A harvest of thorns
Michael Allgoewer sometimes bleeds for his art
Talk about suffering for your art. Some of the first sculptures Michael Allgoewer made included thorns. Collecting them could be hazardous. One time he forgot to take gloves with him, and ended up with bleeding hands.
In 1998, he once again incorporated honeylocust thorns into a striking installation that he exhibited in a solo show at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. In that installation he set out to address the pain and suffering of a century that was fast drawing to close.
“The installation was called ‘Thrinos’ and evoked, in a metaphorical way, the history of the now past 20th century,” he says. “I was thinking of war and the suffering and martyrdom of the millions of people who had been victims of a cruel time in history.”
Thrinos is the Greek word for Lamentation. It’s called Pieta in Italian. A Lamentation usually refers to a traditional religious work of art depicting Mary grieving over the Body of Christ, her son. Mary became a role model for those who mourn, so the Lamentation came to symbolize all suffering and grief.
As with many of Allgoewer’s installations, this one’s appeal was cerebral and visceral at the same time. For one of the works, “Harvest,” he made 25 grenade and thorn sculptures which he arranged on a sheet of steel.
Installations often suffer the fate of being dismantled after an exhibition. Some disappear entirely. But for a recent show, Allgoewer harvested one component of “Harvest” and submitted it to the pop-up retrospective at You Me Gallery.
The pop-up, Building Cultural Legacies, showcases Hamilton artists who were active from the 1970s to about 2000. It can be viewed through the James North gallery’s window.
A painter as well as a sculptor, Allgoewer has been making art and exhibiting for more than 30 years. He has consistently shown himself to be one of the country’s most thought-provoking installation artists. And he achieves this without a hint of pretentiousness.
Renewing and recycling lie at the core of much of Allgoewer’s work. He builds complex installations using found objects, both natural and manufactured. His materials have included wood, seed pods, concrete and steel.
The “Harvest” component consists of a hand grenade sitting on a kind of tripod made from the thorns of a honeylocust tree. The small sculpture unites a dangerous manufactured object with a dangerous natural one, a rounded shape with a skeletal one.
The thorns could evoke Christ’s crown of thorns and his death on the cross. The thorn is also a symbol of Mary’s grief. The grenade is associated with war, destruction and death.
Allgoewer not only recycles his own work, but he often recycles the themes and symbols of earlier art.
“Thrinos” is not the only installation inspired by earlier religious art about the Passion of Christ. A year earlier, he created “Martyrium,” an installation referencing an early 16th-cenarmy tury painting of a suffering Christ crowned with thorns.
Allgoewer’s installations are not the result of serendipitous bursts of spontaneous activity.
“Everything in the Thrinos installation was planned and worked out in my mind and the materials accordingly appeared as if on cue.” he says. “The grenades were purchased from the surplus store which still existed on James North at the time. Of course, they are not live.”
And the thorns? “Having worked with the honeylocust thorns in previous pieces, I knew where to find them. Ironically, most of them were harvested from a tree in front of City Hall.”
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Regina Haggo explores one of the earliest Lamentation scenes in her new YouTube video, “Nerezi: Lamentation.” To see all her art history videos, search YouTube for “regina haggo.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.