Art 308 Sculpture Studio Portfolio

Molly Burtenshaw

Project 4- Self Designed
ARTIST RESEARCH and Bibliography

Chris Burden

Chris Burden has worked through a variety of mediums in order to portray a similar motif throughout his art career. He originally became famous for his performance work in the 1970’s which involved a good deal of self mutilation and torture in an effort to make a comment about the nature of art as no separate from our human functions between the events of life and death (Schjeldahl). Burden’s effort to encapsulate the experience of life, without adhering to any particular notions of “art” was maintained as he moved on to work with machines as a replacement for the body.

Following in the footsteps of the Dada movement, Burden sought to express the terrifying and mystical aspects of machines and technology in our modern society. The pieces he creates do not differentiate between “good” and “evil”, but instead draw viewers into the narrative of the project (Smith). His entire body of work involving technology is an attempt to escape from the overwhelming presence of machinery in society by trivializing it in the sculptures he creates (Kuspit, 65). Part of his method of achieving this goal is to involve playful materials, such as toys, in many of the works, as well as creating grandiose and monumental structures that are ambiguous and overreaching to the point that they can’t be taken seriously (Kuspit, 71). By disempowering the machines of their control over us, Burden revisits the themes of redemption and liberation that were so integral to his earlier body art (Stonard).

Despite any attempts to free the machine or escape from it, all of Burden’s work still features an awe and fascination with the mystery and power of technology. In works such as The Flying Steamroller (1993) he creates a type of aesthetic moment in which the steamroller flies across the gallery, and viewers are left wondering about what kind of spirit lies behind such a entrancing action (Kuspit, 57).

This essential mystery of the machine is the idea that I am attempting explore through my own work. Like Burden, I am not attempting to create a machine that is functional or recognizable. By giving the machine an ambiguous form and function I am removing it from our everyday experience and placing it on a more symbolic level of technology and its representation in the physical realm. Many of Burden’s mechanical works involve biblical and religious comparisons such as Samson, Icarus, and Medusa’s Head. Because humans have created these structures, there is an undeniable piece of humanity and its spirituality captured in the structure. The type of power that machines hold over the functionality of today’s world gives them this religious power through a different vessel. While Burden attempts to remove the mind control machines have over humanity through his structures, he is still fascinated and amazed by what man has created to control himself.

Burden mocks and destroys machines and their conformist nature in order to allow humans to regain their individuality. Instead of destroying the power that machines have garnered, I instead want to explore what other aspects of humanity machines have yet to imitate and overpower – specifically the ideas of feeling and free will. Burden’s structures do not often feature representations of human form since he is dealing more with the aspects of cities and societies of machines, while I am focusing more on the individual piece of machinery that is attempting to gain the power that humans have.

While specific details are different in our approaches to the problem, Burden deals with the same issue of the ethics of power in the relationship between humans and machines that I am addressing (Schjeldahl). We also both recognize the inherent mystery that revolves around machines and their place and overarching power in a land of humans. Burden attempts to enshrine this mystery in his work while at the same time trying to remove the terrifying aspect of the machine. My piece is also focused on this dichotomy of the good and ill of technology and its increasing development towards human like functions. It can’t be denied how useful modern technology is in the world, but will it one day reach the point where machines cannot be differentiated from humans? Will humans even have a place in their own world outside of flipping the switch for the machines to function? Grenzen describes such nihilistic ideas in Burden’s work as, “the machine is an ironic manifestation of human devilishness, a kind of Mephistophelean gift for which we eventually pay with our lives” (Kuspit, 67).

There is a terror in the development of machines to level of our own consciousness, but the soul that exists within machinery, or that is imagined there by human thought, has a kind of religious draw that makes it too fascinating to completely quench.

Kuspit, Donald. Chris Burden: Beyond the Limits. Germany: Cantz, 1996.
Schjeldahl, Peter. "Chris Burden and the Limits of Art." The New Yorker (2007). 18 Apr. 2008 <http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2007/05/14/070514craw_artworld_schjeldahl>.
Smith, Roberta. "Review/Art; 'Medusa's Head,' Without the Snakes." The New York Times 12 July 1991. 18 Apr. 2008 <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6D71F3EF931A25754C0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1>.
Stonard, John-Paul. "Chris Burden. (American, Born 1946)." MoMA.Org. 2007. Museum of Modern Art. 18 Apr. 2008 <http://www.moma.org/collection/details.php?artist_id=871>.

