Blog Post #5 - Wrapping Up The First Piece

June 22, 2018

So people did show up, in droves!  The final participant count was 200 people, including about 60 children and people from all walks of life and across many different communities within the city (black, white, Korea, et al.)  It was actually overwhelming at times – they came with beloved items from home, they came to sniff around and see what was going on, they came with their teachers and many three-generation groups – teenage kids, parents and grandparents.  A Korean friend of the art center and gallery had come by on setup day, then sent out an alert to 130 Korean families in the area (KIA Motors has a big auto plant near here) and dozens of members from the Korean community showed up to lend their support.

A policeman came in with a badge from the department, wanting to have us include it, and a young girl brought in a grandfather’s World War II brass insignia that had been pinned on the grandfather’s Army hat.  People came in, curious, like we were from an episode of Antiques Roadshow, wondering whether something could be included, would it “print” into the clay, was there room or did we think it would be a fit?  Russ, the local notable, gave us his marijuana pipe to imprint in the clay, and his daughter brought in a logo representing his global corporation.

We were busy, and went to work for a solid day adding pieces into the sculpture until 4:00 pm, at which time I was finally able to eat lunch! Then we picked up the ball again to pour the plaster and the foam, ending a very long and full day.

Reflecting on it tonight, I still worry: would the new gantry (a kind of mobile I-beam placed overhead) and chain hoist rig work when we have to raise and flip the piece? At my home studio I’ve always flipped the heavy clay and plaster ‘sandwich’, which weighs about 500 pounds, using chain hoists and steel beams mounted in the roof.  Here, I have no choice: I have to do it all with this mobile portable gantry, and it’s been stressful wondering if it would work. In the end, with 8 or 10 people watching and 6 people helping, we did make the flip to the delight of the crowd. The table started to tip, the gantry scudded a few inches forward, and everyone gasped and clapped as it settled down.

So it all worked, not elegantly, but all fine. We started cleaning, with a rotating crew of 15 people or so all having a chance to peel clay away, with essentially no missteps. It was all starting to be a blur – washing, picking, scraping, scratching, washing again, and more clay picking. It felt like a quilting bee with people talking and sharing and picking – all hunched over the piece from several angles, really drawn into a touching scene of genuine community. Participants were truly a part of something magnetic and worthwhile.  Lots of laughing, teens and young adults along with the elderly. A retired woman, a lifelong textile designer who had just moved back to town regaled us with her wit. “If I’d ‘a known how much fun this was going to be I’d ‘a started doin’ it years ago!”

I set the piece in its little tent to dry, with fans and bricks and boards and tarps and heater all working in unison.

Following the main event, I joined in with another dinner along with members of the Museum Board and friends – it’s been essentially one very long 72-hour- day. What comes next?

It’s clear to me that the hard part is ahead, even though this wonderful LaGrange experience has given me a great foundation.  Will we be able to put this piece and the community experience into context with similar projects from other places? Will we ever find other similarly inspired communities to work with?  As we do more of these will the results start to feel banal/skew toward a predictable middle ground? What if a (perceived) worn-down, beaten-up community (based on factors such as poverty-level incomes or undocumented-immigrant-percentage) produces a work that reflects only on the hardships of the community, as opposed to a vibrant look at who they are: encompassing all aspects of life in this Georgia community?

All ahead, all unknown.  What is clear is that after three exhilirating days (and a few more days tweaking with plaster and tints in upstate Georgia at another residency there)  is a tiny down payment, a preamble, an ante, for the real job ahead. The real work is getting several of these events in a wide range of communities to start building the outlines of a new story, generating fresh insights into places we think we know but never visit, uncovering a way of helping everyone involved find something new and valuable, perhaps something about what it means to truly be an American.

Blog Post #4- Show Time!

June 21,2018

This is the day I’ve been planning for- when people are going to show up, when the Thing is going to be created.  Yesterday we set everything up: the mold, the clay... Museum assistants helped me prepare, the gantry got put up, and people dropped in for a visit, stopping to chat and bringing objects for imprinting into the Shared Spaces piece. Everything ran according to plan.

Collage of images during the day of imprinting works into the clay, LaGrange, GA

My main concern is: when all of these things get done, will we end up with something interesting and meaningful, or just a kind of community “craft” project?   What drove this whole project for me could be summarized: what if?

What if I could get a piece made simultaneously by people in New York and people in Georgia?

What if, in spite of each community having their own (quite different) objects selected to be in there, it was possible that instead of these objects ‘competing’ I could find a way to coordinate creation of the work so that these objects could live alongside one other as some sort of whole?

