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• Current Position • Educator awards • To Sculpt essay

Current Position, Professor of Art: Chair, Sculpture + Expanded practice, Ohio University, Athens Ohio, 1990—present

Awards

Ohio University Honors Tutorial College, Outstanding Mentor, 2015-16

Named, Ohio University’s Outstanding Graduate Faculty, 2011-12

College of Fine Arts Outstanding Educator, 2005-06

Modified from the comments contributed to a forum of Sculpture X

The  Sculpture X provided prompts:

1.    Is sculpture a category of objects, a practice, or a way of thinking about what one does?

2.    Is sculpture a discreet mode of expression premised on its physicality

3.    What are the skills both technical and intellectual a sculptor needs.

4.    Should there be another name for all that other stuff

5.    What is the most burning issue facing the contemporary practice of sculpture

Begin:

Outside of my more esoteric social sculpture projects I also worked back in the 1980’s to sculpt in chocolate the land of  ‘DAIRY QUEEN’, a work that was seen by tens of millions via televisions reach but revealed nothing.

I was also hired as a sculptor artisan to produce the landscape installation for the introduction at the NYC Toy Fair of ‘TRANSFORMERS’—at the time a revolutionary new toy concept that could shape shift from figure to vehicle.

I also worked on the sister-line- ‘Masters of the Universe’ who’s title alone is a revelation on American cultural attitudes—but all this was in life and is in these comments a digression—but also proved to be a formative education.

It was years later when as a professor a student asked me what is it to sculpt—and it was only then I looked into it—looking it up because though my degrees indicated I was a Master at it, and I’d been teaching sculpting for several years at a variety of institutions of higher learning I had no idea what the fields name really meant.

—I knew what it was to paint, print etc. I’d written an essay on drawing as the act of pulling a point perhaps a sledge drawn by oxen, or a hand guiding a cursor to mark on the world–weather that be the earth or paper. It’s not definitive but it would seem that to sculpt is to ‘push’ or better and more accurate to its linguistic root and to the vagaries of how it is practiced, to sculpt is to ‘push around….’

Digression skip as needed

When teaching particularly introduction level Art Studios I often show a slide from Bruce Nauman’s Bouncing Balls—usually this is a still of 4 or 5 frames from the film close on the artists testicles—it is not a conventionally pretty scene. I explain what the work is simply by revealing the title bouncing balls, and then ask rhetorically why would a person do this? Why would anyone think it is art? I then ask for a show of hands of how many people ‘have done this’ followed by a show of hands of how many people ‘wonder about that’ then how many didn’t raise your hand, and how many lied by not raising their hand during the first two questions. Consistently the group that hasn’t done it, doesn’t wonder about it, and was telling the truth is almost immeasurably small. —I then simply state that art is in part sharing what/who we are in order to belong and part revealing our mysteries to assert our difference.

The point of telling you this is to establish myself as not particularly deep or intellectual when it comes to what sculpture or art might be or is for…

…and this might be discussed at length but not now– okay digression over back to the text…

Repeating now:

It’s not definitive but it would seem that to sculpt is to ‘push’ or better and more accurate to its linguistic root and to the vagaries of how it is practiced, to sculpt is to ‘push around….’

This is perfectly descriptive for both the contemporary practice and as a descriptor of an honorable tradition—for to push is to derive energy from within and provoke an impact in the external—to push to frontiers, to push across boundaries to push on beyond the point where others stop this is to sculpt. Further to push around implies a plasticity of direction, an experimental based practice of trying, placing, seeing it, both here and then there before committing—(and if you’ll allow me to again digress a bit–this notion of pushing around rather then in a forward progression might be thought of as feeling for alternatives to the known trajectories and an acknowledgement that no point is final and no trajectory true north thereby rendering sculptings pushing around ready for the constant reiterations of the digital and a queering of all bi-nary tri-nary quad-nary limits). I propose that to sculpt is to push around ramification to the point of impactful evidence.

The Sculpture Tradition at hyper speed

Not in linear fashion but…Mud pushed, scars cut, gods materialized, skills mastered, Holes are pushed through figures, forms are pushed from pedestals, randomness, industrial embrace, the statue is transfigured into pedestrian happenings, video environs, scored public behaviors and cyber collaboratives, —and we sculptors are just getting started. Sculptures embrace of a vast spectrum of materials ends the possibility of encyclopedic learning in our studios and having produced a technique tower of babel-The field remains vital because each maker adds techniques and modes. All this has resulted in ‘sculpture’ eluding the constrictions of a craft and the establishment of any single recipedic, thus the perennial difficulty in defining just what sculpture is becomes in part what sculpture is.

