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Film as Sculpture, Process as Object

Art objects are a record of an activity.  Paintings and sculptures are in fact layers of decisions made by the artist to form a complete end product. Every instance of movement the artist makes in process follows through to the object, even if the action is covered, hidden, unseen, or forgotten.  The material action is undermined by the finishing of the object.  The art object is dead.  There is life in artistic creation, but not in the final outcome.   I do not think that the art object is valueless.  I appreciate it as a document of an artist’s practice and manipulation of material.  When I see a painting, in its marks and gestures I have a desire to see them being made, not at their resting point.

The art object is an end point and appears permanent.  It is a fixture that signals the end of creation. End points are not significant—what interests me in art is the making, and the activity of the materials the artist is engaging in.  My SMP work culminated in a video installation in Boyden Gallery.  The moving images are of paint being poured down strips of fabric.  Streaming forms collapse upon each other until they fall out of view. These are extremely restricted views of a greater action occurring outside of the screen: the viewer is only provided a small portion to regard in the space.  The space itself contains three elements:  a projector mounted on the wall, the projected image, and a cloth scrim that is projected upon.  The video can be seen on both sides of the cloth, and walked around in order to see it from all sides.

The forms that undulate in waves past the eye of the camera do not ever land onto a flat plane and settle.  It is in constant and fluid motion, always changing, and is relentlessly impermanent.  It never becomes something substantial that can be seen in isolation from the entire system.  There are instances in the video that the paint does not show itself at all.  For five to thirty seconds between segments, nothing is projected. The entire “object” vanishes and reappears at random intervals. I acknowledge that I am constructing and presenting an object and illusion, but I do not see it as an endpoint.  It is an object that is simultaneously present and absent, real and projected.  It is not discounting the actions that were made that culminate in this final presentation to the viewer; in fact the action of the material is centerfold to the piece.  It has been made into an object in order for the viewer to better see the possibilities of these images.