Stephen Ladin in front of his banner in Rosendale

By Ellen McKay

An artist is born with certain affinities.

Stephen Ladin started out at the School of Architecture at the City College of New York, and went on to study ceramics (MFA—SUNY New Paltz). These choices represent not only an influence but more likely a response to a calling.

Which came first— the artist or the art?

Just as technique serves as vehicle for content, the artist is vehicle for certain themes. Whether overt or obscure, his expression is as individual as a thumb print, as unmistakable as DNA. The word, technology comes from the Greek, techne meaning beauty.

In Ladin’s work technique is image.

Diamond plate ceramic teapots by Stephen Ladin

Engagement with the structural pervades Ladin’s work—structure, in the sense of the organic process of the natural world as well as constructions of industry and technology. “It’s an architectural approach,” Ladin says. Given a problem, a program with requirements, one solves the requirements by creating a concept, “solving the problem.” Ladin’s functional ceramics are design oriented, as is much of his work. Take, for instance, the coffee mug, as ‘program with requirements’. A current series of these are made to look exactly like dented tin cans in texture, color and form, a kind of ceramic trompe-l’ oeil. Or the “diamond plate” vases, the name taken from the industrial bas-relief pattern of fire escape treads, a ‘non-skid surface.’ The vases are three-sided with a three-four-five triangular format, which is a building’s mason’s triangle. “These are Metabolist pieces,” Ladin says. “The forms are generated by the technique with which I build them.” He explains that the Metabolists were a group of architects in the 1960s whose design concept was to make use of modular elements in their design solutions, in a way which would enable these solutions to change over a course of time—to solve new problems a they evolved. A prime example is Moshe Safdie’s Expo Habitat 67 constructed for the World’s Fair in Montreal. Metabolist design is like a living organism which can change with use. Ladin’s Metabolist teapots are made of primary geometric shapes combined in various configurations, many with a lustrous gun metal gray glaze. The designs are at the same time cerebral and sensuous; their grace shows technology at its most elegant.

Technique becomes the imaginative act; the structural, the beautiful thing.

The poetic leap between one image/technique and another is a miraculous moment in the creative process. In looking at Ladin’s work, you would not think it was the same person who made the teapots, the fired clay figures, the molecular banners, so radically changed are image and media in the various phases of his oeuvre. The leap itself is a kind of synapse connecting one phase to another—each, a world unto itself yet strung together as imaginative occurrences evolving with the demands of necessity and inspiration. It’s a metabolist view, if you will. Each part of the body of work is important; each part illuminates, defines the next.

From the abstract geometric and industrial we move to the figurative: fired clay sculptures of chalk pale human figures delicately painted with tints of beeswax, pigment, oil. When I first saw them at the Donskoj Gallery in Kingston some years ago, I was deeply disturbed by them. They are images of victimization, mutant bodies, images of thalidomide, or more currently, genetic engineering “mistakes,” cloning grotesques, birth defects from environmental poisoning. They are also reminiscent of the figures of ancient Pompeii caught mid-action, petrified in volcanic ash. Ladin says the first ones came out of a desire to work with the figure in a way which would be a social commentary on victimization, this commentary starting with the Holocaust. Genetic engineering in its most grim aspect is connected to the same premise as the Holocaust, Ladin says—the objective being, to cleanse the population of ‘the evil genes.’ The metabolic metaphor carries through: genes are described as the ‘building blocks of life.’

“I would like to think that victimization is an aberration—is not intrinsic to human nature, not something that occurs routinely,” says Ladin. He goes on to say that these works came from feeling disturbed that things have gotten out of hand in the world, that he sees a world which is in a sense, out of control, unaware of the consequences of its actions. “Think of the Industrial Revolution,” he says “a time when a romantic vision of industry and technology was embraced.” He sees our current situation as parallel to that time—our age which holds such promise, such astounding advances also holds a dark side of unequaled catastrophe.