The idea would be to see the final piece with all its variety at the granular level while simultaneously seeing it all come together in a unified, balanced and comprehensive whole from afar. I’ve imagined it might give us some sort of glimpse of a new perspective, where we could reflect on our country with all its conflicts and differences, yet still see it as one cohesive, beautiful whole.

So, as always in these projects, practical matters muddled my original intent. It simply isn’t possible to move the piece anywhere while it is halfway made: my original idea of having Georgia participants to create half of the piece before bringing it home to New York to complete just won’t be possible. This is what I had imagined, but it seems this just won’t be the case -  unless I had convinced a busload of New Yorkers to come with me to LaGrange! From this evolution, eventually the current model of a multi-city tour idea took root: seeking a diversity within each community, and diverse communities around the country, and hoping something similar or at least interesting would happen for each piece. Then hopefully all of these voices can be arranged into one overall exhibit, with the video of their making, on the national level.

What concerns me now has to do with depth.  Will I get the depth of meaning I’ve been hoping for?  Will the things people bring just be personal knick-knacks or things of personal meaning that don’t build up any deeper resonance in others? Also, will people be able to talk about their choices and objects, and do so on camera?  Finally, will a diverse audience show up to participate?

So far I’ve met a number of people here, and by and large it has all been surprising- not what I had expected – different and better.  Starting with my host Wes, who looks on the outside like a northerner’s concept of any random Southern good ‘ol boy, who then turns out to have committed his and his wife’s life savings to building up a high caliber collection of African-American artists’ works on paper, along with other substantive, museum-quality American works.  Then there is his buddy, I’ll call him Russ – we met over bourbon at Boys Night Out up at Wes’s country house a half-hour out of town. Russ started a global company producing custom floor mats, with thousands of employees in plants around the world. He’s retired now, his son runs the business, but stays active in the community. His politics could be described as old-time-Republicanism, and he’s happy to speak like any CEO firmly and confidently about his views on illegal immigration (“lock ‘em up!”) and so forth.  Except that Russ has been one of the earliest, leading figures in the legalize marijuana movement – confronting Newt Gingrich on numerous occasions, donating generously to the cause and sharing a blunt with us at night. “I told him, Dammit Newt! I am Sick and TIRED of being a criminal in my own Country! Now you get in there and talk to Reagan and get this stuff legalized!”

I’ve also met women from the local homeless shelter, teens, a vibrant and large community of Koreans (there is a big KIA plant outside of town) and people from the local colleges. “Who is LaGrange?  Who isn’t?”  is my whole notion of whatever cultural flavor I might find on the “Georgia/Alabama border” just another wrong-headed idea?  It’s certainly different here than New York – for one thing people really like to take their time and sit and talk with each other!- but beyond that isn’t it likely to just be a community full of individuals, like anywhere else, and not something that can stand in for some New Yorker’s view of ‘a datapoint for opinions in rural America’?  Still I feel it is important to be here, to see something that is not New York, and see what I can learn even if it turns out to be completely different from whatever I was expecting.

Tree outside residency Butterfly House, LaGrange GA

Oh, and the stillness in these woods up at Wes’s country house is exquisite!

Blog Post #3: Final Preparation and Arriving at LaGrange, Georgia June 1-20, 2018

Almost there:  Getting psyched for my very first iteration of Shared Spaces in a residency with LaGrange Art Museum in LaGrange, Georgia.  I’ve been compiling a really long list of things I need to bring to this first remote Shared Spaces project, finding it a little daunting how many specific tools and supplies (more than 100!) are needed to take this project from start to finish.  Remembering them all and getting them to fit into the van for my trip down to GA is going to be my first challenge.

I am going through one last run around the track, testing things out by making a piece in my studio start to finish (Shared Spaces Study #5) and trying to write down all the things I need and use to be prepared for when I am onsite.  Picturing myself getting in front of a crowd, on a tight schedule, and then not having a specific tool or supply is keeping me up nights. Particularly since this project involves relief sculpture, there is often only one right way to do it, so advance planning is key.

My expectation is that each place we do a piece will have individualized differences and incorporate new objects, so I’ve been assembling suggestions gathered by the LaGrange Art Museum staff on some objects to locate, source or  3-D print in preparation for making their flag. I hope to work a few of them into today’s study. Also I’m not 100% happy with my last study- the deep waves created in the American flag necessitated deep walls in the shallower parts of the piece, which felt weak and distracting. I’m wondering whether to reduce this or to eliminate the walls entirely. Would it still look OK? These are just a few of the details that I’ve been struggling with leading into this residency.

