Gibberings
Dad told me never to use XTREE when he wasn’t in the room.
January 5, 2009 ~ 10:18:42 PM * -08:00ST
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Log # 487
The Vacuum Traffic Controller
Finally final, the largest work so far, the Vacuum Traffic Controller showed well at the Anachrotechnofetishism show.
About a year ago, I called my father and told him I had started a gigantic painting. I described it briefly, sent him sketches, and called it the Vacuum Traffic Controller, an obvious play on “air traffic controller”, and meant to convey his status as the departure/arrival coordinator for a large space station. My father did not see space in the piece, and assumed instead I was referring to the vacuum-tube trains that ran briefly in the 1800s.
“A TUBE, A CAR, A REVOLVING FAN!”
1866— 1868
Atmospheric railways in EnglandThe idea of pneumatic tubes and railways can be traced back to the English inventor George Medhurst. He proposed using pneumatic tubes to carry letters and packages in a pamphlet published in 1810, and two years later he proposed details of larger railway tubes to carry passengers and freight. In the mid 1820s another English inventor, John Vallance, built a tube on his property at Brighton, 8 feet in diameter and 150 feet long, in which a passenger car ran at two miles per hour. Medhurst had realized as early as 1812 that passengers might not want to ride inside a tube. The darkness and the exposure to tube pressure would make a journey unpleasant. In a last pamphlet in 1827 he proposed what would become known as the atmospheric railway. In this system a small pneumatic tube was built along an ordinary railway track, and a piston inside the tube would pull an attached train running on the rails.1 The ultimately successful alternative of pulling trains behind steam locomotives was under development during the same years by many inventors, culminating in George Stephenson’s engine Rocket, which proved its worth at the Rainhill Trials in 1829, two years after Medhurst proposed the atmospheric railway.
Fearing to roll it, I lashed the piece to the roof of my car, just prior to the eight hundred northerly miles to Seattle. About twenty miles out, there were horrible noises above me. I pulled over and found a crumpled horror: the stretcher bars had splintered and collapsed, leaving the canvas rumpled, and a horrible pain in my innards. I stuffed the painting into my trunk, out of time and options, and grimaced the whole way to Seattle.
The decision was of course made before the abandonment of atmospheric working on the London and Croydon. The South Devon was the last and longest atmospheric railway built, intended to run 52 miles from Exeter to Plymouth, and completed and operated for about fifteen miles. The railway used much larger tubes than the London and Croydon, fifteen inches, requiring more powerful pumping engines, which however managed to convey trains at similar speeds over 60 miles per hour. The tubes were once again the principal problem. The salt air hardened the leather flaps, and the tallow applied to soften the leather only attracted rats to gnaw on it. Altogether the atmospheric system proved to be more than twice as expensive to operate as steam locomotives.3
The day of the show, I ripped up the stretchers and stained them with Asphaltum oil paint, using them as makeshift hangers. They went up wet on the eggshell gallery walls.
The Controller himself displays characteristics of friends, all science-minded jades, who can, and have, worn similar outfits, with similar expressions, in similar states of vague, sepia washes from wistful industrial mistscapes. The artist sees these faces skimming under the tortured surfaces of the piece, and wonders what she’s trying to tell herself.
But it’s a gigantic goddamned painting. And that’s really the most important thing.
The Vacuum-Traffic Controller is currently available for purchase at the Suite 100 Gallery.
Beach Pneumatic [Columbia]
by
Eliza Gauger on September 17th, 2008 ~ 04:16:17 PM
Slotted into Artwork, Paintings, Seattle, Steampunk |
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