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ART 308 / Sculpture Studio

Guidelines for Research, Analysis, and Intention Statement Writing Assignments

What follows are 3 examples of source-to-self essays. Note their basic content including:

· An initial short description that states who this artist is (not in terms of biography as much as in terms of ideas and goals)

· A characterization of the central conceptual issues engaged by the comparison artist’s works (particularly those relevant to the comparison at hand)

· Concise explanations of how these concepts are specifically manifested in individual artworks.

· Comparative comments that might include shared or contrasting goals, shared or contrasting approaches.

The more you push yourself to ‘process’ your research (not just regurgitating the ideas of others), phrase it in your own terms, and understand both the intentions and the and specific means of accomplishing those goals, the more this exercise will prepare you for writing an artist statement and performing the type of visual analysis (cause and effect) that your lecture will require.

Source-to-Self Example #1

On Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark was an avant-garde artist of the 1970s who is best known for his building cuts and ideas on “anarchitecture.” However, this is only the surface of a multi-layered attack on traditional values in Western society. Intent on the creation and preservation of community, Matta-Clark was instrumental in the creation of a haven for artists in SoHo that fulfilled their necessary creative and physical support. He lived his life to dismember the old hegemony and erect a new system in every way he could.

As Matta-Clark’s building cuts are the most well known of his works, they seem the best place to exhibit his ideas. These were basically sculptural transformations of abandoned buildings, often slated for demolition and worked on secretly (McGuirk 1). The end products were meditations on the gaps and in-between spaces, the interplay of light and line (Lee II 1). Gordon was not that interested in the objects themselves, but focused on the whole and the movement through space (Morris 37). These art objects were not works of art in the traditional Western sense, as they were neither finished, whole, rational nor self-contained (Lee I xiii-xiv), asserting that a work of art is never really a finished thing. They were more of a topic, the beginning of a conversation, an offer for a continued dissection and destruction not of the particular building, but of architecture and society in general (Walker 132). The building cuts would only achieve their full capacity through visitors’ actions and interactions (Lee II 1). Working at a time when idea was emphasized over object and the art object as such was nearly eliminated (Lee I xiv), Matta-Clark took on the most real and tactile materials and methods he could think of. Wielding a chainsaw and hacking through the physical and liminal boundaries of walls and floors, Gordon confronted the viewer with a real and tangible experience that they could not ignore or think their way out of. The building cuts demand a sort of “operative viewing,” bringing into question architecture’s usual claims to a whole object or snapshot viewing paradigm (Walker 131). This was non-architecture, a process of dismantling and reclaiming space, not an alternative architecture (Morris 40-41).

The complex nature of Gordon’s building cuts reveals him as someone who has unlearned architecture. As Derrida argues, in order to totally disregard a principle in a sustained challenge, one must have been well versed in it (Walker 129). The great care taken to, in Splitting for instance, cut a house directly in half with a one inch gap, cut a wedge out of the foundation, and tilt half of the house back five degrees (Walker 131), shows a great deal of technical skill and architectural knowledge. While the dismantling of buildings was definitely work in its most literal sense, Matta-Clark also argued that his art was more of a play than artwork: a game of unbuilding where every work was a practice or experiment (Lee I xiii). These were serious games, however, about the reclamation of things approaching social exhaustion, about the people’s right to the city and an alienation from capitalism and the state (Lee I xiv). At a time when the politics of property rights was changing drastically in New York City (Lee I xviii), Gordon’s cuts were a criticism of developers’ idea of buildings as urban currency (McGuirk 1).

The building cuts were based in a “sacrificial economy, same sort of ideas that made up Bataille’s “general economy.” The general idea is that of expending energy that cannot be harnessed for growth in the development of culture. Productivity is lost to some degree by neutralizing a space’s potential and leaving it as a space that does not serve an economic function (Lee I xv). In our society, architecture has one purpose; function is sacrificed for stability and permanence. In a system where accumulation is sacred, sacrifice becomes about minimizing loss instead of celebrating it (Walker 135-136). Gordon reverses our usual idea of progress and history as cumualtive, stating that “only our garbage heaps are soaring as they fill up with history” (Lee I xvi). He presents an alternative to the collective imperative to waste – a non-productive use of energy that preserves objecthood but wastes energy (Lee I xv).