Untitled work, after Piero della Francesca’s Polyptych of Mercy

The figures are beautifully rendered anatomically. The softness of the sculpting in contrast to the image makes them all the more terrifying, as does the lack of affect in their facial expressions. Their faces are oddly serene, as if the soul had already left the body, broken under torture—the mind, gone, already departed, as the minds of saints as they were martyred. The hand and eye that made them did so as if in the manner of a ‘scientific appraisal.’ The sculptures are entirely successful. I almost wish they were less successful, for I can hardly stand to meet these images face to face. They tell a story within a story: only from a position of complete emotional detachment is such figuration or disfiguration possible, whether in actual life experience or in art.

The integrity of traditional techniques is important in Ladin’s work, as can be seen in the discipline of ceramics, and also in the egg tempera paintings, done in traditional medieval style, which is a very elaborate process. Equally important to Ladin are traditional values in art. “I believe that art work should be beautiful,” he says. I take this to mean he adheres to an old-fashioned view of beauty in a classical sense, which conforms to certain standards—standards, which with the advent of postmodernism, have been questioned and often dismissed. Ladin’s art is a place where classical and iconoclastic images of beauty intersect. Of traditional values in his work, social conscience is one; another is the presence of the spiritual in art—that the purpose of art is to bring about spiritual experience and the transformation that comes from such experience.

“In 1996 during a residency at Sculpture Space in Utica I started painting,” says Ladin. “The paintings grew out of the sculptures. When I was doing the figures I tried all kinds of surfaces, crayons, stains, pigment powder. Then I found wax, paint sticks. Beeswax over oil sticks, as a kind of glaze. I loved the look of the oil sticks on a clay surface. I started rolling out slabs so I could paint directly on the slabs of clay.” From there he devised a plaster surface on plywood mounted on frames. Religious symbolism enters in this series. Ladin is at work on a large piece in the shape of a cross, like the folding medieval religious paintings, each square frame with a different image. It will be a huge work, some seventeen feet tall and thirteen feet wide, made of square units each with a different image: a crucifixion, a naked child, an embryo, to name a few. This work was inspired by an alterpiece, called, Polyptych of Mercy by Piero della Francesca.

The sight of a flag standing up in full wind brings pure delight. Banners accompany king and army, images of royalty, clan, country. A flag at high mast is symbol of freedom, victory, sovereignty; at low mast, sign of defeat, mourning. Pennants on beaches and vessels signal storm or calm. Spirits rise with the kite as it rides on high winds. Seasonal banners hang outside houses; daffodils for spring, a reindeer for winter, a heart for Valentines, orange leaves for fall. “Wherever lies Its image, therein is the God,” say the people of Haiti in a Vaudoun aphorism. Banners are celebratory. They herald rites of passage in life or season, call transition forth, the imprint inviting the desired wish. Winds whip Tibetan prayer flags hung from temple eaves, blow blessings to the far corners of the earth. Giant sails of tall ships billow … A spinnaker, a mainsail … out of the corner of my eye, what was that pretty—? Oh, clothes hung out to dry on a line in the sun, they fly sideways, the wind wild, blue shirts, all different blues, red towels…And now what is that, hanging from the Rosendale railroad bridge? And what does it signify?

It signifies itself. Can that be enough? Can beauty be message?

Peter Haberland installing the Rosendale Banner

The “Sky Banners,” as Ladin calls them, are made of modules, five foot squares, some cut in half to form triangles, which are arranged in a pattern to make the banner. The fabric is heavy-duty nylon pack cloth; each module a separate primary color, red, blue, and yellow. The eye loves pattern. One of the aspects that makes these banners so appealing is their simplicity. We have come full circle, here again is the Metabolist theory, first in the teapot, now in the banner. The banners are ‘architecture’ as they delineate, describe space. The module generates patterns, infinite variations from two geometric shapes, a triangle and a square.

