A Conversation with María Elena González: A Trajectory of Sound

In 2014, I engaged in a series of dialogues with María Elena González about her work on the Tree Talk Series. At the time, González was completing Skowhegan Birch #2, the second of her birch bark inspired player piano rolls, which would premier at the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana in Slovenia. During my visits to her studio, the artist and I discussed her experiments with sound sculpture and her ambitions for the Tree Talk Series. Our original exchange was included in the catalog essay for the Tree Talk exhibition at the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. It is republished here in full with an addendum.

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I first saw Skowhegan Birch #1, the player piano roll made from the pattern on birch bark, at MAD (Museum of Arts and Design), in the summer of 2013, not long before the work was awarded the Grand Prize at the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. By all standards, it was an amazing work, as were the accompanying works on paper and framed bark pieces. The following year, I visited María Elena González’ studio, several times, to talk about her work on the Tree Talk Series. For the catalogue essay of the Tree Talks Series exhibition in the Ljubljana Biennial, González thought it would be revealing to talk about the development of sound in her sculpture that began in 1989 and continues intermittently to the present.[1]

Since the artist’s experimental nature of sound has not been previously written about or published until now, it is our expectation that this conversation will broaden an understanding of sound, a carefully and conscientiously conceived element, which eventually exploded into music in Skowhegan Birch #1 (2005-2012) and Skowhegan Birch #2 (2012-2014).

EARLY CONVERSATION

Julia P. Herzberg: Let’s talk about the work chronologically with an eye to your material and conceptual processes. And when we conclude, we will have drawn a fuller picture of how and why sound eventually became music and why music, so central to your very being, was so unusually created in some of your work between 1989 and 2014. Let’s begin with T for Two (1989), the first work that has sound. (fig. 17)

María Elena González: T for Two is a furniture-object-sculpture in the shape of a small stepladder. There are two steps on either side with different graphic markings indicating a place for one’s knees and bottom. I thought of constructing the stepladder so that one or two people could kneel on the first step and/or sit on the second step; in either case, they would face each other. Then they could become actively involved with the piece and tap the rawhide insets on the top. The rectangular rawhide insets serve as drums. As you know, rawhide is a principal material used to make drums, and in Cuban music, in percussion, rawhide reigns supreme. Drums, gongs, and maracas are all percussion.

JPH: What inspired you to title the work after Ella Fitzgerald’s famous song “Tea for Two,” even though the spelling is somewhat different?

MEG: I grew up listening to music pretty much everyday and still listen to music all the time. Since the mid-1980s, I have mostly listened to jazz in my studio—I must have been in an Ella Fitzgerald phase. As far as the spelling is concerned, ‘T’ has a structural, architectural look to it; playing with language is a result of bilingualism.

JPH: Immediately following T for Two, you began working with raw- hide, wood, and rope, materials used in Untitled (1989) and Rotunda (1990), which I included in Installations: Current Directions at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MoCHA) in New York in 1990, and in two other similar sound sculptures at that time. (figs. 18 and 19) All of these were intended to include sound and be interactive. Would you elaborate on their production, and their anticipated presence in an exhibition venue?

MEG: At the time I made these rawhide sculptures, I was not only interested in having sound emanate from the works but equally in having the viewer physically interact with the sculptures to get involved with the pieces. I was tired of seeing viewers in the gallery just looking at the work without ever touching it. I wanted people to touch the rawhide in the sculptures, to get involved in their spatial dimensions, and to be accountable for the sound they were making. Even though the viewers were not going to play a symphony, they could still touch the rawhide and strike up a beat, just as in T for Two. Allowing for that kind of engagement through sculpture was a huge leap for me.

JPH: Untitled and Rotunda were attached to the floor and the ceiling by rope that alluded to the strings of musical instruments.

MEG: Exactly. The tensioned rope alludes to strings, suggesting a strong visual association to musical instruments. And, as I have said, the rawhide insets were intended for people to play on them. The only thing I didn’t do was provide a pair of drumsticks!

JPH: Rotunda actually has a more pronounced drum-like shape.

