S T E P H E N S H A H E E N
E V E
Some Light in Technology
In the creative process, when concept and fabrication are disjointed, the artist and product don’t share the same journey. They become irrelevant to each other, and the flavor of irrelevance infects both the purpose of the individual artist as well as the legacy of the object. When I first arrived in Carrara over 25 years ago there were still young men and women who refused to use electric or pneumatic tools. They only used chisels made by a smithy, even rejecting the gift of carbide. Though I admired their romantic spirit, it appeared to me in the late twentieth century that they were looking for a handicap, or excuse to sequester themselves from the contemporary world. That, or there was too much free time and not enough ideas. Conversely, other people went to this area of Italy to drop off sculptural models, or bozetti, while choosing whether they might have them cast in bronze, or executed in a stone by artisans. Thus, they would physically divorce themselves from the final execution process. These creators seemed to have way too many ideas to bother with their resolution, and little time to do it as well. Perhaps in their worlds there were fewer waking hours to make this possible. Whatever the case, I realized that art making had become a very democratic process in terms of skill and labor—that is, if you could afford it. How fair the visual arts had become compared to say, the classical music world, where at one point in my own childhood I had dreamed of being a concert cellist, only to have those hopes dashed because…well I wasn’t good enough.
Fast forward some years to our current digital world, and a new process has presented itself. The three-dimensional scanner and milling machine now make it possible to capture and materialize just about any form within a limited scale and speed, and to a certain limited detail. We can finally remove all human intervention from the equation—not just the conceiver, but the imperfect human craftsmen as well. I say this with only a little irony, because I have sampled the milling machines myself, with no shame. I find it fascinating how one can finish a working day and then set the machine to run all night. Waking hours can end for us but double up in this new robot-aided era. Bernini would have nothing on George Jetson. So this brings us to Eve, produced by early twenty first century carver Stephen Shaheen. When I heard he had started a piece on the milling machine, I thought that he had either gone to the dark side or perhaps had been hired by some reactionary luddite group as a spy. I wasn’t sure what he could get out of this, having been such a fierce hands-on direct carver. The first thing one should ask is whether a sculpture’s final material adds something to the prepared model. I often thought bronze had done a good job of sterilizing many a great direct model by Rodin and others in the history of sculpture. One would be hard pressed to find the same liveliness of the original plasters and terracottas in any of his final bronzes. Yet the prepared model of Eve remained stoic and reduced, as with the models of many carvers who prefer to rely on the properties of stone to give new life to the original idea. There it is. In the journey of creating an object or image, each step needs to add some new life to the first disembarkment. Either that, or a decisive death blow to punctuate an idea that had nowhere else to go. The pieces have their own narrative as objects that stand apart from the origins of their intent. This involves many layers of process, especially with a material like stone, displaced earth that has already made its own journey before getting a new identity as sculpture.
For Shaheen, the first translation into limestone from his model wasn’t a complete transformation. He had even gotten heavily involved in the digital maniuplation process to devise a fresh way to give a moving texture to the contours of the face of Eve. Thus far there was a good marriage of manual and digital planning for the final product. But only a sculptor with enough history and intimacy with the material could see that something was necessary to resuscitate the limestone. Inevitably, CPR came from the hand, and not just a brief faith-healing clutch of the forehead in the form of a little sanding. There was required a complete intervention with the entire surface by the hand of the artist—with all his imperfections—to give a new life and identity of Eve as an expressive sculpture. The journey of artist and object, by hand and machine, proved that it was possible to make both modes of execution harmonious, when the maker dares to use a new technology, but doesn’t let the piece wander off too far from sight. So what’s to be taken away from this journey? The digital world has actually done great service not only in its obvious ways, but also to paradoxically re-emphasize the value of an artist’s hands-on intervention. Photography had once seemed to be the nail in the coffin for representational work during the fifties, only to become a great tool for figurative painters and sculptors. Digital image-making has been able to take this many steps further. Shaheen has demonstrated, very effectively, that the scanning/milling process has a relevant place in stone carving. Just as important, however, he has made it clear that it is just another tool. If used in conjunction with the other “tools”, it can be very useful. If it is the only tool, on which there is too much emphasis, it can sterilize an otherwise vital subset of sculpture.
Mark Mennin
Notes on the Creation of Eve When I was awarded an artist residency at the Digital Stone Project, I didn’t understand the complexity of the project I would undertake, or that it would require two years to complete. It has been a journey that has both changed and affirmed many of my views on art-making. For those who are new to this esoteric tributary of the fine arts, “digital sculpture” refers to the creation and/or manipulation of computer data to produce the illusion of form (virtual shapes), which are sometimes materially realized through the use of 3D printers or milling machines. In the case of Eve, I wanted to have as much control over the process as possible. I started with a model that I hand-sculpted in clay, then cast and reworked in plaster. This gypsum form was then scanned into the computer. I used software to divide the digital mesh and displace its pieces either manually or according to a modifiable parabolic graph. After dozens of iterations, the design advanced to a final stage, at which point it was then fed into a computeroperated machine and milled out in limestone using water-fed diamond routers. It was here that the real work began. I spent the next three months sculpting back into the limestone by hand, seeking to reconcile the two very different languages that were articulating the sculpture’s physical presence. It was a difficult and complicated hybridization, and felt to me at times more like an awkward pidgin than a fluid creole. Whether or not the struggle—or reconciliation—come through in the work, is up to the viewer. As with all digital media, the use of computers in three-dimensional art is still evolving, full of mind-bending possibilities but also riddled with bugs and limitations. The questions I have about it in my own artistic practice are part of the larger issues I consider regarding humans’ relationship with digital media, which was the seed that started this project.
Stephen Shaheen New York, 2011
Eve 2011, Indiana limestone 60”x36”x18”
Eve (digital surface model) Rhino software
N E W
Y O R K
ACADEMY OF ART APRIL, 2011
Š 2011 Stephen Shaheen. All photographs by Kent Miller/Kent Miller Studios and Stephen Shaheen.