Sculpture 12, Fall 2008, Dept. of Art, UCSB 

FOUND OBJECT DECONSTRUCTION/RECONSTRUCTION 

In Marcel Duchamp’s study of the readymade – manufactured objects recontextualized as art - he pursued not only the presentation of unaltered found objects in an art context, but also created the ‘altered readymade’.  Rather than leaving these objects as he found them, they were manipulated and re-contextualized, employed with other objects, text, paint, etc., giving them new significance or meaning, breathing new life into the simple ready-made.

Bill Woodrow's work exemplifies this project. He has taken Duchamp’s concept of the readymade and developed work that obtains its goal through concise manipulation of objects.  John Chamberlain used car parts to create ‘abstractions’, each construction mimicking the car-wrecker’s crushing and reshaping, but in aesthetic terms. Among many other music-related works Christian Marclay has produced cubes of melted and bent old vynil 'LP' records, the sound of each album no longer retrievable. 

You have been given a woodworking and a metalworking demonstration to enable a greater degree of physical manipulation/alteration of found materials and objects. Keep in mind the feasibility of cutting, shaping, and reconstructing your found object(s), and the project deadline and crit. 

PROJECT OUTLINE:

Select and collect found objects, employing either intent or intuition. Stop and study them. Consider various new formulations based on criteria other than those used in the original object(s). For instance, a chair’s construction has undergone considerations of anthropometrics and function; your reconstruction will employ other reasoning for its form. Deconstruct them: physically disassemble them into their constituent elements. Stop and study the elements. Think about how you might further manipulate them, (i.e., cutting, reshaping, sanding, distressing, painting, etc.), and how these alterations will reconstruct meaning. [Pay special attention to all hardware - don’t cut through metal with woodworking tools, remove all hardware, nails, screws, etc. and save for possible re-use.] Construct a new object from the old. Derive meaning or content using: juxtapositions of objects, associations, context, text [title, or applied text].

suggested reading:  Calvin Thompkins on Marcel Duchamp