CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree Master of Fine Arts in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University
By
Philip Edmond Brou III
*****
The Ohio State University 2004
Master's Examination Committee:
Pamela Fraser, Advisor Advisor Steven Pentak Department of Art
Robert Arnold ABSTRACT
The following thesis is a technical manual that runs parallel to several of my projects. I will discuss my relationships to the Grumman TBM-Avenger torpedo bomber,
“The Bermuda Triangle,” and Leon Battista Alberti. Also, I will present evidence that led me to reconstruct the hospital where I was born, to find and reconstruct Steven
Spielberg’s childhood home, and to commission two forensic artists to draw my portrait.
The writing answers questions in hopes of generating more, in favor of becoming intertwined and dislocated, in hopes of becoming lost.
ii Dedicated to Jennifer
Ill ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee: Steven Pentak, Robert Arnold, and my advisor Pamela Fraser for their support and for being an incredible group of people. I am indebted to Cathy Ellis, Marthe Grohman, Shiela Willman, and Donna Boggs. Without their daily assistance and attention, I am convinced the entire world would come to a screeching halt. I would also like to thank everyone who has made my brain a much more interesting thing to work with: Laura Lisbon, Malcolm Cochran, Elizabeth King, Don Crow, Alan Crockett, Mark Harris, and Carmel Buckley. Mom, thank you for letting me keep everything I picked up during our beach walks when I was a kid. Dad, thank you for teaching me how to make a kite out of notebook paper and broom-straws. Thanks to the rest of my family, both genetic and non-genetic, for their support. And finally, I would like to thank Jennifer, Beatrice, and Bosley who have taught me that wealth has absolutely nothing to do with money.
IV VITA
August 29, 1977 ...... Bom: Virginia, U.S.A. 1999 ...... B.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking, Virginia Commonwealth University 2002-2004 ...... Presidential Fellow and Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University
FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Art
v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract...... ii Dedication ...... iii Acknowledgements ...... iv Vita ...... v List of Figures ...... vii Chapters: 1. The Avenger ...... 1 2. The Triangle ...... 8 3. The Hospital Where I was Born ...... 10 4. Steven Spielberg's Childhood Home ...... 17 5. Forensic Art ...... 26 6. The Vanishing Point...... 30 Bibliography ...... 33
VI LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page 1.1 A picture of my Grandfather before World War II ...... 4
1.2 A picture of my Grandfather after World War II ...... 4
1.3 The Grumman TBM-A venger Torpedo Bomber...... 4
1.4 Lieutenant Charles Taylor...... 7
1.5 The Bermuda Triangle ...... 7
1.6 The Grumman TBM-AvengerTorpedo Bomber...... 7
3.1 A reconstruction of the hospital where I was born ...... 15
3.2 A reconstruction of the hospital where I was born (detail) ...... 15
3.3 The hospital where I was born ...... 15
3.4 Helicopter/Stork landing view of the hospital where I was born ...... 16
4.1 Image from the opening scene of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" showing
Flight l 9's rediscovery in the desert of Sonoma, Mexico ...... 23
4.2 Images from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" showing Roy Neary (played
by Richard Dreyfus) reconstructing the location where aliens will land ...... 23
4.3 Steven Spielberg's childhood home; actual house (top), in progress reconstruction
(middle), and completed reconstruction (bottom) ...... 24
4.4 An image of me, in my childhood home, wearing an "E.T." costume ...... 25
Vil 5.1 Self-portrait, drawn by commissioned forensic artist Heatherly Kates ...... 29
5.2 Self-portrait, drawn by commissioned forensic artist Lois Gibson ...... 29
VIII CHAPTER 1
THE AVENGER
It was a small invention; but Oscar Olsen's self-contained ball turret gun, with smooth, quick movements due to an electrically driven motor, was what made the United States Navy contractors favor the Grumman prototypes over those of the Chance Vaught Company. The year was 1939 and the United States Navy began an ambitious program to modernize and expand the size of its fleet. The United States had not yet entered the war that was sweeping across Europe. However, with Germany's invasion of Poland and Japan's aggressions in China, they knew their military would have to be prepared for battle. One of the many things needing upgrading was the Navy's VT class aircraft: the torpedo bomber. This was an aircraft designed mainly to hunt down and sink large targets such as destroyers, aircraft carriers, and submarines. Submarines were 'soft targets.' They were mainly offensive weapons and had little means of defending themselves if attacked. However, they were difficult to sink due to their speed and ability to disappear quickly beneath the oceans surface if attacked. If a VT squadron was hunting submarines, they would need to first locate one, then sneak up on it, then destroy it. Battleships and aircraft carriers were 'hard targets.' They were heavily defended. If a VT squadron were to approach an enemy fleet, they would need to dive from a high altitude to mount the attack. During the descent, they would first encounter waves of enemy fighter planes. If they survived these, the torpedo bomber would navigate through a wall of anti-aircraft gunfire and shrapnel. They would then drop to an altitude just