Out past the gallery walls the museum grounds and even beyond the artists own hand the sculptors pushing is invigorated and off we have set into this unknown wildernesses both literally and as metaphoric abstraction. We are as always wandering in the fog–but perhaps even more adventurous is simultaneous to our pushing into the spaces of wildernesses, stratosphere, ocean burial and Stellarcs stomach we are also pushing into community. We enter into pedestrian environs and specific demographics where we must meet the people and in doing so our pushing around confronts the idea of a more democratic voice, a more plastic existence, and an end to the dual art fantasies of “its done” and “its mine”.  We put the heroic individual at risk to embrace a collective willfulness tainted by a subversive p.o.v.—perversion of vision.

 (per·ver·sion: something regarded as abnormal or the changing of something perceived as good, true, or correct into something wrong, alien or situated in an un-understandable  state)—please here remember that there is no true north.

I believe we must here pause and recall that if everything is art or if sculpture is inclusive of everything then there is no field, no profession, no reasonable argument for a life focused upon sculpting as a discipline and this I would abhor as among other more important things it would undermine my lively-hood. Therefore sculpting must have limits edges in order to ‘be’ as in ‘be anything of value’. I here will propose some clumsy defining yet shifting coordinates that might be workable:

1. The deliberate subversion of the ‘more-usual function, practice or form of a thing’ into serving a new and possibly esoteric purpose.

2. A modification of the ramification of an object or event is perpetrated propelled by physical or transphysical construction in league with a vision with parameters.

3. Discourse between an object /event and its space-local weather actual or digital is contributory to the effect or ramification derived from the object or action.

Okay big pause, invite editing and arguments—then again its time to move on acknowledging this is just a sketch of possible coordinates…smile  flirt, begin again.

Only for a relatively short time and only in some cultures is it believed that :

The art of a thing resides within the object-thing itself—

and even to say ‘resides’ suggests that ‘it the art’ is not  ‘of the’ object.

Globally ‘Artness’ has more commonly been thought to dwell within social function and or its transcendental or existential implications—thus the frontiers today in sculpture like those in society no longer lie in ‘object form’, nor experimental materials these are of the Amiri-European industrial era, I also don’t believe our frontiers lie among the conceptual either—as conceptualism has become a rather fenced turf, guarded with towers of the overbearing and all too ubiquitous textual analytics. This is not to say that these portions of our earlier pushings are no longer relevant to our work but rather to indicate that these are establishment and therefore not what is most exciting to be pushing around.

I believe the frontier our pushy ‘sculptors within’  look fowards to these days are the issues of trans-shaping  and re-forming the  ‘concept of function’  and  our ‘paradigms of the dissemination of thought and what is produced.’

My own family progressive liberals struggle (despite my earnest tutoring) with a sculpture that is not a ‘product’ made for collection by some form of personal or institutional aristocracy—

Or

as an emblematic monument to a stastically amalgamated ‘public’ blahness—

Or

as a proto-type to trickle down becoming a consumptive  product or service in the existing economy paradigm—

But might we sculpt these sort of notions with more Rodin-like thumbs in clay force, or with Amy Balkin like courage to form using law and real estate as mere tools of creative shaping and thereby define sculpture outside of object product altogether. Might we be aligned with an ancient yet still potent medicinal action–a critical lever slash social binder, active in a practice of artist, tribe, community, society, or culture  (depending on the scale of the initiation) used to collectively see ails, absurdities, and possibilities– and model alternatives weather practical or simply stimulative. More simply, might sculpture today be thought of as a bottom up modeling?  Here the same old and beloved formal concerns might shape ones pushing—pushing  us to consider the scale, structure  and form of our trans-interactions with an eye for crafting well the positive negative space boundaries delineating ourselves and our audience/participants or more likely our collaborators. Our ‘we’ (a we as broad or narrow as we choose) has become the stuff sculpted.

So then doesn’t all this render object making obsolete?  I think not! for though the art-ness of the new sculpture– this pushing of current boundaries at the frontiers may elude containment within objects, the object remains a potent catalyst in social situ. Well made and well situated the objects mere presence can require a trans-shaping of reaction—thus allowing Knee jerk taxonomic self reflection to be finally abolished in favor of a scrutinized assessment of ramifications. We now might prompt the asking of: what is this thing not as an object but as a self defined demonstrative action—as some change that has come to become ‘evidenced’ and empowered by a simple physical reality now rupturing our normalacy.  That all disseminated objects and events have ramification and that it is ramification rather then symbol that comes to house for us a meaning. Meaning the only fruit our actions might bear that is loaded with a juicy sweetness we might call art.

FIN