Artist Linda Stein (photo: Bob Tyson)

Blades 208-213, 1993. Steel, wood, stone, mixed media; 8 x 9 x 8.5 ft.

Blades 197, 1991. Wood, metal; 18 x 45 x 17 in.

Intrigue 175, 1988. Wood, metal, rock, rope; 67 x 27 x 23 in.

Blades 196, 1990. Wood, metal; 32 x 26 x 27 in.

Thanks to Stein's innovative craft, once razor-sharp machete blades, along with outmoded male-female roles, have taken on a whole new meaning.

Linda Stein is literally on the cutting edge of her craft. The New York City based artist begins her innovative work with razor-sharp machetes, turning them into remarkable sculptures that elicit a strong response. At a time when the threat of crime and street violence seems unavoidable, Stein approaches this urgent issue in a unique and imaginative manner.

"I have taken this weapon, a potentially destructive weapon and converted it into a constructive form. By doing this, I am visually controlling violence," says Stein, who found herself intrigued by the machete's long, slow curve. "It was the duality that held my fascination. The power, aggression, force, threat of the steel blade contrasted with the soft roundness of its curve. By fusing the steel with curvilinear wood forms and suspending the sculptures, I neutralize the destructive potential."

The origin of her craft seems predestined. When invited to offer her most "outrageous" effort to the 1990 Bad Girls exhibition at the Aljira Art Center in Newark, New Jersey, Stein happened upon machete blades being sold in a street barrel. "This is the baddest thing I could imagine," she recalls, envisioning a perpetrator wielding a machete with its nine-inch blade in the dark. The cutting edges of Stein's eye-catching sculptures, however, are dulled with power tools to subdue their lethal nature. The blades are then epoxied to organic wood forms and other materials to form powerful abstract shapes hung from the ceiling.

"When the machetes float above the floor, they take on this soft presence," notes the artist. By hanging them at various heights, Stein encourages the audience to relate to the sculptures not only optically, but in visceral terms as well.

Stein began creating metal and wood sculptures in 1989, using machetes and other unlikely ingredients, such as soda cans, keys, and metal calligraphy plates – even the guts of an old IBM typewriter. Her provocative sculptures explore the relationship of opposites: masculinity and femininity, passivity and aggression, power and vulnerability. In her work, Stein confronts the apparent contradictions in our lives: how we can be bold and aggressive at some times, while shy and retiring at others.

The Russian avant-garde artist Kazimer Malevich once said: "The artist creates a new sign, this sign is not a form for apprehending what has already been prepared, build, and brought into existence in the world – it is a sign of the new, of what is in the process of being built and appearing in nature through the artist." Indeed, Stein's sculptures have created a new and innovative sense of balance, with its softness rooted in strength. The visual harmony between the curves of the blade and the reflection of light on it provide effective counterpoints to the shape and lustre of the wood.

"There are [no specifics agendas] I am conscious of when I am doing the work," Stein explains.
"In other words, I am aware of shapes, and there are visceral as well as visual responses to the work that I am doing. And some I know - at least the visual part, I know; the visceral part I only know afterward. As I'm working, I'm just aware of the curve of the machete blade, and there must be, in terms of visceral, a sense of power that I feel when I'm working with the blade."

At the core of her series of sculptures, which Stein calls Blades, are steel machetes imported from China. Ironically, the kind of machete that she employs was actually used as an agricultural tool in the Americas for centuries, after being brought in by the Spanish settlers, whose word for this broad, single-edged, cleaver type knife was machete. Initially developed for clearing heavy foliage, the machete was later used as a military weapon as well as a survival tool for downed pilots.

However, Stein's new installation, Blades 208-213, is a far cry from the machete's original plantation use. The massive, shrine-like structure is eight feet hight, nine feet wide, and eight and a half feet deep. Curved machete blades protrude menacingly from a rectangular base made of a surprising mix of found objects: dinosaur bones and fossils, keys, squashed soda cans, a typewriter ball, calligraphy plates that had been used for invitations, and various coins. An evocative inlay is achieved in the way metals, stones, and bones are imbedded in the wood. One piece combines dinosaur bones and teeth with prehistoric rock fragments on a copper engraving plate.

Whimsical Mix

The artist refers to the juxtaposition of these diverse materials as "the whimsy" in her work. Synergy is achieved in the intermingling of these varied elements, as the once-lethal blades lose their frightening aura.

Having always had an interest in tools and musical instruments, Stein recalls that her previous series of sculptures, Ceremonial Scepters, was "very much involved with fantasy tools and ritual objects of an imaginary civilization." With Scepters she focused her attention on the metaphorical possibilities of abstract forms. Made from bone, wood, metal, and stone, the scepters had an ancient look that prompted audiences to find symbolic values of both myth and ritual in Stein's work. They were enhanced by Stein's stories of the scepter's origins.

One such mythic story created by the artist relates to her 1988 construction Intrigue. This curved and convoluted scepter, Stein explains, "was used in the most sacred and holy of ceremonies of the beginning of spring. Heavy and portentous, this piece embodied the animalism so central to the beliefs of this [make-believe] culture. The scepter, when held, seemed to come alive in the arms of the bearer, to take on a life of its own, indeed to dominate the proceeding." More figurative than any of the others, this scepter, for Stein, "embodied the spirit of health and joy."

