Approaches to Process and the Valuation of Materials -Lecture notes

I spill my coffee on this page on which I am writing about materials and processes.

The process of dropping, the process of the paper slowly absorbing the brown, wet material, the impact –all results in an image, a record of an event, and a distinct coloured shape.

As 21st Century Sculptors we might feel that any material and any process –as well as any combination of materials and processes – is available to us.

From this bewildering field of possibilities we could begin to talk about process and materials by trying to separate them into some kind of categories.

This could be done in a number of ways e.g. traditional art processes and commercial or industrial processes, domestic processes, incongruous or global processes etc. Materials could be organised according to relative value like precious and semi-precious stones, all the way down to house dust etc.

Here, I am just going to try and make one or two separations and simply illustrate certain principles for you to take away and put to use in your own ways.

One important difference might be to separate out those materials and processes that we want the audience to know about, to see and to think about as part of the vakue of the work. And a good enough example of this could well be Coffee.

The don of Arte Povera Jannis Kounellis, placed coffee beans in the gallery, along with several other base materials of or everyday life, simply laying them out, without processing them.

They appeared in the kind of sacks that I imagine Kounellis would have witnessed as a child growing up in his home town -the busy Greek port of Piraeus near Athens.

This location gave Kounellis the child a special perception of the society in which he lived. Unlike a child of the suburbs or some land-locked city who sees the world through screens and superstores, Kounellis was able to se the coal, sugar, pulses, coffee, cement and timber from which his society was really built, and see it physically arriving in its raw state, a state prior to its processing and commodification, branding and display.

It may be also worth pointing out that the docks at Piraeus are probably no-longer the kind of place that Kounellis witnessed as a child. Another artist, called Allen Sekula made work documenting the new container-ised shipping systems by means of which commodities and base materials alike are transported world-wide using uniform containers, uniform ports and uniform trucks.

They arrive in heavily secured container ports where the public are stopped far from the dockside itself by huge strong gates, security guards and acres of anonymous-looking containers.

Instead of Kounellis’ evocative childhood experience, Sekula seems to imply, today we have to try hard to imagine what might fill the thousands of opaque containers we see there or see passing us on the motorways of the world. Everything is hidden until the point of sale when suddenly the produce, the coffee or apples or the flat screen TVs appear before us, perfect and shining, brightly illuminated and surrounded by signs that encourage us to buy.

Passing into this more efficient and profitable age coincides with the passing away of an age in which a certain romance might once have been associated with the transportation of the base materials of our lives.

Occasionally we hear of a shipwreck, when millions of rubber ducks, bound for the bathrooms of the U.S.A are spilled out onto the Pacific Ocean, or Kawasaki motorbikes in boxes are washed up on the Cornish coast. Perhaps sips full of sugar or sand DO sink, but we only seem to hear of oil, oil that fuels our society’s constant combustion, providing much of its comfort and yet simultaneously undermining its security.

Materials can change their meaning simply by displacing them. Oil, in the wrong place, immediately becomes a vile pollutant, in an Audi it gives you Vroom and in a land controlled by a hostile regime it becomes an excuse for war.

While writing these thoughts away with my fountain pen, fuelled by the remaining coffee left from the spill, and grateful for the material of the clean, lined pages that encourage me to go on, my pen becomes scratchy and dry, and I’m forced to top and refill it. In the process I spill some of this sacred liquid too.

I wonder just what the ink is, how it is made and where it comes from. I recall looking into it a while ago and deciding it was burnt wood dissolved into water, but only after a friend had suggested it was akin to the ink of the Octopus, who, like every serious writer, spends much of his life in dark places and squirts the stuff out whenever they are afraid.

As I refill the pen I wonder where I’d be without it, how I’d earn a living, how I’d organise and represent what goes through my head everyday, and about the fact that, with just a pen, some ink and some paper, and the process of writing, I can invent and give form to anything I can imagine.

The influential, intelligent and often comical sculptor Charles ray once produced a large cube which looked like a solid mass of stone or steel –echoing some of his minimalist contemporaries- until some slight tremble or reflection made the audience aware that what they were looking at was, after all, a glass cube filled to the very brim with black ink and thus had none of the resilience they had imagined. Nevertheless, it may have left them thinking –as I have done above – about the profundity of ink in our culture, of all the art and meaning and officialdom for which it is responsible and has been for thousands of years.

