The Best Piece of Art in Ventura

That’s how the above piece of art was advertised to me, and I believe it.  Last weekend I went up to San Francisco with the El Camino College IDEAS Club, and we made a pit stop at Studio Channel Islands Art Center in Ventura, where Tom McMillin, father of ECC I.D.E.A.S. Club Faculty Advisor Russ McMillin, has the above piece on display.

Climactic Extremes consists of a pool of water, in which a 800 degree metal disk sits, below a an inverted cone of ice, which is suspended from the ceiling.  The understructure of the cone is a spiraling copper tube, which is cooled to freezing and accumulates ice.  When the piece is new, you can clearly see the coils, and it looks like a bit of an upside-down, cylindrical ziggurut.  The rim around the pool of water also is made of cooled copper tubing, so it builds up a nice body of ice, as well.  The whole apparatus is in a custom build refrigerated room.  It’s too small in the room to see the whole thing at once, at least not with the lens I had on hand.

Tom had never left the piece up as long as it has been, so the ice has grown way beyond the ziggurut phase, which I think takes the piece from a geometric composition to one much, much more organic.  I don’t know if I would have liked the piece so much had it not obviously been the subject to so much environmental change and evolution.  The piece isn’t static – as people gather in the room, and it heats up, it begins to melt, and the droplets fall right onto that hot disk of steel, and become steam.  So all three ordinary states of water are represented in this piece, which is right in line with Tom’s work as an environmental artist.

I like this piece because of the ice and the viewer interaction.  The cone of ice is filled with details, all veiny and crevassed, running your hands over it is just amazing.  It’s smooth and feels kind of like styrofoam.  It’s a truly novel aesthetic experience, and one that isn’t easily reproduced.  It just invites viewer contact.

As a group of viewers, we easily spent a half hour in the room, waiting to see the ice melt.  The ice has grown so massive that it just doesn’t melt   So imagine a tiny, refrigerated room, with eight people inside, breathing heavily, hoping to see a single drop of water fall that short distance from the tip of the cone to the heated steel disk, for 30 minutes.  Everyone sat around touching, talking and taking pictures of a single piece of art.  People would get impatient.  There were times when we were all on our knees, just waiting.  By the time we had to go the tip had become clear, it was obviously transitioning to liquid, but it just would not drip.

I liked the experience of being unable to affect the piece.  Given the piece’s obvious environmental metaphor, and the current reality that we are in unintended and possibly uncontrollable ways affecting the cycle on Earth, this piece seems to represent an ice age – an environmental power and shift too massive for us to affect – as viewers we are left cold and confronted with the limits of our power.  We are reduced from actors to observers of our own fate.

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