1 above the ocean's smface, aim and launch their torpedo, and climb back into the sky; back through the shrapnel, anti-aircraft, and enemy fighters. Hopefully, having sunk an enemy ship and surviving the flight, the torpedo bomber would land safely back on its aircraft carrier. It was understood that most squadrons would suffer heavy casualties when attacking 'hard targets.' Needless to say, it was an extremely hazardous job to be a pilot or crewmember of a torpedo bomber. In addition to the danger, the Navy had an inferior aircraft to do the job. The Navy was equipped with squadrons of Douglas TBD-1 Devastators. These planes had armor too thin to repel any form of enemy attack, moved too slowly to reach its target before being shot down, and could not hold enough fuel to even reach its target. The Devastator was dated. If the United States were to enter the war, it would need a better VT class aircraft. In October of 1939, the Navy issued a request for proposals to the aviation industry for a new torpedo bomber to replace the Douglas TBM-1 Devastator. Grumman won this contract due to Oscar Olsen's work on creating a new, better ball turret gun. In the ensuing months, Grumman worked around the clock on perfecting a prototype to meet the Navy's requirements. The final result was an aircraft powered by a Wright R- 2600-8 Cyclone engine driving a Hamilton standard pitch propeller. It could reach a blistering top speed of 271 mph and easily maintained 200mph as an extended flight speed. The prototype had a climb rate of 1,430 feet per minute, a ceiling of 22,400 feet, and a normal range of 1,215 miles. The aircraft's skin was composed of half-inch armor plating to protect its pilot, gunner, and radioman. The defensive armament consisted of one .50 caliber machine gun with 400 rounds of ammunition mounted in the ball turret which was located between the cockpit and the dorsal fin, a .30 caliber machine gun with 300 rounds fixed in the front starboard side which was fired by the pilot, and a .30 caliber machine gun with 500 rounds mounted on the lower, back side 'stinger' position operated by the radio man. Its offensive weaponry was housed in the internal bomb bay under the wing's center section. It could hold an unprecedented 2,000 pounds and could be equipped with GP (general purpose) bombs, torpedoes, depth charges, mines, or an extra
2 fuel tank. In short the prototype-the XTBF-1-was a state-of-the-art aircraft that eclipsed its predecessor. On December 7, 1941 Japan launched a surprise attack and crippled the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. The United States immediately declared war on the Axis Powers. On January 3, 1942, not even a month after the declaration of war, the first XTBF-1 rolled off the Grumman assembly line. Coming so soon after Pearl Harbor, the plane was christened the Avenger. This was the plane Lieutenant Philip Edmond Brou piloted in World War II. He was my grandfather.
3 Figure 1.1: A picture of my Figure 1.2: A picture of my Grandfather before WWII Grandfather after WWII
Figure 1.3: The Grumman TBM-Avenger Torpedo Bomber
4 My grandfather survived World War II. After the war he was stationed at Fort Lauderdale, Florida to train new pilots to fly the TBM-A venger. Most veteran pilots became trainers after the war had ended as the United States needed more pilots to defend the country in case another war broke out. Avenger instructors would typically lead a squadron of five planes on mock missions. They would practice simple navigational problems, dropping torpedoes on empty ship hulls, and learning the proper way to 'ditch' (emergency plane landings in the water). Another Avenger instructor at Ft. Lauderdale-and a friend of my grandfather-was a man named Lieutenant Charles Taylor. He had also spent most of the war fighting the Japanese in the Pacific theatre. For Lt. Taylor, December 5, 1945 was just like any other day on the job. It was sixty-five degrees, the sun was shining and there were scattered clouds. With a moderate northeast wind blowing, it seemed like a perfect day for taking his students out for a flight. Lt. Taylor was to take a squadron, manned by five officer pilots and nine enlisted crewmembers, out on a routine training mission in the afternoon. The planes were scheduled to take off from Ft. Lauderdale and follow a triangular flight pattern, flying out to Hens and Chickens Shoals, then north over and past Grand Bahama Island, then back to base. The squadron began taking off at 2:00pm, and by 2: lOpm all 5 planes were airborne. Everything was on schedule when at 3: 15pm the air traffic controller at Ft. Lauderdale received a disturbing message from Lt. Taylor. Lt. Charles Taylor, an expert pilot with over 2,500 hours of combat flying time, a man who prided himself on his navigational skills, an airman who routinely found moving aircraft carriers in the middle of the ocean at night or during storms after returning from a battle, was radioing to report that he was lost. It was an emergency. In the ensuing moments, Lt. Taylor relayed that the compasses in his plane were malfunctioning and that he and the rest of the squadron, squadron Flight 19, were disoriented. Usually, if compasses failed, a pilot could navigate by the placement of the sun or by the direction of the wind. However, for some unknown reason, these navigational methods did not allow the squadron to locate their position. Radio transmissions became faint. The control tower could mainly hear only conversations between the planes and the interfering broadcast of Cuban radio stations.
