Sculpture Studio Spring 2010

Project 1: Process

For me a lot of this piece was thinking about it in terms of a project. This piece was something I wanted to be able to show off to people, to have them be able to clearly see how much work I put into the piece. This piece was something I wanted to be able to brag about to people. For me the clearest way to translate that is to have people marvel at it in terms of scale and time clearly invested. These are both integral to the idea of process. To be able to communicate these directly I chose to work with a simple everyday object that could be transformed by scale and quantity. I directly stole the idea of using everyday objects to transcend the idea of the everyday from Tara Donovan. I then thought about how Tom Friedman works, and how he communicates humorous simplistic ideas very clearly and how he makes his art about the workings of his own mind. I tried to incorporate both Friedman’s artistic focus, and Donovan’s wide ranging ingenuity into my piece.

I feel like the piece would’ve communicated both those ideas more clearly if perhaps the scale had been larger. Ideally I wanted the piece to be 10,000 thumbtacks in the wall. Not only is 10,000 a very nice round number, but it is also nearly exactly a day’s worth of hammering. Each tack ended up taking about 10 seconds to hammer into the wall. The piece as I envisioned it would’ve been three times as large as it was. However the piece still managed to communicate the ideal of scale and work invested pretty clearly. The piece definitely elicited positive reactions from everyone I showed it to. There were some incredulous remarks and a couple of, ‘I don’t get it’s.’ However even my friends that ‘didn’t get it’ were still impressed with the work that I put into this supposedly pointless task.
The actual physical task of producing this work turned out to be strangely pleasurable. Like washing the dishes or cleaning one’s room, the daunting part was not in the actual work itself, but in what surrounded it. Looking at all 30 boxes of 100 tacks was very intimidating at first. However when I got the rhythm down it became absurdly simple.

The closest thing I can compare this to, was when I was in High School and I had a job filling medical records. I was notoriously unreliable when it came to showing up on time and was working as a lifeguard so eventually they let me show up after everyone had left. I would put my headphones in and mindlessly file hundreds of sheets of medical records in total isolation. Hammering in the tacks had the same effect. It was me and the wall, with my back to the entire sculpture studio. Headphones in, and a DJ mix going, I would hammer for 80 minute chunks of time. Each 80 minute chunk directly translated to 500 tacks hammered. It quickly became a mental game with myself. How many tacks can I do in one session? How fast can I go? How long can I hammer without breaking any of the pin’s heads? It was both impossible to continue conversation while hammering and nor would I have wanted to.
I would like to continue this piece at some later point and perhaps on a larger scale, but for now I am content with what I made.