Fine Art Sculpture in the Age of Slop
A Deep Dive into Sculpture's Shifting Status
This piece was originally written for another publication, and is much longer and more ambitious than what I’ve posted here to date. It offers context on my philosophy of sculpture, the changing cultural and industrial landscape, and how sculpture might influence a future shaped by AI and the flattening of culture.
Pour yourself a comforting beverage and set aside some time - I hope it sparks some thought. If so, I’d love to hear your feedback.
Thanks for reading! ~ Sage
Sculptor David Robinson works on two clay figures in his old Parker Street studio. Photo by Yasmeen Strang
“I assumed that free citizens cultivated their responsiveness to works of art in order to mitigate their narcissism and fuel their imaginative grasp of that which is irrevocably beyond themselves, to transform their anxious discomfort at not-knowing into a kind of vertiginous pleasure.”
~ Dave Hickey
Journey into Sculpture
23 years ago, as a floundering drop-out from a communications degree, I was hired as a welder in an oddball, high-end metal fabrication shop in Vancouver, Canada. Lacking any experience, I had to absorb the necessary metal fabrication skills on the job. Metal, I discovered, is magical. The most gifted carpenter can’t fuse wood together, or pour it into a mould. The most gifted ceramicist can’t beat a finished, fired bowl into a new shape. Every material has its own beauty and relevance, but I came to love this elemental medium that can be welded, carved, stretched, forged, folded, cast and hammered. It felt infinitely flexible, and profoundly resilient.
My admiration for the metal created a relationship between us. My job was to cultivate the best outcome I could from a material that dictated the terms of engagement. We were dance partners. I had to learn the choreography of welding, cutting, grinding, drilling, and forming. I had to develop dexterity and strength. In so doing I embarked upon a love affair, a creative practice that emerged from a landscape in which my body, my tools, and my materials were no longer discrete.
Learning in that particular environment was a tremendous gift. It granted the time and freedom to pursue true excellence, and provided talented mentors to guide me. The shop was wildly eccentric, staffed with quirky creatives, full of it’s own mythos and lore. The culture was rebellious and risk-taking. It had toxic elements, but to exist in an utterly non-conformist workplace gave me a valuable baseline from which to measure the increasing uniformity and stagnation of our culture.
In 9 years at that shop I grew into project management and picked up some AutoCAD. Liaising between the owner and the staff, I tried to balance the virtues of our eccentricities with the rudimentary responsibilities of HR. It was my first taste of weighing real-world tradeoffs that affected the workers under me.
Through that shop I came to straddle the worlds of art and craft. Much of our product was both artful and functional, but I had the opportunity to work on fine art sculpture as well. And when it became clear that my efforts weren’t bringing the shop into alignment with my goals, I moved over to the studio of sculptor David Robinson.
The City and The Practice
In 1990, when David leased his first studio at 1000 Parker Street, it was like staking out a mineral claim. Housing more pigeons than artists, the hulking timber warehouse overlooked the train tracks in a desolate urban industrial zone. Within the vast and drafty space, with chainlink and curtains, bollards and rope, every new tenant paced out their territory and plotted the boundaries of their new creative haven.
In those days Vancouver retained a robust and crusty industrial sector. Able hands worked lathes and stocked kilns, stitched sails and spun metal dishes. Throw a stone from 1000 Parker and you’d likely hit a foundry or machine shop. The artifacts of this community were rich pickings for artists. Scouring alleys, dumpsters and scrapyards revealed troves of discarded sand-casting patterns, eclectic metal off-cuts and factory seconds that found new life in works of art.
By the time I joined David, 1000 Parker Street housed over 200 artists in discreetly drywalled studios. But the city still had some grit. In my travels with both workplaces I visited numerous little suppliers each with their own distinct culture and offerings. To ‘browse’ was still to wander through aisles or to flip through a paper catalogue. I watched with curiosity as these shops posted their early, clumsy websites.
Today, the city is largely deindustrialized. Skyrocketing property values, globalism, and municipal policies favouring tech over trades have redrawn the map. That breed of little workshop, thick with the scent of machine oil and coveralls long-worn, has been largely displaced or replaced by sanitized big-box factories in the ‘burbs and the churning offshore machine of Chinese production. The micro-foundries near 1000 Parker have transformed: one into a snowboard store, one into an underground venue for techno music, others bulldozed or boarded over.
In my years with David, his studio has gentrified too, evolving over the years to its current incarnation as a generous but cluttered workspace abutting a spare, white-walled private gallery. But every year our list of suppliers gets shorter, as the companies that have served his studio shutter altogether or reimagine their offerings in the new economy. Gone is the large-scale foundry whose proprietor’s hair was stained permanently green from bronze dust. Gone is the metal spinning shop that served major aerospace and agricultural clients alongside the arts community. Gone is the quirky metal shop that engraved meteorites and wore suits and ties on Fridays. The shop that once sold fibreglass decking still provides the silicone rubber for Robinson’s moulds. But more often, the boxes carted out their door by harried PAs are full of make-up and FX supplies for the movie industry.
