Flimsy Robot

Space Baby,Acrylic and Latex on Wood. September 2012

My statement on this work (from the old website):

This past week I finished this new piece, working title “Space Baby.” It was a complicated project, with 17 separate wood pieces making up the picture, and more in the background acting as spacers and structural support. It measure about 38″ tall by 30″ wide. I’ve been working on it for over a month and a half!

A number of surprises came up while I was working on this. The spaceman motif is nothing new, but without realizing it, I reused the baby-in-a-spacesuit image that I’d first created well over two years ago

The other surprise was a new way of thinking about the spaceman. I’ve been using it in the past as a metaphor for childhood dreams—our hopes and desire for success for our future that more often than not fails to materialize. In this piece, the baby is adrift in space, isolated and alone and crying with no one around to go to for help. The baby is so upset that the suit is slowly filling up with his tears. Meanwhile, the stars and the moon, his goals and ideals are being flown away by a baby bottle spaceship. A common metaphor is to “reach for the stars” and here the stars have been pulled out of reach by the basic necessities of life—food and drink.

But another way of thinking about the spacesuit literally fell into my lap while I was listening to a podcast where comedian Duncan Trussell was interviewing comedian Eddie Pepitone. In the interview, Duncan Trussell explains his concept of the spacesuit—that we’re all here on earth after making a long, arduous journey. That we’re here to explore and experience life as scientists in this strange universe we’ve found ourselves in, but we only have a limited time because our spacesuits—our human bodies—are crappy and are falling apart. Later in the conversation, Eddie Pepitone makes a comment that we’re all babies crying inside, that we all have very basic needs and urges for love and food and other things but that we’re constantly being denied satisfaction. The coincidence of hearing this conversation while making this piece was jaw dropping.

This brings me to my next question: why? Why make this thing? I’ve been thinking a lot about art and being an artist and how I might present things to my students, who often are befuddled by some of the art that I show. Why is this art? How can people consider this good? My working theory at the moment is that making art must be considered some kind of low-level insanity.

Now hear me out…

I spent 6 weeks making the piece above. I don’t have a lot of extra time or money, so creating this taxes my already limited resources. Will this work ever get shown in a gallery or sell? There’s no guarantee of any success of any kind. Also, the image itself is not especially pleasant. In fact, I get a little distressed looking at that baby crying. Knowing all this, I kept on working.

I kept working because of the realizations I had while making the piece. It’s these things that fuel me, keeping me interested. Without these ideas, without the sense of exploration and discovery, I’m not sure there is any reason to make something so useless to everyone else. And art is indeed useless unless you make that personal connection. This is the insanity—I live in a crazy world in my mind where a scene like this makes perfect sense. It’s logical to me despite the surrealism and the absurdity of it.

And this is the struggle I have as a teacher and, let’s face it, a human being. How can I communicate these things to other people without sounding insane? My students will often call BS on many of the theories and explanations surrounding a work of art. Being an artist has always been a bit like being trapped. With perceived rejection everywhere, the only people I can really be comfortable around are the ones I paint on pieces of wood.