Pickety Wickety Clickity Clack

A picket fence does not have to look even. It can be uneven just as well. When it is uneven, the sound will be more interesting when the neighborhood boy comes by with his stick to drag along the staves.

Long sticks make low notes. Short sticks make high notes.

Cut the sticks and tune them. Arrange them so a recognizable tune can be played.

Let the boy and the neighborhood discover that the fence has a tune.

Let the Neighborhood discover why the fence is so uneven.

Change the tune each year.

Make a wooden fence in a circle. Tune the interchangeable sticks so you can play a round. Three children running around and clacking the fence at the same speed can play the round.

An essay written by Marx.

Marxy and his Unicycle

Dave Kohl had mentioned in the very first comment of the very first blog on this site about some photographs he had taken of Marxy, and I found them in a stack of photographs. I think they show Marxy very well.

- Amber Konz

Cast your nets into the deep

The 1972 sabatical trip
of the USA covered 33,000 miles
included every state
wife and 2 sons in a Winnebago motor home.

Thousands of people as audience and
workshop participants. A stunning experience!
Now it is ending.
Last day of trip.
Heading for home.
What to do to make it special.

The map showed Pibel Lake
near Burwell on the way.
We’ll stop there.

Dorris picked some flowers in the road ditch
the day was quiet and beautiful
and the pond was small, weedy, dirty
with a sandy beach.

Karl made a boat out of dried weeds to float
and Paul dangled a line with a bare fish hook
in the water
To play
No pole
Peace.

I felt grateful for Divine guidance
and was filled with energy and
a shout.

How does one say thank you?

I grabbed the reel with the line
and the bare metal hook
From the hands of Paul.
I pulled back my right arm.
and flung out the bare hook
with all the praise, energy
and thanksgiving I could muster.

What a feeling of release!

The instant the hook hit the water
a large fish grabbed it.
I had a fish,
and a possible heart attack.

With yelling and shouting
and pulling on the line
the fish was brought to the shore.
It measured from the tip of
my middle finger to the top
of my shoulder.
Thirty inches!
of Northern Pike.
No pole, no license
no intention.

Can there be success without intention?

A poem written by Marx.

- Amber Konz

The Lincoln Capitol

Here are pictures of the Lincoln State Capitol, and also what the "Nebraska State Capitol" book (edited by Frederick C. Luebke) has to say about them:

Both panels of the south bay were designed by Reinhold Marxhausen. The Minnesota native received his formal art education at Mills College in California and has been a professor of art at Concordia College in Seward, Nebraska, since 1952. For his designs, Marxhausen employed a distinctive technique. Whereas the other muralists constructed their designs by means of traditional techniques, he laid his tiles of plywood panels and glued them in place with epoxy. He did not limit himself to ceramic and glass tesserae, but also incorporated pieces of hardwood flooring into his mural. In all cases, he butted the pieces tightly against each other, thereby eliminating the need for grout to till the interstices.

“Building for the Capitol” is the title of the mural that occupies the southernmost wall space on the east side of the foyer. The last of the murals to be installed, it draws on well-developed principles of mural design that permit diverse elements to be arranged on a single pictorial plane. In this instance, the second capitol of Nebraska stands below and to the left of a framed quotation from the Declaration of Independence. To the right one sees an indistinct outline of the present capitol. Together these elements dominate the composition and are joined in a rich field of variously colored tiles laid in purely abstract patterns.

“The Spirit of Nebraska,” which occupies the south panel on the west wall, is the thematic climax of the series. Because its content was not specified in Alexander’s grand plan, it presented the artist with a difficult compositional problem. Marxhausen chose to treat this abstract subject through a collage of naturalistic elements and symbolic devices. The panel is dominated by a bold Arabic numeral 1 made of gold glass set in a raised square of dark wood. It symbolizes Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, the only one-house state legislature in the United States. The lower part of the panel is dominated by an overall brown color, which, according to Marxhausen, represents both the rich soil of Nebraska and the deeply rooted conservatism of its citizens. Buried in this earth are fossils of Paleolithic creatures that roamed the plains before the Ice Age. Buried with them is a black box containing human bones. They are meant to symbolize the remains of unimaginative, nonproductive people, who, in Marxhausen’s view, deserve to be fossilized along with dinosaurs. But from this dark base emerge two vital elements. A plant on the left stands for agriculture, and on the right is the Nebraska capitol, itself a symbol of the spirit of Nebraska. Marxhausen’s design also includes hands that are kneading bread (to represent work) and hands that are upraised (to indicate hope and aspiration).