During David’s 35 years in studio, alongside the withering of the trades, the digital revolution has occurred. Walk through the city with the right architect and they’ll tell you at a glance what software was used to design each new tower’s façade. Visit the local fine arts university and you’ll find more courses in computer animation than in painting. Where we once viewed art in galleries and museums, we now scroll and swipe and gorge our eyeballs on the latest AI slop.
Some 2D artists have successfully surfed the tidal wave of online imagery, garnering sales from afar, often by baring their lives to our collective voyeuristic gaze. But 3D art fails to translate in the digital realm. To grok sculpture, one must share space with it, be a body in relation to it. Even the most shimmering photos of these artifacts are flattened into mere content when they populate the feeds of Instagram, or jostle for standing in an image search array.
Along the way, we have been weakened by our changing environment. Our attention spans have shrunk, our social fabric has torn, our conscious experience has become more abstracted and less embodied. In the names of efficiency, safety and convenience, we’ve administrated and digitized ourselves into a bloodless existence.
This waning of the culture reflects a larger loss of meaning — one that has sparked excitement and debate about the emergence of a new Romantic movement. And so I’d like to explore some observations about artisanal fine art sculpture. Its impact is broad: it is a vessel for the artist’s creative process, it is a viewer’s object of contemplation and transformation, and it is an artifact requiring complex production in a community of suppliers and services. At its best, it is an inspiring art form that brings people together in space, amplifies empathy, fosters collaboration, encourages material skill, and celebrates ingenuity and authenticity within the grounding stability of tradition.
Of course, different sculptors use different business models and philosophies. My own experiences can’t all be generalized, acquired as they were in eccentric workplaces in a relative backwater of a city. So to introduce our model: David’s sculpture studio is an art practice in a business-shaped wrapper. We’ve got the trappings: thousands of square feet of studio and exhibition space, talented studio technicians who help produce the work, and exorbitant insurance for our operations. We use a wide variety of subcontractors, but as much as possible we keep the hands-on work within our studio and under our creative control. His pieces, centred on the human figure, are created from a wide range of materials including bronze, steel, silver, concrete, mirror, and paper. Their scales range from monumental to the intimate.
14 years into my tenure, I rarely get to touch metal anymore, but it’s a privilege to do work that is aligned with my values — managing his studio, facilitating public and private commissions, photographing his work, and helping him steer the shop strategically and philosophically. Our decisions come down to furthering artistic and philosophical aims, not commercial ones. Intuitively, we landed on Lewis Hyde’s1 observation that art belongs in the gift economy, and that one commodifies it at one’s peril. There is no escaping the marketplace, and we must sell the work. But we complicate that process with our values.
Attention is sacred.
Meaning is personal.
We will not attempt to turn a ‘want’ into a ‘need’.
I’ll leave it up to readers to decide if our studio is a unicorn or a dinosaur.
The Brain Lateralization Framework
A touchstone in our thinking is the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist. His comprehensive work on brain hemisphere lateralization — whether taken literally or metaphorically — has explanatory power in virtually all aspects of our lives.
Most pop science has depicted the right hemisphere as creative and emotive, flaky and flighty. Drawing on reams of evidence spanning neuroscience, anthropology, and philosophy going back centuries, McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere is in fact the weaker link, riddled with blind-spots, prone to confabulation, and generally mired in a world of feedback loops of increasingly abstracted confirmation bias. It is reductive, dogmatic, and intolerant. Furthermore, its orientation is one of exploitation — to carve the world of experience into deadened, detached categories, and to use them for its own benefit.
The right hemisphere is the wise one — the one that can see and synthesize a broader context, detect errors, recognize its own limitations, and pursue values beyond the selfish manipulation and domination of our environments. McGilchrist argues that a balanced brain, and in turn a balanced society, is one in which the gifts of the left hemisphere are directed by and used in service of the right hemisphere’s vision. Unfortunately, he suggests, we have fallen out of balance, and many of our modern ills, from environmental despoliation, to wealth inequality, to eroding liberties, to the substitution of bureaucracy for skill, to widespread cynicism and aggression, are indicators of a culture shaped by the left hemisphere wresting the reins from the right.
In applying these lessons, one quickly understands how the holistic nature of things is a double-edged sword. Our work is absolutely contingent on our shifting environment. But so too can our work influence that environment. And creating and engaging with art are two ways to help restore the right hemisphere to its dominant position.
Technology and the Sculptural Philosophy of Tool Use
Most people think of a tool as a thing you use to do a thing. In my experience, a tool is an extension of my body. It is a means of coaxing out a particular quality of a material. Rightly used, a tool does not impose upon a medium, but collaborates with it.
