we've all got our junk...

Since our discussion on Wednesday about gas welding I felt much less daunted and much more excited about my next piece. I began looking at the artists Greg had recommended and was really struck by the work of John Chamberlain. This piece, Dolores James resonated with me, first of all because of the color and also because of the way the individual pieces interact with each other.

(Dolores James, John Chamberlain, 1962)

I had been thinking of my piece as a tangled mess of “wire” but realistically I don’t want it to be a mess. In Chamberlain’s work while often made of multiple components doesn’t simply appear as a jumbled pile of car scraps. The pieces bend and mold around each other with some appearance of intention even though the work remains gestural and intuitive.

I hadn’t really thought about color in my piece and even in thinking about our trip to the scrap yard I hadn’t considered the prospect that there would be colored materials to choose from and work with. This seems odd to me now since last term I thought a lot about finding ways to incorporate color into my piece. As it stands now I’m in a holding pattern until our trip next week to the junk yard. I think whatever I find there will definitely be informing the actual shape of my piece and how they’re transformed.

What happens when we melt something? The objects are disfigured? destroyed? maimed? ruined? transformed? united with another object? relaxed? stretched? twisted? reconfigured? freed? re-thought? reduced? re-used? re-cycled? undefined? redefined?

What happens when we see this piece? The faces emerge. They’re not disfigured. We see creation not destruction. Not even the records seem defaced just repeated. The face disappears slowly from one to the other as if we’re losing ourselves in the music. or are we finding ourselves? Is it even about music?

But who are we kidding this face isn’t ours. We’re not finding or losing anything, we’re looking at melted records in a frame. It’s cool yes but does it actually say anything?

What if we consider the name Through the Barricade. Where are the faces coming from? What barricade are the pressed against? The word through can’t be already completed because nothing has passed through the records - if those are in fact the barricade - so has the sentence been edited? are we “passing” Through the Barricade?

and what if we look at it from this angle. They look sad.

But so what??

The reason I ended up looking at this piece by L017 was because I wanted to melt things (still do, always have really) so I wanted to look at what other people have melted and called art. While I appreciate this piece for its cool factor I really feel no connection to it. I don’t doubt it has meaning to the artists or to other viewers - if anyone reading this has any thoughts on the piece I would really love to hear them - but for me I can’t get much past the wow that’s cool part which is why I started asking all those questions; to try and realize why melting is interesting. What I realized was that what’s interesting or cool about this is not that it’s melted but that it’s transformative. It’s faces into records or records into faces.

I actually started out looking at another “piece” that I saw in the British Museum three years ago called “The Throne of Weapons” by a Mozambican artist Cristovao Canhavato (Kester).

This piece is striking for the obvious reason - that it’s made of guns. What makes it so much more interesting is the significance of the guns. It’s no surprise (or shouldn’t be) that many African countries since the end of colonization have had a lot of political unrest. The chair in that context alone becomes more intriguing. What’s more is that the weapons Kester used in this piece were acquired through a program called Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) through which both sides of the conflict voluntarily turned in their weapons for farm and construction tools. What I learned in going back to find this piece was that chairs and stools have even more significance in many African countries where they’re viewed as symbols of power and prestige.

Personally, I connect to this piece much more than to the first. I think both pieces have an amount of weight and realistically I think the difference is cultural. I would LOVE to make a piece like this with so much weight and symbolism and significance but it comes from a place of violent political unrest that I imagine penetrates much more of a person’s life than any sort of political unrest we may face in our own country. Even without any history the piece addresses obvious violence which is universally recognizable while the first piece, Through the Barricade, is much more emotional, specific and personal to the artist which I think is indicative of our modern western culture. While both pieces could be said to be trying to connect with the world I think L017’s work is reaching out asking for our attention while the Throne of Weapons is silently commanding our attention and focusing it on a universal condition rather than a personal crisis.

Okay a quick two-parter....

I've come up with a possible new idea for the base of the sculpture, I'm going to look for a table to pull for the installation to set the typewriter on, something fitting the tone of the piece and to ground it in space.

I'm also simplifying the piece for now. I'd like to finish it to the way I described earlier with the wave over head and the pieces dispersing but for now I want to make sure it looks clean and finished for next weekend when we install. I'm going to keep the wave (?) I have and get that stable in the type writer. I'm also going to finish the back of it so that it has options for where it gets placed in the space.