-Amber Konz

Link, Shuelke and Weller!

I'm a student at Concordia and I work in the Marxhausen gallery. I ran across these images of Marxhausen's and realized for the first time that the buildings here on campus are named after actual people.

- Amber Konz

Studio visit

Our class was fortunate to be able to go over to Marx's studio a few days ago and play with some of his sound sculptures and his flurries.

If you want to see more pictures of the sound sculptures, check out this link

Sound Sculptures (there are some pictures of his Stardust on this page).

Last but certainly not least, here is a picture of the man himself:

and this is what he has to say:

It was a boring Saturday
at the Mills College
sculpture studio
in California.
No Plans for the day.
I found a door knob on the table
and welded some wires on one end
just for the fun of it.
I place a knob to my ear
and strummed the wire
on the opposite end

WOW

I got another door knob
welded some wire on it also
and connected the two door knobs
with a metal wire which went over
my head so the knobs
were against my ear.

I invented a manual Walkman.

Found in the Marxhausen gallery--poem used in one of his shows.

- Amber Konz

These comments were posted on the original blog site:Fantastic pictures. The sound sculptures are so awesome, I wish I had some of my own to play around with, and the flurries are just as entertaining. It's good to see the blog up and moving along, and it's looking fantastic. And now to bookmark it.

October 21, 2009 | Steven Odom

I saw this post on Gizmodo and immediately thought of Marxhausen http://gizmodo.com/5435603/a-worse-slinky

Thank you for the Flurry picture; I guess my memory is accurate.

December 28, 2009 | Eliot

Comments on the original post

These are two comments left on the post "Studio Visit" when the blog was on the original server.

Fantastic pictures. The sound sculptures are so awesome, I wish I had some of my own to play around with, and the flurries are just as entertaining. It's good to see the blog up and moving along, and it's looking fantastic. And now to bookmark it.

October 21, 2009 | Steven Odom

I saw this post on Gizmodo and immediately thought of Marxhausen http://gizmodo.com/5435603/a-worse-slinky

Thank you for the Flurry picture; I guess my memory is accurate.

December 28, 2009 | Eliot

Reinhold Peiper Marxhausen

This is the first post of many! That being so, here is what Marxy has to say about his name:

"Words are information, not enlightenment.
We can't believe in words but language. The world needs to have labels on its objects, otherwise we cannot deal with it.

People have names, some even numbers, but the names we have have nothing to do with us as a person. Our nicknames may say more about us as a person. When our parents first looked at us at birth, no one said, 'He looks like a Paul or a Mary'. The name in many cases was arbitrary. In some cases we became our name.

I did not like my name as a child mostly because I never met anyone who had a name quite like it. Even today, my ears perk up when I hear the name Reinhold. Reinhold Pieper Marxhausen is a name almost too long to bear.

Seldom did I identify what the 'P' stood for in my middle name. If I was really pushed, I would say it was Peter.

Reinhold Pieper was a professor my father had at the seminary and I inherited a bronze plaque with his image.

At the age of 25 while attending Valpo University, my roommates discovered my full name and proceeded to laugh alot and make fun of it. They called me 'Peeps'. Of course it was embarrassing at first--then it became interesting. I had an interesting name. No one had a name like Reinhold Pieper Marxhausen. It was all mine. Maybe someday I would be able to live up to it and be as interesting as my name. I like it. I proudly sign the whole name whenever I can."

-Found written on a piece of paper in a stack of notes in the archive.

Pictures of his work to come soon!

- Amber Konz