•
ART WRECK-0
N
ext time you're in the vicin- .
ity of a demolished building,
look for Howard Kagen. A
big, friendly guy with a
graying beard and a fond-
ness for tweedy jackets, he's a long-
time music teacher at Cass Techni-
cal High School and a part-time jazz
musician.
What's a music teacher doing
hanging .out around the wreckage of
old buildings?
Well, Kagen is also a sculptor
and, though not all his work comes
from such pieces, he likes to search
the streets of Detroit with an artist's
eye for rejected "possibilities" —
blocks of stone which he can haul
away, set up in a studio, and slowly
transform into works of art.
The thing about Detroit is —
especially in the Cass Corridor — if
you keep your eyes open, you can get
a tremendous amount of stone for
just a couple of bucks," says Kagen,
who hauls many of his treasures
around in a 14-year-old Ford van,
and is never without a couple of his
trusty chisels. "A lot of limestone
was being used here in the 1920s for
building. All the supports on the
fronts of the buildings, all decor like
doorsills, porticoes — all were limes-
tone.
"I got a really nice corner piece
once from a building in the Corridor.
I was walking by the place one day
and there it was, sitting on top of
the heap. I had to go get my van and
find some friends to help me lift the
thing — it weighed around 200 or
300 pounds. But we got it into my
backyard, eventually.
"I looked at it for awhile —
sometimes, you might have a stone
for a year or two and not even touch
it, just look at it. But, finally, I
broke it up into a circular base, then
brought characters out of it — sort
of like organ-pipe, looping, Klee fig-
ures. All the work was done in the
summer out in the yard. The piece
was too big to bring in."
Recently, Kagen sold the piece
— which he says took about 150
hours to complete — for $500.
Creating such work places
Kagen in a small minority of
sculptors these days because contact
carving in stone is something very
few are working at — mainly, .he be-
lieves, because of the long hours in-
volved. .
On some pieces, he's worked up
to 300 hours. You don't go any fas-
ter than the stone allows you to,"
says the unmarried artist, who
works most of the time at a bor-
rowed studio in Melvindale or in his
own basement or backyard in South-
field. "And it's a long haul to get the
thing together. And, of course,
there's a tremendous amount of dust
and debris you have to deal with. It's
a terrifically sobering medium to
work with but, by going slowly,
you're also looking very closely at
what you're doing. And I love to get
a hammer and chisel, a cup of coffee,
and really work up a sweat. I really
enjoy just taking a piece, setting it
up on the bench, and saying, 'Okay,
let me start — here.' "
Sculpting is an endeavor the
40-year-old Connecticut native first
got interested in about 15 years ago,
while watching a painter-friend at
work.
"We'd start talking, just compar-
ing jazz and art. He'd sit down, doo-
dle some things out with a pencil,"
Kagen said recently at an ongoing
exhibit of his abstract and repre-
sentational work at the Print Gal-
lery in Southfield. He was always
really into lines, colors, combina-
tions, and he'd share a lot of infor-
mation with me, as far as what he
was thinking about when he was
doing the work."
Although he'd done a lot of
model-building and papier mache
work as a child, Kagen, who has a
degree in music from Indiana Uni-
versity, said he'd never really con-
sidered going into art on a profes-
sional level.
"I decided on doing some
sketches myself, maybe putting some
ideas down," he said, adding that he
also began to spend more time at art
museums, an • activity he'd always
especially enjoyed. Eventually, lik-
ing the idea of constructing and
engineering, he began to sculpt, not
in stone at first, but in metal. Al-
though he met with some success,
the medium still didn't seem to be
exactly what he was looking for.
And, besides that, he was beginning
to accumulate his own personal
scrapyard. You have to," he said.
"I'd go down the highway, stop, pick
up pieces of metal off the sides of the
roads."
Then, one day, Eastern Michi-
gan University art professor Beverly
Shankweiler, in a class Kagen was
taking, suggested that he try one of
his designs in limestone.
At first, I was really miffed
about the suggestion," he said, smil-
ing. That's primitive, I though. I
want something with acetylene! I
want air! And I want all this equip-
ment around me, too! But then I
found out you don't really need all
that. Now, I don't work with metal
at all anymore.
"And," he added, smiling, "all
my work is guaranteed for a
Continued on Page 68
A sculptor combs the ruins of
the urban landscape for his
next work of art
VICTORIA BELYEU DIAZ
Special to The JeWish News
Howard Kagen sits among the ruins of old buildings which he fashions into works of art.
55