Matta-Clark’s other major projects were centered around the network of artists in SoHo who established a cooperative community network based around the restaurant “Food,” the magazine “Avalanche,” the exhibition and performance space “112 Greene St,” and the artists’ think tank “Anarchitecture.” Food and Anarchitecture were the brainchildren of Matta-Clark. These were community-based businesses and projects with the goal of supporting and sustaining the art community (Morris 12). Though none of these groups sustained themselves beyond the 1970s, they were successful because in operating outside of the accepted system they managed to change that system (Morris 21). Food, beyond its immediate function as a restaurant, was a political, economic, and artistic project, a spatial and temporal experiment operating in Rauschenberg’s idea of a space between art and life (Morris 21). Food was a collaborative work created and maintained by a group of five friends, giving artists a place to work that they could leave when they had a show coming up and be guaranteed a job when they had a chance to work again. By the end of its life, Food had supported three hundred people (Morris 28). This was an experiment in levels of community: the creation of a small cell aided in the support of the larger body of artists by providing a service to the greater community. Food gave people a venue to show off their cooking skills as well as do food-based performances and find inspiration and a climate conducive to generating ideas (Morris 28). Matta-Clark’s obsession with food existed for the same reasons as his fascination with architecture. Food was a basis for hospitality and sustenance, but it was also a living and mutating medium based in superimposition, envelopment, consumption, and digestion. These were also ways of transforming space to fit one’s needs (Morris 17).

Gordon Matta-Clark’s work appeals to me because of its community base and desire to create alternatives to contemporary society. His ideas on liminality and space vs. place intrigue me, as they are concepts that I have been considering myself. The disregard of rules and social mores created an atmosphere conducive to growth away from the current system. I have also found inspiration in Gordon’s community’s goals of creating a self-sustaining community. The idea of “we need something, so let’s make it happen” has always appealed to me, and seems to blend well with art practices since art is all about creating things that you want to exist. Additionally, I am interested in the levels of a community and the way that those levels can interact. Matta-Clark’s organizational strategies are based on anarchist logic of small cells acting as independent parts of a larger communal group, which then interacts with other groups and the outside world. This structure makes sense to me, as it puts the power in the small group and allows people’s interests to be better met.

The artwork of Gordon Matta-Clark existed in the liminal spaces between life and art, making his life an artwork and his artwork more important to life than most is. He understood that in order to create the life he advocated, he must both live it and work at it.

Sources

Crawford, Jane. “A 1977 Story.” Abstract of Personal Letter. IVAM. Valencia, 1992. Accessed 17 October 2005. Online http://www.postmedia.net/02/mattaclark.htm.

Lee, Pamela M. Object to Be Destroyed. MIT Press. Cambridge, 2000.

Lee, Pamela M. Exhibition 127: Gordon Matta-Clark – In the Belly of the Anarchitect. Portikus, 2004. Accessed 17 October 2005. Online http://www.portikus.de/ArchiveA0127.html.

Morris, Catherine, curator. Food. Exhibition Catalogue. October 3 1999 – February 13 2000. Landschatsverband Westfalen-Lippe. White Columns, NY, 1999.

McGuirk, Justin. “Gordon Matta-Clark.” Icon. Marcus Fairs, ed. June 2003.

Walker, Stephen. “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections.” Architectures: Modernism and After. pp.118-141. Blackwell. Oxford, 2004.

