Everything effects us.
You know, a handful of soil if you like
every material, every object
has some effect on us.
I think that's really what sculpture is about.
Amazingly enough, when you do put a sculpture out
in a public park, everybody gets very excited.
They don't worry about all the buses, traffic and road signs,
the lamps, the buildings or the advertising.
They got used to that.
But suddenly a sculpture out there
is like an alien has landed in their backyard.
Tony's work is amazingly sculptural.
It's very interesting that he started off life
with photographs, with performance work
and now he is making incredibly three-dimensional work
which is very, very powerful
as you can see from this piece in the landscape.
It's a rare category of objects
even if it's a category, it's just a rarity in the world.
We use materials as human beings
that's our predicate of our survival strategy.
We extend ourselves getting dressed in the morning
and sitting on chairs
in buildings, on roads and in cities.
This is an extension,
a material extension of ourselves
with the basic function of keeping our
naked backside off the naked soil.
I mean, it's a still life
that slips in between the landscape and the figure.
But all of that,
the vast majority of our use of materials
is utilitarian by definition.
Governed by certain economic rules
and even cultural rules.
Actually, you have to think about the fact
that everything that is in our mind
has come from the material world around us.
From the minute we,
in the first act of our lives
open our eyes
and the material world flows in through our eyes,
our ears, our mouths and our sense of touch.
We form out of these impressions
of the material world, we form our ideas,
our emotions and language.
It's an incredibly important thing, sculpture.
Because it's one of the only uses of material.
A very rare use of material
that's not driven by utilitarianism,
that's not purely existential.
And because it's not that
it's not limited by the demands of being utilitarian
and demands of being economic.
And by the lowest common denominator decisions
that people, producers, business men
and designers make
about the things that are in the world.
So in the studio, it's not all
carving or making things.
It's a lot of playing, just moving things around
to see what what comes out of it.
I couldn't make the work I make now
without having made that earlier work.
Everything is part of a chain of events
in my life and in my studio,
that have led me to the work,
as I'm hoping that the work I'm making now
will lead me to some other things in the future.
Sculpture with this freedom
allows the material to grow into space
in a very special way.
It gives us new forms, new ideas,
new emotions, new language and new freedoms
and I think that's probably
the most important part.
It expands out horizon and the possibilities of our lives.