Finally I need to figure out how to dry the finished piece on a tight schedule – I have a new compact industrial heater and I’m thinking I can place the piece below a table, cover it with a tarp making a sort of tent, and then force the hot air through with the heater and possibly also a fan. (without lighting the whole thing on fire!)   In the past I’ve used my kiln for an all-day drying out, which is necessary to bring the plaster to its full strength, but I obviously won’t have that option with me on the road. In addition, the pieces I will be making going forward are bigger than any kiln I own, so I need to figure out a new way to dry the works safely.

Shared Spaces Study #5- full dress rehearsal in my studio before heading to LaGrange, GA

Mid-June:  The new piece without walls looks great (Shared Spaces Study #5, LaGrange) and the deeper black ink coloring in the ‘red’ stripes seems to work well.  After a few failed attempts with the new industrial dryer, I’ve figured out its temperament and got the piece nicely dried out.  I put the piece in the van and brought it to Georgia so people could see an example of a finished work while creating the new one.  (This is important since we are making an inside-out-and-backwards mold of the piece, as we imprint our objects into moist clay. The finished piece,  or right-side-out cast, is not visible until a few days later which can be a little confusing for visitors..!)

Street in downtown LaGrange, GA.

I drove two days to LaGrange, arriving just in time for the last plate of ribs at Boys Night Out up at the Cochran farm where I’ll be staying for the week.  Sipped a lot of bourbon, swapped some tales and began confronting the complex reality of life in this prosperous, fairly liberal, manufacturing-oriented southern college town. How will the project make a difference here?  How will it be perceived by participants? My goal is to give people an opportunity to forge a new understanding of themselves, their American experience, while also helping strengthen bonds within the community. Will it work?

June 20: Finally, Setup Day.   We will be doing the actual event around the corner from the Museum, at the Cochran Collection & Gallery, which has the benefit of good foot traffic right on LaGrange’s historic Lafayette Square. Wes Cochran has been a terrific help, and I’m in awe of his and Missy’s collection, amassed over decades, perhaps the largest private collection of black American artists’ works on paper in the country, (along with a who’s who of 20th century art.)  And of the deep, supportive relationships they’ve forged with black artists over the years. And also of the fact that the Gallery’s most recent show by Bruce Chefesky had just been photographed for Sculpture Magazine.   No pressure here...

Laura Jennings, Executive Director of LaGrange Art Museum and supporter extraordinaire, in front of the Cochran Gallery at the end of Setup Day, June 20, 2018

I worked with the Museum’s assistants to get everything moved in and set up, including building the box mold, laying in the general clay outlines of the flag so that tomorrow we’ll be able to start placing objects in it when the visitors show up.  We’ve been promised a good crowd, but I fall asleep wondering what I’ll do if only 5 or 10 people show up…

Shared Spaces Post #2 - How Is It All Going to Work?

In addition to grounding my work in community-building, I also have to think a lot about how the making of the piece is going to actually work in each place.  The hands-on, highly controlled “craft/maker” aspect of building a relief sculpture has been central to my practice, and now I’m opening it all up to a wide range of participants and collaborators.  How can I effectively involve people who I have to assume will have literally no experience in making anything like this?  

In the past I have created large sculptures for installation in a public space, and then watched and documented residents’ interactions and responses to the work, a surprising intervention into their otherwise familiar surroundings.  Projects like Treasury Bondage, set up in Zuccotti Park in NYC, e(Scape), two large heads flanking the entrance to Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, or Emily with Smartphone, an almost-real, almost-life-size young woman hunched over her smartphone and set in places where people were likely doing the same thing.   

Treasury Bondage installed in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan's financial district, 2010.  Raku-fired stoneware lifesize figures, steel, chain.

Yet in all of these projects I was not directly engaging viewers in the choices and creation of the work itself. With Shared Spaces I am going to be able to engage hundreds in the actual creation stages, producing a sculpture directly translating their voices and choices into the finished work -  a complex amalgamation of symbols built into an American flag. This resulting piece, which will remain in the community, needs to be a record of the residents’ values in a powerful, varied, and unifying relief sculpture.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on relief sculpture, and why I have chosen this form.  For millennia, civilizations (and their sculptors) have documented their triumphs in wall relief sculptures, usually built into monuments and buildings for all to see.   And Carrara, Italy, where sculptors have sourced pure white marble since Greco-Roman times, has long been the preferred material for sculptors memorializing their culture and time.  So my wall reliefs, made with a blend of super-hard plaster and powdered Carrara marble, are linked through material and form to this long-standing need we have as a society to document our culture. 

