My friend Adam is giving a paper at CAA this year as part of a panel on sculpture practices and sculpture curriculum. And Adam's got his finger on the pulse, definitely, of this discussion of how to intellectually value making something... so he seems to have largely outsourced the writing of this paper to his colleagues.
My contribution is below:
I make things that are fucked up, and I am here to offer a defense of skill-based learning in an undergraduate sculpture class.
My sculptures destroy themselves, ideally on a grand, violent scale, and ideally in a way that is ultimately redemptive. It consists of variations on taking an armature and overwhelming it with so much material that it breaks, over and over and over again, until a new thing emerges that has moved beyond its brokenness into a new equilibrium that has nothing to do with the original structure of the armature.
So my schtick is a serial violation of basic building rules: I put so many screws into a piece of wood that it gets perforated and shatters. I concentrate hundreds of pounds at one end of a lever and then pull.
(snap!)
I put dissimilar metals together so that one will corrode the other. I cover steel in salt. I court small errors and allow them to propagate until they become grand distortions. I build with paint. I use mass to undermine structure.
Right now, I have two huge dreams:
I want to make a gigantic Sol LeWit type cubic structure out of 6"x6"s that keeps growing and growing like exurbia, enormous--at least fifty feet long, and at least ten feet tall. And as this cubic, Smithson-crystalline wood structure keeps metastasizing, I want to come along behind it and screw tons (literally) and tons of garbage
(tires, aluminum cans, water bottles, old vinyl siding, electrical insulation, whatever)
to it, and then periodically flip it around so that the weight-distribution changes, and the garbage breaks the wood. And then I want more garbage to accrete over that. So that when it's done, you can tell that there was this cubic structure, but that it's buried completely inside this new growth--it's been eaten by garbage. The structure becomes vestigial. A forest of broken bones covered in striated muscle, or particularly aggressive cancer.
And I want to make a forest out of those 12"x12" orange-and-white striped logs that cordon off street construction, in which the forest floor is thousands and thousands of junk tires laminated together, and the immense weight of the tires holds these terrifyingly heavy pieces of lumber aloft, but not rigidly. There will be no triangles, trusswork or even joinery, but there will be defiance of gravity. As you walk along this tire-floor, you will be able to feel the lumber swaying in the wind, and this will make the tires quiver and flex. It will be a structurally safe but physically thrilling dynamic equilibrium of crap.
I owe a great deal to the skills and ideas that I learned as an undergraduate in sculpture class, in which I made all the same lame, overly sanded pod-forms, ersatz soapstone figurines, welded-steel architectural shapes and alginate hands that everyone else made. In sculpture class, I learned how to do it right. And all this knowledge about not putting purple heart into the table saw, and making sure you grind a chamfer before you weld, and how to sharpen a chisel, and the fact that a thick wax is going to shrink like crazy when it's poured in bronze, and the inexorable, corrosive battle that bronze will wage on steel, and how to make the Platonic Solids out of plywood in an efficient way...
...I won't lie to you. All this knowledge made for almost a decade of really truly smelly bad work in which I couldn't stop myself from doing it right, and all kinds of detours and discoveries about why build anything at all were made as I carted truckload after truckload of awful sculptures to the dump, and worked on my own future back trouble as I heaved them, alone, out of my life and into a landfill.
But how do you understand in a simultaneously expansive and implicated way what it is that you are doing when you are making a sculpture if you never stand and look at your creative efforts and your knowledge in the context of the landfill? And how do you relate your life's work as a builder
(because that's all sculpture really is, whether you're humping a hot glue gun or a stick welder, it's stuff you built or contracted to have built as an occasion for reflection)
to a larger conversation about human building activity if you never become conversant in what builders do?
I am 100% pro-Making It Fucked Up. But there is a haughtiness that we college types attach to traditional manual labor that we need to keep in mind when we are defining what "fucked up" is. And that protectiveness of class is inherent in this statement:
There is nothing intrinsic to casting, woodworking, or welding that makes them essential for 3D artmaking.
This statement ignores the fact that there is probably no more important artistic project right now than for us humans to get all deep and existential with our compulsion to build. To really examine our built world, and the way it interacts with the earth it covers, with richness and depth and total, visceral understanding. That while these crafts are not essential to 3-D artmaking, they do begin a conversation between the sculptor and the contractor that has the power to be rich and transformative.
