TEACHING/COURSES
Expanding Sculpture:
Objects of Performance and Ritual
Destruction as a Creative Force:
Entropy, Disassembly and Degradation as Sculptural Practice
Destruction as a Creative Force:
Entropy, Disassembly and Degradation as Sculptural Practice
This class will focus on the blurred distinctions between concept, content, form and means of production in a sculptural practice. It will examine destruction, entropy and degradation as ways of producing artworks. We will investigate how this has been part of previous art movements including Dadaism, Cubism, Actionsim, Earthworks, Conceptualism, process art, appropriation and assemblage. Additionally, we will consider important contemporary examples and the future of fragmentation and hybridity.
We will explore various approaches that are explicitly reliant on the disassembly of seemingly stable and ordered systems. These approaches can use the inherent quality of entropy and applied forces to create the work. They can fracture physicality and meaning and recombine the parts into new forms. They can be damaged, ephemeral, unstable and temporary. Their own destruction can be built in as a creative mechanism. All these strategies rearrange matter and viewpoint into new forms, which lies at the heart of art making.
This class will examine the subject matter through readings, lectures, discussions and student presentations. Students will be assigned projects which address the class subject. These projects will be developed with in the context of class critiques, discussions and final presentations.