SCULPTURAL   ACTIONS

Sculptures aren’t always made just to be seen. Sometimes they can be touched, worn or manipulated, becoming tools for shared experience. In these sculptures people become part of the artwork, they 'act'.

Robert Storr describes this ‘acting spectator’ as follows: “like wandering onstage and picking up loose pages from a script, overhearing bits of recorded dialogue and trying to figure out what the setting is… and what actions might still be taken.” 

The idea of the public as a wondering actor has always intrigued me. Creating a work of art is creating a stage where people can step in, respond, act, and animate the sculpture. It’s in this in-between —between sculpture and actor— that poetics, meaning, and ultimately art can emerge.

But to act, in relation to art, can also mean something else. Mary Jane Jacob’s groundbreaking exhibition Culture in Action in Chicago (1993) took place in neighborhoods, not museums. The artworks were conceived with and by local residents.  Jacob sought art as a living, breathing practice. An art that requires action, not just from the artist, but from real people: residents, neighbors, communities. “ ‘In action’ meant being alive and claiming the right to participate in what shapes your own life” (p. 176). For Jacob, ‘to act’ refers to art as social practice—deeply rooted in real lives.

Action, related to sculpture, means both to me: allowing the public to become actors who activate the artwork and the social act of making art in and with the world. Not for the betterment of the world, but for the betterment of art itself. Because art becomes stronger when it’s forced to transcend itself to other people, worlds and discourses.