Posts Tagged ‘sculpture’

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Apples and Enamel by Lance Wakeling is a series of fifty-five process sculptures – each of which consist of a rotting apple covered in gesso and, then, glossy white (and in two instances, glossy yellow) lead-based enamel paint.

They are process sculptures in the sense that one views each of the apples as an individual art object – yes – but one also views the processes of gravity, entropy, and decay.

These processes are pictured through the artist’s use of the gesso and enamel over the apple’s surface which allows it to flexibly compress without cracking as the apple itself rots away from the inside (one might think of the look of certain Claes Oldenburg “soft” sculptures from the mid-1960s – Soft Toilet, for example).

Thus, the form of the sculpture is in a continual state of transformation.

Eventually, the surface of the apple will compress to the point that it has nowhere else to go, but, at that point, the form of the apple reads as a sign of decay as much as it does a solid form and, as such, one is nudged towards continuing to think of the sculpture in terms of the time of its decay which continues unabated from the inside.

What significance, though, does the apple as the locus of this decay afford the work?

What does an apple do here that, say, a peach or roast beef wouldn’t do?

Well, one could think of the apple as bound up with the Apple corporation – a sort of The Picture of Dorian Gray meets the iPad.

That’s one possibility. Another would be that on art historical / iconographic level, the apple is perhaps best known to be “forbidden fruit” – desire incarnate as described in the story of Adam and Eve.

And if one is to view the works in the context of the white cube art space on either a pedestal or in a vitrine (which would each mark the work as capital-A-Art), then this reading makes a certain amount of sense.

One could say, then, that the work pictures the glossy white sheen of desire incarnate as much as it pictures this desire’s ongoing decay.

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Friday, May 21st, 2010

Pre-Sensation by Hayley Silverman is an approximately four minute video in which one views a laser pointer track over the projected image of another video which itself depicts rhythmic hand-held camera movements over sculptures representing “natural” forms and abstracted nude bodies.

The motion of the laser pointer here is composed of improvised, arcing motions which reflect the improvised, arcing motions of the camera over the sculptures depicted in the projected video.

Additionally, the video is paired with an improvised jazz score by a band named “Willendorf” and is also intercut at one point with several shots of a male sculptor as he washes the dirt from one of his sculptural tools and, then, from his hands.

Silverman’s movements with the laser pointer are legible as a sort of pre-intellectual, pre-sensational sensuality harmonizing with the shapes of the sculptural forms.

The fact that she is pointing her laser beam and her camera lens all over these sculptures, though, is not a neutral gesture.

Rather, the aggressive scopophilia on view here in which the laser and camera ogle over representations of breasts, thighs, penises, and asses is an act of primitivist othering which mirrors and, thus, brings to the forefront, these sculptures’ own participation in this process.

That is to say, as one views the laser pointer and camera scope-out these sculptures as if they were sexual conquests, one feels, perhaps, empathy with them as in – hey, you’re basically raping it with your eyes instead of considering the object as an equal being.

In turn, the sculpture’s own problematic relationship to idealizations of otherness is, then, almost unavoidably brought to the forefront of one’s view on the work.

The history of primitivism in 20th century art, after all, (of which the sculptures depicted in this video are in sincere dialogue) is (it is widely thought) premised on an illusion in which non-Western cultures are presumed to be closer to nature and, thus, more pure than self-loathing technologically-tainted Western cultures.

What was intended as praise for these cultures, is received – in reality – as the worst kind of imperialism in which anyone outside of Western culture is reduced to a myth or a symbol of purity – that is, non-existent (or if existent, then existent only in order to serve as a reflection for Western culture).

Now, it’s important to emphasize the fact that the performance here is intercut with images of a white, male sculptor (ostensibly the sculptor of these sculptures) as he washes the dirt of the sculptural process off of his tools and hands.

By including this particular footage, Silverman both upsets the rhythmic flow of the performance, as well as nudges one’s view on the work towards the fact that the sculptures here were created by a white male artist as an instance of primitivist art.

