last week my concrete culture teacher, sarah, asked us to give some sort of presentation "on where we think we might be responding to the city on a creative level." something to situate our studio practice for the rest of the semester. i pulled together a powerpoint (a few slides from it are above) about text in the urban environment and yada yada. presentation: check. from there, i focused on a list of "contradictions" i've been compiling to inform my first technical assignment. open/closed was at the top of the list. it wouldn't be hard to guess the first thing that came to my mind. make open and closed signs out of colored concrete using my newfound skills from the plywood form demo in class. (pretty much the only difference would be shape and adding letters as negative space.) technical assignment: check.
fast forward to my individual meeting with sarah over the weekend. and her, thankfully, telling me that i missed the mark completely. (what about it has the visual language of architectural plan structures? and why would it need to be made of concrete?) and that is where the learning begins.
with design pretty much dominating my studio classes this year (book arts doesn't count...) i had forgotten that there really is a huge difference between a fine arts class and a design class. we always joke about stephanie holding her own as a painting major in an apartment full of graphic/environmental design geeks. although the girl fell asleep during helvetica, she was exactly what i needed last night to walk me through this process. (it's funny that i supposedly value "deep dive" so much, but don't actually practice it when i'm asked to create something.) soon the conversation of open/closed turned into a tangent about row homes and the little slivers of vacant lots that pop up randomly every block or so. for me, the contradictions (and their inherent demand for a choice) were facinating mostly because of the space between. as someone who tends to see things in absolutes (go broke or go home) i am constanly reminding myself that i don't have to make some radical decision about beliefs or opinions, that the smartest option might just be in the middle, a unique combination of two extremes. the empty lots between row homes became symbolic of such a space, which, as stephanie brought up, could be presented in an infinite number of ways. (that's the crazy part of sculpture. the seemingly minor difference between 2-d and 3-d is massive.)
so much that i had never though of came up... we make things so that we can describe the undescribable in ways that have never been seen before. where does that put creating in relation to contemplating? taking action in relation to just documenting? then representation and history? reading cicero or seeing a realist painting or watching a war on tv? this is the stuff that would come up once in a blue moon when designing a concert poster. (or maybe that dialogue is there and never acknowledged?)
the ah-ha moment was stephanie suggesting that "maybe what you end up doing is having a piece that is only complete when it contains two parts that make a whole." hmmm. now we're talking. then i did the unthinkable. created what was in my head as a three dimensional object in space using my hands. no computer involved. (but i did use paper.) still, when i showed stephanie my idea her response was, "good. now if i was a teacher i would tell you to think of ten other ways to express that." great. and i mean that with only a little bit of sarcasm. it really is great. i need to be pushed beyond my first/cliche/simple ideas. (something bernard has been preaching all along.... i do give him credit.)
now for the conclusion of this (insanely long) story: i have an exciting idea for my first concrete sculpture. and it will probably be insanely expensive. and weigh a couple hundred pounds. no big. amid all that craziness (of which i am probably only diverging 10%) i remembered these two things: a martin puryear quote i tore out of his national gallery exhibition catalog over the summer (he was one of ken martin's favorite) and the website for an artist named truth (really really beautiful urban interventions/experiments.)
look at me, pulling inspiration from the sculpture sphere all of the sudden...
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