On The Fabricated Arts

_{Notes on Sculpture, the Gallery, and the Future}

_{Assembly 1.3.2 : February 2026}

_Preface This all begins with a headache, the pain of opposing thoughts superimposed upon each other. The constant rot of ideas as new modalities of thought render the previous cycle inert and non-functional. Charles Jencks says now modernity is over, the architect must become a “radical schizophrenic” tracing the thoughts of their designs down two opposing and non-parallel roads at once, the vernacular and the conceptual. The architect has an advantage of having a very rigorously defined game. Typically buildings. This is not so much the case for the sculptor, Sculpture is perhaps the most abstract and free form of art offered in most education. There is practically no boundary on what may constitute a sculpture. Tracing these lines forward, constantly anticipating authorial death I feel the need to rigorously and specifically define the medium to myself to have a coherent and consistent approach to my work. I would recommend against mistaking this as an attempt to cartograph or constrict the pure conceptual plasticity which is sculpture’s greatest asset. This is a way of rigorously understanding my feelings on sculpture to their fully explored extent. There are points in this where I will be engaging with concepts pulled from critical theory, I will do my best to provide necessary support and context to be understood, the aim of this piece is primarily to be accessible and easily engaged with. I do not have the condition Foucault had needing to have French intellectuals take him seriously when he wrote all those books so obtusely. I’m sure bits and flakes of glittery know it all language will sneak in, but I’ll avoid my flavor and fashion actually getting in the way of the text’s readability. I am also including a number of symbols (α,ß,π,σ,δ) as a guide for certain throughline ideas as to provide other potential orderings of the text. _1:Sculpture The first, and in many ways largest step to resolve these superimposition headaches and find a rational way to approach this potential “radical schizophrenia” to determine what game we are playing. How materiality should be approached and what personally I can find agreeable as a rigid internal logic. This is for me potentially the most important section but I suspect it will be the shortest as 1: others will build on and respond to these proposals, and 2 there is less “theory” at play, these thoughts are often the end products of the following assumptions. (α) In representational art the semiotics of the sign is the guiding rule for the viewer’s meaning making, but in our increasingly saturated culture these signs lose their projected meaning as used in traditional symbolist art in favor of a vernacular semiotics. (ß) The death of the author must always be considered. Though Roiland Barthe’s essay is originally intended to be applied to written work the assumptions contained within the piece must be adapted and held when making visual art: The author’s throttling insistence of a narrative will often kill a work, I feel if I have to really insist an interpretation of a work then I have communicated what I aimed for poorly. Emotional connection with a work largely should be favored over intellectual muscle flexing The act specific to “the sculptor” today is not the productive behaviors involved in the creation of their work, but instead the declaration of the work as sculpture. This has been apparent for all of the past century, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades point out we live in a sculptural world and the margin line is only how the object declares. There is nothing inherently sculptural about the venus de milo just as there is nothing inherently non-sculptural about a mass-produced bottle of blow-bubbles. A step further in specificity: (δ) the role of the artist is to declare their work as sculptural through context as a movement to suggest to the viewer that they may view it as sculptural. This provides for 1 the viewers rejection of a piece as sculptural and not processing it internally as such, and 2 the viewers prescription of something not specifically declared as sculptural as such. This accounts for the death of the author at its most extreme extent. This act of declaring sculpture is what we should be concerned with. It is the transformation of the assumed corporeal-abstract (ontologic-epistemic) relation. Once declared sculpture and assemblage that would be recognized as a chair has the sign of “chair” separated from it, the place where a body would rest becomes charged with how the body would rest, design choices become polyps of meaning on a charged surface, constantly prepared to bloom in the viewer’s mind connecting any one point to any other point in epistemological fireworks of rhizomatic action. It is productive to look at sculpture as this end product assemblage of implications as 1: this makes fully clear the absolute freedom of what may constitute a sculpture, and 2: it makes clear to the artist what they are doing is acting as director of the artistic gaze as held by the viewer (a conception of art within the viewer as dictated by their cultural codes relating to art). From this I believe it is most productive to view any image (including those produced by sculptures) as a sort of collage of varying degrees of complexity and intensities. The collision of material with image, the collisions of two materials mediated by their composition, the mutation of half recognizable elements into intentionally fleeing and evasive wholes. Regardless of if it is carved, screwed, grown, placed, ect, it is the assemblage of familiar images to gesture towards a fantasy hoping for it to be shared between the sculptor and the viewer. Looking at the image of the sculpture coming first a specific approach to materiality becomes apparent: as the work exists as an assemblage of signs and signifiers with their potential histories attached (collage), the material it is seen can be favored