Jan Henle: Art-Work/Work-Art
You may not notice the man at first. For a long time at the beginning of Jan Henle’s film, Con el Mismo Amor, he isn’t there. Then suddenly he is, walking at a steady clip up a trail that cuts diagonally across the slope that’s gradually been coming into view out of the darkness. The slope, located in the mountains near Maricao in southwest Puerto Rico, is part of a three-acre sculpture Henle created over an eight year period beginning in 1999. The figure—it’s the artist himself—helps us appreciate the size of the piece. Those pebbles are boulders. Or perhaps not. We needn’t be certain to marvel at the pattern of their scattering or the way their pale intrusions punctuate the hillside’s curve. In Henle’s film the fractal quality of landscape is brilliantly evident. Plot or plantation, the natural forces that carve them are the same. The variable that intrudes is us.
Where does art-making end and the artwork start? In Con el Mismo Amor answers proliferate like the tropical greenery. Maricao’s mountains are themselves a work-in-progress, created by the collision of tectonic plates and subject to continuing atmospheric manipulations. More recently they’ve been shaped by economic and political forces. The area’s particular constellation of latitude, altitude, and mineral-laced soil attracted coffee planters in the 19th century, and they, with the help of tenant farmers, made Maricao beans a prized European commodity. After Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory, trade agreements and job opportunities changed; landowners pursued more easily harvested crops or moved to countries with cheaper labor. When Henle acquired the property it was abandoned, and local vegetation—its growth made rampant by the moist climate—blanketed the hill.
Sculpting can be a deductive process, a matter of chipping away excess substance that blocks the view of an imagined form. To clear the greenery and uncover the hillside beneath, Henle worked alongside jibaros. The term, often translated as “mountain men,” refers to inhabitants of Puerto Rico’s back country, many of them descendents of the tenant farmers employed by the Spanish planters. Henle grew up in St. Croix before moving to Puerto Rico and worked in his stepfather’s landscaping business, so the terrain of his piece in both its physical and social aspects is home ground. Work on the hill was accomplished with traditional hand tools—machetes, pickaxes—and techniques handed down from grandfather to grandson, but Con el Mismo Amor is not a reclamation project. The historical context is both there and not there.
That doubleness is central to Henle’s work. What is insistently present in this piece seems to be the hill-in-itself: its mounding but delicate contours, the incised line of the footpath, the vivid red earth that clumps and can be raked apart. Yet we experience it in two dimensions and at one remove, through images: this is hill as the artist wants us to see it. What Con el Mismo Amor also shows is the hard, repetitive, collaborative labor of clearing the ground and carefully planting new hardwoods. For Henle, sculpting and sculpture are not easily divisible. To form a respectful fellowship with nature and to practice working, as he says in the film, “without reason, without thinking, that you know what you are doing because you live in a certain manner,” are as important as the landscape that results. What is being cleared and cultivated in Con el Mismo Amor is not just the physical ground but a kind of consciousness. Where does man begin and nature end? To approach a boundary from both sides is to begin to see it as permeable. And as arbitrary.
