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Will Lamson

Photography by Naho Kubota
Text by Philippa Snow

The installation artist on drawing with wind, walking on water and why the phrase generative artist is meaningless.

“The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”
— Bruce Nauman

Growing up near the sea, I have often taken the ocean for granted. Its relentless tidal sway was a metronomic rhythm for the passing of my childhood years, the sound as historic-constant as the ticking of an heirloom clock: I thought of it less as a force of nature, in short, and more as the source of the kinds of boom and noise which might emanate from a sleep-sound generator. Because of its low-level, everyday presence, I rarely considered its bombast — its power, its generative potential, and, most of all, its cyclicality — until I moved away from its shores. A city-dweller in my twenties, I suddenly started to miss that soothing, ebbing sound, and the shrieks of the overhead gulls (absence, as they might say, makes the tide grow stronger, at least in the mind). The artist William Lamson’s Automatic (2009) has taken that long-familiar lullaby rhythm, and turned it into an artwork: three drawing machines, situated on the shore, are motivated by the forces of nature to sketch out an organic, chaotic earth-portrait. Strangely, when looking at the video of Automatic, I found myself reconsidering the scenery of my childhood: its literal record of the movements of the tides and the winds is a reminder of the ocean’s power. Granted, my sometimes-grey English seawater memories differ, I would imagine, from Lamson’s US East Coast upbringing, but the water is still the same, and still moves in the same, ancient way. Automatic is as universal — and as universe-driven — as art can get, essentially.

There is no single, illuminating anecdote behind Lamson’s decision to use the forces of nature as a medium. It is a matter of practicality, as far as he tells it: if the artist is remote, he must use his remoteness to his conceptual and aesthetic advantage.

“I’ve been doing stuff with landscape since, I don’t know, grad school. With Automatic, I had been traveling for months in South America — Chile, Uruguay, Argentina — and I hadn’t brought a lot of materials with me. So I started working [directly] with the landscape and the sources of energy that animated those places — the ocean, the wind and things like that.

It was such a revelation, in a way. These landscapes were so different from the one that I was familiar with, growing up on the East Coast, and it made me really want to do a project that really worked with these epic forces.”

Lamson is often described as a ‘generative practitioner.’ When asked if this is a label he’d readily apply to himself, he seemed baffled. 

“Honestly?” he asks, with a certain note of trepidation. “It wasn’t something I’d heard of, until I saw it listed on my Wikipedia page. I mean — who would you describe as a really good example of a generative artist? What does generative art do?” 

His voice, which at the moment, is coming to me from a jittery landline in New Mexico (where he is working), has a sunny twang, which gives one the vague impression of a man who is in his mid-to late twenties, though Lamson is actually thirty-five. Given the monumental and timeless nature of his work — his attention to time-echoed pattern and circumstance — this youthful air is surprising — as is his genuine, sharp curiosity. His warmth is less groovy, and more contempo-California cool. I fumble, wildly, for an answer to his question before conceding to his point that the adjective is essentially meaningless. I recall for a moment having read the same descriptor applied to the former Roxy Music-er, Brian Eno: 

Brian Eno spoke about a new form of music — Generative Music — and traced its roots and the development of his ideas on it from the mid-sixties until now. ‘Classical music,’ he said, ‘like classical architecture… specifies an entity in advance and then builds it. Generative music doesn’t do that, it specifies a set of rules and then lets them make the thing.”

“It builds a set of rules, and then lets them make the thing…” This sounds both like what I’d imagine ‘generative art’ to be, and enough like Lamson’s work that I would have said it aloud, if I’d remembered the quote it in full. But I am dumbfounded: the critic reduced to Wikipedia-category broadness. It is a moment which highlights the absolute absurdity of our situation — the interviewer speaking to the man in the New Mexico gas station about the meaning of ‘generative work’; the stupidity of the idea of a genre artist in general. That something as supposedly individual as art should be placed into little boxes of soft similarity feels almost counter-productive, at times: International Art Speak does not, necessarily, speak for the artist. 

“Working with the wind, or the ocean, or the sun — these are very elemental things,” Lamson explains. “And I think with that part of my work, I don’t know where the next idea will come from.”

His works may display a certain subservience to nature, in part, but they are also intent on its study: the adoption of vital science for the production of art. 

