Beyond Parody

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Beyond Parody
Beyond Parody

Beyond Parody

2016

re-purposed scrap pressure-treated lumber, contractor’s cement, self-driving screws, bolts/nuts/washers, nylon rope, margarine container

roughly life sized

Exhibited in the Eastern Edge Gallery Members Exhibition
Dec 16-30 2016

In 2015 I came into possession of a lot of short pieces of pressure-treated 2x4s and 4x4s, waste lumber too interesting to discard.

I had no particular idea what to do with them until I obtained the book On Sculpture, by Antony Gormley, and discovered his many, many, many sculptures of himself – or at least a life-sized man – formed from square blocks of cast iron and other metals. (For readers who have not heard of him, he does different sorts of sculptures of himself, and has become very famous indeed, particularly in the UK.)

So, I set out to make a copy, a standing one because most of his figures are standing up. Too heavy for the glue I was using, that version collapsed of its own stupendous fabric. So I restructured the figure and made it reclining, as is Gormley’s sculpture Contract (2011). And numerous others.

I also made a dog that has found him. (See Gormley’s Lost Dog IV, among others, though he seems to make his dogs of spheres.) The dog was more successful.

In 2008 Sir Antony Gormley was ranked fourth among The Daily Telegraph’s 100 most powerful people in British culture. He does have insightful things to say about sculpture, at least in my opinion, but he does crank out an awful lot of similar stuff. He sells his figures like this for something like half a million pounds each (or north of that), so he is richly rewarded for his efforts.

It’s not that he couldn’t make a sculpture like this, if he wanted, out of pressure-treated wood. It’s that, given that he does so much stuff, one wouldn’t know if he was parodying himself or not.

Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works Some rights reserved
Taken on: January 3, 2017
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