MEG: Well, the stringing part is similar but not the shape. Rotunda is the perfect circle with a beautiful gradation of surface. I feel it has a very sensuous curve, and its finish is not unlike the wood on congas.[2]

JPH: At the same time you were making Rotunda, you were also making sculptures using rawhide but without sound. Then you made Pod and Mambo Mango, which had sound, and were placed on the floor, and were intended to be played like drums. The sculptures are formal departures from the work discussed above. Let’s talk about these. (figs. 20 and 21)

MEG: I began working with ideas I thought were clear, but actually I was working toward something that was not immediately apparent. Fortunately I like being lost because that feeling is what thrills me about making art, finding my way to something new, which is just what happened when I made Pod (January) and Mambo Mango (July). Both pieces are based on nature’s forms—pods and seeds. I made a lot of drawings and some prints of these shapes both before and during the time I made these two sculptures. Mambo Mango references both tropical fruit and tropical dance. I also made a wall piece based on reading Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love, a work I still have. In looking back, I feel that Pod and Mambo Mango, as well as the other works mentioned, were important for their inclusion of sound and because they gave agency to viewers.

JPH: Pod and Mambo Mango are hollow cones that appear to be illuminated from within. Am I correct?

MEG: Yes. They are made with thin segments of transparent rawhide so that light appears to emanate from them. I started working with the rawhide because of the sound and its relationship to congas and making sound as music. But as a sculptor, when you start working with materials, you start noticing their properties, and one of the fantastic things about a particular type of rawhide is its translucency and luminosity. Because of the thinness of the rawhide, these pods seem to transmit light from within. The ability to achieve that kind of luminosity represented another creative leap for me.

JPH: Black Bean Rain Sticks were inspired by rain sticks, objects in the shape of a long hollow tube filled with small stones or beans. When turned upside down, the small stones or pebbles make a sound similar to rushing water or rain. How did you make this small percussion instrument? (fig. 22)

MEG: Again I used rawhide to make the cylinders. Using a drill bit, I made holes so that I could insert thin bamboo rods to interrupt the flow of the black beans in order to create sound. The black dots that appear on the outside, at the ends of the pieces of bamboo rods, are accentuated with a dark epoxy that holds the rods in place and incidentally creates a graphic surface pattern. When the cylinders were closed at either end, I put lead caps on them, much like one would do with a precious container.

JPH: Actually, Black Bean Rain Sticks is a very elaborative piece despite the simplicity of the two elongated tubular shapes.

MEG: You have pointed out something quite relevant, which is the cylindrical shape of this sculpture. So, where am I now: a player piano roll (Skowhegan Birch #2), which is a cylinder. And where does the music come from? The birch tree, another cylinder, which has marks that are translated to sound.

JPH: Your choice of black beans is self-referential. It speaks to Cuba.

MEG: Black beans are a basic food in that country and in other parts of the Caribbean for that matter. I consciously used them because of their relationship, like the drum, to my background. My work is not overt in the sense that it is branded: “I am Cuban.” But I have my own way of speaking about my heritage, about where I come from in my artwork.

JPH: For Untitled (Circle), a work you did two years after Black Bean Rain Sticks, you continued using wood and rawhide but you added metal leaf and metal. (fig. 23) There is a great deal of luminosity in this sculpture as there was in Pod and Mambo Mango. And, similar to those works, Untitled (Circle) has a very tactile quality; it, too, can be touched.

MEG: This goes back to what I was saying about how I continued to discover the amazing qualities of rawhide—one: its translucency, another: its ability to project light. This particular piece makes me think of the word ‘oh’ because it reminds me of the shape my mouth makes when I say that word. So, that is how I refer to it even though it is not the official title. I had discovered that different rawhides have differ- ent densities and tones. For Untitled (Circle), I selected a particularly thin rawhide that was colorless rather than amber. The rawhide used for drums has an opaque amber quality whereas the rawhide used for Untitled (Circle) is the most clear. The background is a piece of wood that is gilded with a silver-like metal leaf to create a reflective surface that allows the light to come in and bounce back out. The rawhide really lights up in a very ethereal, even magical, way.

