Sculpture as event

Gallery walks are hard with almost 60 students. Giving each person's work a fair looking in 10 minutes is impossible, so before we can appreciate any given work at all, we have to make choices about which other works we will necessarily skim, or overlook. Yesterday in the Library we did our second gallery walk, with students sharing their drawings from the project we set the previous week. We had asked students to make a sculpture by choosing two or more readymade objects in their classroom, bringing them together in a way that created an unexpected or meaningful juxtaposition, and to then photograph or draw their results. These drawings are what we were in the midst of mingling around and examining when a number of students started erecting an impromptu sculpture out of the library's wooden chairs.

Before long, the rapidly growing sculpture, and the small collective performance that was accompanying its making, had asserted itself on most people's attention. After the careful placement of the sixth chair, it was agreed that the work was finished, and instead of discussing, as planned, the artworks that students had been working on for the last week, we spent the next 15 minutes talking about the sculpture. This became the most in depth conversation elicited by a single artwork thus far in the project. Students gave a range of insightful and revealing readings of the work, bounced around ideas for titles, and generally got a great, self-directed lesson in the way that meanings can arise out of their own considered observation of changed objects independent of any artistic intention.