The Cabinet of Dr. Bergman

By Michael Oatman

 At a recent exhibition at Albany Center Galleries, I re-encountered the work of my friend Bill Bergman. In a show dominated by paintings, Bill's work was nestled amongst chairs and tables covered with brochures, and the remnants of the gallery refreshments. It's the kind of thing that often happens to sculpture. But for the life of me, I can't even remember what the works by the three other artists in the show, fine painters I'm sure, were.

For the past ten years, Bergman has been making a body. In pieces. Like a Doctor Frankenstein in reverse, Bergman makes a lung here, an arm there, and a foot there. And in the gallery, I had the uncanny awareness that he is making a whole body, one part at a time. It was a chilling realization, one that could only have been made by a person who had seen, over the years, the various severed bits.

I think this is what we do as artists. We talk about "bodies" of work, and really, we go about the business of assembling this corpus, not thinking about its ultimate implication: that this will be our stand-in some day, our body double, all that remains. Few are so literal in the pursuit as Bill, and yet I'm not sure that even he is aware of it.

Then there is are his works that trace the actions of the body in an architectural way - the bench under which gumballs escape, frantically grasped at by unseen hands, the sculpture that gives a phantom ass a place to sit, and the planes and trains that are pushed and propelled by invisible tots. What happened to the missing kid in all these works? He grew up to be an artist, capturing memories in wood, steel, springs, motors, rubber, gears and sound. Remembering. Re-"membering", literally making new body parts.

As I stood there looking at "Sleepless" (a work from 2000 that spells out the word "sleepless" in coffee), "Regret (another 2000 work that drills (screws?) the word "regret" into stone) and "Hold On (the most recent work - 2004 - in which surrogate lungs inhale and exhale), I had another realization about his

work: in addition to the trace actions of arms, and legs, and hands and organs, Bergman traces the psyche. Not just the flailing of appendages unable to do what we command (or the exact opposite, actions that are infinitely, and perfectly repeated, over and over again), but the desperate thoughts that are trapped within us, manifesting themselves in the real world as tics, and language, and worry worn into the furniture.

I had been feeling a great deal of mental exhaustion recently, related to my work, my art, my relationships; in short, my life. And while that is still with me, I had a brief reprieve, as I stood in front of Bergman's work, thankful that arriving late had stilled the devices, quieted the lungs, ended the inevitable drilling and spelling. I had seen these works alive previously, and was relying on my memory of them, grateful for the knowledge that, at some point, all bodies must rest.

-2005

The Albany Times Union Section: ARTS Page: I2 Date: Sunday, October 15, 2000 UNSETTLING CONTRAPTIONS THE PERFECT, PERFECTLY PUZZLING MACHINES OF WILLIAM BERGMAN
 

