Transcript: David Simon - Sculptor

For arts Sake
Episode “David Simon, sculptor”

David Simon: Frequently with my work the initial spark of it is visual, I like sort of the certain way that a form repeats. If an arm is out at an angle I like the way the overall shape of the figure relates to that particular physiology of the model. And so I start to play it up and then meanings emerge out of that as opposed to me putting a meaning on it at the beginning. And one of the things that I think that came out of doing the series of amputated figures was the idea of a physical aspect of a person missing paralleling a either emotional or psychic void.

The scale of the work that I do evolved over time, if I was to do one of my pieces life-size I think it would lose a little bit of its strange quality because it is essentially the same size as you and you are reacting to it in the same way. The pieces that I do are kind of in between that level, they are four maybe 4 ½ feet tall, which I hope sort of gives them that strange quality where they’re not quite doll like and there not quite the same size as you, so you can interact with them in a different way.

Subconsciously there are definitely reasons why after living for 10 years in an apartment in Brooklyn and then all of a sudden moving across the country I would want to do sort of an expo, self portrait because I was trying to figure out what I was doing with my life at that point. I don’t think it was anything as conscious is that, the pragmatic reason was that I needed a model and my wife, even though she said she would pose for me the schedule was so erratic that I was not able to get very much work done, so I just switched it. It is actually fairly typical of my work, from starting a piece one way it will transform into something else.

Eventually I came up with a method of building these larger sculptures and allowed me to change them radically, from standing or sitting, or from male to female in the middle. In terms of building arms in a certain way it would allow me to dismantle them in reconfigure them while there was clay on them and that is why I am unfortunately not as quick as I would like to be in producing these. The older I get the more I’ve sort of count out the ex amount of times, how many do I have left before I go? How many more pieces are left in me? It makes me think that each one has to be getting better.

I have a very sort of profound feeling of the idea that someone chose to live with one of the things that I created and I think that for me that is kind of a big deal. I think that it feels like, because I don’t do necessarily objects that are purely aesthetic or purely beautiful. They have a little bit of difficulty to looking at them. I hope that they are beautiful on a certain level, but for someone to actually to decide that they want to live with something is really a very important thing to me and at the same time I’m a little disappointed to let it go and not live with it myself anymore.

Unfortunately so many people focus on absolutisms in contemporary society. Why would you fund that museum when their children starving in Africa? But if you carry that to its logical conclusion why would you do anything when their people starving in Africa? Why did you buy shoes? Why could and you have more in the sneakers for 10 years? I mean anything that you do pales in comparison to bigger issues and so to me that is not really a valid argument. I mean people argue that all the time for NASA, why are we spending billions of dollars to shoot people in this space when people are starving?

I think there is a really valuable function to the idea behind NASA, which is to me very similar to the idea behind art, which is the expansion of human consciousness. To know what is beyond who we are and I think art functions in that way, I think space exploration functions that way. If you relegate society to the most base needs, like as long as we’re providing food and water to every body we are a great society, I think that is an important function. But I do not think it is the only function of society I think it is as important to feed peoples sort of imagination, and to perpetuate the advancement of society and culture.