Much of the production of visual art is done by machine now. Computerized digital cameras are highly automated, as are image processing systems for still and motion pictures. The digital network infrastructure reaches even to the palm of our hand, distributing images and words. Audio information production is the same. And that powerful combination, added to the printed word, is a mighty voice.

This system of machines supporting visual art does well what machines can do well; lower the cost of mass production and replicate products in large volumes. This is Ford style automated production line. It has progressed wonderfully during the recent digital revolution. The products are similar in source material, design, and workmanship, in that they all share the same imagery: the real world, aesthetics: human global culture, and purpose: communicating ideas and stories.

There is good art being done in digital media and it depends much on machinery. Are its practitioners, if deprived of their tools, prepared to to continue their personal expression in another material way? There may be a filmmaker who uses the media in a fashion that is essentially handmade with a SLR and a laptop, doing the script, acting, lighting, and sound himself. But without them, would he sit by a campfire and create the performance with only his voice, and gestures and a flashlight?  Works of digital media are mostly narrative storytelling, and when not, when being abstract, the meta-narrative of the creation technology becomes the story.

The individual object of art is almost unaffected by this change. It will continue to be created, mostly by one person, by hand, with simple tools, or un-specialized machines, individually. There is little distribution because the market is small and the object is unique and physical, limited in movement. The personal expression of the artist is unique in it’s source: the inner life of the person, it’s creation: the specific manual skill and sensibility of the artist, and it’s meaning: sensuality or spirit, or, whatever.

Individual art is a declaration, not a parable. A statement made by a person. Not the tired moralizing storylines, yet again and again, of good vs evil, the underdog who perseveres, of revenge fulfilled, of personal redemption, the hero, and all that other rot of manufactured sentiment. Enough of all that.

The next day I went back to give a gallery talk with Joyce and Mary, the curator. This was actually kind of fun, much better for talking about art than the few minutes you get with anyone at opening night. Joyce talked about her paintings and the imagery in them, it’s source, the cacophony of images which are the World, and the Mind. It made me think that what imagery is for painters, material is for sculptors. The myriad and endless supply of that thing from which we produce our work, the World. The materials I work from are found everywhere, cement, bronze, plastic, wood, iron, stone, steel, put to a purpose in the built world; but to give them a character and an expression which is their own, not an only utilitarian one, is art, is sculpture.

Every material brings it own nature that causes what I find to do with it. Wood is the only material that has been alive; it is a kind of flesh. Metal is unyielding, up to  the point it is melted, and then it becomes suddenly pliable liquid. Stone was once liquid and is now crystal, harder than metal, it can only be chipped or ground, and by the simplest tools, hammer, sand, water. Plastic is like room-temperature metal, but can only be formed once, and never reformed again in a liquid, it becomes a soft stone. Clay is almost without an original identity, because it is all materials in one. It is a type of dirt, the earth. Everything else in distilled or mined or grown from it. It is primordial substance. Everything is clay. Clay is to sculpture what abstraction expression is for painting. A material able to express from out of the Mind whatever can be imagined… even the formless.