We're outside of the Mind Factory
in Pittsburgh where the artist we're meeting with today,
Kim Beck, has her studio.
She has an incredibly keen eye for our built environment,
paying careful attention to things that many of us
overlook, like power lines, fences, billboards and weeds.
A number of her works encourage us
to reconsider the oft maligned weed, including
drawings, installations, murals and an artist's book.
Kim makes work about architecture and our landscape,
but she's also made them in our landscape.
She's done works that involves sky writing
and also a series of empty billboard skeletons
along the high line in New York.
And I had the pleasure of working with Kim
on a project she did at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
called "Notice-- A Flock of Signs,"
a clever play on the often overabundance of signage
in museums and parks.
We're going to go inside to talk to her.
But I have a feeling we might be coming back outside soon to get
going on this assignment.
Hi, I'm Kim Beck, and this is your art assignment.
So this studio is the place where
I process a lot of different material and information.
You know, I'd sit and look at the images, the photographs
that I've taken.
I play with drawing and rubbings and new materials.
One of the things that I've been doing lately
is, is working on rubbings.
So I started rubbing, doing, making
rubbings of the concrete floor in this building.
And I guess sometimes when I don't really
know what I'm doing I tend to look at the ground.
And the ground in a building like this
is actually pretty amazing because it,
it shows the history of what used
to be in this building, which were, you know,
old manufacturing equipment, old machines.
And so there's divots, and stains and cracks
in the floor that kind of record that history.
And so I started just working with newsprint,
spreading out, um, really just cheap paper on the ground
and taking some crayons or colored pencils
and just kind of recording the, the different kind of textures
on the floor.
Um, and that process is something that, you know,
when I've gone out and made these other field recordings,
or surface tests, um, as I've been thinking of them,
this is the place where I can come and look at them
and pin them up and think about them.
And for me it's a way of, you know,
the way that a photograph records
this fraction of a second in time, in place,
a fraction of a second of light.
A, a field recording or a surface test
is another way of taking a, a snapshot of a place.
It's just through texture and touch.
Your assignment is to, one, get your materials.
These include a nice crayon, a large-ish size piece
of textured sketchbook paper.
Two, find a piece of ground that you respond to in some way,
either because of how it looks or the texture.
Three, go out and make a rubbing of this piece of ground,
putting the piece of paper onto the ground
and rubbing the crayon slowly over it so
that you capture the rubbing.
Four, take a photograph of this rubbing in place.
So while the rubbing is still on the ground,
you can use pieces of rocks or sticks,
or whatever is nearby, to hold the thing on the ground,
and then photograph it.
Take a couple of photographs, and take your time
so you really like the way that you photographed it.
Try photographing from different angles.
And then five, send us the photograph.
OK, so Kim is asking us to do a rubbing, which
you might have done before, maybe
even in elementary school.
But people have been making rubbings for a long time,
including artists like Max Ernst who's
associated with surrealism.
He made these drawings in the '20s called "Frottage,"
or the French word for rubbing.
He saw this floor in a hotel, a wooden floor that
was amazingly detailed, and he made rubbings of them.
And then he actually saw images within those rubbings that
looked like forests or wild creatures,
and he used this technique as a way
to tap into the unconscious mind.
That there's a history to making rubbings,
but I don't really think that's what's happening here
with Kim's assignment.
What I'd like to talk about today
is representation, and how we tend
to assume that a photograph or a photo real painting
is somehow the most accurate way to depict a place.
There are other ways to record something not based on photos,
like a rubbing.
It's something that we all know, but it's
been theorised by the philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce who developed his theory of signs, which is basically
looking at the way we humans come
to know the world through representations.
It was published in the 1860s, and it's extremely complicated,
but I'm just going to share with you the bit
that applies to our assignment today.
But I want you to go and read it all yourself.
Peirce's theory thinks through how
signs relate to the objects they point to,
and he says there are basically three kinds of signs.
An icon is a sign linked to its object
by a shared quality or likeness, like a painting of a landscape
is an icon of the actual landscape it depicts.
And a symbol represents an object
through a rule or an interpretive device.
Like the word "pipe" is a symbol of a pipe,
but it doesn't look or smell like a pipe.
It only has meaning because you've
learned to connect the symbol with the object.
But an index is a sign linked to its object
by an actual, physical connection, like smoke
is an index for a fire.
It's a mark or trace, like a footprint or a cast
shadow-- it gives information or evidence about the object.
Like Jell-o has an indexical relationship
to the Jell-o mold, and a rubbing
is an index of the place where it was captured.
Kim's assignment is not asking us
to create an icon or a symbol of a place,
but to make an indexical sign of that
place-- a very real document that
gives you real information.
This is a place.
I did this thing.
I was there.
So much of my life is spent on the internet, or on the phone.
And it's the thing that isn't transferable,
it's not-- you have to be in that place to be
touching that piece of ground.
And that's, there's nothing more locating than the piece of dirt
below your feet.
So that's why I'm so attracted to the ground.
So now we're going to go get my dog.
Her name is Addie and we're going to take her for a walk.
And we're going to take some paper and crayons with us,
and we're going to go make some rubbings.
I really notice the way different pieces of ground
meet each other.
The way that pieces of sidewalk abut each other
or adjoin each other.
The way that the grass hits the sidewalk.
The way that the poured asphalt might
meet another piece of poured asphalt, might meet a sidewalk.
Um, the cracks in the sidewalk or in the asphalt-- the things
that disrupt the order I find to be really beautiful and moving.
It's such a curious thing when you really
think about what is real and what is realism.
And in a way for me, these rubbings
are the most realistic depictions of space
there is because they may look like abstractions when
you're done.
Again, you know, I described them as a field of static,
or something that looks like a map.
Um, but they're the most realistic representations
you can have.
What's great about this project is the documentation
doesn't function as just documentation.
It is the piece itself.
It becomes part of the project.
So, um, the other things that are scattered around that
might ordinarily just seem arbitrary and random actually
take on meaning.
So if you happen to have a table leg in the potential frame
of the image, you have to think about, oh, there's
the table leg in there.
Do I like it?
OK, yeah, I kind of like it.
It's weird.
Let's keep it in.
And the fun of it is that you can
play with the stuff that's in your everyday world as part
of it.
Well, the materials are one dog.
So you'll need one dog, one crayon, and one piece of paper.