More Than Real: Victor Spinski

Giving Up On Painting, 1999

I have seen sculpture imitating life to the maximum degree a couple of times lately. At MOMA in Manhattan last month, I saw an awesome, but disturbing show by Robert Gober. In his room sized installations, what looked liked real objects e.g. bags of cat litter, a bag of donuts, were actually sculptures.*

Spinski glazing a trash can sculpture

And here is Victor Spinski in a retrospective at The Clay Center, playing with words and duplicating the textures, colors, forms of reality with total accuracy - in clay.



The tubes of paint are in the trash can. Well, of course, it's acrylic. I gave up on that media, too.

A different kind of paint here. What might have been being painted with these paints in black, blue and pink?

Spinski has used luster glazes to make these cans shiny and metallic looking.

Carving A Teapot Out of a Rock, 2008

These last two have something in common. Both are made of rock, supposedly, if you take the titles seriously. They have metal components - the mallet, and the tool and hardware portions. They are quite convincing in their imitation of the materials, I think, in particular the marble teapots.

Marble Teapots, 2004

What compels humans/artists to create these illusions? Is it the challenge of the task or is it the whimsical quality, the intellectual playfulness of creating a different reality from raw materials? Because after all, what does Spinski start with? Like God in the story of Genesis, he makes a world out of a lump of clay.

*A "bag of donuts" in the center of one of Robert Gober's installations -
the walls are covered with drawings of male and female genitalia.