Structure becomes message as in genetics.

“It is a delicate and complicated fact of engineering to install these banners,” Ladin says. The banner which hung from the Rosendale rail bridge was 20 feet by 40 feet. Garage springs were attached to shock cords at the corners to allow for the enormous wind load. It took a team of people to install the banner. One man hung from the Rosendale bridge, swinging over the Rondout Creek and after several attempts was able to attach the banner cable to a moorage set in the ground.

The first banners were hung across Main Street and across the main mall in Poughkeepsie during the ArtScape Festival in 1991. When the Rosendale Banner came down Ladin rearranged its modules and re-installed it as a “Sky Canopy” at the Wallkill Rail Trail bridge off Springtown Rd. in New Paltz. Same fabric, same pieces, held together by steel cable. This is an art which is in direct relation to nature, in concert with the environment. The banners are not in a museum or a gallery. They define the landscape by their presence, and are defined by their landscape and the elements, vulnerable to the weather, at its mercy. Wind tears at them; rain soaks them, sun bleaches and thins them. Who was it who said, “Weather is the last frontier?” We have gained control over everything else—oceans, biology, space. What a relief to know there is a place where we are still awed by the powers of the natural world. These banners speak to that awe, to life as delicate, tenuous, powerful. They make a sound, a pleasant sound of wind ruffling, beating at cloth. Their tenuous aspect was a cause for anxiety, Ladin said. Every morning he would wake and the thought would occur, “Are they still up? Has the wind torn them down?” The wind load was frightening, he said. O ephemeral existence! Buddhists and Taoists exclaim.

Whereas the great emotional distance I felt in the figures was terrifying, now in the banners it is an exalted detachment that uplifts, enlivens, pacifies, liberates.

Flag and banner are closely tied to symbol and literal message. And although I have ascribed meanings to Ladin’s Sky Banners, in fact they go in the opposite direction, away from the symbolic, the message. They carry no message. They are not ironic. They are purposeless. Ladin says he wants to stay away from promoting personal propaganda in specific symbols or symbolism. He has chosen the perfect vehicle for this, for the banners exert no propaganda on us viz any doctrine at all, and therein lies their freedom. And in that freedom metaphors fly on the winds of our individual and collective imagination. What a paradox. An art of such freedom—an anonymous art touching so many without interfering with them. The banners forge a communal relationship between art, people and nature.

“I can’t tell you how many people came up to me when they found out I was the person who did the Rosendale railroad bridge banner to tell me ‘Oh my God you made my drive home from work a joy! The banner made me feel good, made me forget the troubles of the day’” Ladin said. “The best thing I heard was from a woman who told me how her daughter would see the banner on her way to school each day [To see art every day—that’s a lot!] and she would report to me, ‘Oh the banner was drooping and still today. It looked so sad.’ Or, ‘it was sailing and filled with wind; it made me so happy!’” Ladin says, “More people saw this banner than all of my gallery shows put together. And that’s a responsibility!”

From the Icons series

People are moved by the Sky Banners as they are by nature, by weather as mood where emotions shift suddenly, subtle as wind.

The City of Kingston has asked Ladin to design a banner for the city. The banner is to hang from the Wilbur railroad bridge over the Rondout Creek near the Strand. It will be a triangular banner approximately 80 feet by 40 feet high, the largest, most ambitious one Ladin has attempted to date. Even more elaborate engineering will be required to hang this gigantic banner, as well as a boat to direct the installation from. Ladin is seeking permission from Conrail as it is an active train bridge. He is in the process of raising funds for the project and is making plans for the banner to be installed this summer.

A show of Stephen Ladin’s paintings, sculpture and ceramics will open March 12 at the Albert Shahinian Gallery at 198 Main Street in Poughkeepsie, 5-9 p.m., with a poetry reading at the gallery from 8-9 p.m. featuring J.J. Blickstein and Susan McKechnie.