The Thinker - After Rodin, Various Attempts, 2017 ongoing
ATTEMPT 1, 2018, bronce
More attemps are in the making and will soon be cast (I only can afford to make so many in a given time)
there are also 3 attempts in stone in the making
Rodin was my first modern sculptuor (next to Giaccometti, Brancusi etc.) I saw and like at 14 year when traveling to Paris.I discovered him around the same time I read Rilke"s text on Rodin.
Given my work on language learning, reading and observing people listenting and speaking (see my series Seminar/Lecture ) I still identify with Rodin's work as i do with the educational writings of Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys, two other artists i discovered at that age. I read up on all three quite a bit thanks to the availability of affordable books by German publishers.
Therefore, I have no scruples about reworking Rodin's Thinker and using myself as a model. I don't do it out of a narcisistic impetus, but rather out of an attempt to re-open a dialog with Rodin / Rilke. I see it also a Ersatz for a muse to love.
Concerning the finishing of the bronze sculputre I opted to leave it as it exited production. Hence no removal of production specific openings or tubes.
also no surface refinement or production specific "cleaning." This augments the imporession of alienation and shows the sculpture as if after some major drama or trauma that occured in the past. The non-refinement also erases the personal look of the sitter.
Rodin conceived one original Thinkker but oversaw the making of it many times over (alone 28 life size casts of 186 cm hight) not counting the many smaler versions of it of which one i saw at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City which ignited this production of mine.
The French master created the Thinker isolated in various sizes and as part of the Gates of Hell started in 1880.
Unlike the French artist, I make each attempt unique and about a quater of life size high. Each attempt is in a different pose worked of a pictures taken in one evening session with me as a model. Rodin scholars as did the French master himself see in The Thinker an allegory of Philooophy. I see in my figure rather a reminder of Edward Said"s lecture and book The Representaton of Intellectuals which motivated me to start my above mentioned photo series that shows people in often lost, absent and removed looking poses something that always fascinates me. Many people are unhappy whien they are caught thinking or listening because there is a big discrepanchy between the waywe imagine thinking or listening to look and the way it records on camera. I myself am thrilled to see the somehow unfamiliar outcome after the running melted bronze cools down and is crudly separated from the production necessities for bronze casting.
Last but not least, I like the repurposing, the revistiing, or re-articulatoion of ideas and art works / think Edward Said's text "traveling theories" / that already have some milage behind. Rodin wanted to call his sculputre the poet and had Dante" inferno in mind, a book that also was read by me as a young teenager during a summer on the streets hitch hikeing in Italy which had confronted me with aspects of hell. As hitch hiker, book reader and language learner, I slept in heavy dirty, cotton. used military sleeping bags in the plazas of medeval towns and had to endure sexual molestataoin, physical abouse and harrassement by the Italian police - with or wtihout the pretense of drug searches. For their authorities' group entertainment and pure sadism, I was subjected to werid shit. While reading DANTE in Italy, I also encountered Hell in Italy on highways, when endleslzs roasting without much luck or when confronted with disgusting drivers flashing their private parts and subseuqent kickiing outs in the middle of nowhere at any time. This happened to me in Italy more than in other parts of Europe.It is writen, that Rodin's collaborators started to call the POET the thinker and saw references to Michelangelo"s Il penseroso so that Rodin himself could change the name from the Poet to the Thinker.
productoin process