Section of wall relief sculpture from the Pergamon Altar, installed in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin

How does this help me engage a community in documenting their own lived experience?  I’ve basically cobbled together a half-dozen different sculpting methods, new and old, including molding,  casting, carving  3-D printing and assemblage in a way that lets any unskilled person translate an artistic choice into a sophisticated finished product, with the help of myself and my studio assistants.  Participants are encouraged to bring objects meaningful to them, or select from those I provide, and place them within the evolving piece. From tractors to TV channels, social media logos to sports teams, members of the community are encouraged to select and explain the objects they would like to place into the context of the Stars and Stripes.   Thus the finished artwork reflects the pluralistic voices of all who participated while also providing an overarching view of the community, and perhaps even the country, as a whole.

Some  3-d printed logos and other cultural elements laid out in Bob's studio.  Bob creates these works in a 3-d modeling program then prints them on a 3-d printer for imprinting into clay for inclusion in cast wall relief sculptures.

Now I need to put it all together in places I’ve selected.  That involves finding local partners, making advance site visits,  meetings and conversations, and identifying interns and paid staff who can shoot video and help with sculpting and visitor-management. To say nothing of the long lists of studio equipment and the right truck to carry it all.   And I’m wrestling with an uncomfortable balance that needs to be struck:  how much can or should I control in order to reliably achieve a predetermined “good” outcome, and how much should I be leaving to chance, to the unique dynamics that develop within the participants as the project unfolds?  How much design and planning is helpful and when does it start choking off something magic and unanticipated that needs to happen?  For now I’m living with this tension and hoping for the best. 

My first stop? LaGrange, Georgia - a diverse, southern independent city near the Alabama border west of Atlanta.  They’ve promised to reach out to groups all over town, from the homeless shelter to the Presbyterian Church, young an old, black and white, and even a large contingent of Koreans- there’s a new KIA plant just outside of town.  I chose LaGrange because several generations of my Clyatt ancestors had farmed nearby, and am delighted that the local Art Museum director and staff are enthusiastically embracing the project.

Bob with Laura Jenning, Executive Director of LaGrange Art Museum, on a pre-planning trip this May, LaGrange, GA

Shared Spaces Post #1 - Developing a New Art Concept

Welcome to a behind-the-scenes look at Shared Spaces, my new social practice art project.  I’ll be sharing my process - my puzzles, hopes and uncertainties through which, with luck, you will be able to experience what it feels like for an artist to make the transition from making ‘things’ to making art in a community, art that seeks to change hearts and minds and respond to the needs of that community.  You’ll get to watch as I steer and bump my way to art that becomes a shared common experience, a way for us to learn together, and to engage new voices in the Contemporary Art process.

Me, looking entirely out of place, with my cousin and close childhood friend Bruce on the first trip to Paris, Tennessee.  (I loved it, but politely declined the AR-15 with Bumpstock for future trips)

Where to start?  A few years ago, I realized that I honestly didn’t know enough about the parts of the US outside my familiar coastal-urban circuit. No one I talked to in New York and nothing I was watching or reading seemed able to explain it to me either.  I took a few trips to Tennessee to see one of my California cousins who had relocated there and got really excited – it felt almost like another country!  I rode around in a pickup truck and talked to a guy about his Harley.  Shot cans in the field behind the woods.  I came back and told all my Chelsea art friends about it.  How could I get 20 of us together to just go be in Tennessee for a long weekend, just to ride around and talk to people, go to a barbecue, maybe even shoot at some stumps?  My friend Seph Rodney at Hyperallergic listened thoughtfully and gave me a key piece of advice: you have to figure out a project-- a thing to do together--  to give everybody a reason to be there.

Seph’s idea made sense, and I started casting around for a likely project. I had been making wall relief sculptures with dozens of found objects and cultural elements. After watching an episode of Homeland, with the American flag in the credits, everything clicked: we could make flags together- relief sculpture American flags.  People would bring along objects that were meaningful to them, or pick something out from objects I provided, and we would fill the flag with them in a sort of sculptural collage.  I started applying to residencies and figured out how to take my show on the road- how we could make these wall relief sculptures in remote locations outside my well-equipped studio.   

