‘Cockerel Box’, which was completed in 1989, picks up on the concept of art as play, with its recollection of those fairground booths like Roll-a-Penny, its see-saw axis across the centre, its improbable birdcage (from which the occupant has, of course, flown to the freedom of the woods), its conjuror’s rainbow fan. It is itself the outcome of a process of playful transformations, of art as a form of conjuring trick (the panels on both right and left hide what is behind them), being partly made from materials salvaged from earlier constructions, and incorporating sections form an old gilt frame, a piece of an armchair, found and painted pieces of wood, and the roughly printed image from a previously used woodcut block. It is the image of its own making, an exuberant celebration of the power of art to juggle materials and memories into new and joyfully evocative configurations. Michael Rothenstein has an international reputation as an innovative and influential printmaker of the first rank, and has long been recognised as a draughtsman and painter of vivid originality. Assembled out of actual objects and evocative found materials, photographs from old newspapers, studio paraphernalia, brushes, paintboxes and rags, crushed fragments of scrap metal, ripped and jagged planks, Rothenstein’s boxes have a starkly emotional impact. They reflect in the most direct way his enduring obsessions with a number of identifiable themes: violence, sexuality and alienation in modern life; the artist’s studio as the site of imaginative energies and brilliant transformations; the dynamic potency of the forces and forms of nature; the persistence into our technological culture of ancient signs and symbols. Together, Michael Rothenstein’s boxes reveal the workings of a remarkable creative imagination, tensely alert to the vibrancy of the phenomenal world, open to modern experience in all its diversity, its terrible beauty and inescapable darkness.
The Artist
Mel Gooding, Michael Rothenstein’s Boxes, Art Books International, 1992, page 79, illustrated pages 77 and 104, catalogue number 105: