“I’m seduced by motion,” said sculptor Arthur Ganson. “That’s really what it is.”
Ganson spoke Tuesday in the CFA Cinema, starting off the 2006 Samuel Silipo ’85 Lecture Series. This series will bring three visiting artists selected by a committee of studio art majors and architecture Professor Barrett Feldman to speak to the Wesleyan community about their work.
Ganson’s work is comprised of mechanical sculptures that use axles, wheels, and many other intricate parts to often perform simple tasks. Ranging from performing the job of walking a wishbone down a table, to opening a Chinese fan, Ganson’s work is often humorous and centers on an appreciation of movement.
“I love the way things move,” Ganson said. “Behind my work is a passion for the way things move. Where that comes from, I don’t really know.”
Ganson told the audience that when he was a boy he would fill jars with rocks and water and throw balled-up Kleenex into them. Then he would spend hours watching the balls drift down in the water in different patterns and fall in different places. Early in his life his desire to deal with motion led him to biology and computer programming in high school and college. With a plan to go pre-med and become a surgeon, he chose art as his other major because he loved working with his hands. When the memorization seemed to overwhelm him, Ganson decided to get more involved with his art and started a lifetime of creating mechanical sculpture art.
One audience pleaser was “Machine with Grease,” which showed a tube dripping grease over the machine while it moved back and forth. This piece was once displayed in an exhibit of erotic art. Another piece, “Machine with Abandoned Doll,” was created when Ganson found a dirty doll on the side of the road and wanted to see it move. He then constructed a machine to move the lying doll up and down.
Chairs show up in Ganson’s work frequently. “Cory’s Yellow Chair,” currently on exhibit at MIT, was inspired by his son’s chair and starts with a small yellow chair held together by a machine. The chair then seems to explode and the viewer can follow the pieces of the chair as they move out, creating a large circle. Slowly, the pieces come back together to reform the chair and the process starts from the beginning.
One video Ganson showed was of a sculpture entitled “Faster,” made during his time with the World Sculpture Racing Society in the 1980s. The goal of the group was to display art publicly, and to win the sculpture race on the streets of Cambridge, Mass. “Faster” is a sculpture on wheels that required Ganson to run behind it to propel it down the street. While moving, the scultpure guides Ganson’s hand to write “faster” on a note card in the front of the machine. The faster the sculpture moves, the faster the word is written. One obstacle Ganson had to overcome was how to create a mechanism to dispel the finished note cards from the sculpture. Ganson chose to stop the machine when the word was done, remove the card, and give it to an onlooker, causing him to consistently lose the race but gain crowd support.
While at Wesleyan, Ganson also met with two thesis students and studio art technician Kate Teneyck to critique their work. Ganson’s visit was largely due to student committee member Ali Osborn ’06.
“I initially wanted Ganson to come to Wesleyan for a couple of reasons,” Osborn said. “His artwork, an elegant mixture of dance and technology, is largely unknown to the Wesleyan community.”
“I thought people at Wesleyan would really benefit from seeing him speak about his work,” Osborn continued. “Ganson, from Somerville, Mass., does not really concern himself with the art world or the gallery scene. In this sense, I thought his perspective would be an important alternative to the more New York-centric, academic one which pervades the Wesleyan art community.”
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