Backbone Metals

The one thing that has been revealed to me through this investigation is that the scope of what I was originally interested in, is too vast for me to encompass in a single body of research. By default this work has compartmentalized itself into several facets of social, economical, political and historical relevance, all of which have opened doors into new areas of interest and influence for my artwork.

In particular, the few that have struck me the most in this project have been in regards to the social and logistical organization that groups create and perform around warfare. Another is the individuals that emerge as facilitators, leaders and even heroes of these times. Lastly, the ramifications these have on their societies and, most importantly, the lasting effects they have on our society.

As an artist with a technical back round in metalsmithing, my experience with these other fields of interest like American and World history, evolution, economics, politics, sociology and physics are limited to my humble and meager experience with them.

As my thirst for knowledge seems to have a growing relationship with my age, I am leaving this project with an open call for participation from you. I have little experience and no expertise in the subjects that currently seem to provide me with the most inspiration for my artwork. I ask that you introduce this blog to those you know with educations and experience in these fields or anyone whom you think may be able to add to the discussion or may simply be interested. 

My classmate and friend Josh gave me some feedback recently on a presentation that I gave about my research and this blog. His response, I think, provides ballast for my sometimes unsteady stream of consciousness. Here is an excerpt:

Hey Ben,

I enjoyed your presentation and wanted to give some feedback. You kinda got the shaft being last and late after so many presenters.  Despite all that, you inspired some thoughts that I wanted to pass along for whatever they are worth.

First I’d like to say that, having explored your website a bit, your craftsmanship is excellent and your aesthetic is unique and refined. I also appreciate the time you take to outline your main motivations on your blog; something I have been meaning to do for some time. It is on the conceptual level of your work that I will comment for it is the part I am not 100% sold on. I mean this as a constructive criticisms and I take the time to express it because your work is already very compelling.

I have no doubt that your future work will be both visually and conceptually compelling and I really like how you’ve looked at history and seek to point out it’s ironies. If I offer anything it is a, hopefully productive, challenge to what seems to be the main muse of your work at this time; namely, the scientific position that we exist to survive. And to a large extent this is supported by the facts as we know them. However, I would posit that there is something even deeper not only in mankind, but in your work that I respectfully suggest exists. To give it a name I will call this motivation, refinement.

One of your blog entries mentions this motivation in title only, but I suspect it is at least partly a motivation for you and others. In short, a pure survival agenda does not account for many people we know well, namely artists, designers, NGOs, non-profits and the like. What compels you to make an art that has no perceivable purpose beyond your own satisfaction or perhaps some desire to refine the perspectives of viewers? One may argue that there is some collective desire to survive that transcends the individual welfare. This may explain our forefathers who risked their own lives and the measured corporal autonomy of many others in the pursuit of a “more perfect union”. This idea of collective survivalism is interesting, but it is important to note that it is offered in the absence of significant scientific justification. Furthermore, such an idea’s purpose is to justify the very scientific theory that fails to explain the true gamut of human behavior; rendering it a circular argument absent further empirical evidence.

This is not to say that Darwin is wrong any more than Einstein’s theory of relativity rendered Newtonian classical mechanics “wrong”. One might say that Einstein’s work made Newton’s work more right; a collective project of

refinement if you will. Certainly no one would deny the necessities of sustaining life, but is this, or some derivation, all that motivates? Is survivalism the only way to explain our species’ motivation? Surely, I should stick to architecture and my father should have been a banker like his father instead of an artist if securing fitness and genetic succession is all that matters.

It’s all just food for thought, and, again, it is only offered because the quality of your work and thoughts begs a quality debate.  Keep up the good work and feel free to tell me I am full of shit…just don’t forget to tell me why.

Cheers,

Josh

         Darwin defines survival as the continued existence of organisms that are best adapted to their environment. I would add that a major, if not the most important, component of that adaptation is also the control of the resources needed to sustain that organism. For humans, a certain amount of sustenance is constantly needed in the forms of water and food. We need to protect our bodies from the elements, in varying degree, with clothing. Shelter is also necessary for our protection from the elements and for our possessions (i.e. beds, food, tools etc.) from those who would take them from us.

         These facts are indisputable in my mind, as we know medically that humans cannot go for much longer then six days without water before they die of dehydration, and only a few weeks longer without food to reach the same result. We also know scientifically that hypothermia begins after body temperature drops only 1.8 degrees from the healthy temperature 98.6 degrees F. and results in death shortly thereafter if the conditions persist. Simply put, having control over the resources to stave off thirst, hunger and the cold is the key to basic survival. Without those resources, human life cannot persist for long.