Part Two!

As for the next project... While, I don't know exactly what that will be yet I've been thinking about layers and what's always there in the back of your mind. While that doesn't necessarily have to equate to torment it's at least one possibility.

I searched wire sculpture because the self contained seemingly tangled mess has always been an image that reads torment for me and I came across Antony Gormley. A lot of his collections include a lot of figure work but the work that caught my eye was his collection called Extended Polyhedra Works. On his website (www.antonygormley.com) he describes the collection as "In these dematerialised works the bodies are free, lost in space, weightless, and with no internal determination. They appear as emergent zones: you cannot be sure whether the bubble matrix is produced by the body zone of the zone by the matrix."

What I find so interesting about Gormley's work is that despite what I expect to be chaotic because of the wire it's still very structured. As seen in Touch (2007).

The Search for the Title

Okay so my plan for Spring Break is to finish Sculpture Numero Uno. What this involves (in no particular order) IS (drumroll please.....)

getting the base cut out

painting the base

finding a way to secure the "wave" to the typewriter

completing the wave

probably securing the typewriter to the base

finding an aesthetic and secure way to hang the whole thing

at least coming up with a second base option just in case hanging fails

I'm still on the fence about the base. I like the idea of it hanging but I'm concerned about it falling or looking bad or whichever. I'm also having problems imagining it hanging because with the suspension of the wave itself I'm wondering if it needs something to ground it.

Now that I'm thinking about it, depending on the placement of the piece in the space I'm not sure how to "complete" it. If it's going to be free standing should it be conical? Is it a volcano?

Back to making stuff land!

oh and I have to find a title

I get by with a little help from my friends

Like I said in my last post, I don't know many sculptors or installation artists. For me these blogs have been pretty empty as far as providing actual sculptural images but I've found it very helpful looking at everyone elses blogs and having ideas to bounce off of. So for now here are pictures from other peoples blogs that I've found useful. Thanks guys!

From Kim's Blog: From Rudy's Blog:

Let this be our little secret...

Once upon a time I realized I didn't know many installation artists. This was a problem because I was in this sculpture class that was doing an installation and I didn't really know what that meant. One day I remembered that every Sunday I read Post Secret, which is "an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard." (http://www.postsecret.com/).

The creator, Frank Warren, along with speaking tours, books and his own blog, also displays in galleries in what I would define as an installation. I began looking at these displays when I was thinking about font and text and how to take up space with flat objects.

Even though I'm not totally sure Warren counts as a sculptor I think the way he displays his work uses space in interesting ways. What I find most interesting in this picture specifically is the way the light interacts with the free standing walls and the shadows it casts from the

post cards. Considering the subject matter of the post cards I think the shadows can carry a lot of weight.

I know we've talked a lot about suspension but I also thought this was a useful visual of the impact of hanging things and reminded me to think about the height of the hanging objects and how people interact with the hanging elements.

'I can transform like Optimus Prime.'

So we've been on this Translations thing for two months. To be honest everyone seems to be saying it's so broad and I suppose it is but under the circumstances of what we started talking about it was a bit more reasonable. I mean we talked about facebook and technology and communication and how technology changes not only how we communicate but how we are able to understand each other, if in fact we still can. We're not translating any more from language to language but rather from interpretation to interpretation or tone to tone or emoticon to emoticon. I think we've all kind of taken steps out of this discussion in various ways but maybe breadth isn't a bad thing. We won't really be able to tell until it's all put together.

Personally, I think I've struggled a bit with translation versus transformation. So I looked them up.

translate (trans lāt')

v.t.

1. to turn (something expressed, esp. written) from one language into another.

2. to change the form, condition, or nature of.

3. to explain in simpler terms

trans·form

–verb (used with object)

1. to change in form, appearance, or structure; metamorphose

to change in condition, nature, or character; convert.

I feel like translation is the audial or the literal version of transformation or that transformation is the visual representation of translation. At the same time, when I think of transformation I think turning one thing into another where as when I think translation I think of pushing the understanding of something or maintaining the essence while presenting it in a different way. So then with the piece I have now am I transforming objects or am I translating ideas into a visual vocabulary? Or is it all just semantics?