Molding Self
WEB-EXCLUSIVE: Orange County Museum of Art's 100 Pounds of Clay exhibit offers visitors the chance for some free-spirited expression and introspection.
|
||
|
100 Pounds of Clay |
A friend of mine, a girl far more daring than I, once touched a sculpture. At 10 a.m. in a deserted museum in Madrid, I watched breathlessly as she laid her fingers on the marble. They were there for less than a second before a shrill voice barked at her, “No tocar!” It was exhilarating, and I didn’t even do it.
It was the “don’t touch” mentality of museums that made something as simple as a stolen brush with marble so exciting. The idea has been fostered in all of us since our first-grade school field trips, and museums’ velvet ropes, surveillance cameras and security guards have made their stance on the issue exceedingly clear.
This taboo is exactly what artist Charles Long hopes to challenge with his installation 100 Pounds of Clay, which recently opened for its third presentation at the Orange County Museum of Art. The work starts off as 100 pristine blocks of modeling clay, changes into innumerable forms at the hands of visitors and is eventually recycled by the artist to make models of new works.
The installation encourages visitors to shape the blocks of clay into something new, whether by adding onto the work of another visitor or deconstructing another’s work entirely. This collaborative effort results in fantastic juxtapositions, like a detailed human face amidst a child’s work, or a hanging elephant’s head made of garish yellows and purples. In the past, the artist has enjoyed seeing unexpected combinations, such as “a Bart Simpson head morphing out of a flower.” Each object made from 100 Pounds of Clay is a record of the hands that made it, and similarly, we too are shaped by an infinite number of people, both seen and unseen. The installation presses us to discover these signs of collision – the intermingling of young, old, modern, and traditional – in ourselves.
However, even with the knowledge that visitor interaction defined 100 Pounds of Clay, I hesitated. I saw flowers, monsters, doghouses, surfing scenes, and cityscapes. They seemed untouchable and in perfect balance. Long’s original aim in conceiving the installation was to “remove [his] personal expression from the artwork while maximizing expressiveness through anonymous creators,” but who was I to take apart someone else’s expression of self? What was I trying to express anyway?
In the end, I turned a flower and a smiling yellow square into abstract sheets of folding, decorated clay. I couldn't help but ask myself questions. If “the sculpting process reveals how we become who we are,” as the artist says, what did my sculpture say about my need for order, my dependence on logic or my stubbornness? As I retreated behind the familiarity of the glass and plastic of a camera’s lens, I was surprised to find that my creation didn’t seem as out of place as I’d feared; it may have even looked natural. Each sculpture had thumbprints and traces of other colors. They all showed the clash of spontaneity with careful planning. I imagined that my creation hadn’t disturbed the installation’s balance at all, but instead helped to preserve it for another day.
Long’s installation is important because it acts as a vehicle for questioning intention, belonging and identity. “We define the shape of our lives according to many factors,” he says. “A child playing with clay has few limiting factors.” Few are able to live their entire lives as carefree as children do, but with 100 Pounds of Clay, visitors are given the rare opportunity to return to the freedom of unbridled creation. Even if that freedom does not provide an explicit guide to the nature of the self, creation sticks with you – in more ways than one. That afternoon, my mind spun with bright colors and difficult questions, and that evening, I found that there was still clay staining my hands.
