Art and Industry

Essay by Richard Klein

The legacy of manufacturing hangs heavy over the hills and valleys of Connecticut. The State has been home to America’s first iron mining and smelting industry, early American clockmakers, including Eli Terry and Seth Thomas, firearms manufacturers, such as Colt and Marlin, and defense contractors including Pratt and Whitney, Sikorsky, and General Dynamics. But beginning in 1966 Connecticut became the center of a wholly new type of precision manufacturing: large-scale sculpture, following the establishment of Lippincott, Inc., in North Haven. Lippincott’s innovation was in specializing in the needs of artists who were often disappointed with traditional industrial fabricators that had no experience (or very little patience) with the world of visual culture. Peter Kirkiles grew up near New Haven and was aware of Lippincott and their operation from an early age. Although he never actually worked at the company, he did eventually assist fabricator Peter Versteeg, who had been head of layout at Lippencott. Versteeg formed his own fabrication business in Bethany, Connecticut in 1989, producing monumental works for artists including Tony Smith, Beverly Pepper, Nany Holt, Sol LeWitt, and Scott Burton. This legacy went on to inform Kirkiles practice as an artist, which grew to focus not on the end product of traditional sculpture fabrication, but rather on the ways things are made. The artist has stated, “You need a tool to make a tool,” a point of view that put value on the implements necessary to the process of making. Tools, which are often quite beautiful, are an end in themselves, but also speak of past accomplishments and future potential.

But other art-making legacies were lurking in the region. Kirkiles moved to Kent, Connecticut in 2004, which is near both Roxbury and Waterbury. The artist was aware that Roxbury was the home of Alexander Calder, who arrived in the town in 1933. Calder was the pioneer of fabricated steel sculpture in the United States, with his first large “stabile” created in 1937. But as the desire for larger works grew, Calder turned to industrial fabricators in Waterbury, a city with a deep history of manufacturing. Beginning in the late 1950s Calder worked with both Waterbury and Segre’s Iron Works to produce large stabiles. In 2008 Kirkiles was visiting the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, whose institutional mission is both art and regional history. On display was a letter written by Calder in 1954 to Mr. Munger, who worked for the Charles A. Templeton Company that sold industrial supplies in Waterbury. The letter thanked Munger for offering a professional discount on tools, which included Bernard Pliers, a hand tool made by the Sargent Company in New Haven. Its primary feature were jaws that always remained parallel, a design that allowed Calder to accurately bend steel wire and thin sheet metal. On exhibit adjacent to the letter, were a pair of the pliers, which immediately caught Kirkiles attention. Here was a tool that besides being exquisitely designed, was instrumental in the production of work by a major Modernist artist. This encounter led Kirkiles to fabricate a large sculpture based on the pliers, which is now in the collection of the Mattatuck.

Several miles from Kirkiles’s home is the Eric Sloane Museum, which is dedicated to the painter, illustrator and self-taught antiquarian who lived in nearby Warren. Sloane moved to Connecticut from New York City in the early 1950s and began a series of beautifully illustrated books that documented hand-made American folk culture, including vernacular architecture and the hand tools made prior to the widespread adoption of mass-production. The 1950s were a golden age for collecting tools made by people living in rural New England, as farming and home-grown manufacturing, such as blacksmithing, were in rapid decline throughout the region. Sloane wasn’t interested in much made by “smokestack” industry, and his extensive collection of tools primarily dated from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Museum, now run by the State of Connecticut, ironically, was initially funded in part by the Stanley Tool Corporation, one of the very companies whose industrial production wiped away the folk culture of hand craftmanship so admired by Sloane. Sloane was both romantic and reactionary, rejecting Modern art and arguing that early American tools were a higher form of art than what was becoming popular in the 1950s and 60s, particularly abstraction. It is unknown whether Sloane ever met Calder, even though they lived quite close to one another. It’s tempting to imagine the ensuing conversation if they did meet: two men whose lives were deeply intertwined with making, whose views of art were so diametrically opposed.

In Sloane’s book The Cracker Barrel, first published in 1967, a year after the founding of Lippincott, he included the reproduction of his drawing titled First Prize. The drawing, which is a sarcastic caricature of a large modernist sculpture, made primarily with found objects, includes references to Duchamp (a toilet) and Robert Rauschenberg (a spare tire), with an overall composition resembling the steel abstractions of another of Sloane’s neighbors, the sculptor Alexander Liberman, who also lived in Warren. In the text that accompanies the drawing of First Prize Sloane mentions the scale of Calder’s work in disparaging terms: “Let us say that you live in a city dwelling, and a rich uncle gives you a Calder stabile as a gift. You either have to build a house around it or move to the country.”

Given the layered history of Modernism in Connecticut, Kirkiles decided that he needed to make his own version of First Prize as both celebration and wry critique of Sloane and his love for the quickly receding world of Yankee tradition. Wrought from sheet bronze, leftover from the construction of Bernard Pliers, the work’s small scale makes it a memento of what came before. Peter Kirkiles work honors the history of cultural and industrial production by weaving together their complex threads, adding to a story that continues to evolve.

PETER KIRKILES STUDIO

PETER KIRKILES STUDIO