Jean Tinguely

Tinguely’s work is one of great evolution over the decades, but it has always featured machines and their parts in varied combinations to represent some human idea, and later a human form. Like Burden, Tinguely works with abstract and complex mechanical structures in order to portray a comment on modern society.

As an heir to the Dada revolution, Tinguely captured and fore fronted the idea of destruction and entropy in his works. He is likely the most well known artist in the act of using “destruction as a work of art and art as destruction” (Hulten, 35). His interest laid in “dematerializing art” and making the produce of the artwork or its performance more important than the artwork itself. His “meta-mechanics” drawing machines were the first indication of this, as he destroyed the machines that didn’t produce drawings he was satisfied with (Hulten, 80). Later, Tinguely moved on to his world-renowned self-destructing machines as the ultimate expression of what he believed to be the basic law of the universe: that everything will be destroyed through movement.

These explosive pieces of technology had moved Tinguely from celebrating the aesthetics of machines to representing dark metaphors for life in the industrial age. These and later works capture the anxieties and horrors of modernity (ArtandCulture). Complexities of the will and capacity to do good or ill of machines and their creators are incorporated not in a single work of Tinguely’s, but across the entire spectrum of his career.

In his later years, Tinguely moved much more towards representing the human form in his pieces, and it is this period that most influenced the intentions of my final project. Beginning with the project Eureka, Tinguely moved towards a parody of human movements in his machines, and personified them with human characteristics (Hulten, 278). In a similar fashion to Burden, Tinguely began to make caricatures of the utilitarian, mechanical world through his structures with the use of recognizable images. (Graulich). However, Tinguely was attempting to not overcome the power of technology but more to make his audience aware of it through his work.

His life project, le cyclop is the ultimate realization of the disconnect between humans and the machine’s representation of them. The term often used in the discussion of the overlap is “uncanny valley”, which is the point at which a machine becomes too human-like and is utterly repulsive to humans. Neither I nor Tinguely are attempting to accurately represent the human form in our work, but by referencing it in a way that is completely inhuman the piece becomes disturbing to a viewer. I want to harness this type of discontent in order to make viewers think about the relationship between humans and machines, what the modern advances in technology can lead to, and whether humans really want to follow down that path.

My final project is similar to Tinguely’s work in both physical representation as well as metaphorical meaning; though it may not appear as such on the surface. I do not have the time, knowledge, or means to make the kind of great kinetic machines Tinguely created, yet I do still have a desire to incorporate light and sound into the work in order to make it a machine with a function, even if it is one that is unknowable. Tinguely avoided using modern machines because he felt that older parts conveyed the love and attention of humans much more so than current technology (Hulten, 308). I am of similar sentiments on this idea, but chose instead to use pieces of modern technology to contrast with the need for human touch.

Tinguely’s greatest fame came from his deconstructive methods, and this has been a notion I’ve been interested in since the beginning of the semester. In my piece Rot, the whole purpose was to observe the natural change of time as realized through decay and entropy. My final piece, though it does not self destruct, is made of bits of dead and unusable machines that I’ve taken apart by hand. The reconstruction of them into a new work is not supposed to be something cutting edge or workable, but a mishmash of forgotten parts that are trying to form together into something greater. Tinguely’s le cyclop has been described as “marked by a metaphorical violence”, a machine that is beautiful yet terrifying (Johnston). The machine I am creating is one with a history and an individualistic nature that is intended to encompass feelings of horror but also a desire that can’t be ignored. The pull between love, hope, and desire and hate, distrust, and entrapment in the face of modern technology and all its implications is the foundations for the work. The myriad of feelings is not going to present for each person, but as long as they can walk away with unresolved feelings and discontentment over the nature of the machine, its purpose will be completed.

"ArtandCulture Artist: Jean Tinguely." ArtandCulture. 19 Apr. 2008 <http://www.artandculture.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ACLive.woa/wa/artist?id=85>.
Graulich, Gerhard. "Jean Tinguely." Tate Collection. 19 Apr. 2008 <http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2046&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio>.
Hulten, Pontus. Jean Tinguely: Meta. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1972.
Johnston, Jill. "The Cyclops of Fontainebleau - Sculpture, Jean Tinguely and Niki De Saint Phalle, France." Art in America June 1996. 19 Apr. 2008 <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n6_v84/ai_18356707/pg_1>.