When not caught up on the treadmill of whatever is NEW!, our society treats technology as a means to an end. If you want a hole cut in a steel plate, the obvious choice is the tool that achieves the fastest, most accurate result. We grant artists more leeway — we romanticize their process. But there are broad benefits to choosing your tool based on its how (a right-brain perspective) as well as its what (the left-brain stance). In ignoring this, our advanced technology has abandoned fundamental principles2 and fallen into disfunction.3
The more primitive the tool, the more it demands of the maker. A simple Japanese chisel can manifest works of staggering beauty and subtlety. Grappling with that simplicity develops both skill and discernment. The complex relationship between attention, embodiment and agency that develops as one works with tools fundamentally shifts one’s relationship to the environment. It develops new cognitive capacities, enriches one’s vocabulary of metaphors, and promotes ease with the contingent nature of life as a human.4
Such skilled work facilitates flow states. Limbic Capitalism5 aims to hijack this human capacity with the faux-flow of algorithmic feeds and machine gambling terminals. We’re so distractible that Netflix scripts are written to be coherent to people busy scrolling on their phones.6 Many university students can no longer read a book.7 But picking up a tool and transforming matter with skill and intention becomes a revelatory experience. You lose and discover yourself simultaneously.
Whether or not any given person develops a manual skill, the whole of society benefits from including such makers. Not only do they have competencies that can benefit their community, but all else being equal, they tend to be grounded, attentive to their environments, and carry the humility of those who know the hard limits of a physical world.8
Primitive tools are more conducive to creativity. The more sophisticated the tool, the more it dictates its usage. The very adaptations that have made high-tech tools efficient have constrained their scopes. With simple tools, developing one’s technique allows for exploration that may inspire a whole new direction for the project, or an insight that gets applied in the next one. Yet the surviving fabrication shops in the vicinity of Vancouver have been pushed towards business models that centre high-tech, prescriptive tools that funnel artists towards narrower channels of creativity. We still rely on these shops to produce our largest public and private commissions, and we value these companies greatly. But my sense is that their business models — through no fault of their own — lack some of the humanity and ingenuity of the extinct, craft-driven shops.
More primitive tools are easier to repair, or even to make from scratch. As one moves from a hand saw to a manual plasma cutter to a CNC waterjet machine, the cost, complexity, and square-footage expand exponentially. Unlike the lattermost, a saw fits in a toolbox, requires no power, and will never need a software update.9 But there is a time and a place for each, and David’s studio uses all three of these cutting technologies regularly.
When we are in production mode, making a new edition of an established piece, we may reach for the efficiencies of more advanced tech. But during the exploratory phase of a new work, we often err on the side of the primitive. This intentionality is aligned with Ivan Illich’s concept of Tools of Conviviality10, which points out the dangerous tendency of advanced tools to control humans, rather than the reverse.
In David’s side of the studio, where he is modelling figures from materials like clay and plasticine, he is able to use an immense array of tools in creative ways; he arrived one morning with a milk-foaming wand to see how it would texture the clay. Alongside his hundreds of handmade rakes and loops he may reach for an antique veterinarian cauterizing tool, a scalpel, podiatrist’s side cutters, compressed air, dish soap, modified chopsticks, and various dental tools including an alcohol torch, wax pen and dental picks, just to name a few. While the other zones of the shop — metalwork, mould-making, woodwork, wax-work, and so on, are more prescriptive in their tooling, his creativity bleeds over into those areas and their approaches.
The assortment of the above tools from different eras and industries strikes me as community in microcosm. It’s analogous to a cohesive network of skilled workers of different generations in different industries performing services for their neighbours. It suggests trust in our fellow humans’ competence. It suggests curiosity and collaboration, specialization and cross-pollination. It can innovate while respecting tradition, it can resist planned obsolescence. It is idiosyncratic in both selection and application. It resembles, in some ways, the Vancouver of yore.
These are very humanist qualities in an increasingly technocratic world. From hands-free faucets to self-driving cars, our environment increasingly disrupts the action-perception feedback loops that train our skill and discernment. Our trust in others degrades as professional reliance on technology makes opaque the relationship between action and accountability. Chesterton’s fence has been replaced with Chesterton’s drop-down menu: choice architectures that constrain our options, conceal their underlying incentives, and breed passivity in users. Every tool we use shapes us, and the less we understand the tool, the weaker our understanding of how we’re being transformed.
From a hemispheric perspective, the tools that help facilitate right-brain engagement are those that are used in a more embodied way, and those that are more open-ended in their applicability. A sculptor’s studio is the perfect laboratory for exploring this synergetic relationship between maker, tool, and material. From industrialization to the digital age, from AI to the unknowns of quantum computing, humans needs to develop adaptive modes of relating to technology in which they are the user, not the used. Peco suggests there will be no stable future unless it is populated by human beings who have “a strong felt sense of the healthy boundaries between themselves and tech”.11
Maintaining environments where old wisdom about tools persists may contribute to building those boundaries. And as Michael Polanyi12 pointed out, it only takes a generation for some skills to be lost forever. We can’t rely on text to retain this knowledge. The concept of ‘stealing with your eyes’, which is common in East Asia, points to the importance of learning by watching a master at work. Text (and even verbal instruction) is flattening. In ‘stealing with your eyes’, you’ll be bypassing reductionist abstraction and conceptualization by learning through your unmediated senses. And importantly, in watching you may learn techniques the teacher doesn’t carry consciously, and therefore cannot verbalize or record.
