Artist explains his expensive art projectfrom @middlebrowpod

Transcript

One of your works is a very large scale Play Doh Mound. Is there any point when you're working on this piece over two decades and you best millions of dollars on it where you're like, What I'm doing is insane? Yes. Good, that does happen because in getting involved in, some of the projects, my stone ballerinas have been very much in that context. Initially better involved, I think that the time is going to be much shorter. I'm told that the time will be much shorter by the people I'm working with that have experience manipulating those materials, whether it's a fabricator or somebody involved with milling. But then once you get involved, you start to realize that they haven't really thought it through the whole way. And you start to understand everything is much more complex than what you initially thought it was. I've partnered in the past already with MIT with Better and Atoms to try to find solutions that could help expediate some of those works. Generally, they're very good ideas that'll come worse. But if you good start it in the very beginning that way, it could have really reduced the time. But once you're so deeply involved to where you are, it doesn't really make sense to start over. So Play Doh, I originally wanted to be a polyethylene sculpture. It's a form of a plastic. Little tight makes a lot of children's toys, like a house for your backyard that you can have like a log cabin or some type of playhouse that as a child, you can have adult fantasy. So I wanted the sculpture's material, the Play Doh, to have that optimism of that kind of gift of a future. And I've worked on the piece for many years, but it became so complex, all the undercuts, that the type of draft that I would have to make for the polyethylene sculpture, I would have lost too much detail. So I ended up making it into aluminum tier and painting it in a manner that it looks like polyethylene.