I am here to argue that something important happens when you, who have given yourself over to an artistic and intellectual exploration of the built world and how to build things, lug your irrelevant, overly crafty shit to the landfill and put it into a sea of other things that were once crafted themselves, like the piles and piles of drywall and 2x4s that used to be someone's house. Because you have skin in the game, you understand this landscape differently than the person who bought a bunch of stuff, or contracted to have the house built. You are not an observer--you are implicated. You're part of the problem and will continue to be because you can't stop thinking about why we build and tear down just to build again. Why we need to have such a big presence on the earth when we are relatively small creatures. How fundamentally weak we are, surrounded by exaggerators of power and scale like planes and cars and buildings that are asphyxiating the planet. How fucking clever we think we are because of all this stuff.
As a sculptor, this set of questions is absolutely a burden that you don't merely witness--that you carry.
There is nothing intrinsic to the fundamentals of a sculpture class, except that they are the fundamentals of the rest of the built world, and that teaching these fundamental skills creates a strong dialogue with every builder of everything on the planet, whereas teaching sculpture without these skills creates a dialogue with Make Magazine and Martha Stewart. If these fundamentals teach 85% of all sculpture BFA students to work in a machine shop or as a plumber's apprentice, then I guess I would ask what the problem is with creating a class of thoughtful tradespeople. What is our allergy as thinking people to the actual building of things? Why do we want to protect students from becoming laborers if the students themselves find solace and engagement with a larger world in that work?
I mean, we know that most art students are not going to become artists anyway. What's so much better about churning out crafty homemakers, or administrative assistants who can't help but cleverly arrange the post-its?
It could be that this call to fucked-upedness isn't about the students, or art, but is really about saving faculty from having to look at yet another pallet of plaster and know that it will be turned, in a great dusty, gloppy mess, into yet another sea of veristic plaster hands and one clogged sink, just like it was last year. I empathize deeply. I don't want to have to stretch for something thoughtful to say about the thousandth or ten-thousandth slitted pod form of my academic career, either. There's no denying that it's hard to do anything but learn to weld when you are learning to weld, and that the assignment where you make the Platonic Solids out of plywood is so ungodly rigid that I would never use it in a sculpture class of my own. The facts are inescapable. Teaching students the fundamental crafts of the building trades does doom students to years of bad work, and the hot glue gun is the fastest path to actually having an interesting critique with some interesting things in it.
But is teaching all about getting students to make good work? Any student who doesn't know what they are doing can make something that looks kinda fucked up. But how is a student supposed to know how to "make it fucked up" in a way that's powerfully meaningful over the long term without first enduring the tedium of learning how things are made?
The loud, dirty, dangerous and arduous traditional sculpture class is not without its faults. It's boring for teachers and it creates bad art. But I honestly believe that it occupies an increasingly important position. It stands as a useful counter to the somewhat magical, computer-chip driven, injection-molded world we inhabit, in which our ears are stuffed with headphones and we believe there is no risk in the world and actually embrace white keyboards and know nothing about how anything is done or made, and in which all dreaming is done on the internet.
You can see, right, how important it is to be able to dream in real space, and how little else in the rest of the world compels us to do that?
It's definitely possible to look out at the glossyscape and believe that forcing all twenty students how to stick weld is definitely romantic and possibly even sadistic. But I prefer to see the revolutionary potential in the task. I mean, not as if nobody's welding anything anymore. Planes and cars and skyscrapers and bridges still require a welded structure. Why reject something that we still use every day as diSuvero-esque anachronism? Why buy into the larger cultural drive to cloak everything in a hard white molded shell that hides how dirty and interesting the built world really is?
Perhaps the most fucked up, revolutionary thing a sculpture class can do is not ignore its traditions, but enliven them. Perhaps it would be more fucked up to forcefully, with a dirty raised fist, object to this classist drive to render the built world invisible and protect our college kids from joining the ranks of its laborers. Perhaps the most fucked up thing a sculpture class could do is hamhandedly force an existential and intellectual dialogue that actually reveals the way heavy equipment messes with our sense of scale. Or how strangely self-aggrandizing airplanes are. And thereby illuminate how we, as a culture, can be downright aggressive about not wanting to consider the way our built world shapes our sense of self.