5 Two Martin Mariner twin-engine flying boat patrol planes were dispatched by 4:00pm to track down and rescue the airmen who were possibly in their lifeboats in the open sea after having to ditch the Avengers. The rescue planes were not able to find Flight 19 and nobody ever has. On December 5, 1945 five Grumman Avengers, led by Lt. Charles Taylor, disappeared. To compound the situation, one of the Martin Mariner rescue planes, after reporting that there were high winds above 6,000 feet, was never heard from again. This aircraft held a crew of 13 men. In all, 6 aircraft and 27 men were unaccounted for. When a plane crashes into the ocean, its oil floats to the surface and creates a slick that stretches wherever the tide takes it. The slick is visible enough to see from an aircraft and an easy way to find if and where a plane has gone down. The Avenger is a plane designed to be able to land in water. It will stay afloat for 90 seconds, in which time the crew exits and inflates the lifeboats. The intensive search including 307 planes, four destroyers, several submarines, 18 Coast Guard vessels, search and rescue cutters, and hundreds of privately owned boats found no evidence. They did not find any oil slicks or even floating debris. The search lasted about a week and covered 380,000 square miles of sea and land. The Navy checked for evidence in every possible direction that Flight 19 could have gone. To this day there has been no evidence telling forensic experts exactly what happened to the squadron of Avengers. This had not been the first time a disappearance had occurred in this part of the Atlantic. In fact, it had gained a reputation for strange occurrences: earning nicknames like "The Hoo Doo Sea" and "The Graveyard of the Atlantic." My grandfather refused to take his students out over this part of the ocean, claiming it "screwed with the compasses." Instead, he would take his squadrons west to train over the Gulf of Mexico. After Flight 19 vanished, the area of the ocean acquired a new name. In honor of Lt. Taylor's three-sided flight plan over Bermuda, the area became known as "The Bermuda Triangle." "The Bermuda Triangle" was named after the flight of Lt. Charles Taylor. I was named after my grandfather-Lt. Philip Edmond Brou-who, in taking his men out over the Gulf, did not train them to disappear.
6 Figure 1.4: Lieutenant Charles Taylor Figure 1.5: The Bermuda Triangle
Figure 1.6: The Grumman TBM-A venger Torpedo Bomber
7 CHAPTER2
THE TRIANGLE
In 1435 Leon Battista Alberti, inventor of fixed-point perspective in painting and seminal thinker in the Renaissance, wrote that human sight "operates by means of a triangle." Vision was described as rays, like "very fine threads," that quickly moved.from the objects in the world into our eye. The shape of all of the rays was "a triangle whose base is the quantity seen, and whose sides are those same rays which extend to the eye from the extreme points of the quantity." The rays were responsible for relaying visual information into our eye. There were three main types: the extrinsic rays existed on the edge of our vision, the median rays existed between the middle and the edge, and the centric ray existed in the center. In De Pictura, Alberti applies this theory of vision to painting and uses it as the underlying principle to construct a method of accurately capturing a sense of depth and visual reality in painting. His system of perspective drawing was not a mere method of recording, it was not just a tool. Alberti 's system was an all-encompassing mode of thinking. It was a way for humanity to understand their relationship to the world. This was a major subject of Renaissance thought. Alberti thought that when a painting was composed according to his system of perspective, the visual triangle could intersect the picture plane in a way that would make the picture seem like a window looking out into a scene in the world. The visual triangle needed to be reversed so that the depiction would recede and objects would become smaller as they moved to distances shown as further away. The centric ray of the viewer corresponded to the vertex of the inverted triangle on the picture plane and became what was called the centric point. In the eighteenth century the centric point was renamed the vanishing point. This is the place that the human eye can see no further. The vanishing point marks
8 the horizon line. The reality of the picture plane does not exist past this point. All lines of the composition move towards the vanishing point. De Pictura is the birthplace of one point perspective. A significant tool spoken of in Alberti's writing is the velum, which can be translated from Latin as "veil." It was a grid of strings that the artist would place between himself and an object he wished to render. The artist could-while holding his head completely still-look through the veil at the object and have the veil's grid in place to help flatten out the subject and measure its parts. It was an aid to assist in accurate depiction and a tool for locating where a vanishing point occurred in a complex subject.
