Confession Time!

I am one of those assholes who, for the last four years or so, has been sending the AIM Program ten of my hard-earned dollars along with a really stupid answer to their requirement:

Artist statement describing your work and professional goals (maximum 200 words)

And I am posting this because I know I can't be the only one. I generally chafe so bad at the Professional Goals part that I wind up writing some 100-word Taoist treatise-in-a-teapot about how having goals as an artist equals creative death.

I know... And then I send them ten dollars. Only an artist, right???

It's that time of year again. And I was looking up at the J train at the corner of Lorimer and Broadway when suddenly it dawned on me that I was responding to rigidity in a stupidly rigid way.

So, what the fuck? I actually believe what I wrote this year, and perhaps that is an end in and of itself. I'll share it with you:

I am in the inspiration business.

A lot of things must change because our democracy is broken and we are cooking our planet.

There are no answers yet; just questions and problems. With that in mind, I want to be a decent pre-revolutionary.

I am looking for specific truths by looking at the way the earth builds itself, and how it decays. So far, I have found:

Everything we build is destined for the rock record
Corrosion is a powerful metaphor
Everything has a narrative arc of creation and decay. Sculpture should too.

I work to contextualize my current body of work in three important ways:

1. Middlebury College’s Environmental Studies building provides an excellent context for my work and contains my core audience--the next generation of thinkers who are putting this questioning into action. I want to place more large public installations like Solid State Change in this academic context.

2. Many other cities that will be under water because of human activity should be publicly represented in a way that brings the future into the present. I want large-scale bronze and steel sculptures like New Orleans Elegy to be commissioned by the Netherlands, the Maldives, New York City, Miami, etc.

3. Companies like BP, ExxonMobil and ADM should back up their eco-friendly advertising dollars by buying my art for their corporate offices. I want every corporate headquarters to own a huge corrosive crystal map, similar to Garden District, of their home city, so that decision makers can watch their own beautiful home slowly decay while they make huge decisions that affect our collective future.

(Ummm..... Don't tell the good folks at the Bronx Museum that it's actually 260 words.)