‘throw-sculpture’ May 2020

 

‘throw-sculpture’ n15, May 2020

 

‘throw-sculpture’ n28, May 2020

 

‘throw-sculpture’ n21, May 2020

 

‘throw-sculpture’ n23, May 2020

 

‘throw-sculpture’ n18, May 2020

 

Background

I’ve written about this small object collection in the previous post, where I explained that creating ‘components’ which could be put together into bigger ensembles, different arrangements or loosely determined piles used to be one of my main ‘things’. I also referred to not being so keen on ‘deliberate arrangements’ nowadays, and that’s the basic idea behind these ‘throw-sculptures’, so I wanted to expand upon that idea now.

‘Nature isn’t always pretty’  Of course it’s not! So to re-phrase this, and because it’s not only about prettiness but more in this case about things being in the ‘right’ place .. ‘Nature isn’t always the thorough designer we’d like it to be’. For example, a beautifully balanced view of a lake seen through a framing of trees, fringed on the far side with forest and distant mountains beyond that, might have a Giant Hogweed sprouting up in centre view. Although it’s placement there would offend most people’s aesthetic, the Hogweed is probably much more ‘true to nature’ than the rest.

We’ve spent the ‘lifetime’ of our species rearranging nature according to our needs so we’re not only thoroughly conditioned by this approach to nature, it may even be in our genes by now, either way we may not be able to help ourselves. Is ‘love of nature’ or more importantly the respect needed to leave it be, no more than a continually resurfacing crumb of counter-culture?

When I’m teaching model-making and we come as a group to the painting of surfaces, one of the things I most enjoy advising (because it’s most often forgotten) is to include a little ‘mess’. Especially when creating a natural pattern, there’s the tendency to make it too regular. Anything other than an industrially produced pattern will have ‘messed up’ areas or slight distortions which we can easily spot if we scrutinise, but which do not corrupt the overall effect. In fact these aberrations are what makes a surface convincing .. they make it live .. because the eye takes them in as natural even if we are not directly aware of them.

So the arrangements above are just as they fell, and there were certainly ‘rogue’ elements I wanted to tweak but had to leave alone. It’s not just about allowing small disturbances though, it can also include seeing the value of a complete contravention, such as the Hogweed .. dissonance in music, an opposing notion .. except that there weren’t any of these here because of the way I’d shaped the pieces.

‘there’s no such thing as random’  Or again, rather .. there’s no such thing as ‘completely’ random, though some would argue there’s no such thing as anything being random at all. Although I conceived the piece to be dropped as a pile and these featured versions have been left as they landed without any adjustments, I did as I’ve said consciously create forms that were likely to settle in certain ways, to reflect the fact that ‘natural’ is always a combination of two types of occurrence ..  those which are already determined by previous actions and those which can’t be. So for example the forms are all straight, and smooth, and of the same basic shape .. they’re aesthetically determined anyway, so however oddly they fall they’ll be united. But in addition their shape determines how they will behave physically. So when I pick them up with both hands to drop them they can’t help but align, like a clutch of pencils. When dropped they slide over each other, one of them can’t balance easily on another, and there’s no way that any of them can land upright. After that, or rather after a whole list of other things like that, it’s anybody’s guess exactly how they’ll fall.

‘the artist shouldn’t decide everything’  In prepared ‘statements’ of artistic intention I think I used to put that I was not happy with the ‘Final Word’ presented in a gallery, unchangeable from that point on. I didn’t really think about the notion that each person will ‘change’ what they’re seeing anyway, regardless of what the artist does, according to their own internal version of the world. I didn’t consider either that what many artists do throughout their careers is basically reiterate the same sculpture or the same painting, so none can be construed as a ‘final word’ just the latest inflection of the same one. So Art can’t afford to be as pompous as I once thought it was, and that’s come as a relief .. and a release! However, that remains part of my explanation of why I’m interested in creating things which can be changed; played with; repurposed; individually customised etc.

Is this form of work accepted?  This was back in the 1990s, and in Germany, when I first tried these things .. and some people wanted them! But what I wasn’t prepared for was when people said, in honesty, that they’d prefer if I’d make my own arrangement, which they would then leave be! It defeated the object, or some of it .. and I was too, a bit. But so far I haven’t gathered much of an answer to the question. Should we assume that artists have a fuller understanding of their own work than others? Perhaps. Should we assume that artists are somehow better educated, stronger willed, or better at thinking than others? I don’t think so! Does the final artwork represent just one of many ways it could have gone and perhaps not necessarily the best? Hell yes!