These days, such art studio ‘laboratories’ are hard to find. Not only is the environment around surviving studios more sterile and technocratic, but artists increasingly outsource their work to a new breed of big industry: the large art production house. A few sketches, a digital model, or perhaps a maquette — a small model of the intended work — are shared with these massive full-service shops that turn sculpture production from artistic venture into contract work. As the overhead cost of running a studio has increased over time, this big-shop model of outsourcing is often the only viable model for artists who want to produce work at scale. This model has its advantages. It allows the public to experience art from a wide variety of artists who would never have the means to produce it themselves, and these shops provide jobs and economic benefit to their communities. But this model also reduces the number of opportunities available to sculptors by encouraging 2D artists, designers and architects to throw their designs into the ring. These pieces often take the form of “2D sculpture” — graphic forms like laser-cut steel plates that don’t require sculptural chops.
And just like a big-box retailer can wipe out the local hardware store, the big shop model puts pressure on independent studios that train workers in an artisanal mode and allow the artist to evolve the artwork throughout the production process. And like big-box stores, the incentives for these production houses are different from those of the artist. These shops work firmly in the marketplace, seeking efficiency and economies of scale. By necessity, their timescales are tuned more to warranties than generations. Both tradition and innovation must give deference to administration. Their monuments are constructed from schematics, not from visions. They become, in Marshall McLuhan’s language, “servile mechanisms” of their tools and systems.
If this framing brings to mind the Luddites who protested the industrial revolution and its decimation of cottage trade, you’ve noticed one aspect of how artisanal fine art sculpture may play a role in a new Romanticism.
Analogue Art in a Digital World
What hasn’t the internet changed? From degrading the quality of tools to manipulating property values, the web touches everything we do. But I’ll focus on the psychological impacts most pertinent to sculpture.
Not only are there obstacles to creating analogue art with analogue tools in analogue spaces, but the audience’s capacity to even understand the analogue is dwindling. Past generations had more hands-on skill, and could better appreciate the labour and proficiency involved in producing these artworks. In today’s world of disposable goods and planned obsolescence, we default to assuming artifacts are just pumped out of some factory somewhere — how hard can it be? These days, when I’m asked to explain the processes behind David’s artwork, the listener often reacts with shocked disbelief, or gets lost and glassy-eyed within seconds, too detached from anything I’m describing to absorb it.
One need not understand the making of these objects to value or love them. But there is no doubt that appreciation for them is richer when one can visualize the path the artist walked, discern the choices the artist made, and evaluate the time and skill invested in the making.
This detachment from the process may be part of what drives the voyeuristic nature of much online engagement with artists. A few video clips on Instagram can give the viewer a sense — often a false one — of how the work was created and what kind of labour it required. The product being sold in these videos is not the artwork, but the artist’s lifestyle — or rather their curated presentation of it. The addiction to narrative is satisfied, and if the artwork is actually purchased, it may exist not as an object for the buyer’s contemplation, but as a mere souvenir of the virtual experience offered online.
We have a joke at the studio — “You can die of exposure”. This pun reflects the real harms of focussing attention on gathering eyeballs rather than making art. Not only is this an enormous opportunity cost, but it’s almost impossible to do authentically. The making of art MUST be unselfconscious, and promotion — especially of the ‘lifestyles’ variety, annihilates this state. And like the ‘bring your whole self to work’ movement, this blurring of the public and private selects for people who prioritize social consensus over authenticity.
These artist-at-work reels, and to a lesser extent still images of artwork online, also succeed in delivering a dopamine hit that used to come from engaging with and acquiring art in real life. Thus sated, however briefly, viewers are unburdened of the desire to actually invest in the artwork and develop a relationship with it. Instead, the algorithm will allow them to swipe, dating-app style, with work from all over the world. And like dating apps, commitment is discouraged as the promise of something better is always at their fingertips. Increasingly, the art crammed into these feeds isn’t even human-made. At such volumes, and delivered by such means, unique artworks become fungible content, functionally indistinguishable from cat videos.
This couldn’t be more different from the older model of cherished heirlooms passed down through generations. For many now, the idea now of buying an artwork that your children might someday want to own is almost quaint. Purchasing has become a symbol of individualism, making inherited goods an affront to one’s cultivated identity. Rather than building a bond with items that reflect our history, family and community, we leach off the bloated marketplace of disposable goods shaped by micro-trends and endorsed by influencers.
This globalization of taste is flattening, to use Ted Gioia’s term, and rewards “creators” who pour their energy into formulaic, demand-driven artwork and social networking.13 In the internet age, the public has surpassed the critic14 as the seat of taste and must be courted as consumers. In maximizing the delivery of ‘experience’15 over the production of artwork, these creators tend also to be generalists and multitaskers, robbed of the resources and incentives to go deep into a truly individual art practice.
When the customer is always right, art tends to follow two trajectories — banal designerly consumer goods that appeal to a wide audience, and political16 (often public) art that reinforces the dogmas du jour. Recent examples of these public installations, described by Mary Harrington as “Swarmist art”, are rarely objects of contemplation, but that’s not the point. They provide backdrops for selfies, create jobs for selection panels and consultants, and loan moral virtue to the municipalities and developers who back their creation. To thrive in this system an artist needs bureaucratic skill and a willingness to avoid controversy — two traits that disqualify many gifted creators.
