One thing I like about Dallas is the ability to listen easily to great artists coming through the city to talk about their art and their creative process. While I usually stick to the Arts & Letters Live series of the Dallas Museum of Art (Zadie Smith! Ann Patchett! Paul Auster!), in late January I attended the talk by New York artist Barry X Ball as part of the Nasher 360 Speaker Series at the Nasher Sculpture Center, on the day his retrospective opened at the Nasher.
What is unique about Ball is the way he uses 21st century tools such as robots and 3D printing to re-imagine masterpieces, such as Sleeping Hermaphrodite on view at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The talk provided fascinating insights into Ball's process - how he scans sculptures using 3D imaging and makes alterations to the 3D scans and then produces a small-scale version of the sculpture he has in mind followed by a reimagined sculpture thanks to an army of assistants and robots carving the stone. Ball also donates the original 3D scans to the museums that own the work of art he has scanned, to help with conservation. The process itself is painstakingly slow because the robotic arm has to go very slowly. As an example of alteration, Ball showed his reimagined version of Pieta by Michelangelo, who died a few days after completing it at the age of 89. Because it was Michelangelo's final work of art, Ball replaced the face of Jesus Christ with the face of Michelangelo. He also removed a piece of wood near Mary behind Christ to have cleaner lines. The Wall Street Journal explains the statue took Ball seven years to produce at a cost of $1m. This brochure explains his process too.
The Wall Street Journey has a great 6-minute video of Ball's process. Ball has a great new studio (at the tune of almost $20m) that will allow him to create even bigger statues and takes pride in being able to make changes to the sculptures that were not possible at the time the original artists made them. The video also discusses the financial side of art-making and Ball's financial pressures.
In his talk at the Nasher, Ball also discusses his sculptures of two heads representing Envy and Purity and he had an interesting take about one of the pairs, which was supposed to represent the violence women in some parts of the world are still subject to, especially acid attacks in India. Amusingly enough, he used the word duality a lot to describe those pieces, and it made me think of duality in linear programming every time. Given my work on robust optimization, duality is probably "the" word that I cannot hear in everyday settings without thinking about my professional life.
Shockingly, the exhibition at the Nasher marks the first survey by a major U.S. museum of Barry X Ball's work in three decades. His work is so good it certainly deserves more attention - some people might find it kitsch or derivative, but I love how he uses modern engineering tools to add his spin on famous statues and make us rethink how we view them - and hopefully this retrospective will be followed by many others.
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