BRICOLAGE: Art With Dimensional Materials - Phyllida Barlow

I am making this short series of posts about artists who will be included in my talk at the Eighth Annual Encaustic Conference (June 6 - 8 in Provincetown, Mass.) because I want to pique some interest in the work and to show short videos that animate the work in a way that still pictures can't.

Phyllida Barlow, one view of "Dock" installation at Tate Britain, 2014

Phyllida Barlow is a sculptor whose work I became aware of after watching a video in an ArtDaily Newsletter (this one is a long video). I had never heard of her, but that was my loss. She has been teaching and making sculpture for a long while and is very well known in Britain. I admire her particularly because she has just reached age 70 and began showing her own work publicly just a few years ago. She's now in the Hauser & Worth stable and so showing worldwide in some of the world's most enormous galleries. Any artist, particularly a woman, who has been working that long and has just been "discovered" is well worth a close look.

What interested me about her was not only her work but what she had to say about it and about sculpture in general. She spoke about time as an element in sculpture and about choreographing the audience's views of sculpture because of the way the work is placed. She also mentioned the pomposity and grandiosity of older sculptural works, especially in Britain. (I am envisioning the general-on-the-horse kind of thing that viewers have to strain their necks to see from a viewpoint far below.)

The relationship of space and the work is very important to her and she spoke of her works as making "an aggressive invasion of space." She has a lot to say about materiality, surface, destruction, surprise and invention. What an interesting person she is and what a wonderful teacher she must have been for so many artists who went on to become art stars on their own.



Here is a short video I found of her speaking about the Tate Britain installation, Dock, pictured above.

And here is another video about an installation called Hoard, where she speaks about her inspiration coming from an interview with a man whose home was upturned in Hurricane Katrina. She is careful to say that although she may begin with an idea such as this, she lets the materials themselves lead her to something new in the actual work so that she is making discoveries along with the audience.

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BRICOLAGE: Art With Dimensional Materials - Nick Cave

Nick Cave is another one of the artists I will be including in my talk at the Eighth Annual Encaustic Conference in Provincetown. The conference, founded and directed by Joanne Mattera, runs Friday, June 6, through Sunday, June 8th this year. Here is the link that gives all the details.

A button-covered soundsuit with an abacus faceguard by Nick Cave

My talk on the Friday is entitled, Bricolage: Art With Dimensional Materials, and I will be presenting the work of more than 15 artists. I have chosen a range of work, most of it wall mounted, to illustrate that bricolage can bring art to a place somewhere between two and three dimensions. However, I have also added a couple of sculptors to the mix of artists because the technique of bricolage can be used with freestanding, fully-dimensional works.

For me, the important thing about bricolage as a technique or process is that found objects and materials lose their original identities and are transformed into new creations. Bricolage often involves destruction and revisioning, unlike assemblage, in which found objects retain their original identities.

Nick Cave is a unique artist who exists between worlds: he's a sculptor, a clothing designer and a dancer. A website describes him as "part Alexander McQueen and part Andy Warhol." Nick Cave's first soundsuit was created from twigs he gathered in a park. Initially he thought of it as a stationery sculpture, but when he put it on his body and moved with it, the twigs hit against each other and created sounds that reflected his motions. The suit also gave him a new identity without racial, gender or national origin characteristics

Click here for a short video from the New York Times where Nick Cave demonstrates the sounds that two soundsuits make - the first one a loud and clanky collection of spinning tops and noisemakers, the second a soft, swishy, swirl of long fibers.

Cave's soundsuits transcend other boundaries in that they may be worn for public performances and also exhibited in museums and galleries as artworks. Nick Cave's New York gallery is Jack Shainman (also home to the great Anatsui) where soundsuits list for $45,000 and up. The suits are designed by Cave using a vast collection of objects and materials gathered at thriftshops, tag sales and wholesalers.

Last year the Denver Art Museum presented Sojourn, an extensive exhibition of works by Nick Cave. Here are two videos provided by the museum. The first one is a tour of the exhibition narrated by Nick Cave. The second shows the labor-intensive installation process.

Denver Art Museum tour of Sojourn - 5:34




Installation - 2:52

Marc Sparfel - The European Bricolage Connection

Writing this blog and Art in the Studio have led to some surprising virtual connections for me with readers who let me know that they have appreciated posts I have written. One of those surprise connections happened recently when I received an email from Marc Sparfel, a sculptor born in Brittany, France, who has lived in Barcelona for the post several years. He wrote to me when Google turned up a post I had written on Lee Bontecou*, whose work he had seen at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Some of Marc Sparfel's bricolage sculptures

I thought that Marc's work would be perfect for this blog because he creates sculptures from furniture and wood he finds on the streets of Barcelona. He says that he started late in sculpture, having begun only about seven years ago, but has always used found wood because it is free but mostly because "sometimes there is so much wood furniture in the street that you can 'hear' the trees shout! It's really sad." Also he enjoys the fact that there is a history within the materials and the idea of transformation which symbolizes the possibility of a different life. Chairs are his favorites. He loves disassembling them and giving them another opportunity that may be less stressful for them than having to support people as they did in their life as chairs.

In front of Marc's studio - Fossil 2, 75" x 71" x 8"

Fossil 1, 51" x 51" x 2.75"

Fossil 3, 126" x 85" x 8"

Fossil 6, 65" x 82" x 8"

(Note that I have converted all the dimensions into inches from centimeters.) Marc says that he is usually able to find planks of wood for the backgrounds of these fossil pieces. He cuts and pieces the wood and then paints or stains it before mounting the sculpture on the background.

Since I understand that in France there are stores called "Mr. Bricolage" that are like Home Depot, made for the weekend warrior or do-it-yourselfer, I asked Marc if there was a bad connotation to the term "bricolage" in Europe. He said that "it can be quite perjorative in regard to art, as [in] the expression "Sunday artists," but if you think it's the best term in the U.S. to describe the type of work I do, maybe it's a good solution."

I picked these Fossil pieces above because they are more like the bas relief that I usually show here, but it looks like most of Marc's work is freestanding sculpture, so here are some examples:

Aphrodite and Satire (I think that might be Saturn)
Aphrodite is 53" x 29.5" x 12", Satire is 59" x 33" x 12"

Elephants, 37" x 14" x 10"

Oiseau Senufo (Senufo Bird), 39" x 21.5" x 12"

Guerrier (Warrior) III, 37" x 37" x 16"

Grand Taureau (Large Bull), 53" x 29.5" x 12"

Marc shows in Barcelona and is also represented by Friedmann-Hahn Gallery in Berlin. Meeting him and seeing his work through the magic of the internet was really a pleasure and I am glad that we could make this connection. Who would ever imagine even a couple of years ago that the world would become so much smaller this way?

Marc Sparfel, Sculptor

*Note:  I wrote three posts on Lee Bontecou in 2010 in Art in the Studio, here are the links
http://artinthestudio.blogspot.com/2010/08/lee-bontecou-personal-inspiration-part.html
http://artinthestudio.blogspot.com/2010/08/lee-bontecou-personal-inspiration-part_08.html
http://artinthestudio.blogspot.com/2010/12/discovery-of-lee-bontecou.html