JPH: You talked about the possibility of doing a public artwork, for which you have a very distinguished record, in the form of a labyrinth. How did these individual sculptures of ear labyrinths evolve? (fig. 24)

MEG: When I was doing a residency at Eternit AG in Payerne, Switzerland in 2001, I worked with fiber cement. I experimented with the possibilities inherent in that material, one that depends on its den- sity to absorb and to carry sound. I became really interested in the idea of a public art piece where the viewers would hear bits and pieces of conversations as they walked through the labyrinth. With those ideas in mind, I started envisioning an acoustical labyrinth as a public art piece where you could talk to the wall in one part of the labyrinth and someone else would hear you in another part. The work I envisioned was not about getting lost inside; it was about being lost in a cacophony of fragmented conversation.

JPH: How and where did you make these pieces that form the maquette?

MEG: I made several maquettes at Eternit. During the time I sculpted these, I also made many drawings of labyrinths. If I had the opportunity to do a labyrinth as a public art work I would make it out of either fiber cement or cast cement.

JPH: As a public artwork, would the sound bounce back and travel so that the people in different parts of the space could hear one another?

MEG: I believe so. However, I would have to do a lot of research to get the results in order to fabricate the labyrinth correctly. Were I able to secure funding, it would be a matter of testing what works and what does not.

JPH: Your short video Fountain Fest (2011) is very light-hearted and whimsical. (fig. 25) It presents about twenty to twenty-four individually created fountains bearing names such as Wally, Ambilic, Saint Sebastian, Balzac, Wonderland, Raupen, and so forth. The fountains are made from ordinary buckets with electrical cords for the water pumps. Tell us about this most unusual grouping of sculptures, each one made from a little of this, that, and the other.

MEG: During a two-year period from 2009 to 2010, I made these fountains from recycled PVC buckets left over from a body of work I had just finished, my solo exhibition Suspension (2008), for which I made molds and cast them in Aqua-Resin. The process was tedious; it demanded precision and lots of planning. So when I finished that work, I felt I needed to do something spontaneous and relatively unstructured. It turned out to be such fun and so liberating to create the fountains from the leftover buckets and hardware I had on hand. I also liked the idea of recycling the buckets because I do not like wasting materials. Being frugal with my materials comes from my Cuban background where I had to make do with little, so I learned to create with few means. Over time, making do with little became part of my mindset.

JPH: Let me ask a couple of technical questions. How did you create a water pump that recycles the water?

MEG: The fountains are self-contained. The water falls back into the buckets. Since this project was about recycling and being self-contained each of the fountains has a certain amount of water that is constantly recycled. I used a pump similar to one used in a small fish tank. The spigots in each fountain regulate the flow of water, making some stream really fast, some trickle, and some have just a barely visible but steady flow. As you saw in the video, when all the fountains are arranged in close proximity and run simultaneously it’s like hearing a symphony.

JPH: How did you create figures that seem personified? (fig. 26)

MEG: I used expandable foam and parts of things I had in my studio. Their personifications are related to personal and private associations, some of which come from my studies of art history.

JPH: Were these ever shown anywhere?

MEG: No, they were not formally shown in a gallery. I showed them to a few individuals in my studio. Most of the fountains are destroyed, but I kept about four or five of them.

JPH: Given that you are premiering Skowhegan Birch #2 in Tree Talk Series, let’s end by reflecting on Skowhegan Birch #1, for which you received the Grand Prize at the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana in 2013.

MEG: Skowhegan Birch #1 is a player piano roll, played by a pianolist on a player piano. Skowhegan Birch #2 will premiere in this exhibition, Tree Talk Series, and now I am ready to begin work on Skowhegan Birch #3. From my view, Tree Talk Series will conclude when the three player piano rolls are played simultaneously so that the listeners will hear a forest. Although there may be more than one way to accomplish this, I envision having the three piano rolls individually transcribed into sheet music that would be played by pianists on standard pianos. I would need at least two pianos per roll because of the number of notes on each composition. Accordingly, I imagine six pianos playing Skowhegan Birch #1, #2, and #3 simultaneously in a music hall. And that will be the end of Tree Talk series. I have a couple more years to go with this. (MEG laughs.)