9 CHAPTER 3
THE HOSPITAL WHERE I WAS BORN
I was born on August 29, 1977 at Riverside Hospital-now called Riverside Regional Medical Center-in Newport News, Virginia. This hospital is my literal vanishing point. It marks a horizon line past which I do not exist. It is the only building I have ever left without having entered as a separate person: an individual. 1977 was the year I became a noun. It was also the year Richard Serra said: "Drawing is a verb," not a noun. My present home, in Ohio, is 575.53 miles away from the hospital where I was born, according to MapQuest.com. This is a fairly long distance, a drive that would definitely occupy the better part of a day. However, the distance is insignificant compared to that traveled by the space probe Voyager I. It was launched the same year I was born and is now 8.5 billion miles away from Earth. I have no way of comprehending 8.5 billion miles. It is too expansive. It is infinite and still becoming more. I can however, through a factual study of the people, places, things, and ideas of my life, draw an awareness of the distance I am from my vanishing point. It is a kind of triangulation to locate a self. On August 10, 2003 I visited the hospital where I was born. I grew up in a military family and my father was re-stationed shortly after I was born. Therefore, this trip was to be the first time I would be at the hospital since being born and also the first time I had ever entered the hospital as a separate person. Before my trip, I did some research on the location. Newport News, Virginia is a community built mainly on its proximity to several large military bases. Riverside Hospital began to expand its facilities in downtown Newport News after World War II in
10 order to accommodate for the population explosion that had occurred in the post-war years. The community quickly outgrew these expansions and in 1959, the hospital finished construction and moved all personnel to its new location on J. Clyde Morris Boulevard. The architecture is typical of its time. It bares a vague resemblance to some modernist architecture, appearing as if designed by an architect who studied from the best but created only the mediocre. The building was still relatively new when-18 years after its construction-I was born. Riverside Hospital looks like a hospital where anyone could be born. The doctor who delivered me-he asked that I not use his name-did not remember my birth. He said he had delivered hundreds of infants in his career and would have no way of recalling it unless mine was very unusual in some way. I went to the hospital with the agenda of painting its image from direct observation. It would be a way of claiming it with my eyes and hands. I wanted to record what a hospital built in the 1950s looked like in the present. I wanted to get a direct feel for its size and scale and transfer it onto a piece of canvas. I soon realized that this was too quick of an answer. It amounted to nothing more than a type of territory marking. Things needed to be slowed down. Also, the fac;ade of the hospital was in the process of being radically remodeled. I made some sketches, took photographs, collected maps and brochures from the information desk, and did other sorts of evidence gathering activities. Among these, I decided to find the administrative office and see if they could help me with my project. They were interested and pointed me to Ms. Kelly King, director of the public relations department. This department was at a different location, about a IO-minute drive away. I met with Ms. King later in the afternoon and explained that I was an artist who was born in her hospital and was looking for any sort of materials she could give me to help develop a project. She was also interested and was able to give me several professionally shot photographs of the hospital before renovations started, some from roughly around the time I was born. The photographs were taken at different angles, some from ground level, others were taken from a helicopter. I now wanted to find a way to bring the work back into my studio in Ohio. I began building a scale model of the hospital out of cardboard boxes. I changed a few
11 minor things to compensate for a lack of facility in the language of model making, but overall I kept it as accurate as possible. I made the model because it was an exciting activity. It was an area in which I could think with my hands. I started to visit several hobby shops in town for supplies like balsa wood, fake trees, and fake turf. These were the types of hobby shops where guys hang out all day and discuss things like role-playing games and-at the drop of a hat-can critique, say, the paint job on a 1/350 scale model of an F-16 Falcon. During one visit, a man was showing other modelers a gold filling that he painted on the tooth of a soldier that was to be a part of a model of a tank. The soldier's head was about the size of a pencil's eraser. I saw this gold tooth and was floored. Nostalgia perpetually points towards something else, something irrecoverable. want to make things with an immediate presence, not things that point out. I want to recover a sense of place, memory, and time and embed it in an object: to construct a fact based forensic reading of place, memory, and time. If a veteran pilot remembers flying his plane in WWII, he is being nostalgic. If a modeler builds a scale model of a plane from WWII, it is an activity that is different from nostalgia. There is a distinction between a clouded memory and a fact-based reconstruction. I do not want to re-live something; I want to re-make it. I constructed a table on which to build the model of the hospital where I was born. I decided it was fitting to use this as the model's display table: the model's birthplace. The tabletop was thirty-two inches off of the floor. To look at the model close up, you had to slightly lower your field of vision and maybe even squat down a bit. By building a model of reduced scale, I made an object that was immediately present; but conceptually, the reduction could locate it as closer to a horizon and perpetually far away. I added fake turf and an access road on the tabletop and then felt that the free-floating table needed a greater sense of location in the room. I painted a rectangle in the corner of my studio in an intense blue so that it would appear to be a type of sky when the model was placed before it. I went to Lowe's and chose interior flat Fiesta Blue as the color for the sky. Throughout the construction I made drawings of the hospital from direct observation. When the model was complete, I began to make watercolors from it. These
12 paintings were too vibrant and warm. I needed something more focused and cold. I switched to gouache, a material where I could not undo mistakes and distortions. I began using a perspective grid, a veil, to place between the hospital and I in order to assist in the rendering. I was painting the building, sky, grass, and trees. I narrowed my rendering down to just the hospital in order to confront its image head-on. I chose three views that were interesting to me. One was a view from me sitting on a ladder about 8 feet over the model, one was a little bit lower, and one was from the model's ground level. These views were displayed on a vertical axis and read as the movement of a helicopter or stork as it landed at the hospital. I painted these views on a muddy yellow printmaking paper, a color paper often used for architectural renderings in the 1950s. The paper was the standard factory size of 15"x22". I used a palette with a narrow range of hue, value, and intensity. I began the drawings with the idea that I was an architect who was to present these drawings to the client, at a final stage of production, in order to sell them the idea. These drawings were each done in one session that I tried to make move as fast as possible. After going through the extensive labor in building the hospital where I was born and completing preparatory sketches to locate my points of interest, I wanted these drawings to simply happen. I did another gouache from the middle view of the helicopter/stork's descent. introduced a more inclusive palette and reintroduced the sky, grass, and trees. The printmaking paper seemed out-of-step for this painting. It was more of a landscape painting rather than the potential project of an architect. I switched to 15"x22" Twinrocker Hot-pressed watercolor paper. I used very small brushes, brushes that needed to be constantly re-dipped to get more paint. I painted each blade of grass individually. I wanted to stretch a kind of high-focus reality to the edges of the paper. Also, I imagined that this gouache should look like a painting that could hang on the wall of a hospital; I wanted the first impression to be "doctor's office art," and have it move from there. During a critique of the project, a friend of mine said that I was making a model in the way that "the guy from Close Encounters of the Third Kind" made models. In this movie by Steven Spielberg, Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) obsessively builds
13 models of a location that he does not know or understand. His activity is carried to an extreme. The models take over his house and eventually force his wife and children to doubt his sanity and leave him. As the narrative continues, we learn his compulsive making was caused by aliens from outer space. They implanted an image in his head of a location: Devil's Tower. This is the place that they were going to land in order to establish contact with humanity. Neary was uncontrollably building scale models of this site in his house. "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" came out in 1977: the year I was born.
