Intro: Found Sculpture as Intrepretation of Reality

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp

Sculpture, in my opinion, is one of the most difficult forms of art to understand.  Ever since Marcel Duchamp rolled out his series of “readymades,” (including the 1917 work, Fountain, pictured above) the concept of scultpure has radically changed. 

For many, sculpture falls neatly into categories based on media: bronze, glass, woodcarving, stonecarving, ceramics, etc.  These are all types of sculpture made from materials that I consider to be fairly raw in their natural, unaltered state.  Almost anything can be made using these materials, given a skilled artist and the willingness to put forth the labor to transform them into works of art.  Consider, for example, a full scale tree carved from marble, it’s branches carefully balanced to avoid breakage, it’s surface carved and etched to give every nuance of natural bark.  Impressive, isn’t it?  Now, consider that same sculpture, but instead of an intricately carved marble tree, the artist instead opts to use a real tree to represent a tree.  It still looks the same, takes up the same amount of space, nearly identical in every way, yet for some reason, it simply isn’t as impressive to the average viewer. 

My starting point for wanting to further explain and understand found object sculture began in my first few weeks of graduate school.  I had been making sculptures from found wire froms, stretching canvas over them and putting lights inside to illuminate the work – the result falling somewhere between Rauschenberg and Noguchi.  The graduate program that I had signed into seemed quite determined to transform every artist that passed through the sculpture program into David Smith – making big geometric outdoor sculptures from polished welded steel.  I decided to keep working in my current style, and at the time I was stripping umbrellas and covering them with ragged found clothing and canvas as an exploration into the concept of shelter.  The faculty in the sculpture program kept trying to get me to make giant umbrellas out of metal, which would have been interesting, but were in the complete opposite direction of the concept I was pursuing.  After dropping out of the program, I was left wondering – “Can you use a real umbrella as an umbrella, and still call it art?”

Artists that utilize found objects as well as those who interpret found objects captivate me in ways that “nobler, purer” artists often fail to do. In this blog series, I will take a look into the methods that modern and contemporary artists have used to incorporate found objects into their work as well as their interpretation of familiar objects as subject matter.

Binoculars by Claes Oldenburg