Constructions

In 1990 I began building free standing constructions using mostly industrial materials: wood, sheetmetal, wire mesh, metal pipe, and concrete. The work, clearly indebted to Constructivism - an international movement that began in Russia around 1914 and eventually spread to the west by the 1920's - nevertheless had a very different agenda. My intention with these early works was to construct objects with a semblance of practical function thereby inverting the Duchampian readymade. While all these things suggested some practical use, they were made, not found objects. There is an undercurrent of absurdity in work that merely appears to have some practical purpose, however, at some point it occured to me that this work demonstrated the difference between performance and purpose, that it had a conceptual function. As I would later write in a kind of manifesto introducing the work: 'Simply put, this means that these things function in some way as devices, yet do no practical work. They have no purpose in this regard. But practical work is not the only useful work.' (The Conceptual Object, 1996) One aesthetic purpose of these curious constructions might involve blurring the distinctions between found and made things.