14 Figure 3.1: A reconstruction of the hospital where I was born
Figure 3.2: A reconstruction of the Figure 3.3: The hospital where I was hospital where I was born (detail) born
15 Figure 3.4: Helicopter/Stork landing view of the hospital where I was born
16 CHAPTER4
STEVEN SPIELBERG'S CHILDHOOD HOME
The opening scene of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" shows a group of scientists who have rushed to the Sonora Desert in Mexico to observe an amazing discovery. They arrive to find 5 Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that have mysteriously appeared in the desert. The scientists realize they have rediscovered Flight 19. In the film Spielberg proposes that aliens abducted the squadron as they flew over the Bermuda Triangle in 1945. They were taken so that the aliens could study humanity. A close encounter of the first kind is defined as when an alien or a spacecraft is seen. A close encounter of the second kind is when evidence of an alien is found. A close encounter of the third kind is when contact with an alien is made. Found, seen, made. The idea of an alien from outer space can be thought of as the ultimate outsider, the true "other." This is a theme that runs throughout Spielberg's films. Be it the giant shark or dinosaurs from "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park," the aliens from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T., the Extra Terrestrial," or the experience of the Holocaust in "Schindler's List," Spielberg works with the idea of an outsider's ability or inability to fit into an environment. When a perspective grid is used to draw, the tool can be seen as a method of making yourself outside of the subject, a veil to stand between you and the world. Another theme of importance in many Spielberg films is childhood. He continually builds his narratives around reconstructions of his own childhood. He is quoted as saying that he "can always trace a movie idea back to my childhood." The lost boys from "Hook," Elliot from "E.T.," and Barry from "Close Encounters" are just a few
17 of the children populating his movies. Robin Williams was cast in "Hook" to play the adult version of Peter Pan, the boy who would never grow up. The lost boys wanted a mother, Barry's father died, and Elliot's father ran away with his girlfriend to Mexico. In Spielberg's movies, themes dealing with childhood are usually seen in relation to a disconnection with parents. They are disconnected with their point of origin. They are objects without vanishing points. Spielberg's films played a huge role in my childhood. "E.T." is the first movie my parents allowed me to go see without them, with just my sisters. I remember drinking an orange Slice and eating Sour Patch Kids during the movie. My "Indiana Jones" action-figure used to be my favorite toy. He commanded all of my G.I. Joe guys. "Jaws," though I saw it on television, still made me terrified to go swimming, even in a pool. When I was 5 years old I dressed up in an E.T. costume for Halloween. My mom let me keep the costume out for play long after Halloween had ended. These are my childhood memories rooted in movies that are built upon Spielberg's own childhood memories. It is a type of twice removed childhood memory. His movies were my favorites: he was the producer and director of my childhood. I began doing research on Steven Spielberg in order to find out more about him. I found he was born, and spent the first four years of his life, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His family moved around a great deal for his father's job and he had a peripatetic childhood. In Cincinnati, his family owned a house across the street from the Adath Israel Synagogue where they worshipped. I looked up the location on the Internet and, with MapQuest directions, drove there in hopes of finding Steven Spielberg's childhood home. Unfortunately, the synagogue moved in 1964. The neighborhood where it had been had deteriorated so it had relocated to a safer area. The people at Adath Israel gave me the old address and I was soon in my car, driving to find it. The old synagogue is now a Southern Baptist church; but it still looks like a synagogue. There is Hebraic writing and the Star of David carved in the masonry around the outside of the entire structure. I figured out it was a Southern Baptist church because, on the front lawn, there was a banner strung between two aluminum poles which read, in bright red text: "Southern Baptist Church."