As our art becomes more shallow, so to do our audiences. Attention itself is commodified — bought, sold and solicited at every moment of the day. It is rare now for humans to have the capacity to contemplate a work of art, even in a gallery or museum, for more than a few seconds. When the left brain is dominant, it rapidly funnels such inputs into abstract categories that leave little room for curiosity and discovery.17 It is incapable of seeing that which it doesn’t expect to see. Observing and processing new information is a right hemisphere specialization. And great art, with its ambiguities and metaphoric transmission, creates a dialogue between the right hemispheres of the creator and the viewer. Together they generate meaning. But only when open attention is bestowed upon the art.
Figurative sculpture may be an easier portal into this quality of attention than some other art forms. Seeing the human figure represented engages our mirror neurons, which helps surface empathy and embodiment. The 3D nature of the work gives us tactile and kinaesthetic signals, and encourages us to move around it, again engaging our bodies and giving our truncated attention spans new data to process without abandoning the subject entirely. It can also spark curiosity about its materials and construction as well as its form and content — qualities that are more foregrounded in sculpture than other media. But sculpture is literally flattened online. One cannot experience sculpture through the web, which makes the internet a very weak tool for the sculptor attempting to impact their audience and sell their work. To gain that which is offered by sculpture, we must commit the time and travel to actually visiting it in the real world.
As AI-generated art drowns out the human-made, sculpture may be a temporary hold-out in the world of art as something actually designed and crafted by people — artifacts of ‘fossilized attention’18 rather than fossilized automation. And as the technology allowing AI to design and build sculpture becomes more common, these pieces will still require a little human handwork and will exist as a physical object. It’s faint praise, but at least such an artifact could get people into a room together rather than home scrolling their phones. More significantly, some aspects of production can never be fully automated, and the production time will always be much slower than running a prompt through the likes of Midjourney. This material bottleneck means even Gen-AI sculpture is resistant to the problem of artistic satiation19 described by Erik Hoel.
This example helps illustrate the tensions of the industrial revolution. Faster wasn’t necessarily better when it de-integrated cottage industry, destabilized communities, siphoned people into dehumanizing working conditions, and replaced personal, handmade artifacts — some of which could become heirlooms — with mass consumer goods.
I think it’s worth quoting Illich at some length here, because he aptly describes forces driving the new thirst for Romanticism:
“Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”20
Many people now feel imprisoned by the strict social and administrative control of modern life. By the sense that there is nothing left to discover, there are no new frontiers, no new horizons. That their life’s work at a bullshit job could vanish in the next Carrington Event, and that no one would notice when it does. That they are surveilled and barcoded, bought and sold, reduced to metrics in a database. That their fear and insecurity are constantly cultivated and weaponized, that they must conform or lose their mobility in a cut-throat world of immoral inequality. Is Romanticism the antidote?
Romanticism
I can see why Romanticism has a pull in this moment. Many others have spoken better than I can about the historical parallels that are swinging this pendulum. While I’m loosely interested in a revival, imitation of the past is a recipe for inauthenticity. I’m not too concerned with the particularities of the movement, but rather the wider sweep of it.
From my understanding, the Romantic era was not so much a rebellion against the Enlightenment as an expansion of perspective that was inclusive of what came before. It was a right-hemisphere shift — one that helped put the reductive Enlightenment insights into their proper place, subject to the greater wisdom of an implicit, relational universe.
In my limited knowledge, I imagine that the expansiveness of the era came from two places. First, the very nature of the right brain perspective is expansive, inclusive, holistic. As then, we would benefit from embedding this awareness in our culture today. And this expansiveness can find itself dissolving definitions, categories, and norms. Such boundary-pushing can be useful when culture is calcified — often in forms that benefit the powerful. But the right hemisphere doesn’t tear down the fence or upend tradition without cause. In fact ritual is one of the best ways to engage the right hemisphere. To the extent that Romanticism represents these qualities of a grounded opening up, an ease with paradox, a sensitivity to the immanent, a welcoming of embeddedness, and a penchant for what is obscured, it’s a positive model. And subjectively, it has great appeal. This right brain mode is the seat of the sublime. It can offer feelings of deep connection, of raw vitality, of unconditional love, of an eternal now free from anxiety. When everything is fresh and novel and vibrant with its own presence of being, we can feel deeply at home in a revolutionary way.
But there is a potential for a dark side here too. The things that make right hemisphere experience so appealing are grasped after by the left hemisphere, which wants to co-opt and control them. For a person who has glimpsed these gifts, but is largely locked in the deadened, abstracted world of the left brain, the solution may appear to be pursuit of novelty - living more and more recklessly in search of a hit of vitality. They may arbitrarily push boundaries, notching their belts with taboo behaviours, and using sex to mimic the intimacy of the right brain perspective. In a culture of consumers and narcissists, this flip side of the Romantic coin will likely turn out a self-destructive cohort. At best, we’re likely to see the culture put it on as a costume rather than embody the profound spirit of the movement.