Making ‘throw-sculptures’ and ‘smallhenges’ in wood and PVC, May-June 2020

 

‘throw-sculpture’ group1 2020

 

‘men looking at stones’ 2020

 

‘woodhenge’ group 2020

 

‘woodhenge with dolmens’ group 2020

 

‘polyvinylhenge’ group 2020

 

Background

Almost as soon as we went into ‘hibernation’ here in the UK, I had the urge to work in wood. It seemed the natural thing to do in the situation! Perhaps it’s not surprising .. whittling wood can be very relaxing, especially if you’ve no firm objectives for the outcomes. I wanted something which could be progressed quite safely while listening to music, or audiobooks, or glancing at the TV, because I needed those distractions .. sometimes I needed to escape far away with them .. but the thought of achieving something constructive while escaping was pretty cool! I also had quite a bit of wood .. pine and ramin lengths, and birch from dismantled IKEA furniture .. which I thought I should get rid of, so it was also the positive thought of making something from nothing.

The ‘throw-sculpture’ group was the first, made from odd leftovers of ramin. This is a tough wood, not so tough for sensible mallet/chisel carving or using power tools, but tough enough when whittling with a scalpel which is what I’d insisted on using. The concept behind this artwork .. and the photo you’re seeing is just as much the ‘artwork’ as the group of wooden forms itself .. is one I’ve experimented with a number of times in different materials. Especially when I was living off my exhibited work for a certain time in Hamburg in the 1990’s I worked on collections of small forms which could be arranged differently each time, or thrown down part-randomly, or played with by the gallery audience. I tried to define them with various titles like ‘Variable Sculpture System’ or ‘Interactive Sculpture Kit’ but I wasn’t comfortable with any of them. At the time I didn’t know of any others who were doing, or had done, a similar thing, and that was probably just as well, because I’m impressionable like a chameleon, and if I’d had more contact with fellow artists I probably wouldn’t have been able to ‘see’ myself so clearly. The photo documents a ‘placed handsful’, meaning the 12 pieces of the group taken up with both hands and placed with not too much deliberation on a specially made mat of Douglas fir, with no alteration to the way they fall. This last condition was the most important part, because I’ve become very tired of ‘deliberate arrangements’. The pieces are shaped so that they will ‘organise’ themselves to a certain extent when dropped, but not quite according to our part-conditioned human aesthetic sense. In other words .. nature decides, to some extent.

‘men looking at stones’ developed as an offshoot from the ‘woodhenge’ work and the subject flowed naturally from that. It just ‘happened’ one day, because I cut the tip off a split end of wood and when placed on its feet it just seemed to say ‘Man’ very clearly! Nothing but filled trousers, if you like! So I made a number of them and this is the first ‘trial-photo composition’ featuring a pile of boulders I’d very painfully whittled from an old, hard and resinous length of pine, or maybe spruce. I’ve made a group of women now too, so there’ll be a series coming.

‘woodhenge’ was a bigger undertaking, or rather just much more of it, of which this test photo is just a fraction. Better photos will have to follow. I really regret not having kept an earlier version entitled ‘foamhenge’ which featured a number of standing ‘sarsens’ and a handful of ‘bluestones’ in untreated blue styrofoam. It just seemed very apt, including the stark ‘juxtapose’ of styrofoam being so fragile, ephemeral, synthetic and negatively ‘modern’. But the sanded, smoothed blue was also so beautiful in its own way. It’s almost gone now, the blue, because of EU regulations .. it was not benign apparently! So ‘woodhenge’ is more sustainable, and my purpose in whittling and smoothing quite a large collection of shapes and sizes, apart from justifying a huge load of television time, was an earlier idea I’d had for naturally-shaped building blocks. A more nature-inclined, less anthropocentric construction toy, so to speak!  No, with these you can’t build ambitious towers without them toppling fairly quickly! No, you can’t construct a tight, impervious wall, or a solid triumphal arch! What you can do with them though is appreciate how certain things balance in spite of their differences. What you can see is how even the smallest, most irregular element becomes a crucial part of the whole! There you go!

But you’ve noticed with ‘polyvinylhenge’ that my allegiances are muddled! I’ve been working with foamed PVC for so long, exploring and nurturing all that it’s capable of, that I’ve come to think of it as ‘mine’! It’s a plastic, which should not be considered lightly, but it’s such a wonderful, versatile plastic to work with! This was just a quickly thrown-together photo, and as I’ve said better are meant to follow, but the polyvinyl ‘stones’ are doing more or less what I wanted them to. It may be just visible that I’ve ‘grained’ the surfaces of the blocks by running sandpaper firmly along to give them a wood-like quality but I’m also looking at further subtle ‘pitting’ with blunt tools. The coloured PVC (this one is the grey, which is actually a very attractive one) is limited in thicknesses so for most of these forms I had to bond up to 6 cut-outs together before sanding.