt great to be able to add something to the piece, as minute as a detail as it may be.  At first I don't think she liked it, but my super funky plug grew on Alisa after a few hours. 

The second half of the workday was spent hoisting the tank into its position in the "wagon" to measure where we were to mount the bearing housing so that the thing would eventually spin when cranked.  We spent a long time discussing its mounting and both got into the idea of making a simple but elegant cut in the diagonal beam to help expose Alisa's beautiful S shaped ornament on the tank's side.  

We worked late into the night via halogen work lights mounted to the gantry's A frame, removing the tank 

from the hoists in its measurement position on the diagonal beam.  We had to drill a number of counter sinks and the ornamental cuts into the diagonal beams.  

We struggled for a time with THREE different jig saws, all property of the park.  One was totally inoperable, one was unable to lock its pitching mechanism, and the other did not support the single jig blade Alisa had in her truck bed full of supplies.  A trip to Tractor Supply was planned for the next day and we made a "grocery list" of required hardware, blade included.  We also had to track down an operable jig saw. 

We had a drink each and crashed around 2am, painfully aware of Monday's 8 am start time...

The Myth of Sisyphus: An Introduction

So here I am in Chisago County, Minnesota, at the Franconia Sculpture Park. Those top windows of the house is where I am staying and writing this.  Alisa and I have tirelessly put in our second 12 hour day assembling and defuckitizing a piece of her work titled "The Myth of Sisyphus."  There's still a monumental amount of work to be done, but our spirits are high and we're confident that, with the help of a clown brother and a farm equipment implement wizard, we'll have this thing finished and fully functional by the time our two weeks here are up. 

We both arrived rather late on the very first night.  We had planned to meet at the park around 8 or 9 pm, but, believe it or not, we both ran late, and it was the better part of 11 before I finally arrived.  It being so late, my body wrecked from a condition I've come to call "car butt," and the utter ec

stasy of seeing Alisa after so long, it was hard to have a first impression of the park, and really, of the entire situation.  We had hardly finished a hug before I was opening two of the Bully Porters I brought along.  Minnesota doesn't sell any booze or beer or nothing past some early GD hour of 8pm or something like that.  Not being ones to waste any time, and I, seriously ready to move my body and relieve myself of my "car butt" issue, set off into the dark back half of the property to unload Alisa's truck, beers in hand.  

As we were unloading, I was introduced to the work.  To keep it short, it's a work of kinetic/human powered  sculpture. Imagine a wagon that is moved by a hand crank.  The gear ratio is set up (...err, will be set up) so that a lot of human cranking moves the wagon only a tiny little bit.  There is also a large salvaged diesel storage tank that is to rotate on the inside of the wagon, geared up to the drive chain.

It was dark, I was getting drunk.  Despite these handicaps, it was clear as day that the work had some serious problems to overcome, mainly in the transference of power from gear to gear via a salvaged tractor chain.  As it was set 48 hours ago, the chain would have run not only into the rough sawn white oak frame, but also into the very wheel it was to be driving.  It felt a bit overwhelming and it was getting cold in the night so we moved it inside and drank more.  

Alisa brought out her bottle of Old Crow and I drank some of it. Actually, I drank quite a bit of it.  After my inability to stop talking nonsense kept us awake and drinking until 4:30 in the morning, it was agreed by us both that I am now to just stick to beer. 

  

In the morning it was easier to gauge how the place was set up.  At left is Alisa's workspace.  The basic frame of the 'wagon' is visible along with a detached wheel (salvaged from an old tractor) and the diesel tank is there too on the left.  There ar

e several (maybe 6-8?) outdoor gantries that are used by the interns here, on the back side of the property. There are right now about 5 or 6 residents all working on various wood and metal works.  

The first morning I was a bit stumbly, not all together, a bit hung over. We spent a lot of time organizing Alisa's pickup truck bed of tools and materials she had brought along.  Everything seemed to be taking too long on account of the previous night's sleep deprivation. We struggled to attache a vise to a work table.  We dropped bolts that took us what felt like hours to find in the gravel.  It was dumb.  We were finally getting our functionality on and discussing the piece's mechanical shortcomings when we were visited by John and Jerod(?), who have established a relationship with several residents of the park.  John salvages lumber from old barns, and had 6 months ago supplied Alisa with a lot of her white oak.  He had stopped by to say hello.  We all chatted a little and Alisa started in on what we were working with.  As she was talking my head was pounding.  This thing was so fucked.  I didn't have any good ideas. It was shaping up to be a really long 2 weeks.  

John, however, is special, very mechanically inclined, and probably was well rested and not hung over. Very cooly he solved our problems with an extended arm pointing and some really basic common sense.  He had two or three very simple quick fixes to our problems that I doubt either Alisa or I would have picked up on,  at least not on the first morning.  

"You're like a wizard, just blowing in here, and solving our problems," I told John.  

"You know what? That's what they call me at pool too...The Wizard."