On safer ground, another appeal of Romanticism is its association with nature. This can feel like an antidote to the world of bytes that we increasingly live in. Many factors have driven us towards a virtual life. In research, the low-hanging fruit of the material sciences has all been plucked, leaving computer science and social sciences as the low-friction paths forward. Collective horror at the atom bomb and Chernobyl may have contributed to a recoiling from further ‘progress’ in the world of atoms. And corporate and political interests both benefit from shifting populations into digital spaces where attention can be captured and activities tracked. These trends, along with the off-shoring of industry, have devalued material-based skills, including those of the sculptor.
Unlike the internet, the natural world is conducive to engaging the right hemisphere. And for modern urbans, a craving for the wilds is a healthy impulse. In Romanticism, they find not just nature, but an adventurous spirit — an archetype of a human competent to contend with the contingencies of nature and to bask in the sublime. There’s no substitute for nature — I’m a backpacker for that reason — but the sculpture workshop is another of my portals to competency and awe.
As alluded to above, Romanticism is also associated with paradox. This too is a very right-hemisphere characteristic that can be crucial to solving complex problems. In a moment where we are tribally divided and deeply identified, gaining ease with the paradoxical opens doors to new levels of thinking about the relationships between conflicting values. Commentary on sculpture and paradox could fill another essay, but at baseline, anything that engages the right hemisphere can cultivate this capacity.
A Glimpse of the Romantic
If my early days in the metal shop opened my mind to a new world, my early days in the sculpture studio blew it wide open. The processes of art-making that we engage in repudiate the left hemisphere standpoint at every turn. Nothing can be seen in isolation, everything is relational. The finest tweak in scale or context and the image before you transforms utterly. Each sculpture is an ecosystem in its making.
Often, when I have been intimately involved in the production of a piece — particularly the first in a new edition, or a unique commission — it becomes an animate presence for me.
Beginning with humble media, we feel our way towards that final essence of the work. It evolves as a conversation between the inherent intelligence of the materials, the intention of the makers, and something that might be called the muse.
Countless operations are needed to walk this path, and with every step, the vision of what is emerging clarifies. Once complete, in the studio, I admire its form with excitement, but it hasn’t yet been imbued with the final spark of life. Yet when we hang it on the gallery wall, or install it on location, a strange transformation occurs. It suddenly has a presence that far exceeds its form. It feels emergent, claiming its rightful place in a void that had been awaiting it. All the creative acts that built it up out of nothing cohere into a scintillescent presence that speaks from the interplay of matter and consciousness.
I’ll admit this effect is often weaker when I have not been so hands-on in the making. And yet each finished piece, without exception, becomes far more than the sum of its parts. In speaking with our collectors and patrons, I know others feel this too.
And it excites me that sculpture brings this power of art to life in a mode that is so collective. A painter alone in their studio can produce a revelatory artwork. But we could cram our gallery full of the people who have contributed to the production of David’s works, and I know the buzz in the room would be infectious as each contributor gasped and grinned in wonder and recognition of their part.
In my years at the studio I’ve seen how sculpture can be a catalyst for emotional engagement, embodiment, exploration and ingenuity, comfort with contingency, and explorations of ambiguity. But it is also stabilizing in ways that help offset the risks of Romanticism. It balances all of the above with a strong grounding in tradition. It fosters stability by demanding a real investment of time and material to its production. Finally, creation is antithetical to grasping, so creating sculpture, producing sculpture, and engaging in your own process of discovering meaning in a sculpture are all means of displacing limiting left-hemisphere tendencies with more healthy and holistic ones.
And interestingly, sculpture is the only form of artwork that reliably binds together the elite collector with the welder, the foundry worker, the machinist. It therefore has some potential to create common metaphors and common values between people of different class and experience — something that could be powerful in offsetting the massive divides of the moment that are driving the new Romantic impulse.
Trust, Responsibility, and Ambiguity in Society
My work has helped me understand the trust required for pluralism. In the last 23 years I’ve worked alongside a staggering range of people in different shops and on different job sites. Despite kaleidoscopic backgrounds and politics we’ve all worked together to create beautiful things. We’ve lent a hand, loaned a tool, or shared a technique. We’ve drunk bad coffee, and good whisky, and sung songs. We’ve signalled virtue by laying down a good weld, and we’ve tested purity by checking someone’s tie-downs on a truck load.
Physical work builds trust. The feedback you get from materials is immediate and clear. You can observe your competence, and others’, in real time. You can engage together in unmediated ways, and when a task allows, participate in collective ecologies of attention.21 Next to that, the increasing administration of society feels stifling and at times, cowardly.
All of these experiences have given me a deeper appreciation for trust — both in the sense of trust earned, and in cultivating an orientation of faith. The first is tightly bound to responsibility — we earn and bestow trust based on reliability. The second is tied to ambiguity — in opting to remain in a trusting stance towards that which is uncertain.