18 I realized that many old houses surrounded the church. I did not know how I would figure out which one belonged to the Spielbergs. I asked a few passers-by for help. They had no idea and looked at me strangely for asking. Having failed, I drove back to Columbus. I checked out more biographies from the public library in hopes of finding the clue that would allow me to locate the house. Steven Spielberg used to lie about his age in order to seem younger than he actually was. He claimed to be born in 1947 instead of 1946. This would-in 1968 when he was beginning his film career-make him appear as the 21-year-old wiz-kid rather than another 22-year-old adult trying to become a good director. It was a tactical lie. A few biographies told this story. One included a copy of his birth certificate in order to prove the correct birthday. This was the evidence I needed. This document showed that on December 18, 1946 Arnold Spielberg and Leah Posner became parents of their first child, Steven, while living in Cincinnati at 817 Lexington A venue. City records showed that the street numbers and names had not been changed in the area since this time. I had located my house. The house looked like many other houses I have seen in Ohio. It was constructed around the housing boom of the 1890s. This was a time, in Ohio, when families could afford expansive homes. There was an abundance of combustible fuel to heat the houses and plenty of materials with which to build them. Around the time of The Great Depression, families could not afford to live in such large homes. People began to let others live with them to differ expenses. This quickly led to two and three families sharing one house and the age of the Midwestern Split Double was born. Single houses were rearranged so that multiple families could live under the same roof and still be independent of one another. Little has changed since then. Most homes in urban midwestern neighborhoods are still made up of Split Doubles. When I found Spielberg's childhood home, I discovered that it was condemned and, after talking to a maintenance man at the Southern Baptist Church, scheduled to be demolished next month. The most successful producer of my time-who traces all of his films to his childhood-was going to have his childhood home torn down. I did not know
19 what I wanted to do with the house, but realized I would have to work with a very short timeline. I began collecting evidence. Over the next three visits I collected paint chips, drew the house from observation, took photographs from all possible angles, and (most importantly) measured the entire perimeter on the house with my footsteps. I measured every length that touched the ground and recorded the information. I repeated the technique three times in order to ensure my footsteps were accurate. It took me about 2 hours to complete the measurements. All evidence I gathered was from the exterior. I thought that it would be invasive to enter the house. I wanted to deal with information that anyone could have accessed. I began a technical/architectural drawing of the house from a combination of my drawings, photographs, and pace measurements. I drew it in graphite on a sheet of 18"x24" graph paper. The grid was printed in light blue ink, each square was 1/8"xl/8" with a darker blue line at every one inch interval. It is the kind of graph paper that looks good no matter what you draw on it. I drew the front, left, right, back, and top views of the house. The scale of my footstep was shifted to equate to one 1/8"x 1/8" square. I determined the height of the home by a system of triangulation I remembered from my high school technical drawing class. It was a way of locating the third length of a triangle if the other two lengths were known. I started building a scale model of the house in my studio from the technical drawing. The scale of my footstep would now shift to being three-quarters of an inch. chose this scale because it would result in an object of relatively large size that was a relatively small scale. It would be a kind of little-big object. Size and scale became dislocated from one another. I took paint chips scraped from the house to Lowe's. I had them color matched and then bought a quart of the paint. I built the structure of the house out of corrugated cardboard, poplar for support, and glue. I used black extra-fine sandpaper to glue onto the roof as shingles. I cut the sheets into 1/2" strips and designed a rig that was used with the band saw to cut notches into the strips in order to make individual shingles. The
20 strips were glued to the roof. The chimneys were made from poplar. I used a Dremel Moto Tool with a small bit to carve out each individual brick. In the actual house there was stonework around its entire base. It extended three feet up from the ground. In my reconstruction I built the stonework from Sculpey. The Sculpey was rolled into 1/4" strips and I carved out the stones with a toothpick. I bought brick-embossed paper from the hobby shop to go on the sides of the house's exterior. However, the paper remained looking like something I bought. It was a quicker answer than the labor I put into the rest of the house. I decided to make my own brick-embossed paper. On a sheet of birch plywood, I glued pieces of balsa wood into a reversed image of bricks. I ran this through an intaglio press to create an edition of homemade brick-embossed paper. After measuring and cutting the sheets, I glued them onto the exterior of the house. The rest of the construction was made from standard modeling supplies such as bass wood columns and balsa wood window frames. I made window panes by covering one side of pieces of Lucite with black spray-paint. This made the windows completely opaque. My reconstruction was about the exterior. I did not want the interior to be visible in any other way than the black holes that these windows became. When construction was complete I painted the house. The entire exterior was painted with different varieties of interior paint. The table built for the reconstruction of Steven Spielberg's childhood home was made from poplar. Its top is thirty-two inches off of the floor. The table looks partially like one an architect might use to display a model and partially like a table for a game one would find in a recreation center. About half way through the project I decided it would be a good idea to attempt to contact Steven Spielberg about my work with his childhood home. I had seen his movies and found evidence of his life. It was now time to have my close encounter of the third kind: I had to make contact. I called up the Adath Israel Synagogue and told them about my project. They put me in touch with a relative of Spielberg who still lived in the Cincinnati area. Though somewhat skeptical and puzzled, the man-who asked that his name not be used-said he would relay the information to Spielberg's father. He said that
21 Arnold Spielberg would be interested to know that "the old house was going to be torn down." I left him my contact information and have not yet heard from him. In another attempt to make contact, I called Dreamworks' headquarters in California. I was able to finally talk to Spielberg's secretary's secretary after having been transferred to the security department twice. She recorded my information and said she would give it to Spielberg's secretary. I told her to tell Steven Spielberg to call me if he had any questions. I have not yet heard from Dreamworks. In the latest attempt to make contact, I approached a representative from Dreamworks who had come to The Ohio State University in order to participate in "The Barnett Symposium." This was a symposium focused on topics dealing with educating artists and preparing them for the future. Marilyn Friedman-from Dreamworks-was to be a panelist in a discussion on new media art. After the discussion, I approached her with a package that contained complete information on my project. I did not want her to feel as though she was only an in between person and I did not want her to feel as though my project was a joke. I knew it was going to be a strange question. She was talking to a bunch of people and drinking a bottle of water. I approached and waited for my way in to the conversation. Then-using the social skills I learned from my father-I made eye contact, gave her a firm handshake, and introduced myself. Though necessarily awkward, the conversation went well. I explained the project and asked if she would be able to give the package to Spielberg. She said that Dreamworks had strict rules governing what they were allowed to accept. She asked that I open the package and show her what it contained; to make sure it was not a screenplay. Friedman took my package and said she would do the best she could. shook her hand again and left. I am still waiting to hear from Spielberg.