Removing the clay mold material to reveal plaster relief sculpture – a Work in Progress

My hope is this will open up doors and give me a way to meet people I would never otherwise have any interaction with. Break down some of the stigma around each of our ‘types’ and let real people start to interact despite our different cultural and political viewpoints.  In the end, I’m hoping I can do these projects with different communities all around the country and somehow get a richer understanding of who we are as a nation, of our complexity and diversity. I’ve decided to call it Shared Spaces: a journey into different aspects of American society that remain hidden in plain sight.  And to reach even higher, in these fractured contentious times, to uncover some kind of new narrative at the end of all this – some hint or evidence pointing to some kind of new way for us all to live alongside each other despite our differences.  I’m hoping to recover, uncover, discover some kind of new way for us to be Americans.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Social Practice Artist with NYC Sanitation Department worker (image courtesy Social Practice Queens)

In recent years I’ve  been looking at lots of artists who do Social Practice art, working with communities of people and making some kind of societal change the point of the work they do.  People like Pablo Helguera, Trevor Paglen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mel Chin.  It’s a new-ish field and still wide open to innovation which feels refreshing.  I’ll dig deeper into some of these artists and their work soon in a future post, and will keep returning to their and others’ work in the field to draw contrasts, parallels and lessons as I embark in this new direction.

Shared Spaces - Ways of Healing - Learning to live together again in America

Conflict, mistrust, anger - America is a divided place. We may live in one country but increasingly it feels fractured - Red State and Blue State, Republicans and Democrats, gun owners and those who want them restricted or banned. Men and women, people of different races and backgrounds and histories. Urban Coastal and Rural, the 1-percenters and everybody else, all living out our visions of rights and duties and often enough bristling with feelings of injustice.

What can anyone do? In the past year I've been going to parts of America different than what I'm used to. For me that means rural and inland areas, whether in Texas or Tennessee or rural places nearer home. I'll be doing an artists' residency in north Georgia in June, with more scheduled throughout the year in the Midwest and West.

I don't make a lot of specific plans. I've just been showing up, being available to talk and to listen.   Bit by bit I'm learning about other ways of being American. This year I'll focus on rural places where my great grandparents lived-  places "I" might be living today if not for some quirk of fate or a decision made by an ancestor a century ago.

What is coming out of these journeys is a series of interactions and writings along with a new body of work: Shared Spaces. Inside the frame of each sculptural relief are signs and symbols and reminders of lots of different ways of being American. Guns and pickup trucks, Goldman Sachs and CNN. Cigarettes and soft drinks and granola. It's all mixed up, finding a way to exist together in Shared Space. I'm hearing a new set of voices out there:   Even if many of us never come to like each other or understand or agree with each other we still need to figure out how to live together, somehow. Following this process, and the interactions and art projects flowing out of it are my way of working on this, my way of healing.

Contemporary Relief Wall Art

Creating a new body of work that connects me to long traditions in sculpture- wall relief art-  that are for some reason not widely pursued by sculptors today.  It has been fun figuring out a new way of working that has immediacy, cultural resonance, flexibility and feels alive.  Process is a blend of 3-d printing, direct carving, mold-making,  life-casting, and press-molding.  Learning to think inside-out-and-backwards and relishing the surprises.  This next sentence is for the bot-like non-humans because this is the place they love to come and read and feed, and they must be fed!   contemporary sculpture relief art, wall-mounted.  contemporary art and sculptural innovation.

contemporary relief wall art, Cultural Landscape Series #45, bob clyatt sculpture 201742cm x 260cm x 10cm deep.

Contemporary Relief Sculpture and Heads Sculpture

In an attempt to ensure people can find my work according to the kinds of things they like to search for, this page is my way of dealing with that.  Humans will probably find things more interesting on other parts of the site.  Thanks for visiting :-)

Below is an example of my contemporary relief art, a traditional-referencing bas-relief or alto high relief sculpted art form.  Art using Brands and Logos, as well as figurative relief art sculpture.  This art also uses emojis in contemporary art.

Contemporary Relief Sculpture Art, wall-mounted relief art, Cultural Landscape series, Bee Art

I also have large head sculptures for public art installations, as well as smaller wall-mounted sculptures of face art and head sculptures for collectors.  These head sculpted contemporary art is the latest evolution from my wall-mounted head sculptures.

(E)scape New faces public art Head sculptures installed outdoors at Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem NYC.  Photo Courtesy Hyperallergic.  They engage the community in a dialog with art, an aspect of art social practice outreach art in a community of color.  This is inspired by the work of such artists as Theaster Gates and Nick Cave.