Ben La Rocco’s Sculpture
Recently, Ben LaRocco and I were discussing what was to be done about the floating island of garbage in the Pacific Ocean, now apparently equal in area to Rhode Island. I offered the usual arguments based on outrage. It has to be cleaned up, of course. The garbage threatens marine life and shows lack of care and respect for the Earth. What we have created, done to the world, brings feelings of grief. Above all, it is ugly.
“Is it?” Ben asked. “Why not declare it art? And, as art, curate it!”
If the island is a grievous reflection of our behavior, then shouldn’t we honor it? Freud said that which remains unconscious undergoes no alteration with time. LaRocco brings the grief, in material form, into daylight, into his studio. If the ills of the world are to be cured (shares a root with ‘curate’), first they have to be valued- held in aesthetic esteem and held up to aesthetic scrutiny. Ben sees that we live in a swirl of detritus. As residents, therefore, it behooves us to work on it, to make it beautiful.
Saving the world with art practice is a precarious position, but, hey, maybe sculpture and poetry can succeed where politics fail.
Nature is never out of balance in form, light and color. How? Cezanne called it harmony and believed it took place in the way light struck the eye. So an observer is the other half of the equation. Now, the observer is in the experience as is the eye and the nerves that fire. Suddenly, the range of activity and process becomes pretty infinite. I think LaRocco argues that this is a good thing. So how to proceed with these self-imploding categories? When a whole bumps up against its boundaries it becomes “part” again, and the process goes on.
It has been said that paintings proceed to finish through alternate cycles of affirmation and negation on the part of the artist. Building and erasing. This seems self evident but LaRocco calls out this idea for what it is, a fantasy. A
fantasy hard wired in us for whom beginning, middle, and end are a given. He proceeds via accretion, mimicking the behavior of a coral reef. As in a tropical reef, the focus of interest and beauty is scaleless, proceeding from microscopic to very large incrementally, with no possible location for the jumps between contiguous scales. These sculptures are the result of a slow, incremental, additive process. As such, they outstrip the subjective reach of the artist’s hand and intention. No single action is decisive.
This work asks us, the viewers, to shed certain assumptions of privilege implied in authorship. I, and most of my painter friends, hope to gain insight from our activity, and pass that insight on to the public through exhibitions. Ben makes no such claims. He displaces the ‘insight’ onto the viewer. I may prefer this object to that one, but that’s on me and my subjectivity. The operational fantasy here is that every part is as interesting as every other part, throwing us back into wild nature. The artist has spoken to me about the equal fascination in all the activities of his daily life; teaching, child rearing, relationship work, and cleaning up his backyard. Art making is another daily action without special emphasis.
LaRocco’s claim is that we are looking not at intention, but behavior. And not only the artist’s behavior, but that of the world. Cycles of growth and decay. Place is the emphasis here, not space. Specificity trumps “abstraction”. By using bits and pieces gleaned from the street, objects and paint left over from job or home construction, LaRocco extends ‘place’ from his studio and basement to the neighborhood, sometimes incorporating artworks found on the sidewalk into his practice. “Ownership” really has no relevance in the reef, just usefulness.
Peter Acheson