• Home
  • Introduction
  • Text & Word Works
    • Phenomenotes (3)
    • Sign Patterns
    • The Time Table
    • Focal Point (Energy Field)
    • Countdown (Millennial piece)
    • Fragments
    • Headstone (Laying NO to Rest)
    • Compact Record of Discarded Thoughts
    • Scroll of Babble
    • The Hour Of Our Fate
    • Postcards
  • Artist's Books/Bookworks
    • Graphite/Reflections
    • Four Day Diary
    • PM
    • Eye To Eye
    • Liber Dermis (Skin book)
    • Apothecary
    • Book of Maladies
    • John Brown's Body
    • Facade (Compendium Wall)
    • Giordano's Window
  • Drawings
    • Box Shadow Studies
    • Wall Charts
    • Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas
    • Untitled (Tondo drawings)
    • Dutch Manuscript
    • Untitled ('map & case')
    • Untitled
    • Untitled (smudge)
    • Shadow Work Series (6)
  • Constructions
    • Untitled (Rotor)/Mixer
    • Pairing Vessel
    • Untitled (Mill)
    • Turntable
    • Sensor
    • Sight/Site
    • Colonic Flute
    • Hooklinesinker
    • Dry T
    • Scale For The Blind
  • Assemblage
    • Caged Spring
    • Art of Bandaging
    • Breathing Station
    • Magritte's Old Saw
    • Mantle (After a Fashion)
    • Bucolic Strains
    • Enchanted Isle
    • Small World/Ringing Silence
    • Twilight of Eden
    • Shew Stone (After John Dee)
    • Casuality
  • Collage
    • Illustrated Man (Culture and Nature)
    • Poet's Journal (4)
    • History Lesson
    • Map of Chaos
    • Pulse
    • Shattered Illusion
    • Tangle
    • Dark Web (Machinations)
    • Recollections (4)
    • Emergent Self
    • Echo Chamber/Night Soil
    • Skeleton Crew
    • Shadows and Names Fool's/Gold
    • Crucible (Document)
    • Paradise
    • A Tale of Two Worlds
  • Resume

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.

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