According to Todd Stuart, criticism is necessary when the majority of online sculpture galleries — he puts the figure as high as 90 per cent — sell their capability to manage large-scale sculpture projects under exaggerated if not false pretences.
Todd criticises companies that use their websites to stake a claim as the best candidate to supply big public art. Accusing them of a smoke and mirrors approach, he says persuasive web content, seductive imagery, and slick salesmanship are poor substitutes for artistic experience and practical knowledge.
A dead give-away is the use of the term ‘project management’ in the context of commissioning major sculptures. Todd has had 25 years in design, sculpting, and hands on engineering and project management around the world. He knows there is only a handful of gallery owners in Australia who have the know-how and the experience to properly manage such a project.
What a third dimension reveals … and hides
Unlike other works of art, sculpture by definition must be three-dimensional. And that third dimension both reveals and hides an array of talent, skills, and manual dexterity. While these are plainly visible in two-dimensional works — what you see is what you get — the same rules do not apply to sculpture, especially monumental works.
Take a painting or a piece of writing, for example. Regardless of their size, they always use the same basic materials: pigments or electronic characters, and the surface on which they’re deposited to create visual relevance (or not!).
Sculpture on the other hand can expose an extraordinary talent, not only for visualisation of a richly expressive form, but also for rendering it into an often-difficult physical existence. The larger the sculpture the greater the material, engineering, and manufacturing challenges.
But hidden within the form lie the triumphs of chemistry, formulation, rigidity, bracing, and all other intricacies of the sculptor’s art — or their potential failure.
Three-dimensional choices
When the sculptor then has to make three-dimensional choices that may have to endure decades, even centuries of potentially adverse environmental conditions, the challenges multiply further.
Where the challenge really lies is in bringing a larger than life 3D form into existence, on time and on. Larger sculpture requires a team effort and not an individual for it to be successful. In other words it needs a managed collaboration to meet targeted goals. When galleries claim project management it should mean they know a range of pre-qualified parties.
At a minimum, these should include artists, engineers, production and finishing experts, logistics, installation specialists, and plant and equipment suppliers. They should also have management skills for all parties and processes at play.
And they must be able to operate anywhere, not just in their local market if they want to uphold their claim to offer a technical and value based solution. To market the term project management means not simply turning to sculptors at arms length in the hope they will control the process for them, as happens in most cases.
Worse, if the gallery can use only the one per cent of sculptors who have the necessary 20 plus years’ experience, it usually comes at the expense of diversity and creativity. Those sculptors who manage their own process usually do so as experts in their narrow niches.
The materials themselves bring with them trials that the painter or writer never face. Working with steel, bronze, glass, clay, stone, wood, resins, or other constituents, good sculptors must have an intricate knowledge of each of their physical, chemical, or thermal properties. They need both gross and fine motor skills to physically create the object within the confines of complex natural laws.
And again in the case of monumental works, sculptors need to have a working familiarity with manufacturing and logistics issues. These will include sourcing, buying, storing, and handling not only the right materials, but also the right grades of the right materials.
If the so-called project manager lacks that depth knowledge and hands on experience, they cannot know what they don’t know except by learning organically. That familiarisation often comes at the expense of the client again. When the process involves an interwoven web of design, materials, construction methods, quality control, finishing, packaging, and official documentation, failure of any one component causes a knock-on effect. The gathering shock wave can roll on to affect deadlines, budget, quality, performance, and even safety.
It will involve forming and maintaining relationships with manufacturing and engineering experts in foundries and other material processing works. These in turn require human resource management skills to deal with teams of artisans, transport specialists, and installation professionals. These are all a far cry from tubes of paint, camel hair brushes, a fountain pen, or a laptop’s word processor.
Cutting corners and short cuts
What does this say about gallery owners and managers? For a start, it underlines an eternal human failing: our weakness for cutting corners, for the short cut. Todd’s 25 years in design-based self-expression, and his journey to artistry through creativity, mastery, and eventually engagement with a small cohort of enlightened clients, speak entirely of the long haul.
He warns that an impressive website can often conceal a lack of depth and a paucity of knowledge. Less than scrupulous galleries will showcase flattering images of work that may have design and technical flaws imperceptible to untrained eyes, including those of the galleries themselves.
To borrow a maxim from the kingdom of finance, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Yet these same galleries have fallen prey to the temptation of commoditising a discipline whose very essence is steeped in individual interpretation and representation. Their hope is that a few desirable sculptures will sell a limitlessly repeatable series of new works. The philosophy holds no consideration for the needs of the buyer, the artist, or the public.
Quality versus quantity debate
Perhaps the most annoying factor for Todd in the quality versus quantity debate is the hollow promise so many of these galleries make to prospective but uninformed buyers. It’s the notion that by decorating their sites with limited editions, buyers will, through a kind of creative osmosis, transport themselves from the common to the exclusive.
Sculpture, and especially large-scale sculpture, is the grand adventure, the tour de force of art. It stands firmly on a complex of processes that should demand a critical, diagnostic approach. Such a method will answer an intertwined range of public and private questions centred on creative, historical, and — yes — business and financial answers provided by sculptural experts practised in the field. Pretty pictures on a website don’t have a plinth to stand on.
If you have qualms about buying or commissioning a sculpture, talk to Todd Stuart on +61 4 5151 8865, or visit mainartery.art and put your mind at rest. You might also like to visit his blog on How to avoid plop and plonk sculpture: the value of strong diagnostics.
