Today we're meeting up with Geof Oppenheimer, who
grew up in DC, spent time in San Francisco,
and is now based here in Chicago.
Just makes art using a wide variety
of materials and approaches, including
photography, sculpture, and video, thinking
about how images and objects are not
neutral presences, but are invested
with the social and political structures that created them
and that surround them.
Recent work, such as The Embarrassing Statue,
bring together disparate materials
like a leaf blower, a brass plated armature,
a pair of pants, and a marble pedestal to consider
the human figure and the dehumanizing aspect
of the labor it performs.
For the assignment today we're going
to be thinking about sculpture, and how
it can represent our values and engender a wide range
of emotional responses.
Hi.
I'm Geof Oppenheimer, and this is your art assignment.
I came to be interested in sculpture
because sculpture is in life.
Like, there's-- we walk around things all the time.
It wasn't so alienated as, like, a painting, which is always
a kind of presumed world over there
inside the frame, where sculpture
is made from the things we walk around about every day.
And it just seemed a lot more accessible to me,
and was also capable of communicating a lot
more, because it's something we all share.
Even the videos I make, and the photographs,
it's all sculpture.
I think sculpture is a thinking process
as much as it is a medium.
Like, sculpture is just a way to think through objects in space,
and the kind of social legibility of objects.
And once you have that, you can apply that
to any way of thinking.
And so there's videos that are sculptures,
just as easily as there's videos that are not sculptures.
It's just dependent on how you use the tool.
One of the hardest and most interesting things
to do with young artists is to teach them
that regardless of the type of work
they do, whether they're a painter or a sculptor,
is that art is a really broad world,
and is capable of inducing a variety of reactions,
and sort of states of mind.
It doesn't always have to be affirmative.
You know, it doesn't always have to make you feel good.
Although that's an important thing for art to do.
I mean, this sounds like a really romantic idea,
but I think art should reflect experience.
And so I don't know about you, but I often feel uncomfortable,
you know?
Or I'm often embarrassed, and so I
think it's a great productive challenge
to do in an art assignment, is to make something that
makes you feel uncomfortable.
Art can produce lots of different responses.
For your art assignment, I want you to make
an object that is embarrassing.
Out of a material or group of materials,
make something that makes you uncomfortable.
So Sarah I feel like we might get
a lot of, uh, poop jokes in this particular assignment.
Yeah.
Well, and I think bathroom humor can be OK if well played.
I mean, Paul McCarthy is an artist
who for the past few decades has been
making pretty brilliant work that
makes me blush quite a bit.
Yeah.
The giant inflatable poop.
But for me, what's embarrassing is
so personal and so subjective.
I mean, what embarrasses me might not embarrass you, right?
And it's also something that I think changes
so much over the course of time.
Like, what embarrassed you 100 years ago
is different than what embarrassed you
50 years ago, or now.
Yeah.
And also, embarrassment is not just personal.
It's also social and political, and historical,
and that's part of how, like, our embarrassment's changed.
But one thing that I think has always been embarrassing
is the human body.
That's true.
We all have a body, so it's not really surprising
that artists have used that as a vehicle to communicate ideas.
And you can go back, way back into art history,
to the ancient Greeks or earlier,
to think about the way the human body is depicted in art.
The ancient Greeks were preoccupied
with the idea of the perfect human body,
including Polyclitus, who made sculptures
like this, Doryphoros, or spear bearer, in the 5th century BCE.
It was a naturalistic but not realistic depiction,
as a soldier would have certainly been wearing clothes,
and it wasn't of a particular person, either.
It was an idealized figure, meant
to demonstrate the perfect mathematical proportions
of the body.
And thus was unleashed on the world
classical sculpture, which would be copied by the Romans
during the Renaissance, by 18th and 19th century Europeans,
by Americans, and so on.
The idealized figure held its sway for a long time,
but by the end of the 20th century,
artists like Martin Kippenberger had pretty aggressively
picked this ideal apart.
In 1989 he put a male figure into a gallery,
but it wasn't a confident, virile specimen.
It was a series of slight, downward gazing
replicas of himself, titled Martin, Into The Corner.
You Should Be Ashamed Of Yourself,
made after an art critic called out his drunken and provocative
behavior.
Kippenberger's ashamed sculpture,
like Geof's embarrassing sculpture,
plays with the long tradition of the heroic figure,
and dramatically undercuts its power,
asking us to ponder who exactly is experiencing these feelings.
Is it the artist, is it the sculpture, or is it us?
I think this culture that you're
making for the assignment can be figurative,
but I think a more challenging thing
is to think about what are the kind of forms and materials
that are embarrassing, or make you uncomfortable,
that don't rely on a kind of representational form?
It can reference things, whether it be the figure, architecture,
or control, but maybe need not look like those things
directly.
I think in doing this assignment,
you should take the prompt as a way
to think about your own experiences,
and speak to what you know.
What are the materials or forms that are embarrassing?
Like, are you going to go get some terry cloth?
I find terry cloth an incredibly embarrassing material.
That's what I would do.
You know, is it squishy?
Is it hard?
Is it sharp?
Is it-- you know, bulbous?
What are in the things that, in your own experience,
engender those reactions?
I think that's a good way to think about art
even outside this assignment.
Like, speak to what you know, and trust your own sort
of subjective experience.
It's an inherently subjective field.
The goal is to be acute in your own subjectivity.
I like that ambiguity.
You know, I think it's productive, because I-- I mean,
I look at it.
I made it.
I still get embarrassed looking at it.
Like, I feel like you're looking at something
you're not supposed to see.