Tag: sculpture
about a year ago i was finishing up my last project for my metal sculpture class. my progression in the world of art that semester was a struggle. i was also taking an anthro class about cultural identities of art. my life was circumscribed by form v. content. in the class on form (metal sculpture) the teacher had some issues with my ideas of content. i didn’t go for aesthetic pleasure. i wanted to make people feel uncomfortable. i didn’t do this by making a ‘Piss Christ’ or anything of the sort. One project was a maquette of a monument. mine was rather typical, a long vertical column that had five feet extending from the bottom in a circle. it looked stable and banal. that wasn’t the point. but that was the way the class liked it. i, on the other hand, liked it better my way. flipped over. the five protrusions reaching up to the sky and everything precariously balanced on the column. (it was actually more stable that way anyway). it was slightly uncomfortable to look at anyway.
another project’s theme was ‘transport.’ i had to make something that would transport people. i thought about making a catapult but that was too complicated. hell this class was only an elective. I decided to make a chair. kinda the opposite of transport, eh? it was all made fround ground steel and the chair back extended up and had two little disc things coming out at the head which when someone sat in the chair looked like big steel earmuffs. still not getting the transport idea? well this chair transported through the idea of pain. i covered the chair with nails. especially the ‘earmuffs/headphones.’ when people looked at my chair, thinking about sitting in it was supposed to transport them to a world about thinking about sitting in a chair. the class didn’t get it. but apparently other people did. the professor told me that he kept catching people trying to sit in it.
out of all the transport projects, an arc made from cubes, a gun with a twisted barrel, a catapult, others, mine was the only one that people actually used to transport themselves.
if it sounds like i’m bragging perhaps it’s because i am, a little.