Cast Off, Piled Up & Made Again

by Micah Malone

This essay was written for the exhibition catalog, Cast-Offs: Girls, Riddles, Fate, Firehouse Gallery, Burlington, Vermont,
September 24-October 31, 2004 www.BurlingtonCityArts.com

One of the more interesting aspects of the casting process is the vast number of objects that can be reproduced by utilizing a mold. Unlike purely carved work that becomes unique and irreplaceable due to its labor, a cast object can theoretically be made over and over again. Yet how an artwork gets "made again" can have numerous connotations depending on the context of its display.

In her exhibition, Cast-offs: Girls, Riddles, Fate, Leslie Fry has built up a group of concrete sculptures in the center of the gallery. Outlining the ruinous pile-up of cast forms are the rubber molds - the skins that gave the concrete forms life. Several of these objects were flawed in the casting process and were unusable for other projects, some were "experiments" while others were and are viable as outdoor sculpture. But through the gesture of piling-up, which is remarkably akin to the casting process, the forms no longer function as garden sculpture, public art or ornament. These "cast-offs" have found a new life and have been "made again" as a sculptural installation.

This re-contextualizing offers a curious dilemma. Theoretically these forms could exist in several places at once: in the exhibition, in a garden setting or in another public venue. As a living record of a past that is catching up, the sculptural pile-up is acquiring new meaning as it accepts its role as unsold, stored and most importantly stored together. The group display, in essence, revels in its static accumulation.

In an attempt to forge an opposition to dominant trends in contemporary art, Fry states that "despite the prevalence of technologically-driven media on view at most contemporary art galleries and museums, [she] is dedicated to time-honored, traditional methods and materials." For Fry, the building of armatures, modeling in clay and the laborious casting process stand as an alternative to the fabricated look of "industrial" sculpture and the high volume of media-based work (which is also interestingly, highly reproducible), in the art market.

Throughout history the delicate and skilled practice of casting has been central to the work of numerous artists. Its affect on Modern art and artistic strategies, has often served as an attempt to differentiate fine art from industrial design and mass production. Medardo Rosso, for example, sensationalized the casting process by holding champagne parties during his working hours. So certain was Rosso of the "art of casting" that he did not produce any new molds during the last 20 years of his career, relying only upon those which he had already made. For Rosso, the casting process itself was what gave sculpture its substance. Through different techniques involving waxes, plaster and bronze, each cast was distinct and unique to itself despite the sameness of the imagery.

At the other end of the spectrum is Constantin Brancusi who examined the very nature of reproduction by making objects that bore such resemblance to commodities that many claimed it was not art at all. This was best exemplified in the infamous "Bird on Trial" court case where his work entitled Bird in Space was taken to court for not qualifying as art because of its resemblance to a handrail. Of course, what made Brancusi's work relatable to design and commodity was the highly polished surface of his works, with the sanded and finished sleekness of the handrails that they resembled. Brancusi took a traditional handicraft and made it look "industrial." The typical role and labor of the artist was thus relatable to the larger production of commodities. With this, it is interesting to consider the manner in which Fry's pile-up is posed alongside another series of works in which the process is literally "framed" by the very look of industrial production. Fragile forms cast in paper are then framed by aluminum shadow boxes presenting a serial display that literally pits two different modes of labor against each other. The physical and traditional mode of casting stands in ironic opposition to the slickly fabricated aluminum shadow boxes that define the space where imagery resides.

The images, surrealistic and based in fantasy, are often used over and over again, as this is what the casting process allows and even requests. As one walks by the repeated frames, the same cast shell supports the image of a finger or a hand in a slightly different way than before. The hypnotic cadence of the frames permits the characters and symbols to disappear from one frame and reappear in another. There is no linear narrative, only a strict framework that allows these girls and riddles to rejuvenate from frame to frame. This is the literal enactment of what the pile-up does conceptually - that is - by way of casting it reproduces a new and ever changing context for viewing the imagery it holds.

Micah Malone is a Boston-based artist and critic. He has recently contributed essays on the work of Barbara Gallucci, Noble/Webster and Erick Swenson, among others.