The title, "Clockwork Fish" is a clue.  You may be familiar with the phrase "Clockwork Orange".  There was a movie based on a book of the same name by Anthony Burgess, an author who was intensely interested in language.  The phrase "Clockwork Orange" is a Cockney expression for something that is so artificial and screwed up that it bears no relation what it was originally.

    I have been spending a lot of time walking the beaches of the western shore of Lake Huron.  I realize some of you may be unfamiliar with Michigan, the state that has the longest coastline in the United States ( and I intend this as no slight against the great state of California, which we all admire for having clung to the west coast of these 47 other states so tenaciously for so long.  Nor am I dissing the people of California whose politicians we out here in the flat and uneventful mid-west hold dear for their entertainment value.)  But let me familiarize you with Michigan's Lake Huron area.  To do this, I have to get personal.
    Hold your right hand up, fingers together, thumb relaxed, with your palm facing you.  This is the handy map of Michigan.  The eastern coast of Lake Huron extends along your hand's silhouette from the tip of your middle finger to your index finger and down its side to the web of your thumb up around the thumb's tip, Port Hope, and down your thumb to the first knuckle, Port Huron (or as the local pronounce it with a nasal twang, "Pert Urine".)
    As I was saying, I've been walking the outer margins of your thumb above your first knuckle and I have noticed the detritus that waves deposit at the high water line:  Pieces of  tree branches, clam shells, water fowl feathers, seaweed, fish bones, rocks and fossils, a lot of fossils from the Devonian Era.  Most of these objects have spent some time in the water washing against the sand and rocks and, finally, a longer time lying on the beach, exposed to the sun and wind blown sand or buried under the sand until uncovered again by waves, rain or wind.
    But those aren't the only objects that tumbled to rest between the gentle surf and the pine.  No, among this assortment of nature's crumbs are civilization's discards: broken glass, pot shards, pieces of floor tile, rusty metal, plastic bits of various origins, rusted metal, deflated ballons tied to ribbons, rope, nets, and lots and lots of packing styrofoam.
    Now, I was born to hard scrabble hillbilly parents and I grew up in Detroit, a labor intensive town.  (Detroit's lower down, on your thumb's second knuckle.)  So I got a double dose of the work ethic and, for me, spending long hours hanging out on the beach builds up a guilt debt.  To discharge this debt, I promised myself that for every day I spent on the beach, I would make sculpture out of materails from the beach.

"Beach Fish - Deep Stickback" 2003

    Soon I was up to my ass in beach fish.  Fortunately, I own a 200 foot stretch of fence adjacent to the lake shore highway, the main drag from Pert Urine to Port Hope.  So I painted a sign that says "Fresh Art Fish - OPEN" and hung my fish on the fence all along the road.  Motorists stop and, when they are serious, they holler me up from the beach  Sun-blasted and mute from the breathless climb up the cliff, my dazed appearance and silent manner is sometimes interpreted as the ignorant demeanor of an "outsider" artist.  My usual beach attire does nothing to dispel their impression that I am a social outcast.  The prices which are marked in crayon on masking tape affixed to the fish confirm that I am not a real artist, for, rather than being equivalent to the cost of a new car, the prices more comparable to that of, say, a fifth of good scotch .  Anyone familiar with the art world and its prices "knows" I don't know what I'm doing.  The Fresh Art Fish business is good but not good enough that I have to worry about my liver.

    Any way, back in my studio in the city, away from the beach, where I spend the other half of my time, I still think about the lake (it's a Great Lake).  And I think about fish, nature and civilization that drives up and down the road along the shore.  I think about that mix of stuff on the beach, the natural artifacts that have been washing up on the sand since the Devonian Era, and the new exotic materials that have appeared in the blink of the last couple of centuries.

    Obviously, "Clockwork Fish" (above), the sculpture hanging in your gallery, was not fabricated on the beach.  It contains nothing found on the beach.  It's more a product of thinking about the Lake, fish, nature and civilization.  How we have become separated from the rest of the natural world.  A little known fact is that the very concept of nature is a recent invention only a few centuries old, and appeared in the collective mind about the same time that those manmade objects appeared on the Lake Huron's beach.  It is a concept comprehended only by a culture that considers itself somehow separate from nature. And now that we are separated from nature, we a starting to consciously manipulate it.  Unfortunately, we are starting to manipulate it beyond its ability to recover.  One example is that we are now "farming fish" and altering the ecosystem of the lakes and oceans.  Furthermore, we are genetically manipulating the DNA of these and other creatures so that they are no longer capable of playing their evolved role in the biosphere.

    We are modifying their bodies and scheduling their behaviors to our convenience.  And while we justify this as meeting the food demands of our "successful" human species, that is simply a rationalization.

    We are really doing this for the money.
 

Jim Pallas
November, 2003

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