Hans Theys

 

 

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Hans Theys

 

The Flying 12-Pounder

 Conversation with Joost Pauwaert

 

Joost Pauwaert loves heavy wooden and metal machines and objects such as anvils, cannons and gigantic saw blades. He sets himself the technical challenge of making these objects himself. Can he get a heavy anvil to balance on a spring? Or catapult it and catch it in a funnel? Can he make a cannon himself? Or have two cannons fire at each other simultaneously so that the cannonballs collide and deform? The poetry of these undertakings emanates from the originality of the questions he poses, taking him beyond the usual forms of artistic expression. Actually, they precede them and take us back to times when science and art were closer than they are today. Or they lead back to fundamental questions in sculpture, which always had to do with balance, stability, gravity and density. By this
I mean that we come closer to a fundamental poetry, which derives from the beauty of the things themselves.

The above lines were written last summer, which lay wet under a cheerless sky. Today, six months on, we are ploughing our way through an equally wet winter. The land has turned into a misty swamp, vehicles have ground to a halt, the carts are mired, the ironwork has rusted and the leather harness turned mouldy. I slide open the meters-wide, hanging, rough-board door and enter a newly-built workshop, risen from the ruins of a pigsty. Glowing in the middle is an ancestral stove. Pauwaert fills a Bialetti with water and coffee, clamps the jug in a vice and heats it with a gas burner
as he welcomes me.

He is currently working on two big cannons (Gribeauval 12-pounders) and a large catapult with which to blast off 20-kilo anvils. The largest wooden core of the gun barrels is in the making on a lathe. It will serve to make the casting moulds. Glued-together beams have already been sawn into the shape of the gun carriages, but have yet to be finished. Sawn-up pieces of the steel suspension of a marathon carriage, which earlier this year provided the wheels for the scale models of two 6-pounders, were used
to make the arch of the catapult. The slats of the arch are held together
by spurious welding joints in the form of rings. (See ill. on p. 163.) Lying glowing in the stove is a thick iron bar. “I want to forge a sledge from it for the anvil to slide on,” says Pauwaert. He takes the bar out of the fire, places it on a large anvil and whacks the end three times to create a 90-degree angle.

Pauwaert: I’m on good terms with the scrap iron man. I pay 60 cents a kilo. Last week I needed a metal chair. “Screw it off that tractor”, he said.

- What material are you going to use for the gun barrels?

Pauwaert: Each barrel is going to weigh 800 kilos. A kilo of bronze costs ten euros. That means one barrel would cost 8,000 euros, just for the material. So it’ll be cast iron, which is cheaper. Originally field artillery was made of bronze. As bronze was stronger than cast iron and less likely to crack or explode, they could make the barrels thinner so that the pieces were not as heavy and easier to transport. But nowadays we have better quality cast iron, so we can make the barrels as thin and light as bronze barrels. Cannons used at sea were made of cast iron because they could be heavier. These cannons are 12-pounders. But at sea they used cannons that were three or four times larger and heavier. At some stage, I want to build 32- or 48-pounders.

- How do you make the barrel hollow?

Pauwaert: Barrels used to be drilled out, with water. A good, clean bore took several days. You need a lathe that is twice as long as your barrel. So five meters. I make a core of sand and then leave it to rest on a couple of pieces of iron in the mould. It has to be very precise, otherwise I’ll never be able to get two cannonballs to collide.

- You are building a concrete tunnel at the Verbeke Foundation where you want to fire the guns at each other. (See ill. on pp. 32-37.)

Pauwaert: I once managed to have two cannonballs collide and also to film it. (See ill. on pp. 74-75.) Now I’d like to photograph the whole trajectory of both balls. Cannonballs travel so fast that you can’t see them, unless they are coming towards you. Two hundred metres per second. Over the whole length of the bunker there will be a horizontal embrasure with cameras set up behind it. I need special flash bulbs, air gap or air spark flashes, which emit light for one millionth of a second at exactly the right moment. You need 15,000 volts for that. I hesitate to build them myself because it is so dangerous. In the USA there are people who have combined their passion for weapons with photography and have those sort of installations, but I don’t know anyone in Europe.

- You are also building a catapult to shoot anvils.

Pauwaert: I would love to shoot an anvil through the window of a gallery, but I don’t know if that will be allowed. At Verbeke I’d like to have an anvil fly through the roof of the greenhouse, which is ten meters high. I can already picture the glass shattering all around, glistening in the light, while the anvil rises millimetre by millimetre.

- You sound as if you are describing photographs.

Pauwaert: Yes, that could well be. I can visualize it clearly and I’d like to capture it. I also want to place cameras behind every gun in the tunnel. But of course I can’t do that. I will have to build periscopes.

- You are still a photographer.

Pauwaert: I love photography, but when I was younger it felt like a dead medium. I got fed up with the plethora, the randomness, the infinity of it all. But when I photograph my own work, it is precise, limited and exciting again. The pictures are unique.

- 12-pounders were used by Napoleon.

Pauwaert: Among others. Thanks to Gribeauval, they were standardized in 1765. Before that cannons were always one-offs. But if, for example, a wheel broke, it took a long time to replace it. Napoleon had spares with him (he laughs). The French writer Chateaubriand recounts that he was walking along the Brusselse steenweg – the Brussels Road – in Ghent when he heard the rumble of thunder in the distance. It was the Battle of Waterloo starting. I hope my guns don’t make too much noise, that the earth wall around the tunnel sufficiently muffles the sound. But I really don’t know. One day, when I am world-famous in America, I want to have two cannons fire at each other on a salt lake.

- What does the word 12-pounder mean?

Pauwaert: It’s the weight of the projectile. All the other measurements
of the cannon are in exact proportion to that weight. When you make
your own cannon, you realize just how many working hours must have gone into one battle. It is staggering.

- You mentioned that you have not yet made up your mind about the colour.

Pauwaert: When you see a cannon in a museum, it is always the colour
of oak. But that is historically incorrect. Until 1760 cannons were red.
The next thirty years they were bluish-grey and from 1790 olive green.

- You don’t make the wheels yourself.

Pauwaert: I buy them. Most wheels were made around 1900. More carriages were built then than ever before or since. That may seem strange because trains and barges were already in existence, but that new bulk transportation meant that many more carriages were needed to carry goods to their final destination.

- Where does your fascination with flying anvils come from?

Pauwaert: Anvils are heavy, beautiful and difficult to find. After the Second World War, you saw them piled up everywhere. But these days they are rare. And in Looney Tunes they often fall on someone’s head because they are recognizable heavy objects. Anvils are archetypal heavy objects just crying out to fly around.

 

Montagne de Miel, December 14th 2021