For the grown-up artist Kounellis, and for some of his Arte Povera fellows, base materials were an excellent way of reminding their audience of both the political and the poetic implications of considering the fundamentals of modern life (though here I am concentrating on the political aspects there is no reason why we couldn’t try to conduct a conversation related to the ‘poetic’ aspects of materials and processes too)

In this respect the ‘Povera’ of Arte Povera alludes to the modesty of unworked and commonly available materials, which are the antithesis of highly processed and thinly distributed materials such as Gold, Diamond, Lapis Lazuli etc.

Their example seem to speak of an age of mass-society centred on crowded cities, suburbs, superstores and mass production when the artist’s use of materials and processes might make the gallery into an alternative space in which to the audience might be reminded of what is going-on behind the scenes of consumerism’s spectacular and devious theatre.

For Kounellis, displaying coffee beans meant –and probably mean more than ever today -
Making some dialogue between the gallery audience –who might sp an espresso before touring the show- and the unseen workers in impoverished and sometime inhumane conditions producing the base material in Africa or South America.

Today, we have become used to making these kind of links, and Nicolas Bourriaud still refers to artists’ duties to the materials they use in these terms. Consumerism has also responded, by offering ‘Fair-Trade’, ‘Greener’ or ‘Healthier’ versions of our favourite commodities. But for Kounellis and his generation, to make such a connections must have been a very provocative use of the possibilities of art.

If we jump now into the 21st Century we might see artists tusselling with the job of transforming the mountains of crisp and complex packaging and materials that inundate our lives and seem to keep us further and further from their source by the use of imagery, advertising and design.

The eclecticism and collage techniques of the early 20th century, of Pop and of postmodernism are still alive and well in many current Sculptural practices, keen to show some response, some way of forming and perhaps defending ourselves against a seeming onslaught of materials, forms, colours, designs and processes constantly dreamed up by consumerism to maintain our desire.

Artists like Gary Webb or Martin Westwood are good examples of how this might be done. Webb’s work looks as though he scours thick trade catalogues form around the world in search of ever-more unexpected juxtapositions of 21st century materials and new processes with which to manipulate them. In one of his Sculptures c. 2002 he juxtaposed artfully folded Perspex with rubber mats and carrot soup.

Westwood meanwhile, seems to have a knack for expressing the unspeakably dry materiality of everyday office environments where printers, photocopiers, glass and steel, carpets, air conditioning, water coolers and fluorescent lights all dictate an inhuman, and yet extremely common environment for 21st Century human beings.

But at the start I suggested a separation of materials and processes into those we might want our audience to see and think about and those we might use to form our ideas but which we might like to think of as mere vehicles, almost invisible or ‘dumb’ materials, as it were without a voice of their own, materials to which make it all the easier for us to give them a voice.

Here, the perfect example might be a recent vogue for Styrofoam, cut and carved, finished with a fine layer of fine concrete, and then painted. Many sculptors today –Phylidda Barlow included- seem happy to use this light, fast process. It becomes a default or base material of the sculptors studio, much as clay or stone or wood might have done to a previous age. It becomes common to realising every idea, it becomes a given.

Nevertheless, in previous eras, much has been thought and written –by the artists and the historians- about the precise nature of the relationship between such a common, given material and the forms and ideas It assists in communicating to the world. If you think of the relationship between Rodin’s Bronze and his figures, or Michelangelo’s marble and his, you will see what I mean.

But if we attempt the same consideration of the relationship between Styrofoam and concrete and the forms it communicates we suspect that the conversation may not be so inspired. The best way to approach it might be to compare this current process with one a little closer in history.

E.g. the hard edged- geometric glass and steel and Perspex of minimalists like Donald Judd are widely understood as being the perfect choice of materials and processes to reflect the environment of post war American city life, in which architecture was using these same materials and process to construct the kind of new world that people like Judd were living in.

Styrofoam and concrete mix however doesn’t directly reference our environment in this way, in fact it seems worrying like the amateur ‘sculpy-mix’ type base materials we can find in the local art shop, and not like a truly innovative, imaginative or idiosyncratic choice at all.

But perhaps the styrofoam and concrete CAN be celebrate as the marble, or the glass and steel of our day, in that they are not hewn from the earth or representative of architecture but are nonetheless symbolic of the light, superficial, highly packaged, colourful and inherently false/simulated environment in which we live today.

Of course, there is a lot to be said for a base material that is as malleable as a writer’s ink or a film-maker’s digital memory, something that we don’t necessarily have to think about before getting to work; something which sees invitingly passive, waiting for us to mold it with little resistance or insistence about what it should become, a material which seems to have little language of its own to interrupt the things we want to make it say.

