Art 308: Sculpture Studio

Monica Milstead

Project 4- Self Designed
ARTIST RESEARCH and Bibliography

For my self-designed project, I decided to focus on the aspect of accumulation of objects, and collections.  There is something fascinating to me about the types of items people collect, and the various reasons why they are collected.  A collection of objects usually signifies that that object is important.  By gathering and attempting to preserve certain objects, they are elevated above other items. 

Two artists who focus on the collection and the re-sorting of objects are Tony Cragg and Haim Steinbach.  Their works gather accumulations in certain patterns, re-ordering or reorganizing sometimes everyday items into ideas and visual patterns.

Tony Cragg is a British sculptor.  His work generally consists of a large mass constituted of smaller found objects.  The objects he finds: bits of trash, plastic, recycled materials are reordered into new forms.  The artist’s action of accumulation and strategic reorganization transforms these discarded materials into something to be contemplated.

Green, Yellow, Red, Orange, and Blue Bottles II (1982)

Green, Yellow, Red, Orange, and Blue Bottles II (1982) is an installation piece.  The objects on the wall he has organized correlate to single objects he has placed on the floor.  The floor objects are varying product bottles of the aforementioned colors.  And behind each of these bottles is a projection or explosion of the same shape in pieces of discarded plastic.  He has sorted through discarded plastics in order to match colors to the single bottles.  The wall pieces, which function as mosaics, echo and celebrate the shapes of the bottles before them. 

Because of how Cragg has organized this piece, the viewer must first notice color.  Critic Peter Schjeldahl writes, “The mosaic is all blues, selected from the universe of discarded plastic stuff by that chromatic criterion, and I felt guilty that I had never done justice, by carefully noticing, the wonders of blue.  Here was a chance of atonement.”   Indeed, there is a gathering of such fine detail and variety in a single color that can be glanced at once and read as a whole color.  It is upon closer examination that we begin to read these as single parts of a whole.  For Cragg, going through trash was “a fantasy journey through a land of strange forms and colors.”

Spectrum (1985)

Spectrum (1985), is also an accumulation of found plastic fragments—organized by color—into a rectangular brick that sits on the floor, about a foot tall.  It is a large mass of trash that has been reorganized into an aesthetically pleasing pattern. “Cragg's method of dispassionate ordering and composing seeks to make evident the vast array of objects and images that surround us, but with which he feels modern man has only a superficial relationship.”   Because we are drawn closer to these objects in order to examine them, we develop a more intimate relationship with them than we would have otherwise.

This attention to the discarded is vital.  For an artist to make art out of garbage sends out a message that, given certain attentions, anything can be art, or anything can be precious.  What I have chosen to collect in my own handmade boxes are by-products of everyday life in the culture I live in.  Dryer lint, used matches, dead batteries: products whose sole purpose was either to aid in a larger process or was created from a larger process, and then discarded.  Organizing these things in boxes elevates them beyond just simply trash.  Often collections seen by outsiders can be read as worthless anyway, but preservation or the effort towards preservation lends a language of preciousness to the objects I have collected. 

While I admire Cragg’s ordering, Haim Steinbach’s idea of systems is also just as interesting.  Instead of floor or wall pieces, Steinbach constructs shelves for each of his collections, and the shelves and found objects work together in order to form a distinct visual sentence. 

Steinbach uses the shelf as his method of presentation—as I do.  However, while my shelf is a found, already familiar object, his shelves are specifically made with his found objects in mind.  The found objects themselves are each unique—but he sometimes has collections of several of the same object. 

ultra red #2 (1986)

In his work ultra red #2 (1986), Steinbach has placed four lava lamps, nine enamel pots, and six digital clocks all next to each other.  And they are not simply placed, they seem to have been meticulously organized in a perfect pattern, according to some sentence that we cannot quite read.  Besides their color, these objects could be from the same domestic setting, but we are not told this.  They reference an aesthetic in consumer culture from the 1960s to the 80s.  “The artist’s decision to display similar items side by side, arranged according to the objects’ social or cultural connotations, is intended to provoke what Steinbach terms ‘psychological anxiety’ and to question the nature of contemporary fetishes.”   While his objects might not be collectables, by shelving them in specific quantities they become part of a collection.   

Steinbach’s objects are different from my own because instead of focusing on just by-products, he is instead tapping into material culture and objects of everyday use.  The need to have something is questioned when we see it displayed in a collection.  I might want that lava lamp when I see it in the store, but it becomes an entirely different object (perhaps not that of desire) when it is placed next to the cooking pots and alarm clocks. Even though his shelving arrangements echo “the arrangement of goods on department-store shelves,”   there is something eerie or quirky about their display. 

tongkong Rubbermaid (2007)

Another work of Steinbach’s, tongkong Rubbermaid (2007), consists of two Tonka trucks, a mop bucket, and a dog’s chew toy.  These objects aren’t incredibly difficult to come by, but he increases their complexity when posing the possibility to us that they may be related.  And how are we to get to this leap?  By examining his visual sentences.  They are placed close together, on similar shelves.  We are meant to read them as similar, but there is no real explanation offered, other than colors and material qualities.

The readymade is not a new idea, certainly.  Both Steinbach and Cragg are dealing with it, and I am also attempting to take it on.  By implementing an object that is disposable or already disposed of, the art object created from this questions the idea that art is a precious thing made from an intense labor.  I am hand-making boxes, yes, but then I am placing trash or discarded items into them.  I have a system for the organization too—the shelf I am using is a found, ready-made steel shelf that one could see in a garage type setting.  There are three levels, and upon each I am organizing the boxes according to color: red, yellow, and blue.  Perhaps all of the items in the red boxes are related directly, or they may beg that question.