Maintaining a fluid balance amongst these lines of tension is a key element of living in a relational, rather than transactional, world. But so much of our society has been organized around transactional frameworks that we can forget to think in other terms. We’ve lost that Romantic sense of our embeddedness in a complex and implicit world.
So many frustrations, anxieties and faulty strategies come from failing to trust life, from believing that things should be another way. My work has embedded me in the world in a way that establishes what IS. Yes, we can work toward change. But the idea of arguing with reality becomes a lot more laughable when reality hits back, as it continually does when you work with matter. For any Meyers-Briggs geeks out there, I’m an NT, so the world of ideas is my natural playground. But my work has shown me that it’s counterproductive to try to displace reality with concepts.
Paradoxically, it has also shown me that the IS, that reality, is wildly ambiguous. But it’s an ambiguity that is real and fundamental in a way that abstracted thinking isn’t.
And that ambiguity is the doorway to revelation. I’ve listened to countless people tell me how David’s art has been healing or transformative for them — as it has been for me — and that is only possible to the degree that these pieces evade our left hemisphere certainties.
Unfortunately the world is increasingly hostile to our mode of working. As the years have gone by and my perspective has broadened I’ve seen an increasing disconnect between my values and those of society. At the core of that disconnect is this matrix of trust, responsibility, and ambiguity. In both the corporate and political worlds we organize ourselves through mechanistic models that exemplify distrust, assume bad faith, and corrupt a healthy sense of responsibility. It’s the water we’re swimming in, but working in the arts has helped me bring it into focus.
It’s obvious that trust can’t scale perfectly as companies and communities grow, but it’s not clear to me that the responsibility that bolsters trust can’t be maintained in larger contexts. Unfortunately, many of our systems of administration actively enable and reward individuals who evade and diffuse22 their responsibility. This cultivates low-trust, low-responsibility environments that infantilize workers and are ripe for incompetence, corruption, and poor morale.
We also fail at scaling comfort with ambiguity. We layer up unnecessary bureaucracy to try to clarify that which can’t be defined, and then turn a blind eye to everything that falls outside our tidy boxes. It’s wasteful, inflexible and dehumanizing.
For people looking around at our tribal, low-trust society and wondering why we are lacking a broader pool of effective leaders and a more muscular culture of civil debate, I’d suggest that it’s partly because our society is siphoning off and denigrating members of our communities that understand what material, collegial accountability looks like on the ground.
There’s opportunity here to create beneficial feedback loops. Incorporating the values of the artisan and artist into society can help remedy that toxic degeneration. So fittingly, an environment conducive to sculpture would be at ease with more ambiguity in the regulation of the Arts. Our administrative state works hard to control and categorize every aspect of their production. This is utterly stifling to spontaneity and creativity. Solo artists may take some liberties within these systems, but a sculptor who bears responsibility for employees is more constrained. Rather than insisting that all artistic activities and products must fit into neatly regulated boxes, a supportive society would trust personal responsibility and cultural values to do some of the scaffolding currently provided by the state.
The inherently transactional market suffocates trust in different ways. Treating art as a commodity - especially sculpture, which is comparatively expensive to produce - introduces perverse incentives into a system that should be about freely sharing subjective value between artist and audience. Three examples: commodifying art lays the pathway to propaganda. An artist who wishes to discount a piece for a deserving client risks devaluing their entire catalogue by doing so. And in order to protect the creative practice from the world of commerce, intermediaries such as galleries step in between the artist and buyer, anonymizing transactions and preventing human connection between these parties. A system that allowed more fluidity and ambiguity in valuation without penalizing the artist would reduce the corrosive effects of the market economy on the creative practice, increase community, and enlarge the potential pool of owners.
And then we have the strictures on speech, the mistrust of expression. I have profound trust in the principle of free speech - another Romantic notion. A healthy environment for sculpture would understand that speech and expression are our most fundamental tools for avoiding violence, and are particularly crucial in a pluralistic society. A healthy society would benefit from being able to create, contemplate and learn from a wide variety of perspectives in sculptural artifacts. It would also see the value in those ambiguous messages that transcend narratives altogether. Comfort with ambiguity fosters curiosity and empathy. It invites us to explore, rather than assume, different perspectives.
Critic David Hickey argued for art’s ability to civilize by resolving tensions without revolutionary violence or authoritarian edict.23 But he also suggested that both sides of the political divide, with the support of our cultural institutions, have attempted to strip art of this power. These factions have “conspired to limit our freedom to construct new meanings and values for works of art: the right wing by seeking to censor any art that might generate healthy anxiety; the left by explaining away art’s ability to challenge us individually, by presenting art to us in perfectly controlled, explained, and contextualized packages.” A healthy environment will set aside these attempts to undermine this meaning-making role of art.
A society at ease with ambiguity and responsibility would be better poised to encourage holistic, embodied living in its citizens. This would manifest in greater emotional intelligence, widespread manual skills, physical health, a strong sense of community with quality time spent in others’ company, and a felt sense of connection to the world. Such a community would be well suited to creating, appreciating, and sharing the experience of sculpture, all necessarily live events - “where most of the excitement and energy in the creative world is generated.”24
Looking Forward
We’ve been exceptionally lucky that David’s practice has survived the pressures and contortions of this increasingly inhospitable society. But too many gifted artists can’t afford the immense investment required to produce work such as ours, and I hope that can change. Realistically, it wouldn’t take much of a swing to render such shops — at least those without devoted patronage — extinct. Neither unicorn nor dinosaur is adapted to 21st century earth.
