Thinking of Patty Catto

"And He Made A Wavy Motion...": Codfish Wickerson's Moon Boat

Michael Wickerson’s sculpture of a tractor-red Viking ship manned by a raggy-taggy band of seafaring puppets dropped anchor in Kansas City’s Robert Frazier Gallery, (3120 Troost) just about the same time the Dead Sea Scrolls Show sailed into town and moored at Union Station.

Though some might have gone right over to trawl the Scrolls, straining for an eyes-on glimpse of Big Mythic Wonders, others might’ve drifted over to ogle Wickerson’s lunatic boat and achieved a similar end.

Oh, blasphemy!! Oh, hell kite!! you might say.  But….

How edifying is it in this day and age to walk into a gallery space and suddenly be bobbing up and down in the Cosmic Ocean like a pubescent porpoise following in the wake of a mirage-like Junk of Dreams?  How fine is it to be visually kidnapped by a crew of mutinous puppets who look like they fled from expensive, full color, art history books, such as  Our Pals the Oceanic Ritual Objects or All Things Huichol or   Chagall Meets The Raft of the Medusa? 

The answer is rhetorical.

It is edifying.   It is fine right now in a waste landish, parched, cyber spaced-out, depressed, socio-pathic, war-weary culture to do as Melville’s Ishmael (Call him, that, will ya?), does in Moby Dick.  When he’s had enough of the Land and its denial of the gorgeous non-rational, he takes to the Sea where “the gates of the wonder world flood open,” where strange sea beings, elemental, star-drenched nights and troubled seamen from globally dysfunctional families threaten each moment with uncontrolled adventure.

Ships, even ones that will never touch water sail off with us, liberating our grubby, land lubber projections, awakening our religious desire to float, muse, luxuriate, incubate, fly, dress like Captain Hook or Jack Sparrow or Noah or Odysseus, a salty Lord (or Lady) of the Water World, the Underworld, the Underwater World of Wonder.

When Wickerson first revealed to me his sculpture’s title, “He never had a pot for the fish he caught, so he had to use the big dipper,” he did so by singing the whole ditty from whence it came.  Check out, if you will, this strangely familiar, rhymey-dimey master piece of “Stompin’ Tom Connors of Saint John New Brunswick.

Codfish Dan from Newfoundland.  He dreamt that he had three wishes,

And he took Mars and all the stars, and he turned them into big fishes;

He said the sky was much too dry, and he made a wavy motion,

And the moon, like a boat, Began to float upon the starry ocean,

One night he strayed to the Milky Way, To cast his nets upon it,

He spied the tail of what he thought was a whale, And he harpooned Halley’s comet;

He never had a pot for the fish he caught, So he had to use the big dipper,

And the Sun, by Jove, was a very good stove, For cookin’ up smelts and kippers.

Now, the Northern Lights that seemed so bright, like nothin’ could be grander,

Well, they’re just waves of the moon-boat, Made by the Newfoundland Commander;

And don’t you sigh and say, “Oh, my! What gross exaggerations.”

‘Cause he’ll tell you the dream was true, When Codfish Dan awakens.

-Charles Thomas “Stompin’ Tom” Connors (b. 1936 in Saint John, New Brunswick)

Pretty quickly I realized that Codfish Dan had hooked Wickerson’s Self just as easily as he harpooned Halley’ Comet.  And it was my good fortune to witness Wickerson’s transformation from land dwelling sculpture chair of the Kansas City Art Institute to his truer incarnation:

Co-creator Fisherman God who arranges the Cosmos so he can use the Sun to cook up his Fish!!!

Yes, Wickerson had walked the plank and plunged into big old motifs, trans-cultural parallels to Creators like:  Vishnu the Dreamer from whose navel the whole cosmos emerges and recedes, the slumbering Finnegan who’ll WAKE to begin the world again, Raven, Jehovah, Manitou, etc.

Indeed, the Cosmos is made over and over by the Artist/Deity/Scientist, whether a particle physicist Big Banger, a train tagger or possibly you.  From the inner space ocean behind our closed eyes, from the outer space ocean stretching infinitely across the Galaxy, shapes emerge as strange fishes coming almost to the surface.  And it is the Artist/Creator who must catch and cook them, make them somehow real enough to eat – and even to multiply them for the hungry multitude that can and does batten on art daily.

Taking his turn, it’s Wickerson’s strong, spontaneous desire that has fashioned a cartoonish boat into a micro-cosm, a floating world manned by his manic shamanic impulses.  I think the puppets are both his fish and fisherman and that they feed us.  Each might be someone we couldn’t catch for ourselves but when we see them, they have resonance.  Become material, they tell a tale as nicely as any Greek goddess or god or therio-morphic being stepping out of their pantheon.  They are serious.  They are comic.  They are compelling. 

One has a failed fetal face, one a weathered rabbit’s; one seems a Trojan’s half mask and another a gruesome overseer of Penitentes.  They fly up into the crude rudimentary masts of the ship, themselves sails and windy-spirits.

Like the ghostly crew in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, they’re somehow dead but alive enough to perform their professional duties: sailing.

Melville says, “Water and meditation are forever wedded.”  And it is the same with detailed, specific, variegated, verdigris-spotted, flayed, pitted, cast, cast out, cast away puppets or any other worthy objects, We only need gaze at them deeply to start our journey in.

Understandably, Codfish Wickerson loves and values the eloquent materials of his creations; wool, Osage orange, jute, burlap, stone, fur, tar, liver of sulfur, beeswax, iron, graphite, oak, ash, maple, Douglas Fir, brass copper, rock, salt, leather, Ferguson red enamel paint.  He’s read Stones, bones and skin:  Ritual and Shamanic Art with his whole body.  (He’s kept it by his sewing machine.)  He’s hung around with Head Shaman Jim Leedy, a notoriously bad influence on sane people and a great influence on crazy ones.  He’s traipsed over Canada (his homeland) and Newfoundland, Sutton Hoo and Argos, Chichen Itza and the banks of the River Styx.  Probably he had an invisible cameo role in Jim Jasmusch’s movie Ghost Dog where a guy builds a schooner on the roof of a tenement in Brooklyn and never intends to get it down physically.

Antonio Machado or Pablo Neruda or uh, some smart Welsh poet like that tells us something like, “Mankind has four things that are no good at sea.  Oars, sails, rudders and the fear of going down.”  That’s profound though irreverently cited.  Yet let’s partially end on that thought.  Let’s add that life is also like a mad-ass, Popeye the Sailor Man boat smeared deadly red and filled with ancient corn, home-made coins, adulterated salt and captained by Pirate puppets who’ll never dock any where they can’t get discount rum!!

Patty Catto

2007