Today we're in the St. Claude Arts District of New Orleans,
inside of Press Street, an organization that
promotes art and literature in the community.
We're going to be meeting with Bob Snead, the Executive
Director of Press Street and an artist independent of that.
He's originally from South Carolina,
and traveled all over the country in a vegetable
oil-powered bus doing community-based projects
with the art collective Transit Antenna
before he landed in New Orleans in 2010.
Bob's works take a close look at the everyday objects,
materials, and places around us.
Past works include a series of autobiographical paintings,
a full size recreation of a pickup truck out of cardboard
cartons, and a handmade replica of an ATM placed inside an art
gallery.
Recently, he's also created Family Dollar General Tree,
for which he painstakingly turns discarded cardboard
into the commercially fabricated goods
that you'd normally find in a dollar store.
Bob often involves other people in making his work,
and today's assignment is going to ask you to do the same.
Hi.
I'm Bob Snead, and welcome to your art assignment.
Dollar stores are a real part of our everyday life here.
We have a lot of dollar stores instead of grocery stores,
particularly in our neighborhood and in the Lower Ninth.
When I was working on the Wreck project,
I was creating these fields of grass
that were replicating a New Orleans neutral ground.
When I was doing that, I started running out of the cardboard
that I was using that was from our move,
and so I started going to the dollar stores
and collecting cardboard and getting
really obsessed with how every piece of trash
from a corporate dollar store is branded in some way with logos
and the things that used to be in these boxes.
And so as a side effort and kind of just playing
with this material, I started making
the objects that used to live in the boxes
and then built from there.
The first iteration of it took about two years to develop.
When I'm making something for the store,
I'm not thinking about one of those things.
I'm thinking about making 20 of them,
and how the different steps will transpire
in making those 20 things.
So it's more about the process than anything.
The last iteration of the store that I made,
I had to recruit former students of mine to assist.
So I had a crew of six former students who
helped produce the project, because we
had a six-month deadline.
Your assignment is to produce an assembly line
with a group of friends.
Your first step is to make an object.
Your object can be made out of any material
that you find in your home, your office, your work environment--
wherever you find material, you can make something out of that.
And then that object, you need to make a template
from that object.
Then you take your friends-- you invite
them to come to your house, to your studio, wherever you work
on things-- and have them produce an assembly
line with you making the object that you made originally.
And document the process.
So take pictures.
Make videos of you producing this assembly line and how
the process has happened, and then put it online
and show it to us.
So Sarah, this gets to something
that really kind of troubles a lot
of people about contemporary art,
I think-- and also troubles me to an extent--
which is that artists don't make stuff as much anymore.
Their actual hands are not involved
in the creation of their work.
Well, there are still plenty of people
who actually make their art.
But it is true, and it does bother a lot of people.
For a long time, artists have used other people
or hired other people to help them make art.
And originality is what a lot of people value about art,
like the way a painter lays down paint
or the quality of their line.
And I totally get that.
It's just that there's another way of making art, too.
What is this other way?
Hiring it out.
But is that really legitimate?
I think so.
Artists have been doing that since the Middle Ages.
My mind is exploding from all the possibilities
of what we can discuss for the historical precedent.
I hope not literally.
You can think about the whole history of instruction art,
with artists like Sol Lewitt, who
make instructions for a work that other people can produce.
Right.
But I think that if you go further back in art history--
because that still feels pretty contemporary to me-- maybe
you could make a stronger point.
OK, well let's talk about sort of the atelier or workshop
style of art making.
Take famed Italian Renaissance artist
and agreed upon genius Leonardo da Vinci.
He himself was an apprentice in the workshop
at the artist Andrea del Verrocchio,
starting at the age of 14.
It was there that da Vinci developed his skills
as a painter and draftsman while working on paintings
attributed to his boss.
At age 20, da Vinci became a certified master
in the Guild of Saint Luke and eventually
went on to create his own workshop
and take on his own apprentices to assist him.
Art was a trade, just like being a cobbler
or a miller or a physician.
Skipping forward to 1962, the guild system was gone.
But the tradition of artists having assistance
was alive and well.
It was in that year that Andy Warhol moved
into his famous Silver Factory, where notables gathered,
films were shot, and countless flower paintings
and Brillo boxes made.
He was a pioneer of art automation,
saying, "I want to be a machine."
And his signature use of silk screening
allowed him to do just that.
Many if not all of the decisions were Warhol's.
But the process allowed him to make use of assistance
and ramp up production to create not just a single image,
but additions upon additions upon additions.
I think the big thing is kind of connecting with your friends
in a way that's new, working with people
and seeing how they make things.
And then also, doing this assignment,
you get a real connection with how things are made.
And really, I think it changes the way you see a store.
So now we're in my studio and we're
going to produce an assembly line.
I'm here with my friends Ricky and Jo,
and they're going to help me produce
this bottle of detergent.
Sometimes it can be really frustrating
having people make something that you have an idea about,
and then they kind of produce it.
And often the instructions were verbal.
And so rather than having this kind of written thing and then
I would have to come in and kind of modify things and show them
how to make things.
So actually, throughout the process
we developed a series of rules, like the edges of the products
could not have a really thick glue line,
or the seams had to come together in a certain way
or it was unacceptable.
Developing those rules then made it
to where I could point to the rule and be like,
that is not following the rule book
and so it's got to be done over.
And then no feelings were hurt if I
had to remake something or kind of rethink
how they were working.
The way that I work is I'll make a template
and the first product first.
When I'm cutting all of my pieces and kind
of working through how the thing comes together,
I'm building two of every piece.
When I'm done with that first product,
I have a template that everyone can go from.
But often, the templates, it's not really clear
what the pieces are.
So then we had to figure out in the studio
writing directions on all of the templates
and making it clear-- like, do not
use this piece in the studio-- so
that everyone was on the same page
and we could recreate the item over and over.
I end up looking at things like, how could I make that
into cardboard-- particularly bottle shapes, like how
can that transform and translate into cardboard
and still be read as the original thing?
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