         Survival is the one thing that every living organism has in common. It is also therefore, the one thing that consequently, all living things compete with each other for. When I think of life in these terms, I see human existence in a whole new light. Historical events like wars and protests, organizations like religions, nations, borders, walls, laws, taxes and anything else that ever confused or upset me in some way now hold much greater meaning and significance.

         I have come to recognize people as tribal. That is, living in accordance with some kind of group setting. Thousands of years ago, when mankind was trudging through its earlier stages of evolution, the tribe was a means of comfort, support and ultimately survival. People had certain roles to fulfill in the tribe and if it was organized well enough, it provided the group with the means to live a safer life than those who were on their own. This was an invaluable relationship for humans as there was of course no means to get the resources needed for survival but by the most hands on and difficult methods. The group dynamic allowed the delegation of jobs such as hunting, gathering, food preparation, etc.

         Today the population of these tribes has exploded to exceed billions. Tribes can no longer be exclusively defined as one’s clan or extended family. The new definition of tribal living has been stretched to its limits as it now must include terms like club, team, profession, neighborhood, city, state, nation, philosophy, religion and so on. In that context the idea of survival must also take on new meaning, as some tribes no longer have to hunt and gather for food in the traditional ways. Some tribes die off and others assimilate into larger tribes. With each additional person another layer of complexity is added to the perpetually evolving struggle to control access of that which is needed to survive.

         This is how I have come to think about current events. Why are wars fought in the Middle East? Why are corporations trying to buy water rights throughout the world? Why are the prices of scrap metal soaring? I am sure there are many details in the answers to those questions. The specifics of each situation might set them apart from one another, but when examined through the lens of a larger scope however, I believe that they are much more similar than we may think. Tribes fight for resources. Some fight for land, some for water. Most of them, in the last 50 years, have fought for oil. Some do it with conventional warfare, while others use more subtly inflicted, but no less effective financial methods. All of them one way or another are fighting for the control of resources though as do all of us in our own tribes on a daily basis.

         I would argue that this system is as old as the first stages of humanity and took stronger root in our culture as the population of the tribes grew. Controlling access to a watering hole guaranteed survival for most of the tribe. It also laid the foundation for a system of power (if they could enforce it) based on territory. Trade and commerce were concepts that naturally followed, as were theft and punishment So, it was the tribe that controlled the watering hole in the beginning that in turn became powerful. This may have been the birth of politics, as we know it.

         Over the course of time, biological and technological evolution, people have created the system we see today by which power and status is based on the amount of vital resources a group (government or private) controls. This is of incalculable importance to me as my work is an exploration of survival and its long and vast reach into our society and culture.

Time Machines: 

A Conversation with Sculptor Benjamin Carpenter

Interview with Holly Williams, San Francisco State University, 2008

  Ben Carpenter is a sculptor from New England, doing his Master’s Research at San Francisco State University. Carpenter attended Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, where he did his undergraduate work. He is focusing on his own practice while working collaboratively with a collective to produce large-scale works exhibited internationally. His steel wall works and recent kinetic sculpture are reminiscent of mythologies of an Industrial America, reconciling the relationship of man and machine in a technology driven, post-industrial world. Using Industrial metalsmithing processes such as die-forming, blacksmithing and welding he creates singular works of art that describe the position of the individual in relationship to the American experience, both historical and contemporary.

B. I have spent so much time working with metal and steel specifically, that sometimes I can only think in those terms. If I have an idea I immediately think of how to make it in metal.

I chose the Maine College of Art because of the metals program there, which was focused heavily around jewelry making. There were other elements to it, but the general scale was small. Despite that, I figured I would get a better technical education there instead of in the sculpture department. Sculpture was wide open, but lacking a bit with what I was really looking for which was hands on skills. My friends in sculpture and I would go back and forth as to who was receiving the better education. I felt like I was being limited by the scale of my major, and they were always frustrated they were not getting any “how –to “ education. We met in the middle and I had to navigate a path through that because I was just working bigger and bigger, I realized that my hands were too heavy to make little stuff.

 H. Your work is pretty large scale; it is beyond easel size, if you want to talk about it painting terms. What about the scale on the early work, those almost anthropomorphic system-oriented works?

 B. That would have been the early 2000’s. That work is interesting to me because it was sort of a segway from the smaller scale to where I am now. It was really a matter of access. Before moving to California, I did not have access to a shop to make that kind of work. When I moved here, I found a shop that had a small gas forge, and a very small power hammer. I was able to bang some of those things out and work in such a way that was largely exploratory for me, really diving into the material that had been wanting to get into for a long time. This work did not have much conceptual backing to it, as I was mostly playing around to see what I could do with the stuff. It was simply a matter of refining my techniques and making the material look good. This slowly started to combine with other things that were important to me such as politics, society & culture all anything else that might be important to anyone. Up until very recently it was hard for me to reconcile those ideas with the actual work.