Additionally, the fact that the name of the band who scored the video’s improvisatory jazz score – “Willendorf” – is presumably taken from the twenty-four thousand year old nude sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf, also nudges one in this direction.

As such, the performance’s physicality and sensuality activate one part of one’s mind, while the artist’s careful critical framing of this very physicality and sensuality, activates another part, a counterpoint, calling into question its own premises.

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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Same Shit Different Island, a sculpture by Joel Holmberg, is a thin, haphazardly bent-up metal beam supporting a rough chunk of concrete in the shape of, say, a long piece of petrified grey shit, which itself is held to the beam by a thin piece of fishing wire.

Also attached to this bent-up metal beam-armature are a small piece of wood and a second, relatively smaller metal beam element, which, in turn, each support a vertical leg of the larger metal beam-armature.

Before the sculpture is an object, it is – for the artist – a process which is designed to be replicated and reproduced through a broad spectrum of scales.

The work consists of the following 5 process-steps:

1. A beam is bent in three points, forming an armature.

2. Two wires span the uprights of this armature and a third, longer (and, thus, more deeply hanging) wire is suspended down the middle of the first two wires.

3. A tarp is stretched over the three wires, resulting in a hanging “hammock” form.

4. A cement mixture is poured into this hammock form.

5. After the cement dries, both the tarp and the outer two wires of the armature-form are removed so that a curved concrete shape (the piece of shit) is left suspended in air by the “third wire” which still spans the upright points of the beam.

One is, thus, provided with a blueprint for the creation of the “same shit” on “different island(s).”

As one evaluates the sculpture in terms of form, one evaluates it as a set of instructions as well.

It’s virtual art.

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Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Painting (with mouse pad) is a sculpture by Harm van den Dorpel consisting of:

1. A framed and matted print of an abstract digital painting (found by Van den Dorpel on the Internet) leaning against a white art gallery wall.

2. A vertically-inverted mouse pad depicting a cliche Chinese landscape painting resting on the top right edge of the painting’s frame.

When combined, the painting and the fan don’t seem to add up to anything. Van den Dorpel has talked about wanting to create images and image combinations that don’t mean anything – that create a certain neutrality. This sounds absurdly simple, but, in fact, it’s difficult. In an image-saturated world, almost every image ends up carrying some clear message or point or symbolic weight. In this work, though, the combination of the images ends up creating a double negative, an unsettling feeling of meaninglessness. The more the viewer tries to create some sort of connection, the more they get trapped in the middle of the work.

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Friday, February 19th, 2010

For 400 days, Charles Broskoski diligently worked his way through a downloaded torrent file of 356 .pdf files displaying computer programming books written in a highly technical language.

As he read through the books, Broskoski took daily notes compiled in .txt files, as well as a series of .jpg-compressed photographs depicting a list of the downloaded programming books.

In each photograph, he would cross an entry out every time he successfully completed a book.

This performance art is the bedrock of his work Computer Skills.

In the wake of the performance, there was an exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York in which Broskoski exhibited two trace elements of his performance:

1. A sculpture.

O’Reilly, the company which publishes the computer programming books read by Broskoski, agreed to send the artist physical copies of 250 of the books which he stacked in a grid of four columns – each column of the grid fit into the cut-out nook of a brick wall.

2. An epic poem.

Broskoski printed out and bound a book consisting of the notes and digital photographs he took during his performance organized chronologically.

Each page of notes in the book is framed by a pair of thin black lines which form a round-cornered box around the body of the text.

This framing allows one the opportunity to view the chronologically organized notes as something not noted, but written.

As the notes develop, the absurdity of his task mounts and the clarity of the notes themselves begins to devolve.

He asks existential questions and begins to view reading the books as laborious. But this labor gives him a thought:

He writes:

Honestly, the thing that resonated with me the most was the amount of times the authors thanked their significant others for letting them spend time on the computer while they were on their honeymoon.

I think what I gained is a heightened sense of how computers operate, and a better idea of the humanity behind all programming languages.

*****

With this is mind, one views the humanity of Broskoski’s performance as well.

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