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03/12/2007: "Destroying Art Part Three – Finale" by Andrew Wielawski
I enter the Esplanade Plaza, and see Barry Cavin with a nice big video camera, boxes of lights, recording equipment and cables. I look at the sculpture, and for a moment am unsure if I want to go through with this. All of the voices I heard on absolutearts are with me in this moment, the ones who said, go ahead, it’s courageous, and the ones who said, how pitiful, it’s a cry for help. The ones who said, do it in the closet and don’t tell anyone, and the ones who said, if you do this in public, it becomes an art form in itself. I look at Barry, enthusiastic as he is to participate, ready to roll, and think, well this is now, isn’t it? At least for us it is.And for Barton and Dianna who are there, too. Juan and Kira from the Studio gallery. Joanne Sanborne from the Marco Island Foundation for the Arts, and her husband Bob. The property manager comes up to me, and says,
“I was told you’d be out of here by three. We can’t have big trucks driving in here during Happy Hour.” I think, and say, “There’s no big trucks. Just a car, and maybe later, a pickup truck.” With that he regains his composure, and helps me back in the Charger, so I don’t run anyone over. We position it so the grill looks like it’s about to take a bite out of the sculpture. Barry sets the camera up shooting along the row of obelisques with the car at the far end.
He seats me under the arches behind Does This Not Make Sense, and does an interview, asking about why I want to do this, and I tell him a more refined version of everything I’ve already said in my previous blogs. Then we start. The first shot is on the Charger, with Barton and I inside. We both open the doors and climb out, me with the hammer and chisel in my hand. We walk towards one of the middle ones, and I plant the chisel a few inches below a top. Barton holds the top to keep it from flying off and breaking something. I smack it with the mini sledge. The sound is much louder than I had thought it would be, and cuts through the soft music that’s playing like a door slamming. Still, no one at the bar more than glances towards us. It’s remarkably hard to break this top loose. Finally it cracks, and we carry it to the trunk of the car and put it in.
The next one’s the same, and I’m thinking, yikes, what happens when we get down to the thicker parts? But all five tops do come off, and then we start on a thick part, about halfway down the one closest to the car. On this I work from all four sides, sending shock waves into the stone to get it to shear off. After fifteen minutes in the eighty degree evening, my white shirt is completely soaked with sweat, and the piece finally breaks free. We load it in the trunk. This one weighs about forty pounds. I grab a beer and take a break. My pause turns into an hour, as two slightly inebriated men come over and one asks if he can give it a shot. I hand him the hammer and the chisel, and Barton holds the part he wants to shear off. I see that about twenty people have stopped to watch, as the dark of the evening sets in. One lady watches as the man smiles as he’s striking the chisel, and shakes her head sorrowfully.
“I can’t understand why you’re doing this,” she says, “This was one of my favorite pieces.” I tell her I’ve got other work to attend to, and that this piece had to be removed anyway, and that it was just going to distract me to pay any more attention to finding it a home. The truth. Joanne comes up and introduces me to a man who says he wants the bottom of the piece I had just hacked off midway. “How much?” he says. “If you like it, you can have it for nothing,” I say, ”Save me weight at the dump.” “I wish I’d known this whole piece was for sale before you started,” he says.Fact is, after the initial press coverage for this piece and all the others, no more articles came out. For anyone who wasn’t there at that time, it was difficult to know the sculptures were all for sale. A reporter from a local paper has actually shown up, and starts firing off flash photos of everything. The man chiseling is getting tired and asks for advice. I tell him that if his lines were straighter, the piece would come off easier. He shakes his head in agreement, exhausted but committed, and goes back to hammering, a mission visible in his eyes.
Bill, the property manager, returns, and asks if he can have something, too. He’s got a bad back, so he takes a few of the little bronze wrapped candies from the Taste pyramid.
The crowd gets a little bigger. One by one, more people start to come up to me and some even ask if they can have some of the chips that have fallen off during the larger extractions. Three little girls, about three, four, and five, beg me for some of the small bronze elements, as their mother tries to explain what I’m doing. I give one girl the dog, another the perfume snifter, and try to come up with something else for the third. The dog is really only a half a Shitzu, from the Hearing pyramid, because it was sticking its head out of a mosaic niche ready to go into a barking frenzy, and you couldn’t see the rest of it anyway.
The lady who said ‘why are you doing this?’ is back, and claims the base of ‘This’.I remember I said to Brad I’d save him the snake head, so I ask the man whacking to take a break, refresh himself, and tell him he’ll knock that sucker off in one hit when he comes back. I take the hammer and chisel and start sending shock waves in from the outside edges towards the snake, hoping to get as much of it off in one piece as I can. Just then I break it badly, and half the head and some mosaic tiles fly off. A man comes running up and says he wants the whole pyramid. “Don’t worry, I’ll fix it”, he says. I say fine, and he carefully picks up the half head and the mosaic pieces and goes off to get his truck. “It’s three, four hundred pounds,” I yell after him. I give the chisel to the guy who was hammering, and he goes back to work.
The piece he’s striking finally gives, and as the crack becomes visible a cheer goes up from the crowd. Ironically, it’s the piece with the carrot on it from the Taste pyramid. He raises his hands triumphantly, and his friends surround him, but without waiting too long, he hoists that forty pounder up, and carries it to his car. His face is shining with sweat, and he’s totally drenched.
The pickup comes in, and the guard helps the driver back up to a good spot to load. There’s three or four pretty large men helping, but what these things require is knowledge and experience. I know how to do it, but I’ve never been very convincing about telling anyone that, so four or five trials of weird loading ideas go nowhere, before anyone listens to me. You don’t lift, you lay it against the tailgate and slide it up until the weight starts to diminish because the fulcrum has moved. In it goes.
“I’ll send you some replacement tiles for the ones that are missing,” I tell him. And he’s off.
By the end of the evening, we’re taking pieces out of the trunk of the Charger to give to people. All the base pieces, with the inscriptions, ‘does’, ‘this’, ‘not’, ‘make’, and ‘sense’, have been claimed. We don’t have anything to take to the dump.
Barton laughs, and says, “What a waste of time getting all that cardboard for my truck bed,”
Inside the Bayview Restaurant, Gligor offers me a very fine Tequilla, and we talk about the evening. “You know, when we were about to install that piece, we kept getting mixed up about what order the words went in.“ Shaking his head sadly, he continues. “What we saw here, tonight, with the musicians, and this ‘art’ event, this ‘happening’, brings me back to the piazzas in Europe. For this evening, it felt like I was there. But what I think now, is, that those pyramids should have read, ‘This does not make sense’. Because really, what you did, didn’t.”
I think about the course the evening took, and go back to an idea for another public piece that had come to me. A marble slab kind of like a giant chocolate bar, with those indented lines along each piece to make them break off easily and where you’d want them to. The individual squares could have images on them that worked together with the whole, but also alone by themselves. At the end of an event, I could break them up just like I did this time, and give them, or sell them to people. The introduction of this idea at the end of an exhibit could be done mysteriously, with some kind of flair, to make it all the more alluring.Then I think, no. It’s already happened. It’s the risk that fascinates me, the moment just before an act, when all things, both positive and negative, are still possible. The charm that always remains just out of reach, and lures me towards all that I haven’t yet tried.
(All images are copyright: Kira Krumm Design)