2019 CONVERSATION CONTINUED

Since the publication of the initial interview, María Elena González has completed the third and final birch bark player piano roll. The exhibition of all three trees together at Mills College Art Museum (MCAM), marks the culmination of the Tree Talk Series, including the artist’s vision of seeing the birch bark compositions performed live. The evolution of this ten-year project proposes new questions about the artist’s process and the relationship between sounds and form. On the occasion of the Tree Talk exhibition at MCAM, González and I continued our conversation from 2014 to get a sense of how a project of this scale matures and engages with sound and music so much more than I had ever anticipated.

JPH: We ended our last conversation shortly before the opening of your solo show in the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. Skowhegan Birch #2 had been completed and played in concert prior to the opening. Video documentation of that performance was included in the exhibition. Now that you have completed Skowhegan Birch #3, concluding the Tree Talk Series for the exhibition at MCAM, it is a great opportunity for us to return to our talk about sound in your work.

MEG: Indeed, it has been quite a journey through the Skowhegan Birches! This last one, #3, was particularly challenging, principally because of its size—it is the largest of the three trees and more than eight feet taller than #2. This adds visually to the cartography of the bark pieces or modules, and also to the sheer amount of notes and length of the acoustic piece.

JPH: Will you elaborate on the process of making the Skowhegan Birches from fallen trees?

MEG: Once I found the fallen tree in Skowhegan, I peeled the bark, numbered the different sections of the bark sequentially, brought them all back to my studio, cleaned and flattened them, and glued them to cardboard segments with the interior of the bark facing out. This was the preparatory process that enabled the production of the player piano rolls.

JPH: Originally you thought that when Skowhegan Birch #3 was completed you would have the three piano rolls individually transcribed into sheet music that would be played by pianists on standard pianos. You anticipated needing at least two pianos per roll because of the number of notes in each composition; so six pianos could simultaneously play Skowhegan Birch #1, #2, and #3 in a music hall. When did you become aware that the piano performance would not be realized as you had originally envisioned? How did you arrive at a collaboration for an interpretive program with composers John Ivers and Marc Zollinger?

MEG: In a way, I still plan to hear Skowhegan Birch #1, #2, and #3 played on conventional pianos. However, the process of transcribing the piano rolls to sheet music, organizing so many pianos and pianists requires extensive resources and time. I had expressed my ideas regarding a piano concert to Stephanie Hanor because I was aware of the amazing history of Mills College’s experimental Center for Contemporary Music and Pauline Oliveros’ work there. Oliveros’ approach to “deep listening” is well known. Stephanie reached out to the College’s music department, which put a call out to graduate students about my project. John Ivers and Marc Zollinger, two professional musicians and MFA students, responded. In our initial discussions we talked about sound, composing, interpreting, chance, visuals, and acoustics. We also spoke about Earl Brown’s graphic scores, David Tudor’s interpretations, and John Cage’s work, among other composers. Ivers asked me why I wanted conventional pianos playing sounds that already existed through the player piano. That was a great question, so I responded that I was open to other ways of using the marks for interpretation. At that point we decided to schedule studio visits, so Ivers and Zollinger could see my process and how my project had developed. After they visited my studio, we discussed the next steps and decided that each composer would play my collages as graphic scores. Some weeks later, in September I think, we all met in the museum’s print storage room to determine who would play which “tree”. Thus, Ivers’ interpretation is based on my T2 #1 collage and Zollinger’s on my T3 #3 (Marc’s Tree) collage. We worked together in a very organic way. It was truly a collaborative experience in the sense that our ideas flowed without interfering with the expressive, cross-disciplinary nature of our individual work.

JPH: The composers performed their unique scores with their ensembles in the museum beside the corresponding tree drawings, which were separated in the middle of the gallery by a partition wall. Ivers’ ensemble, Dirt and Copper, performed positioned between T2 #1, the rubbing with graphic notation, and T2 (Bark), the original raw birch bark. Illuminated Grey Ensemble, led by Zollinger, performed surrounded by T3 (Bark) and T3 #3 (Marc’s Tree). How did you personally feel as you looked at your work while listening to the musicians interpret your drawings? How did you react to the percussion instruments that have so often been part of your work?