Stein draws on her knowledge of calligraphy to produce her dignified and graceful work, which is, at the same time, both scary and captivating. In Chinese calligraphy, a character is constructed around a pivotal point, called a radical. In the Blades-sculptures, the machetes function similarly, in that they become the central element, both conceptually and formally, to which Stein painstakingly adheres her mixture of found objects. Like Oriental calligraphy, the resultant work is an amalgam of discrete resonant units that interact to produce a multilevel message that is at once obscure and complex. Her richly encrusted surfaces give the feeling of ancient, ritual objects while carrying a powerful message for today's society.

By conducting panel discussions and providing sign-in sheets at exhibitions that say, "These blades make me feel . . .," Stein uses each show to build a "dialogue" between herself and the viewer, which she says gives her inspiration. The responses range from one-word comments to longer analyses. Predictably, Stein's machete work elicits a strong view response. Some words used to describe the steel-blade sculptures include: avant-garde, adventurous, eerie, hopeful, paranoid, and militant. One viewer wrote a poem on the spot to show her feelings. Many times the comments are intimate. After seeing one installation, a view wrote that she was a rape victim and the metal, fused with the wood, had a soothing effect.

"Every day we're hearing about violence," Stein says. "Women feel vulnerable. I like to discuss our fears and strengths. I've heard them say I;m neutralizing the weapon because what I'm doing, in fact, is filing the edges so that they become dull, so they are no longer sharp knives. I'm taking the aggressiveness and violence out of them."

As to whether the menacing aspect of a machete inhibits or enhances peoples enjoyment of her work, Stein notes that "there are as many viewpoints as there are people. For some, they find that would disturb them. For some, it would excite them. For others, it would be just another form of modern art that is new and hasn't been done before. Others would find it intriguing." People encountering her work for the first time are commenting, "Hey, look, art made out of knives!" for Stein, is the aesthetic equivalent of people first seeing Cubist art and saying, "Hey, I could do that!"

Surprisingly, Stein says, she has not discovered any real opposition to her work, but notes: "I mean, people who would not exhibit abstract art in their home would not exhibit this. But I have people who have these sculptures in their living rooms over their coffee table, so this is a personal decision that people make." Such decisions don't come cheap, however, with prices for Stein's machete-work ranging from $1,500 to $8,000, depending on their complexity and construction time. "Art collectors buy my work, nationally," she adds.

Stein is a painter who has also had considerable experience teaching art. In the 1970s, she founded Have Art: Will Travel, a nonprofit corporation that gave high school students an opportunity to exhibit, sell, and teach art in their communities. The company currently gives professional artists an opportunity to exhibit. Through her work with teenagers, some of whom came from violent backgrounds, Stein realized the importance of public dialogue.

Widely Exhibited

Stein's work has been featured in numerous one-person and group exhibitions in museums, universities, and galleries throughout the United States and Europe and is on display in many private and public collections, including the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York, the Museum of Boca Raton in Florida, the Newark Public Library in New Jersey, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

In addition to creating her own body of work, Stein is curator of exhibitions and acquisitions for the Shirley Fiterman Gallery and the Triplex Gallery, both in New York, as well as Art Acres on the Siemens Campus in Boca Raton. In 1992, she founded BUGS (Breaking Up Gender Stereotypes), a curatorial project to organize exhibitions that help people examine and dissipate rigid gender-based assumptions, and she has curated several shows in New York for this program, including the premier show, which featured the work of men quilters and women welders at the Triplex Gallery. An upcoming BUGS "gender-bending" art exhibition will be Men on Flowers, Women on Computers, December 13,1994, through January 25, 1995, at the Shirley Fiterman Gallery. In this project, Stein hopes to dispel negative associations toward men who paint flowers as well as women who do computer art. "I am, in a sense, playing on and scrambling expectations," she says.

"I see my work as Modern, avant-garde art. I have been included in articles about a new trend in art called 'Bad Girls.' I think there is a part of me that accepts that there is something about the machete blade which people consider bad. You know, 'Good girls shouldn't play with knives,' that kind of thing," says the lifelong artist, whose earliest recollection concerning knives were recurring dreams she had as a child of being hurt by one. The origins of her dreams were the sense of "powerlessness and vulnerability" she had both as a youth and as a female. Since then, she has gone on to incorporate these early psychological events into her work as a way to quell the threat they represented to her.

Stein also notes that it's unfeminine to work with blades. "I accept that," she says. "I derive some pleasure out of doing something which is typically masculine. There is the power and the vulnerability. The power of a machete blade, but then the softness of the wood, which makes for a more vulnerable feeling, a more graceful look. And there is the duality of masculine and feminine, and therein lies the concept that girls shouldn't play with knives. So I'm going against the stereotype there."

Indeed, Stein's work is going a long way in breaking down outmoded gender-based concepts - and turning some menacing weapons into memorable art as well. Blades will never be the same.