B. A lot of people approach me with a similar version of that question. So it must be there somewhere. I do not know if it was entirely conscious on my part to include the notion of the body so much as I was thinking of systems. Maybe it comes through because my body is used so rigorously to make it …my personal physical labor is intense. There are times I am literally wrestling with it… those curvy twisty forms happen because the piece is temporarily welded to the table and I have a torch focused on one spot. Even when the metal is hot, it sometimes takes my whole body weight to bend it down.

  B. Yeah, and I think that could be the extent of incorporating the body into the work. People see a material that they recognize as industrial or something that is very strong and used as structural elements. When they see it bent in shapes that are unfamiliar, they may assume that it takes a lot of work and a lot of strength.

There is another side to all of this work (the pieces that are representative of organs) that came out of something else entirely. I live in the Mission district of San Francisco where I find myself surrounded by Hispanic, Catholic imagery. I see a lot of imagery of what involves the sacred heart of Jesus. To my dismay, I was raised in a Northern Baptist church and by comparison, my church experience was very dry and boring compared with this version of Christianity.

 H. So that work actually comes out of your experience of moving to the West Coast and living in this particular neighborhood, that you’re using this symbol of the heart.

 B. Yes, partly. It is imagery that was not used in my religious education as a child and seeing it now congers all kinds of new thoughts and questions about people’s beliefs, psychology and survival. This religious imagery has fed my work a great deal in the recent past. Even without the spiritual contexts, the fantastic radiating halos around the heads of the saints and excessively ornate pictures of Jesus pulling his heart of his chest … it’s kind of frightening… so I became really interested in the image of the heart. I started to think about it and what it means to people in different contexts and found a disconnect between the spiritual and the scientific functions. The heart is a pump, just a part in a larger machine, but we assign other stuff to it- we assign to it the stewardship of our emotions.

 I first die-formed a heart in sheet metal and then thought, what about the rest of the organs, do we assign similar meanings to those as well? I figured that I should make a series of organs otherwise I miss the point to all of this.

 H. It talks very much about the body as machine, or the way that we project our subjective agendas onto systems, or parts to a whole.

 H.  So, the “Mandated Series”, the flag pieces that come later, also incorporate the heart as part of the flag. 

 B. This work was the cusp of conceptual change for me. The things that I am interested in socially and politically started to infiltrate the metal work that I was doing. I would put those pieces at the beginning of my conceptually oriented work, the joining of the two.  It has been really hard to be a member of this country for the past several years, and I think at my age, especially so. I got interested in images of the flag and what that meant, started to research the flag and the different versions it has gone through and what they all meant. The symbology of the flag opened up a whole new world of meaning for me.

 H. The work has a time machine effect where we think about not only contemporary politics but we also think about them in reference to history.

Would you say that the medium of Steel acts like a bridge from one time to another?

 B. Sure, it could. That is interesting and it pleases me to know that is the effect one might have when seeing this work. I came to steel as a material partly out of an interest in history. When I was eighteen years old and deciding what I wanted to do with my life, I thought that special effects might be the direction I took. So, I went off to film school, which did not work out in the end. Nevertheless, I realized that I really enjoyed working with my hands. My childhood was filled with armchair history lessons from my grandfather and hours spent watching and reading sci-fi and fantasy. In hindsight, I know that the elements that attracted me to those genres were visual. The look and feel of the backgrounds (star ships, alien planets, knights in armor and Gothic castles) always translated materially to me, which was at times heavy, rusty, shiny, layered and textured, but always metallic. When I was watching westerns I was looking at the old locomotives and big riveted chambers and the steam power and then if I was watching science fiction it was always the sleek spaceships. There was always a material attraction for me.

It was sort of a natural evolution to get involved in metal work.

 H. On your flag pieces, there’s a sort of a patina that makes me think about finish fetish, but finish fetish was more about sleek, so you’re giving us a patina that talks about age, makes the thing look like it’s been used, or worn. Obviously that talks about nostalgia but in reference to politics are you trying to speak about a certain level of failure?

 B. The patina for me is a way to finish the work, to separate it from other metal sculpture. Adding color brings a whole new level of life to the work. I guess the age question….I do not know if it expresses a level of failure, maybe success rather. I have always thought the patinas I do give the work a look like it has lasted through the ages, this it is something that has been built, and buried and lost somewhere and then uncovered again.