WILLIAM JAEGER Special to the Times Union ALBANY
 
-- It is as though William Bergman's own personal, charming innocence has infused his sculptures, for though they seem idiosyncratic, challenging and baffling, they remain ingeniously toylike and gentle, just kid's stuff for big people. This cheerful seriousness comes through the artist in person, a tall, solid, easygoing figure whose uncomplicated humility disguises a sharp, inquiring mind. The artist, whose work in shows this year at Albany Center Galleries and at the College of Saint Rose's Picotte Hall Art Center, instinctively addresses big issues -- hypocrisy in religion and dying -- yet he avoids sensationalism. When looking at a defaced Bible or a rotating, full-sized rifle in one of his finely tuned works, you know there are hot issues at hand, but that they come from months of toil and reflection. They are not offhand provocations. Bergman's observations often turn to the most everyday experiences, like a trip to the fabric store. ``I saw this fabric and laid it on the table and it kind of hovered,'' he says. He speaks as if still fascinated by the memory. The beauty of the trapped air under the cloth related to problems in a sculpture in progress, which has a huge camera bellows attached to a weight. When the weight falls the bellows contracts, blowing air upward, into the cloth, which will catch it like a stratospheric blue parachute. The inspiration for this work came from another sculptor, who recounted that when her father died, his heart stopped but his breathing continued. Bergman's mechanical, wood and metal device will, when it's done, draw its own life -- and spirit -- from that essence. He says he's not religious -- ``Not at all'' -- but he grew up with Roman Catholic influences. ``When I was a kid in church, you prayed to get stuff,'' he says, gives a quizzical tilt to his head, as if that is bizarre, even irksome, beyond comprehension. His art gave him a venue to react. ``Some of the people -- priests -- don't read the Bible.'' This thought begat the sculpture ``Unforgivable Things.'' A vision hit him while walking across Lancaster and Dove streets in Albany. ``I just saw the Bible flipping around, the bubble gum spitting out the front, and the fire alarm. I didn't know exactly how it was going to work. I saw it all at once.'' So he made a pulpit with a Bible on top. A visitor turns a crank and the pages of the Bible turn; each and every line, every single page, an entire Bible, has been crossed off, so that nothing can be read. (``I had help, lots and lots of help'' with the redacting, he says.) As you crank, a gumball occasionally shoots out from the base toward the wall. Pull the fire alarm, and some louvers will open, revealing a gumball machine. ``Unforgivable Things'' offers metaphoric candy for the masses, and for children in particular. ``I felt like I'd gone too far,'' Bergman says. Speaking generally, he says, ``That was really evil. It was a nasty thing.'' He pauses but doesn't equivocate. ``I was terrified when I made it (that) I would get harassed, but it didn't happen. I really didn't want to offend anyone.'' The public wouldn't leave him alone with his most recent work, however. ``Roman Roulette'' was installed this year in a window at the Saratoga County Arts Council. At waist level, a toy train goes around on a small circular track, driven indirectly by a crank on a box mounted on a wall nearby. You can hear the sound of a jack-in-the-box as you crank, though nothing pops. What you might expect to pop is a rifle, also rotating, mounted six feet up on a pole above the train. The title may call up certain scary associations with suicide games and the Roman Catholic Church, but it was the gun that people could see through the window, and even in an art show, with school shootings in the news, guns are still guns. Responding to complaints, the gallery approached Bergman. ``They wanted me to take it out of the show,'' he says. ``I objected strongly. They left it in.'' But they did move it away from the window, adding ``a note that said the gun has been rendered non-functional.'' Again, he expressed a kind of gentle dismay. ``That's the whole point, to seem dangerous. When I first (made it),'' he says, ``I thought, Oh, my God! It bothered me.'' Since finishing graduate school at Alfred University in 1997, Bergman has finished only six or seven pieces, but this isn't from not working hard. Each one is complex, and he perfects the woodwork, the mechanics and the electrical controls with a watchmaker's precision. Even if the objects were static, they would remain visually, physically astonishing. He has a unique ability to focus and follow through. Not that it's been easy. As he began his current job as a sculpture technician at the College of Saint Rose, in October 1997, ``All of a sudden, there was a fuzzy spot in my eye. I didn't pay much attention. By February, I couldn't see out of the right half of both eyes. They did a CAT scan.'' He is matter-of-fact. ``They discovered a brain tumor.'' Luckily, it was benign, pinching his optic nerve, and was removed. ``That was a wake-up call,'' he says. Today, between assisting students, hanging shows for extra money, and working on his projects, he is frustrated by one main thing: time. There's another, he says: ``Being here in Albany. Getting my stuff seen outside of Albany.'' Finding a local gallery to show his kind of art is difficult, he says. ``It's big, it's relatively expensive, it takes up real estate. You can't put a thing like that in your living room.'' Even as sculpture goes, Bergman's work -- not decorative, pushing emotional buttons -- is a difficult sell. But this is what he loves to do. When he first took a class in three-dimensional art, he found his calling. He says, ``I was, like, wow, this is it, this is what I should be doing.'' And it still is. Even with the realities of life bearing down, he still wears the joy of discovery and invention with ease. And the products, his exquisite, incomparable, improbable, and utterly sincere nonsense machines, convey his sureness perfectly.

 

Daily Breeze, Torrance CA  Friday Oct. 1st 2004
Scaled-down sculptures make big impression at Dominguez Hills

Artists rise to challenge of down-sizing their work for Eighth International Shoebox Sculpture Exhibition at CSUDH Art Gallery.

BY RONDA AYERS
SPECIAL TO RAVE!