Lisa’s comments:

This very good example includes extensive research, an excellent characterization of Matta-Clark’s overarching issues, and enough specific examples to address how some of these larger issues played out in specific works. But I’d make a few recommendations-- First, note how there is a tendency to rely on stringing together quotes from research rather than synthesizing and processing the ideas cited. In other words, I wish this student had done more to distill and connect the essential ideas contained within all the various quotes, and then state these relationships in their own words (not that quoting is out of the question). Second, I’m not sure some of the ideas focused on are as relevant to this student’s own work as others. But maybe this weakness comes from the fact that she doesn’t go far enough, and get specific enough when it comes to comparing Matta-Clark’s work to her own work. She does do an excellent job naming shared goals but it is the specific comparisons that are lacking. Maybe leaving the comparison part till the end is one of the problems (see other examples that do not).

Source-to-Self Example #2

On Kendall Buster

Kendall Buster is a member of science and art communities. As an undergraduate at University of Alabama she studied microbiology. Her science background certainly still influences her artistic works today. A Washington D.C. artist, Kendall Buster is a faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University and is represented by the D.C. gallery, FUSEBOX. Her work explores biological modules in relation to architectural structure. In her work, Kendall Buster feels compelled to demonstrate that “the structure is a dynamic system – reflecting not only a defined structure with an accessible interior, but also a kind of animation.” (1) Buster’s work reflects an interest in ambiguity and contrast. She balances opposites to create an appealing whole.

Several of the contradictions Kendall Buster is interested in are promise of protection versus entrapment, biological versus architectural, nature versus machine, open versus closed, and object versus environment. Some of Buster’s works also have erotic undertones from the connection of these ‘biological modules.’ I am interested in Kendall Buster’s work for these contradictions, as I feel they give the work a sense of ambiguity that I also wish to achieve. “Buster creates shapes that can be appreciated as purely abstract forms, but that also possess a ‘strong associative principle,’ calling to mind a variety of other subjects.” (2) Buster’s work also interests me for its balance between object versus environment. For example, Double Chalice: Joined and Separated, “appears light enough to blow in a breeze, but it has the toughness of a jet engine.” These works of welded, bent steel are a balance between strong architectural structure and delicate form. (3) The viewer can see each artwork as either a beautiful, grand art object, or as an architectural environment to be experienced.

One of the strongest feelings I feel a viewer would experience from Kendall Buster’s work is a sense of ambiguity. Buster herself states the ambiguity and contradiction offered in Parabiosis; “’[Upon] first encounter, it’s not necessarily aggressive – yet it is aggressive in a way. You get a sense of enormous scale with chambers that are not so enormous.” (4) Kendall Buster’s audience is an involved one: they are forced to curiously explore Parabiosis (image 7) because of its large scale in a small space. The term ‘parabiosis’ refers to “the artificial or natural joining of two individuals.” In Parabiosis, Buster generates an architectural complex that suggests a combing together of two independent organisms. (5) This form creates ambiguities from its obviously planned construction played against its dynamic form. The work takes the definition of parabiosis “beyond the literal joining of forms, extending it to include a structural conjunction of the architectural and the biological and a fusion between space and object.” (6) Kendall Buster’s architectural language is of science and structure.

This language of science and structure is one main element that attracts me so much to Buster’s work. The ambiguity she creates is something I attempt in my work. I want the viewer to be unsure whether what I am thinking about is large or small. This ambiguity, I feel, becomes a metaphor for the ideas in science and faith. Ambiguity between micro and macro also encourages thinking on various levels of scale: cellular, organism, environmental, global, and religious. Since differences are already apparent, I feel ambiguity also makes the viewer search for correlations instead of dichotomies.