22 Figure 4.1: Image from the opening scene of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" showing Flight 19's rediscovery in the desert of Sonoma, Mexico
Figure 4.2: Images from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" showing Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfus) reconstructing the location where aliens will land
23 Figure 4.3: Steven Spielberg's Childhood Home; actual house (top), in progress reconstruction (middle), completed reconstruction (bottom)
24 Figure 4.4: An image of me, in my childhood home, wearing an "E.T." costume
25 CHAPTER 5
FORENSIC ART
My grandfather died in a freak helicopter crash long before I ever had the chance to meet him. My father, Philip Edmond Brou II, has said that I, Philip Edmond Brou III, look like and remind him of his father, Philip Edmond Brou. I do not know what to think of this. It is a cross-generation triangle. If what my father says is true, then to know myself is to make contact with my grandfather. Looking into the mirror sets in motion my own sequence of close encounters.
If nature had only one fixed standard for the proportions of the various parts, then the faces of all men would resemble each other to such a degree that it would be impossible to distinguish one from another; but she varied the five parts of the face in such a way that although she has made an almost universal standard as to their size, she had not observed it in the various conditions to such a degree as to prevent one from being clearly distinguished from another ... (Leonardo Da Vinci)
Leonardo Da Vinci was a disciple of Alberti. I found this quote on "forensicart.org." It is a website designed by Heatherly Kates. She is one of the two forensic artists I hired to draw a composite sketch of my face. I e-mailed every forensic artist I found on the Internet asking if they would be interested in doing a commissioned sketch of my face. The drawing would conceptually place me in the position of being both witness/victim and suspect. It would be a way to problematize the suspect's ability to vanish and the witness's capacity to assist in locating. It would be a drawing from indirect observation, a way of dislocating my hand from my eye.
26 Initially, the only forensic artist to respond was Lois Gibson. She was based out of the Houston Police Department but flew around the country assisting in cases and giving lectures and seminars. Lois was also the 2004 Guinness World Record Holder for "Most Criminals Positively Identified From the Sketches of One Artist." Since 1986, her sketches have assisted in the identification of more than 135 criminals. Lois agreed to complete the commission for $225. I had originally wanted to describe my face over the phone. Lois however, stressed the importance of a direct and involved artist/witness dynamic. She could not get good results over the phone. She suggested we use her daughter as a "witness," and have her look at a photo of my face that she could describe to her mother. I thought this was an inaccurate approach as most people do not witness an image performing a crime. I suggested that I send her daughter a video of my face. I then wrote asking how long the video should be. Lois has worked with people who have seen a suspect for a split second; others, like the woman she was to work with the following month in Oregon, had been held captive for over a week. This was chilling. She said that sixty seconds would be a good amount of time and added, confidently, that sixty seconds was all she needed. All of our contact was done by e-mail. I kept my language as impersonal as possible. I did not want her to get too much of a feel for who I was because I thought it might influence her drawing. In the video, I moved my head around constantly. I sent it, a check for partial payment, and a note explaining that I wanted the drawing to be as close to what she normally does as possible. All materials normally used, any notations on a drawing usually made, and her signature, were to be included in this project. The self-portrait I received in the mail was on an 8"x10" piece of grey Canson pastel paper. It was executed in black and white pastel. In the upper left hand corner were the notations "w/m (white male), average height, average build." I carefully placed the drawing into an A very archival sheet protector made to fit into a 3 ring binder. I attached it to the wall at eye level with two aluminum-bodied thumbtacks. I imagined it was displayed like it would be on the wall of a police department. The sheet protector creates a glare, which fragments the image, until the viewer is close enough to cast their
27 own shadow on it. A lot of people who see the drawing say it does not look like me. At times I think it does, at other times I think it does not. I like that. Lois signed, dated, and put a copyright symbol on the drawing. Officially-although she said she would not hold me to it-I am supposed to get her permission before showing my own self-portrait. Along with the final payment, I sent them a "thank you" card purchased from CVS. This is a formality instilled in me by my mother. A week after I received my first forensic portrait, Heatherly Kates responded to my e-mail request. She had designed a questionnaire that would allow for a drawing to be generated entirely by e-mail. Unlike the project with Lois, Heatherly presented the opportunity to create a forensic self-portrait completely from my own descriptions. She instructed me to thoroughly review her witness interview packet and send it to her when completed. This process created the initial drawing. Next I wrote corrections for her to make and she updated the sketch. The drawing went back and forth three times before we decided it was complete. When filling out the questionnaire and in making corrections, I did not look at myself in the mirror. I used only the memory I have of my own image. The corrections made were not due to flaws in her work. Rather, they were mainly due to inadequacies in my memory and an underhanded desire to make myself look better. I would describe my jaw as more square than it was or I would make my ears stick out less. I had to confess to my flaws and sharpen my memory in order to make the likeness occur. The final drawing was on 11 "xl7" white drawing paper. Heatherly drew it in graphite. I think that my likeness is stronger in this composite. One of the idiosyncrasies of Alberti' s one-point perspective is that humans have two eyes and his system accounts for vision from only one. Although the brain assembles the two views from the two separate entrances into one cohesive image, the image still recedes towards two vanishing points. Both forensic self-portraits are displayed next to one another at eye level. Together they form a type of mirror, a reflection occurring before my brain assembles me into one image.
