In this video we're going to talk about sculpture. Sculpture is part of three of the next chapters and videos we're going to talk about in three-dimensional art. And so with the other mediums that we've talked about in the past, we want to start by discussing what is different about one medium than the other. And so what can you think about is different about sculpture than the other mediums?
Yeah, one of the things about sculpture is it's three-dimensional. And so people need to, an artist needs to think about all sides. When they're thinking about paintings, they assume that the audience is going to walk up to the painting and pretty much stand in front of it and look at it from one angle.
To where a sculpture, artists have to think about all sides and an audience sort of walking around the object that they're looking at. All right, so just like with the other mediums, we have focused on techniques and materials associated with the mediums. terminologies and artists and sculpture is no different. And so four sculpture techniques that you should know are modeling, casting, assembling, and carving. And these are the four basic techniques and we'll go over each one.
But basically you can also take different sculpture techniques and separate them into additive and subtractive processes. For instance, modeling is an additive process. And that would mean that you start with nothing.
You start with no material and you add the material to make the object. Assembling is the same. Another additive process where you would add material to make the object along with casting.
Casting is actually different than the other four because it's more like photography and printmaking. And do you remember what was special about photography and printmaking and different than the other mediums? Yeah, it's an indirect process.
and you can make duplicates. And so that's what casting does. Carving would be a subtractive process, meaning that you would start with the material.
In this case here would be a big stone. You would start the material, and then you would subtract material to make the art, and you would subtract some of the stone to make the sculpture. All right, so let's start with modeling. Modeling, like I said, is an additive process. Modeling is when you take material and you mold it into the art object.
This specific type of modeling is terracotta, and this one is ceramics. Ceramics is the material. Terracotta basically means, or literally means baked earth, and it's when you take clay, you mold it into the form, and then you would fire it. I know some of you in high school or at some point have played with ceramics.
You would model the clay. then you would fire it in a kiln and that's how it becomes hardened. Sometimes when you put them into a kiln you can also glaze it before and by glazing you would put a chemical material over the top and depending on the temperature in which you fire it you could get different colors on your ceramics. This one here was not glazed.
This one was painted after it was fired and we know this because a lot of the paint is chipping. off this figure. When you glaze it, it basically is a chemical reaction to the ceramics and it stays there.
Casting is, like I said, it's an indirect process and it makes multiples. This one here is a casting technique called a lost wax technique. And basically what you would do, let me zoom into this here, you would start with a clay core.
and that's not going to be a part of your sculpture. And then you would model over the clay core in wax. The wax is going to get replaced by another material that's going to be the sculpture.
In this case, it was bronze. But you would carve the wax to make the sculpture that you want. Then you would put more wax rods around it.
And then you would cover the whole thing in more clay. And so the wax sculpture is a channel between the pieces of clay. You would then put it in an oven to heat it and that wax would melt from the inside and it would come out creating an empty chamber that then you could fill with whatever material you wanted. It could be bronze or any type of molten metal or fiberglass or what have you.
And then when you break the clay, then your sculpture is revealed. Now this lost wax... casting technique does not create duplicates because you basically smash the clay but you can do it with different types of epoxies and rubbers where instead of using clay you would use rubbers to form the mold and then you could cut that in half open it up to relieve your sculpture and then put them back together and pour some more.
Here's some casting techniques by Sam Butcher, these precious moments figurines. I'm sure when you enrolled in Art 100 you didn't ever think you would be looking at precious moments or any figurines of this matter. These precious moments were made by Sam Butcher.
You can find these at your Hallmark store. And they're usually figures that are bought for, in this case, if someone's going to get married, they get engaged. They would buy these cute little sculptures as they were. Or if someone's going to get pregnant, you would buy a little stork with a baby in its mouth or what have you.
This type of art. as we would call it, is known as tchotchke. Tchotchke art is small, miscellaneous, sort of worthless items in a monetary sense, but they could be worth a lot to the person who owns them. Tchotchke art is something like if you have an aunt that collects spoons from all over the world, or maybe a grandma who has a bunch of etched plates up in her kitchen, that's tchotchke.
When I was younger, my grandma had hobo clowns. like little clowns with these baggy pants, and they looked like they were hobos and stuff. And she loved them, right? But it's not really art that you're going to see in a gallery or museum like a lot of the art we've been talking about in class. So that's what tchotchke means, those little figurines or objects that people individually hold dear to themselves.