“I definitely follow the sciences,” he says. “I don’t subscribe to scientific journals, per se, but I definitely think a lot about what discoveries are happening, and how I might incorporate them into my practice.” He is a particular fan of the podcast Radiolab, which he describes as “science for the non-scientific community.” “The show,” he tells me, “has made the sciences a source of content for work for a particular group of artists who listen to it, even if that content is not literal like it is in mine.”

There is a certain vogue, I point out, for the artist to be presented as a shaman; the suggestion that contemporary art exists to take the place of the rituals and rites which we have been performing since our inception on Earth. This seems to me, particularly, a reasonable suggestion when dealing with Lamson’s work: the works are, as I’ve said, as accurate and unfaltering as any scientific survey, but somehow they elevate themselves beyond. His piece on the Delaware river, Action for the Delaware (2011), is what the artist describes, tongue in cheek, as a ‘Christ re-enactment’ — a straightforward platform structure built into the riverbed, to give the illusion of a water-walking miracle. Solarium (2012), in kind, is as much a place of worship — in its atmosphere, at least — as Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire; a hillside hut, its golden-amber panels house three species of miniature citrus trees, as well as providing a ‘space for meditation.’ The effect is one of almost undeniable holiness: the structure is made from panels of baked-down sugar. Its very existence turns the act of photosynthesis in on itself like an ouroboros. I feel compelled to inquire as to what Lamson hopes that the viewer will communicate with inside the sugar-light walls of the solarium — what revelations-cum-contemplations he invites. If the Chapelle du Rosaire is meant for communing with God, is the Solarium meant for communing with some other great and unearthly power?

Action for the Delaware, 14:09 minute HD video. 2011.
Solarium, 2012. Steel, glass, sugar, citrus trees. 10’ 10” × 8’ 11” × 10’ 3 58 in.

He describes the piece as, “This hybrid enclosure — one which is both an environmental greenhouse — where we’re trying to grow these little citrus trees — and also an open-air pavillion retreat that’s set in the landscape in much the same way as mountain chapels are (or indeed, the kind of one-room cabin that’s very iconic in American landscape art).” 

There is, too, as I suspected, an element of throwback piety — Godforce, even — in the artist’s creation of this structure, a sugar-made paeon to forces invisible. “Because of its scale and its colour,” he explains, “it creates this reference to stained glass chapels. It’s a reference to my youth — growing up being dragged into Catholic churches all over Europe with my parents. But also that real tradition of American reflection within the landscape… It certainly invokes an open kind of spirituality.”

Matisse — despite the soul-jangling piety of his high, sun-glorious chapel — was an atheist. “My only religion,” he wrote, “is love of the work to be created, and total sincerity.” This isn’t shamanism, or worshipful wonder — it is something new, entirely. In William Lamson’s work, the shaman, the showman, the priest and the scientist converge. It is an identity that even the artist finds tough to define. 

“There are some artists I really like whose work is shamanistic,” Lamson says, returning to the idea of the artist as paganistic oracle. “James Lee Byars, for instance, basically took on full shamanistic outfits and would do these ritualistic performances. I don’t see myself as this connecting-with-nature, you know, cult leader type. But I think that the performative aspects of what I do in these projects does have that ritualistic potential. I think that viewers can see into a — potentially — primitive or simply meditative repetitive action with it.” 

“I wouldn’t say that I see myself just as a shamanistic figure,” he concludes, the static sweeping, momentarily, over the gas-station phone line; a sound not so dissimilar to the sound of the sea. He laughs. “What’s that Bruce Nauman bumper-sticker line, about the role of the artist?”

I look it up, later: “the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths,” is the Nauman line. It is an aphorism which can be appropriated for several uses — with po-faced sincerity or, as Nauman intends, with a lacquer of modern irony. It is the equivalent of William Lamson appearing to walk on the water of the Delaware river, a ‘Christ re-enactment’ which acts as suggestive of truth and illusion in perfect tandem: of elevating and battling, simultaneously, the forces it reveals, just like the artist does in the act of creation. 

The mysticism of the miracle, in short, and the workaday truth of the scaffolding beneath the artist’s feet. Or, if one prefers: the mysticism of the truth itself, in all its scientific and quantifiable beauty. 

This originally appeared in WAX Issue 3.