 B. Yes.

H. Now you are In the middle of this new project – the kinetic sculpture, which is also a wall work. There is a connection to painting and definitely a narrative that functions like in a painting.

 B. Sort of loosely 3 dimensional paintings. Some parts are literally painted, although the focus is on the structure.

 H. Is this your first kinetic sculpture?

 B. It is, even as simple as the machinery is; there is a lot of thought that goes into it. Once you commit to things you are stuck, if a part is in the wrong place, that’s it. Fortunately I have a lot o friends who are engineers and scientists and do this stuff professionally. I am involved in a group that does large-scale pieces that usually involve a lot of engineering. I am fortunate because I get to, by osmosis, pull from that body of knowledge. This (new work) is still largely experimental for me.

 H. So this is your first interactive work.

 B. As an individual, yes. However, this was largely inspired and informed by my collaborative work, which has always included different layers of interactivity. 

 H. Your collaborative works are the “Steampunk Treehouse””, and the recent” Neuron chamber”

How did you become a part of this collaborative team?  Do you have trouble separating your own work from the collaborative works?

 B. No, my work is is very much my own vision and responsibility. When I work collaboratively, I have a different sense of ownership in the work. I put my best skills forward, but because of the group nature, I do not have to make all of the considerations that are needed for a large project. It is relieving in ways. We formed over one project that happened just about 18 months ago (The Steampunk Treehouse - exhibited at Burning Man 2007) we worked well together and over the course of the last year, taken on projects as a group. Most of us though also do our own work individually. Right now we are trying to formalize this community into some kind of official collective, so that we can push our individual careers forward under the umbrella and safety of a group.

 B. This new work is about exploring history through the lens of art and contemporary society. I am using portraits of the founding fathers of the United States with overlapping imagery of Gothic & Neo-Classical architecture.

I am also experimenting with humor in the work in the form of animals, namely monkeys and pigs (at this point).

 There is this big steel rectangular frame and it sits on the wall. In it there are six small frames, which will house the portraits of the ‘Fathers’. Behind these portraits are tubes that hold rods, which will move up and down.

 H. Will all of the machinery/ mechanism that moves these rods will be exposed?

B. Yes, it is human powered, so the viewer activates the piece by turning a crank. Every time it turns, the rods will be pushed up and down. Therefore, you will stand in front of the piece and turn a crank to actuate the whole thing. The rods will be moving over a field, which will mimic a flag in the form of a radiating sun.

So, at the top of the rods will be the monkeys who will be holding automatic weapons. I should say that this is a nightmare to describe and difficult to imagine finished. I am not making any definitive political statements here. My work is more about questions than answers.

 H. So it is not necessarily didactic, but it is definitely narrative.  Moreover, that is a break for you, since your earlier work is very abstract, organic. This actually is a moving story that involves time and labor.

 B. There are issues about the second amendment in there, which was the impetus for the piece, but now it has evolved into a larger idea. I am toying with the title, “Sorry Guys” as if I were apologizing to the founding fathers, for what I (we) have done with what they created, but this has not been finalized yet. Reading about the events that led to this country’s founding is sometimes shockingly similar to what I see happening today. It is like I am watching the local news in my mind’s eye, but everyone is wearing funny wigs and ugly coats. I am reading a book right now about how the Continental Congress supplied Washington’s army to fight against the British in the revolution. The book cites examples of how a weak, yet determined group rallied support, both financial and moral from its people to literally build a force strong enough to repel and ultimately defeat the largest army in the world of that day. About half way through, I slapped my forehead when I realized that the birth of liberty was also the birth of military privatization.

We had these founding fathers that were absolutely scrambling to build this war effort, to stand up against the imposing force of the British Empire and in the end (today) we have a bunch of monkeys dancing around with guns.

 B. So that is where I am right now. It has renewed an interest in history for me. My formal education in history ended in public high school. Growing up in New England where this stuff actually happened, I feel that I should be intimate with this information, but there is so much that I never learned. Some of the best generals in this war (American Revolution) lived in my hometown, and I am just now realizing this. So, I am finding History through Art. Which is a very exciting path for me to be on right now.

 -Holly Williams, November 2008.

www.hollywillliams.org

To learn more about Benjamin Carpenter’s work, go to:

www.backbonemetals.com

A quick note about another project I am involved with:  My buddy and collaborator Alan from Almost Scientific just had a major project of his (The Neuron Chamber) accepted into Lightwave 09 . This is taking place over the month of January in Dublin Ireland. Alan ran a crew of 4 (including myself) through the design, fabrication, and the first installation of this. It looks very much like we will be attending the festival to present this to an international conference of art and science.