Concept vs Object in art

In May I had my first solo indoor sculpture exhibition at Prospect Gallery here in Adelaide. It was a great experience. My second solo sculpture exhibition will be happening in February/March next year at Art Images Gallery in Norwood.

During my Prospect Gallery exhibition I addressed a group of year 11 students one day. One of them published her review of the gallery visit and my talk in the school news. It was fascinating to me to read that this year 11 student found my small multi-part sculpture called 'dichotomy/continuum argument: concept/object dilemma' the piece of most interest - most people dismissed it quickly as pretty boring.

The student wrote that "This piece allows the viewer to consider the question posed in the title: when does the concept become the object? Or are they the same? This is a question that I have often wondered about, as art could be seen both as the initial idea as well as the finished product. There is no real line between the concept and the finished product, as the product is in essence the concept but the product is also the recognised expression of an idea. I really like this, as it shows the progression between an idea and a product; it also allows the viewer to question whether it is a concept of an object that is displayed before them."

Crikey, this student gets it!

I had a similar 'AHA!' experience when I was about the same age as this student and my parents took me from Seattle to visit (what I think was) the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Somehow, and I don't think it was particularly my parents' objective, I ended-up meeting some conceptual artists who were working or studying at UBC and they walked me around and showed me some of their artworks. This was between 1970 and 1972. Before meeting these guys my concept of art was always The Object - it was something that had physical presence - you could see it, you could touch it (not that it was always allowed), it was something real. It was the result of an idea, not the idea itself.

Then these artists showed me that it didn't have to be The Object, and I've been swaying back and forth between concept and object since that time. Part of me wants to be a conceptual artist, part of me likes making physical objects.

Where does it end? Anyone want to buy a concept?

My adverturous friends in Second Life

My friend Fang hosts a podcast with Dave and Kent called The Extraordinary Everyday Lives Show and in listening to it I learn lots of interesting things about social networks and the other topics that the guys cover. Some of the stuff I had never heard of, but I now know what 'the long tail' is in reference to something for example; and I have a feeling for what Facebook, and MySpace are.

In fact, I actually signed-up for MySpace as there is a artist-run art gallery in town that uses MySpace to communicate with its members, but I kept getting these annoying emails saying that so and so wanted to be my friend, and thought, bugger that! I don't want to be your friend - we haven't even been introduced! Isn't it exciting that Facebook has re-jigged itself as a distribution channel for developers! Well, isn't it?

There's a good article about Facebook in the current issue of Wired magazine. But be careful of what you put in it as the FBI will be reading it, and Customs and Immigration will Google you when you arrive in the US and not let you in the land of the free and home of the brave if your Facebook profile is, let us say, a bit 'non-mainstream', and potential employers might reject you because, well, just because - or so I'm told by the ever reliable newspaper articles we read.

Dave has been in Second Life for a while, Mike couldn't be bothered installing the software for a long time, and from what I think I heard it didn't sound like Kent had much time for Second Life either. Then I learned that the guys have actually hosted a podcast recording with another Australian podcaster - GlobalGeek - from actually within Second Life. Which I have duly downloaded and listened to today.

It was a pretty interesting intro to Second Life for someone who hasn't used it yet. I checked-out the Second Life website and was amazed at the volume of (real USD) business that is transacted on Second Life. Are the guys who created Second Life clever or what! Selling a virtual environment in virtual space, but charging real dollars to do so. Wow! It sounds fascinating.

Dave took an image of one of my real life sculptures called Aim High and created a virtual version of it for his Second Life place. And the guys gave it a plug in the podcast! So here's a 'shout-out' (is that right Mike?) to y'all for doing so!

I'm a member of a sculpture-related community and created a thread about virtual art in Second Life, and got a few responses. The community is more 'real-life' focused but a few people are getting out there with virtual work. On the recommendation of another sculpture.net/community member I'm (very slowly) playing around with the free animation software called 'Blender' as a tool to build virtual artworks.

My concern is that I already spend ('waste' says my loved one) enough time on the darned computer, which isn't really family social, so what happens when I get hooked on the drug of Second Life?

And the kids say, 'we're bored, we don't have anything to do...' Hah! Get out there and bounce on that darned trampoline or something!

Re-reading an old favorite - Chuck Close

A long time ago I bought a book called 'Close Portraits' that was published in 1980 by Walker Art Center in Minneapolis about the art of US painter Chuck Close. I was always fascinated by the huge photorealistic portraits that Close did of photographs of his subjects. I keep coming back to the book, flipping through the catalogue of his works. When the rest of the art world was busy with abstract expressionism Close developed his own, unique style of hyperrealistic, huge paintings.

One of his paintings is titled 'Phil', first painted in 1969, and I've looked at the picture of it I don't know how many times until tonight when I read that 'Phil' is actually Philip Glass, one of my favourite composers. You either love Philip Glass's music or you hate it - nothing in between. 'Phil' is more than 2.7m tall by 2.1m wide. Wonderful scale!

I liked the book's description of Glass's music (which is taken from Robert Rosenblum's 'Notes on Sol LeWitt', Sol LeWitt, ed. Alicia Legg, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1978, p 20.) '... Glass's music is composed of what at first may seem monotonous, repetitive tones, electronically amplified in a way that nearly conceals personal style. Yet the experience becomes a kind of slow immersion in a sonic sea, where the structural anchors of the score tend to be washed away by the mounting sensuous force of the cumulative sound.' Yeah, I was about to say that!

And to think of the number of times that I have looked at the page in the book with 'Phil' on one page, and those words on the other. Maybe I only bought it for the pictures...