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.