28 Figure 5.1: Self-portrait, drawn by Figure 5.2: Self-portrait, drawn commissioned forensic artist Heatherly by commissioned forensic Kates artist Lois Gibson
29 CHAPTER 6
THE VANISHING POINT
Alberti's vision had deteriorated by the 1950s. Perspective had become a mere tool for architects rather than a hopeful thought process for humanity. Architects used fixed-point perspective-usually with two or three vanishing points-in the initial phases of their process. In most common architecture, perspective drawing had generated renderings, which led to models, which led to buildings that populated the world. In thinking through perspective I realized that my results were a kind of dyslexia, an architecture played backwards. I was finding evidence in my world in order to locate buildings, which led to models, which led to drawings, which located vanishing points. It was a conceptual implosion, a move inward. Alberti 's thinking did not attempt to transcend the world, but rather, to embed itself in it. Perspective contains vanishing points and uses them to locate the placement of objects on a picture plane. Vanishing points are places that not only describe where the human eye cannot reach, but also where perspective cannot reach. Nothing exists beyond a vanishing point. Perspective is a way of thinking that contains and admits its own end rather than making the end a destination. In following Alberti's model, in using perspective and Renaissance thought to construct relationships to my world, I could not do him the injustice of merely sampling perspective as a historical artifact used to draw nice pictures. Therefore, I imagined that I was perspective's point of origin; that I was its inventor; that I found the centric ray, the visual triangle and the veil. This can be seen as a narcissistic activity at the very least. Ironically, this corresponds perfectly with Alberti' s belief that "the inventor of painting ... was Narcissus ... " for "What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool." The major difference is 30 that when I look into the pool I do not see the reflection of a beautiful flower. I see a guy from Virginia whose state flower is the dogwood.
31 I have written mostly about the evidence my work is built on: its point of departure. My aim is to make self-contained things: things with multiple readings that might undermine one another, contract, or collapse. I do not produce fixed objects with fixed meanings. I make fixed objects with moving meanings. Flight 19's point of departure was the Naval Air Station at Ft. Lauderdale. Its place of arrival was a vanishing point. It is not explainable and not understood. I want my work to arrive at this kind of dis-location. I do not use vanishing points to locate buildings, people, and objects. I use buildings, people, and objects to locate vanishing points. This is not a circle or a loop. It is a triangle: a triangle whose base is my self and my objects and whose apex is a vanishing point; a move inward, a contraction. The formal ingredients of painting are tools I use to get lost. They are a type of navigation equipment used to find things like the Bermuda Triangle. Therefore, when asked to explain what my work means, I can honestly and emphatically say:
We are not sure of our position. We cannot be sure just where we are ... We seem to be lost. . .*
* One of the final radio transmissions of Lt. Charles Taylor; shortly before he and his squadron of Grumman Avengers vanished over the Bermuda Triangle.
32 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alberti, Leon Battista. (1972). De Pictura. On Painting and On Sculpture. The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua. (C. Grayson, Trans.). London: Phaidon (Original work published 1435).
Baxter, John. (1996). Steven Spielberg: The Unauthorized Biography. London : HarperCollins.
Berlitz, Charles. (1974). The Bermuda Triangle. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Hoptman, Laura. (2002). Drawing Now: Eight Propositions New York: Distributed Art Publishers.
Kates, Heatherly. (2002). Forensic Art.org. http://www.forensicart.org/.
Klingaman, William K. (1988). 1941 : Our Lives in a World on the Edge. New York: Harper & Row.
Kusche, Larry. (1980). The Disappearance of Flight 19. New York: Harper & Row.
McBride, Joseph. (1997). Steven Spielberg: a Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Mondey, David, ed. (1977). The International Encyclopedia of Aviation. New York: Crown.
Scrivner, Charles L. (1987). TBM/TBF Avenger in Action. Carrollton, Texas: Squadron/Signal.
Sinyard, Neil. ( 1986). The Films of Steven Spielberg. London, England: Bison Books.
Taylor, Philip M. (1992). Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, and Their Meaning. New York: Continuum. 33