Another contrast that Buster presents is that between object and environment. While one might automatically think of these enormous metal sculptures as environments simply for their sheer size, they exist not only as environments but also as objects. Kendall Buster’s sculptures fall into both object and environment categories. They seem as if they could be delicately placed forms, but they also encourage the viewer to interact and enter into them. Even smaller sculptures, such as Cells, (image 7 ) which may seem more like objects, becomes an environment because the air filled white cells are dependent on the movement of the viewer to create their motion and floatiness that is so unique. (8)

A viewer of Kendall Buster’s work feels like both a spectator and a participator. In my work, I hope viewers can be both as well. By creating forms in the medium between smaller and larger than human beings, I am encouraging the urge to enter the sculpture. However, the presence of another form inside the sculpture which is not visible at first glance will force the viewer back into the role of spectator. This balance is important to achieving a sense of preciosity. Kendall Buster uses ambiguity and contrast to create a sense of the biological, the mechanical, and the erotic in architectural form. The unique contrast and balance of parts is what creates the ambiguity for both myself and Buster.

Footnotes

1. Buster, Kendall, “Artist Statement (Fusebox),” Fusebox Gallery 2003, < http://www.fuseboxdc.com/> (11 Oct 2005).

2. Cateforis, David, “Kendall Buster: Sitelines and Suitors,” Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art October 1999, <http://www.kemperart.org/exhibits/ CatalogEssays/busterkendall.asp#> (3 October 2005).

3. Weil, Rex, “Kendall Buster: Baumgartner, Washington D.C.” ArtNews 95 (1996): 140.

4. Franke-Ruta, Garance, “Artifacts: Breathing Room,” The Washington City Paper 29 March 2002, 48.

5. Buster, Kendall, “Parabiosis (Fusebox),” Fusebox Gallery 2002, <http://www.fuseboxdc.com/> (11 October 2005).

6. Moyer, Twylene, “Kendall Buster at Fusebox, Washington, D.C.,” Sculpture 22, no.3 (2003).

7. Sculpture and Extended Media, Kendall Buster, Oct. 3, 2005, Virginia Commonwealth University, <http://www.pubinfo.vcu.edu/artweb/ sculpture/portfolio.asp?galNameID=96> (3 October 2005).

8. Shannon, Joe, “Kendall Buster at the Kreeger Museum, Washington D.C.,” Art in America 92, no.3 (2004): 134-35.

Lisa Comments:

Very little to add to this excellent example. What is not included here is the next step-- taking these ideas and being able to apply them to specific visual examples. She has begun to do that for Buster’s work, but not for her own. It isn’t as simple as just putting up slides and reading research text. It means illustrating an idea in real time. For instance, this student states “I want the viewer to be unsure whether what I am thinking about is large or small.” So her slide lecture should include her pointing out an aspect of a specific work of hers and explaining just how this ambiguity of scale occurs. Is it the same way Buster creates scale ambiguity? or are the intentions the same but the means different (as is often the case)?

Source-to-Self Example #3

On Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson is a photographer who operates in a narrative style. His photos resemble stills from a science fiction film- Close Encounters of the Third Kind is often referenced as an inspiration for his aesthetic and content, especially concerning “Twilight”, his latest series done in collaboration with the citizens of Lee, Massachusetts. All of his narratives are staged in suburban America and “concentrate on a tension between domesticity and nature”[1].

His series “Natural Wonder” focuses on the backyard space, “Hover” with street scenes viewed from above, and “Twilight” with garages, bedrooms, and other personal spaces. Done in color and made to mimic reality to a fault, Crewdson’s photographs are concerned with hypothesis and possibility, with portents and threats, with psychological undercurrents and unnamable fears.

Gregory Crewdson’s photographs depict worlds that resemble our own but are entirely of his own creation. Exploring the verisimilitude of the photographic medium and the filmic narrative, he “creates a seductive visual science fiction, gleefully calling into question our notions of truth and reality.”[1] Just as he molds source material from the world around him to fit his particular vision and message, I combine elements to fit mine. However, verisimilitude is not my goal. If it were, I would use actual objects and not things I have handmade or photographed to represent them. Crewdson uses taxidermy, but I sew forms from my own patterns.

