There’s Catharsis to Be Discovered Inside the Dumpster
I walk into the first-floor sculpture room at 11am every day. The week before Texas States student juried show every day I am told to submit my work. The thing is though; I don’t have any work to submit. Four years of creating and learning with nothing to show? Sounds ridiculous. Most things I’ve made have been reused, stripped down, unstuffed, dismantled and thrown away. If you’re a lover of art or an artist yourself (we all are in our own ways) this fact of my art practice might come as a shock. A horrifying waste of time and money even. Though with sculpture, an ephemeral medium, a part of the world as much as we are. There’s freedom to be found for young artists in destroying their art. Creating something that most likely will be destroyed soon after. The medium that bridges between mediums. After throwing away my art year after year. I found Catharsis in the Dumpster.
It was like this day one in the sculpture department.. When I made my first successful piece, a week later I was getting emails asking if it could be thrown away in order for the welders to have sufficient room. I couldn’t keep a plaster cast of guts wrapping an estates sale sign next to my bed. So, off to the dumpster it went. What of The result of all my hard work? All I had left was amature documentation. I never questioned this pattern or stopped to mourn. I tunnel visioned into my college work. Three years later it clicked when the Spring juried show rolled around once again. An exhibition where students submit work to the TXST art gallery to showcase the student body. Professors in every department encouraged students to engage.. This year I looked around our studio of advanced sculpture students. All being asked to submit work, and none having any. Only one sculpture was submitted out of the whole class. Now wait a minute? I know why I don’t have anything to submit, but why didn’t they? Amazing artists stood around me. I’ve spent years seeing them create and evolve and for what? I had just discovered we were all on the same boat. Asking myself where’s all our sculpture gone? The answers were consistent. Sculptures are very hard to keep inside small apartments.
This conversation was brought up on the opening night of the juried show a week after my own realization. Not a single sculpture made by a sculpture student sat in a room of my fellow young artists. A metal piece here, a ceramic piece there. Both 3D and in the realm of sculpture. Though staying safely in a small scaled, single (or reduced) material range. The one sculpture that had been submitted was not selected for the show. I don’t think the show was poor because of this. Being brought up with no means of bringing others’ works down. This personal thought process is due to my close involvement with the sculpture program. The show was nice and the three-dimensional work that was showcased was among the best ( a metal cast of underwear won best in show). These were individual artists with distinct styles and ranges. Though now when I look at my own work I think of only the dumpster.
I sculpt with garbage essentially. Construction material, discarded fabric, found objects, reduced, reused, and recycled. But, eventually also being thrown away for someone else to crush or repurpose. I’ve been sitting on this prick, the dumpster, the last couple of weeks. Bringing it up in casual conversations with other sculptors. When asking I get knowing scoffs and glances of a shared annoying reality. This isn’t targeted at other art, or a victimization. It’s knowing of the constraints on our physical material, and world views. My non traditional sculpture most lilley will be damaged, discarded, misplaced, and trashed far more than a painting. More than a metal cast, print, ceramic cup or bowl. I know what those things are. Where they belong. How sad and off kilter it would be to see hundreds of hours worth of a painting at the bottom of a metal dumb. Knowing that it doesn’t belong there.
Often I don’t even know what to call what I make. I’m still young in the early stages of my career. I ask myself what is sculpture? Where does it land on this standardized scale of understanding what art is? A painting is a painting because it’s a painting. You then can narrow down from there. How do I do this with sculpture? When I can make art out of anything I can find. How can I fit such a variety in a box? I can’t. There’s no box it seems. No set rules in its creation, and on the other hand in its destruction. That is where once again I find myself seeing the dumpster. Making a sculpture for me is being so excited to eat, your first big bite is so good you almost choke. When I have no more room in the back of my car. No galleries to house a large project. I say goodbye. With every buzz of the copper on steel, drill gun whorl I know that I might be making for nothing. Though after accepting the inevitable throw away. I find playfulness in creating. A light freedom of not knowing what could happen. Anything can be realized only restricted in material not space or self.
There is a place for a painting on a wall, a palace on a pedestal for shinned metal, places for jewels to hang off fabric, places for video and sound to fill space, and places for a print to sit on a t-shirt. Pushing standardized places is what I love to do, it’s what a lot of artists love to do. Often when boundaries are to be pushed sculpture is a medium that easily breaches these conventions. I see it in so many works around me. When one medium meets another. All to the painting on the wall. But when the painting starts to create the question “could this be considered a sculpture” my heart spins. And drops. Will the fact of its less-storable nature keep the piece from being “successful”? On this small scale of things in my college apartment, I found the answer teetering toward yes.
I see the dumpster bright as day. Sometimes I wish I’d fallen in love with an artform I got to keep more often than not. Though I do look at the option of the dumpster as an advantage. I’m not afraid to say goodbye and move to my next project. As I roamed this question of the dumpster. A seasoned sculptor told me that inside the sadness of letting go. I had found catharsis. Without ripping out the old stuffing, how could I stuff something new? The money I have to involve myself in my art isn’t enough to have everything be new. That’s why I chose sculpture in the first place. It was the cheapest of the departments to work in. I dove in the dumpster after every school day with my friends. Most of all of our early works were made this way.
I found my opinion on what sculpture is. Its catharsis. Uncontrollable nature of things. Lovely, accepted push and pull. It’s life to me. A medium that holds boundless freedom. A medium that lacks respect and understanding. But doesn’t need it. Without sculpture to join art and us on the third realm. We would never breach new art.