This is Jeff Koons, and he's the artist we're going to be talking about in Talking About Sculpture. And what he did in the 80s is he took these ideas of these little tchotchke figurines cast in porcelain, just like Sam Butcher's. But the difference in his, their life size.
And so he blew them up. So we approach them differently and we view them more in a fine art sense. Also, his subject matter is much more convoluted and is very interesting in his concepts. For instance.
Sam Butcher would do these little figurines for people getting married or having a child. You can really see the oddity of Jeff Koons when you try to describe what you're looking at here. For instance, this is a giant prized pig that's being led by these two angels and a woman in a snow outfit, a skiing outfit, kissing his butt for some reason. It's really odd sort of subjects. This is one that you may have seen before.
This one is actually at the Broad Museum. And when we get back... to museums opening their doors.
If you haven't been yet, you really have to head up to LA and check out the Broad Museum. It's a really fantastic museum. Eli Broad and his wife used to have their collection at LACMA, and then they had a disagreement with the LA County Museum of Art, and so they left and just opened up their own amazing museum that deals with post-World War II artists, and they have a bunch of Jeff Koons, including this one.
This is one of Michelangelo Jackson and his pet chimpanzee named Bubbles that Jeff Koons cast in porcelain and it's life-size and he painted it gold. Here's Rachel Whitered. She is from your book and this is some castings that she did by using natural objects as molds. This was a window, you know, like your windows have like double pane windows and there's a gas chamber in between the windows that refract light.
And so she would take those apart and then fill them up with plexiglass or some other material to make her molds. This was a cool series that she did. She's from Great Britain, and there was a lot of gentrification of these old neighborhoods that she grew up in, where they would come by and tear all these tenement homes down where these people lived and put up malls or strip malls or whatever.
And she wanted to preserve that sort of old neighborhood. And so what she would do is buy a home. one of these tenement homes, and she would use that as her cast mold.
And she would fill the whole thing with cement. And then she would tear down the walls and everything. And what was left is this monument for these old homes, where now you can't build a molder anymore, because she has basically made this giant cement block as this statue for the neighborhood.
The next process is assembling. Assembling is again an additive process like modeling. And basically with assembling is you take objects and you assemble them together, just like it describes.
Now, you can do this like David Smith does by welding objects together. You can glue objects together, nail objects together. But you can also make assembled sculpture just by putting objects next to each other.
And so in the classroom, I always joke that this is my sculpture called. Art, Honors Art 100 that we've assembled everyone together in one room. So let's imagine that we're back there now. This is one of my favorite self-portraits. This is David Smith.
He was actually a non-representational sculptor. Just like artists like Jackson Pollock who would splatter paint, what he did is he would just take objects, random objects, and put them together. But they're not meant to reference anything in the natural world.
So this one I always see a grasshopper, but that's not his intent. He's making non-representational objects. And what I love about this self-portrait, it looks like he's out in his backyard building these sculptures and we bothered him. And he also looks like Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec, if you've ever seen that show. And if Ron Swanson was a sculptor, he would definitely be a non-representational assembled welder.
Carving is our last technique and carving is a subtractive process. meaning you start with an object and you get rid of some of the object to reveal the art piece. This is a Dying Slave by Michelangelo.
And Michelangelo was a Renaissance artist that loved creating sculpture. These are some of the tools he would have used to create this sculpture. Just chisels and a hammer.
And today, people who sculpt in stone use the exact same chisels. The only difference, instead of a hammer, they have like a hydraulic that they would put the chisels in that allows them to get rid of the stone much quicker. But what he would do is he would take these tooth-like chisels and he would use those first to get rid of a lot of stone. And so this back piece here, you can see this rough stone at the bottom here that is used as an engineering stone to hold up this figure. He would carve and get rid of a lot of the material and get rough like this.
Then he'd get some of the flats and some of the points to create more detail. And then the last thing he would do is go in with different types of... burnishing materials and sandpapers, that's what this is here, to really smooth out the stone. One of the amazing things about Michelangelo, and we'll talk more about this when we get into the Renaissance, is he would go to a quarry.
Here's a contemporary quarry, but in Michelangelo's day they would have looked pretty much the same. A quarry is just a big hole in the ground that has different types of stone, whether it be marble or limestone or whatever, and he would go and look at the stones that were dug out of the walls. of the quarry and he could look at a stone and he could