Provisional arrangements. Order and Disorder. Structure and counter structure. These are some of the ideas Art Professor Jeffrey Schiff will investigate as part of his current sculpture project, “Contingencies,” a project for which he has been awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Guggenheim Foundation asserts that the purpose of its fellowships is to “help provide Fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible…No special conditions are attached to [the grants].”
Schiff will use the fellowship to explore objects placed in temporary, impermanent orders — the disorder of piles, scatters or objects propped against a wall, such as a broom for example. Schiff also intends on creating what he calls “counter structures” — frameworks to support an otherwise gravitationally self-supporting construction.
“Things in flux are in a provisional order,” Schiff said. “Yet, everything even then is in that particular order in that historical moment, and that moment sets the stage for the next, and the next.”
Schiff has created sculpture for over 30 years. He has been awarded fellowships since 1975, including a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Fellowship, multiple Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Rome Prize.
Though Schiff primarily works within the field of sculpture, he draws upon different media in order to express ideas more robustly.
“I try to get at certain ideas from multiple directions, in different forms,” he explained.
This was the approach he took to “The Library Project,” his 2003 exhibit at the University. Along with three students, Schiff created eight installations “exploring the library as an index to the larger world,” as he explained to The New York Times.
The call numbers you see adorning the sides of buildings and benches are remnants of one installation. Another exhibit can be found on the first floor of the Science Library, in between the computer stations and the circulation desk. Rather than presenting books in standard open-faced format, three glass exhibition tables present books stacked one on top of the other, some with carved-out sections that allow one to look into the book to a page of text framed by perforated edges. The installation is called “Excavations.”
Schiff is drawn to the way sculpture communicates ideas.
“When I first went to college I thought I wanted to be a painter, “he explained, “but I became more interested in the language of sculpture.”
Schiff began contemplating the ways in which structures express orders while living in Rome during his twenties.
“[I] developed a fascination with historical layering, and how in each moment the city we see is really an amalgamation of multiple historical moments,” he said. “The newer structures respond to the older ones, and then the older ones are reinterpreted in response to the new. So I came to see order as contingent in all sorts of ways—anything but pure or unified.”
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