Everything humans create becomes a part of the external world that the right hemisphere uses as its sanity-check. When we create things in the image of the left hemisphere, we create a positive feedback loop that reinforces left brain perspectives and values. To the extent that we must generate new forms — be they homes, tools, or artwork, and even technologies, metaphors and narratives — making them artful beats back that recursion to the dead, reductive mindset that is dismantling the vitality of our world.
Sam Jennings recently wrote about the risks of outsourcing our cultural stories to systems such as AI. He ends his essay25 with the assertion: “Artists are the only people ridiculous and pretentious enough to claw those stories back—protecting history, science, and human beauty from a society which is always desperately trying to forget everything it knows. The artists are always a divine bother, always fools in the court of the king: they never let anyone forget.” If he is right, it seems to me that sculptors, who are arguably more grounded in history and science than other clades of artists, are well-positioned to lead this charge, if we support them in doing so.
In David’s case, I see his legacy as being as much about how the studio operates as what the studio creates. Over three decades it has taught complex hands-on skills to many artisans and technicians. It has supported a wide network of small businesses. It has given patrons who commission work a way to externalize their values in the real, material world. It has helped audiences, including thousands of people who saw the work without owning it, to experience different modes of connection with each other and with the meanings they found in the artwork. I’m sure I could go on. The point is, the true legacy is not in the objects, but in the processes that the studio has undertaken and inspired. If we happen to be entering a prefigurative culture, I hope that today’s youth can see the value in this legacy, and will create a future with the economic means to perpetuate it.
As we grapple with a new path forward, we need to innovate, but we needn’t reinvent the wheel. Shops like David’s instantiate values that push back against the dehumanizing, alienating trends of the world. We can build upon these islands of sanity, and build bridges between them. If the idea of a sculpture practice as a proxy for a vibrant society isn’t Romantic, I don’t know what is.
Hyde, Lewis. Creativity and the artist in the modern world. New York: Vintage Books, 2007
Crawford, Matthew B. The world beyond your head: how to flourish in an age of distraction. Penguin Books, 2016.
So-termed by David Courtwright in his book The Age of Addiction
https://www.fastcompany.com/91264942/netflix-knows-youre-looking-at-your-phone-and-its-changing-how-shows-get-made
Crawford, Matthew B. Shop class as soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work. Penguin Books, 2009
The fact that software is increasingly leased rather than owned is another symptom of our shift into increased abstraction and administration.
https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/Illich_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf
Polanyi, Michael, and Mary Jo Nye. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
William Deresiewicz describes these trends with great clarity here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepreneur/383497/
The focus on experience is so pervasive that one of the large art production houses in Canada recently changed their name from “Heavy Industries” to “Heavy Experience”.
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/12/the-painted-protest-dean-kissick-contemporary-art/
McGilchrist, Iain. The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the western world. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Matthew B. Crawford describes watching glassblowers collaborate on a cane: “The manipulations that give rise to a finished piece can’t be fully specified ahead of time. Rather the piece is the frozen record of a team’s coordinated finesse in responding to one another and to the glass. Having witnessed its making, I could only view the finished cane that Houk and the Demains produced that day as a sort of ecological specimen—a fossilized bit of joint attention.”
Crawford, Matthew B. The world beyond your head: how to flourish in an age of distraction. Penguin Books, 2016.
“The semantic apocalypse heralded by AI is a kind of semantic satiation at a cultural level. For imitation, which is what these models ultimately do best, is a form of repetition. Repetition at a mass scale. … And so art—all of it, I mean, the entire human artistic endeavor—becomes a thing satiated, stripped of meaning, pure syntax.”
https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/Illich_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf
Matthew B. Crawford: “The kind of collaborative improvisation that takes place among musicians in bluegrass, jazz, or classical Indian music is a good example of what I mean by an ecology of attention. It is mutually adaptive. The improvisation is possible because all parties are attending to one another. It is fruitful only because they are also steeped in forms; the history of their art has become the genetic material, the constitutive fiber, of their own creativity… One must be alert, opportunisitic. As in ecology, that is how new forms arise.”
Crawford, Matthew B. The world beyond your head: how to flourish in an age of distraction. Penguin Books, 2016.
For instance, from Jaron Lanier: “It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual… What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization.”
https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism
For a more comprehensively expressed perspective, see: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence
From the essay “A World Like Santa Barbara”: Hickey, Dave. Perfect wave: More essays on art and democracy. Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 2023
Wow, Sage - this was definitely a more than one "comforting beverage" read. So much here to think about. Thank you.
Hi Sage, I loved this. I really appreciated this perspective especially:
"From my understanding, the Romantic era was not so much a rebellion against the Enlightenment as an expansion of perspective that was inclusive of what came before."