MEG: I kept looking at the drawings on the walls, every so often, to see what I was hearing! It was a most exhilarating experience. Early on we all agreed on how important it would be for all of us, including the audience, to sit in proximity to the visual works that we were listening to. It was as if one could follow the bouncing ball, like the one that used to bounce over the lyrics on televised sing-alongs, but not quite that literal. The musicians integrated the different instruments within their ensembles fluidly; only during the instrumental solos were their individual sounds discernible. I found the pieces transporting and riveting. (fig. 6)

JPH: When listening to the two programs by Ivers and Zollinger—both experimental composers—I imagine you were quite thrilled to hear the musicians improvise. I might add that improvisation, as you noted earlier in reference to Ella Fitzgerald, together with a sense of indeterminacy, basic to the legacy of John Cage and the Judson Dance Theater group, are qualities that you have always admired and worked with in your practice. Am I on point?

MEG: Yes, you are right on. I attended rehearsals for both of the pieces. During our conversations, each composer addressed different aspects of my process and made their own observations of the trees (the bark, physical properties, and so forth). It was astonishing to hear the full performances. For example, diverse wind instruments musically articulated the relationship between the birches’ lenticels, which are the trees’ breathing apertures, and the cuts on the player piano rolls, which let air through the player piano’s tracker bar to activate the piano keys. The percussive sounds in both ensembles were unfamiliar but alluring; the sounds were not all made with traditional musical instruments. The musicians’ solos were improvisational voices that gave the moment unexpected acoustical movements. We are still reeling from their performances.

JPH: Do you have any special feelings you would like to riff on?

MEG: This is one of the richest projects I have ever worked on. It is so generous and vast in scope. It is ever growing—another layer or possibility keeps revealing itself. I am not sure I will ever work on an idea or a project of this scale again.

JPH: The aura you felt seems to have resonated with another listener at the performance. A mutual friend who attended vividly recalls the vigor and creativity of the musicians as they torqued and tweaked a fascinating array of instruments.[3] He felt the new sounds were at turns quiet and raucous, languid and intense. He sensed the players seemed to relish the opportunity to interpret very different “scores” to engage the audience. Amid the drawings, T2 #1, T3 #3 (Marc’s Tree), and the protean T2 (Bark) and T3 (Bark), the musicians delivered a varied and nuanced performance that expanded upon your original vision of a Skowhegan forest.

No doubt, when Skowhegan Birch #1, #2, and #3 were finally premiered together in completion, the performance must have been an important milestone of a ten year production of an exceptional body of work. Thinking collectively about the musical program performed by Dirt and Copper and Illuminated Grey Ensemble, in addition to the videos of the three birch trees piano rolls, you have once again acknowledged the trees themselves: their music and their silence.

Herzberg’s “A Conversation with María Elena González: A Trajectory of Sound,” is in María Elena González: Tree Talk, Mills College Art Museum. Oakland CA: Mills College Art Museum, 2019 (pp. 30-54). ISBN978-0-9854600-6-8

END NOTES

1. María Elena González and I began discussions regarding this essay in April 2015. We recorded the conversation on June 22, and since then we have had numerous subsequent communications that further shaped the conversation in its present form.

2. Congas are tall, narrow drums played with the hands.

3. I thank Tom Parker who, as a director at Hirschl & Adler Gallery, has worked closely with the artist. He observed that González sat quietly in the audience seemingly very content to let a new set of artists take up where she left off. She seemed elated as she watched them take Tree Talk to another level. Parker further added that at the end of the program, the audience went back to the drawings for another look at the music’s origin and the process behind what they had heard. Parker thought there was an unmistakable sense of excitement as he and the audience grasped anew the limit- less possibilities of this unique work of art.

Herzberg’s “A Conversation with María Elena González: A Trajectory of Sound,” is in María Elena González: Tree Talk, Mills College Art Museum. Oakland CA: Mills College Art Museum, 2019 (pp. 30-54). ISBN978-0-9854600-6-8

Artwork © María Elena González