over the material as it really is. Approaching materiality anticipating the viewer's gaze simulation of material becomes a far more approachable method ahead of material legacy which often assumes a historical knowledge of material that the typical viewer may not have, and more importantly forces an intellectual process over an emotional one. _{The Gallery} This section grows from two things, I have often been vexed by though I am a sculptor and love the act of creation, I rarely feel close to other sculptor’s works. In investigating what I did feel close to in media it was so often a private or synthetic private experience. I feel close to films watching them alone, having special memories attached to seeing them for the first time. As we are largely programmed by our art education to aim for the gallery, and the gallery has the necessary life support systems for a sculpture to exist. Making work in anticipation of the gallery holds up a sort of curved mirror to what art can be, pushing art into more sterile and intellectual areas. This was one problem that I found a dead end with, but in investigating further my issues with Museum cards and the gallery’s insistence on dictating the meaning of their contents to their viewers a greater specificity and reason for these issues became clear. The museum (broadly not specific to art, this is the science museum, the art historical gallery, the natural or not historical museum.) exists evolving from earlier private collections and cabinets of curiosity. As illuminated by Tony Bennett in The Birth Of The Museum the museum came to find a form closer to what we understand today following the Great Exhibition of 1851, which provided the essential program for museums to follow. The museum is a civilizing tool intended for use of a working middle class in order to convey what power determines civilizing and cultured knowledge to "undercultured" lower classes, inscribing a tenant of culture to be strove for as well as instituting a hierarchy of culture associating the capital abstraction with the cultured/civilized abstraction. The existence and this program of the exhibitionary complex (Bennett’s term) exist as well to affirm the advancement of a civilisation, a ruckus celebration of how we (the culture) at present moment are the most advanced we have ever been, in our ability to capture and catalog the past, and our utter advancement from it. It is not a leap to apply all of these functions to the contemporary art gallery. For one as this program is a largely architectural one, the lack of difference in display technique is a dead giveaway. Furthermore the attendees of the contemporary art gallery very clearly recognise it as a civilizing/culturing mechanism and use it as such. That is what I observed most strongly at company gallery, the new york high art social clique-yness, though I don’t doubt the attendees general interest in the art and engagement with it, it appeared first and foremost to be a badge they were able to use to affirm an identity as cultured and intellectual. This is of course not a single case issue, it is simply most saturated in the niche, attendance of MOMA lacks the potency found in smaller galleries as the culture is not quite as new, and the more obscure the brighter the badge shines. As the contemporary gallery must affirm advancement, intellectual and cultured power must be illustrated within the art. This is the root of the issue with the gallery. This as a conclusion is powerful and the key to understanding so much of art and art education today. This is the reason for the little booklets at museums like MASSMOCA that explain the artist’s intent behind an artwork in anatomical detail, walking the viewer through every thought, as the museum itself is paralyzed in fear that you may not understand the magnitude of intellectual rigor put into a piece. I would even go so far as to claim that this is the route cause of the clear cut conceptualism which has reigned over the art world for so long. The artist in aiming to have their art seen prepares what they would imagine creating for the conditions of the gallery (be these physical or intellectual conditions). Even works that are more on the emotional side or illustrating more accessible narratives are transformed beyond the ropes of the gallery, polyps of intellectualism on a work are dilated and ogled. Although unchanged the gallery will prepare and glide the viewer through a work in a specific epistemological context and attempts to make a work incongruent with that are largely sanded over. I am highly doubtful that simply understanding this will allow the artist to be free of this presupposition (as do not let me deceive you, I have identified the gallery as largely an enemy and target.) and neither do I believe that just moving to vaguely non-gallery spaces will create a solution either. The artist is so accustomed to producing work for consumption by the gallery that unless the gallery is usurped, any space will be attempted to be transformed into a gallery in function. I have seen how classes prepare their work to be shown in VAPA, coherently for the most part, not a gallery. The view of the gallery as a necessity for professional respect is just too strong. So, embrace the abandonment of professional “respect” the civilizing factors of the gallery depend on what Deleuze and Guittari identify as Fascistic Poles of the mind. Those that need to assert superiority: “that invests the formation of central sovereignty; overinvests it by making it the final eternal cause for all the other social forms of history; counterinvests the enclaves or the periphery; and disinvests every free "figure" of desire—yes, I am your kind, and I belong to the superior race and class.” (Anti-Oedipus 277) So the inverse must be embraced, what D+G call the schizophrenic pole, complete deterritorialisation of art and the galley, short circuit all stoplights, bathe all maps in ink, abstract every sign. Schizoanalize.

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