A project on anticipating the viewing audience.
video link to Cat Carrier Vandal
(2009) Surrounding the East Carolina University School of Art and Design building are dozens of sculptures ranging from small to large iron works, heavy aluminum pieces, and concrete pieces created by students, faculty, and visiting artists. All of the works are outfitted with a special concrete platform, and some are even fastened to the ground with bolts. There is permanence not only in the material itself, but also through precautions in place for safety, and to deter looters. In one incident at the school in 2009, ECU campus police were on the scene as I arrived, and a sculpture student was filing a report with them.
The piece was one of a series of sculptures that had been defaced that year. This time, it was a former student’s six-foot iron sculpture entitled Medusa. Adam Buth, an MFA alumnus was documented stating, “I expected this would happen at this University, with all the debauchery and excessive alcohol consumption that goes on there…It’s not the first time artworks have been destroyed or vandalized at the sculpture garden, and on the campus”26. The local news did a feature on the incident which aired that night, and news spread to local newspapers with titles exclaiming “Vandalism Strikes ECU Sculpture.”
I found it interesting that a steel sculpture made from heavy impervious metal could be destroyed by a bunch of student vandals. It strikes me as supplemental to create a public work of art that is fleeting, or has no permanence at all which anticipates a destructive audience. For example, Totem (Figure 3), is a piece constructed from found materials; a cat carrier, spray painted gold on the outside and white on the inside with (3, puck-style, under cabinet) lighting fixtures, atop a fully extended camera tripod.
The piece was adorned on the inside with a Michael Jackson’s Thriller CD hanging in the center of the cat carrier. Totem sat atop the exact location of the Buth’s slain Medusa and served as a memorial to both Buth’s piece and Michael Jackson (died June 25, 2009). After about a week, the Totem piece was stolen from the sculpture garden as I had anticipated. Herein, the piece was designed for my looting participant, and became a success because of audience participation. Granted, the sculpture garden is not necessarily public enough that people can go stealing sculptures, yet the event did set up an interesting proposition: using public space to anticipate viewers actions with artwork that succeeds with public participation. With the piece, I used the historical connotations of pirates to describe the pirate-loving student body at ECU.
more on this blog post: Stolen Sculpture