In terms of process, Crewdson builds a set that serves as a microcosm of a larger environment created to fit the photographic frame. States Crewdson in an interview with Antonio Lopez, “I think one of the things we can get from photography is this establishment of a world.”[1] This is similar to my process of creating a small reef that represents an entire civilization acquiesced to ruin and overrun by nature. Crewdson’s tableaux are, like Skoglund’s, based in human space, such as backyards, neighborhood cul-de-sacs, and garages, while mine is an ex-human space, or even a completely non-human space, if it has been submerged under water.

The scale of Crewdson’s work varies. In his earlier series “Natural Wonder”, he constructed sets that would fit in his studio, and for the later “Hover”, he chose to work on a filmic scale, in order to take birds-eye view images of the action he choreographed. Still later, in his “Twilight” series, Crewdson shrank his scale back down to fit the rooms of houses in Lee, Massachusetts. The scale of my work falls somewhere between “Dream of Life” and “Twilight”, as my work is not environmental in scale but also not made specifically to fit a photographic frame.

Crewdson’s work, like mine, deals with a lack of human control. In “dream of Life” his backyards were teeming with strange animal ritual, decomposing limbs, and insect orgies. This is a savage world that exists on the edge of our perception, but constantly threatens to cross the threshold into our everyday experience. My piece echoes this liminal feeling of the recognizable becoming exotic, foreign, and threatening. Crewdson’s later work incorporates human models that interact with the unsettling imagery, such as a woman standing in her garage, dazed as she gazes upon an enormous mound of flowers. These models “act subconsciously, as if under the spell of a foreign entity. Their unusual actions suggest a mysterious narrative involving supernatural contact.”[1] While I want to evoke the same dreamlike, surreal state that Crewdson so often employs, the environment I have constructed is post-human and therefore if I were to photograph it I would have no need for human models. However, I wish for human viewers to interact with the space to behave much like the subjects of Crewdson’s photographs, as if in a trance, much like people behave while walking through a battleground, or the Vietnam Memorial, or the Holocaust Museum- solemn awed, disbelieving, abject.

Crewdson enhances the mood of his photographs through use of brilliant color. Quotes A.M. Homes, “color and light key the story to a pitch the human eye only registers in states of distress- the high hysterical hues of shock, horror, and ecstasy.”[1] These vivid palettes also evoke a sort of threatening toxicity that “have less to do with mutation itself than with the creepy evocation of a specific generational mood in ecological consciousness- a 60’s moment when, after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, bright and wholesome suburbia looked terminally corrupt.”[1] The use of over-the-top color is a tool that I also employ in order to create a kind of stressful hyperrealism. The colors used to make the coral forms appear to not occur in nature, when in fact they exist far below the surface of the ocean. When all together the colors radiate against each other with a sort of tense energy that I want to affect the viewer in the same ways that Crewdson’s flora and fauna do.

1. Homes, A.M. “Dream of Life: Gregory Crewdson.” Artforum International April 1993: 70-73.

2. Green, Charles. “Digital Gardens.” Artforum International May 1997: 114.

3. Schmerler, Sarah. “Gregory Crewdson: Twilight. Luhring Augustine, NewYork.” Art on Paper July/August 2000

4. Sheets, Hilarie M. “Studio: The Burbs and the Bees: Gregory Crewdson.” Art News October 1994: 97-98.

Lisa Comments:

Another excellent example. Again, these broader findings need to become ‘applied’ in the context a visual analysis of specific artworks. But broad characterizations are the right place to start. I like the way she sometimes uses contrasts as an effective way of making a comparison. But I wonder if this student could have gotten more from this exercise by using the opportunity to formulate a more complete characterization of her own intentions. As it is, she does a great job doing a point-to-point comparison (his work aims for x as mine does, yet he does this whereas I do that etc.) And it is true, of all the 3 examples, she probably comes the closest to this goal with statements such as “The use of over-the-top color is a tool that I also employ in order to create a kind of stressful hyperrealism.” Think about how useful this will be when she writes her artist statement:)

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