My point however, is that, even in such cases, it is wise to be aware of the specific influence that even ink may have upon writing, even pixels may have upon films, and even Styrofoam and concrete may have upon sculpture.

Now I want to swing back to consider some more materials and processes that draw attention to their particularity and peculiarity over and above the forms they have been given.

For some reason, though you may have lived and learned and seen so many shows and artworks, on occasions like this when you are searching for appropriate examples with which to make a point, certain experiences jump to the front of your mind as most significant, even if they should have been buried in the depths of the past.

While preparing to write about processes and materials one work that I couldn’t keep from my mind was encountered in a memory of a visit to a West End gallery in the late 90s to see a show by the –then up-and-coming- sculptor Ed Lipski. The reason it came to mind was simply ‘Poppy Seeds’.

Among some early figures by Lipski – whose work at that time had a beguiling take on a feint sense of horror underlying the everyday - a small child, a boy, in shorts perhaps, life size and maybe wearing braces (if my memory serves me well), stood in the gallery looking reasonably normal apart from some disturbing clusters over the eyes. They had a quality that made them hard to define, something about their texture, the way they reflected light, their elusive colour, all made their impact more enduring. It was only later that I discovered that they were clusters of poppy seeds –something which I had previously associated only with the wholesome memory of freshly baked bread, and of carrying freshly baked bread, as a child, home for my mother, always tempted by the appearance, texture and smell of that artfully finished surface given to bread by bakers, presumably for thousands of years, to ingeniously make it more delicious and desirable.

Lipski had appropriated and perverted this baker’s art by sticking an excess of the stuff all over this child’s desiring eyes and thereby turned innocent pleasure into a fearful vision with one clever decision in the studio. As an addendum to this example of Lipski’s skill with materials at that time, in the basement space of the same gallery Lipski had placed a plaster pig’s torso on a low plinth, tightly stretched suede over its before creaming it with lipstick and illuminating the rump with a single disco light.

One more example - this time taken from a current group exhibition at Domobaal in Holborn – is a piece in which the artist used sheets of seaweed (of the kind used for domestic Sushi making) and a process which simply mixed the material with the sweat form the very hands that were trying to form it (into a book shape). The outcome was a strange sculpture (presumably VERY light) which resembled both hands, and book. It was as if the artwork wee nothing more or less than a perfect record of an attempt at transformation, bearing every trace, and nothing more, of the process, in perfect balance with the source materials, while the intention was somehow arrested in mid-act before it could be wholly realised. (This artist's name is Harald Smykla and you can find out more about him at :

http://www.englandgallery.com/artist_bio.php?mainId=170 )

(Here we diverted to mention Robert Morris’s early and well-known piece ‘Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making’ –now a far cruder-seeming piece from classic sculpture history, and yet comparable at least in that both pieces refer so directly to the process of their 'own making’)

Now I can conclude with a kind of corollary to the Kounellian considerations with which we began. If you visit the V&A’s Sculpture courts, and the small Sculpture gallery that vaults between and above them like a bridge, you will find a wide range of historically utilised sculpture materials –from Bronze, to stone, to plaster, to terracotta, to ivory, to mother-of-pearl, and other semi-precious stones, as well as instructive films on processes such as bronze casting or gold-lacquering. What seems relevant to our talk and to contemporary sculpture however is not just the particular technical possibilities of each material and process, but the relative moral value of the materials on offer.

e.g. it’s clear that the audience for contemporary art has changed the way it feels about ivory, and the same can now be said for coral, which –though there are amazing examples of how to carve both materials – has also recently become a sign of shame and extinction rather an a symbol of wealth and exoticism (we could more simply say the same for a provocative material like fur, but to do so is only again to point to cultural and historical shifts –which are continuously shifting- in our moral responses to materials).

Though these cabinets seem to represent a distant past, they also refer to our own time by reminding us of our present moral responses to materials and processes (what might an immoral process be, we seem to have skipped over this?), just as we could see Kounellis’ placing of coal in the gallery (or even live horses, as he once did) in a similarly political and ethical light.

Whether Judd’s steel, Charles Ray’s ink, Rodin’s bronze, Michelangelo’s marble, Lipski’s poppy seeds, or pervasive styrofoam and concrete all operate in the same way to speak not only of a time’s technology but in some way of its ‘heart’ (or heartlessness perhaps?), is a question which this writing has merely discovered and by no means exhausted.