The Sculpture Heard Round The World
A talk with the creator of Monument to Pro-Life:
The Birth of Sean Preston at Capla Kesting Fine Art
By Andrew Naymark
ANaymarkWriting.Blogspot.Com
By now, the image is firmly lodged in the minds of millions of people: a nude Britney Spears on all fours, giving birth atop a bear skin rug. As if that weren’t provocative enough, the life-size sculpture bears the title, Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.
The response to Daniel Edwards’ artwork has been nothing short of explosive. The uproar was first sparked by the blogging community, which sent thousands of angry emails to Capla Kesting Fine Art, the Williamsburg gallery exhibiting the sculpture. International media channels began picking up on the sculptural lightning rod, and a full-blown blitzkrieg was soon in effect.
In the past, certain art works have caused seismic cultural shifts, acting as lines in the sand around which everyone must orient himself. But Monument to Pro-Life seems rather to have blurred those lines. Incredibly, Edwards’ sculpture has managed to equally offend both sides of the pro-life/pro-choice divide, as well as organizations like PETA, who bristle at the inclusion of the bearskin rug. The pop culture audience has likewise been scandalized by the decidedly unglamorous appropriation of Britney Spears. And the art world has been turned off by such a sincerely conservative statement without a protective layer of irony. The sculpture seems to function like a grotesque funhouse mirror, in which every viewer senses a subversive threat to his own sensibilities. Monument to Pro-life simply won’t vindicate any particular viewpoint. Perhaps because of it’s refusal to mean what anyone wants it to mean, everyone is fascinated by it. The only thing everyone can agree on is that the work is shocking.
Daniel Edwards doesn’t see his sculpture the way everyone else sees it. “I don’t use shock as a tool. The goal is to put across an idea in a way that no one’s ever thought about it before. Time will take away the shock factor. What’s left is what is really important.”
Despite the controversy-baiting title, Edwards is desperate to keep his sculpture from being pigeonholed as merely the articulation of a political stance. “My works have always been social. I’m not a political person at all. The people I choose to sculpt are chosen for the sake of social commentary.” Though the sculpture flies a “pro-life” flag, Edwards refuses to make a categorical statement about the issue: “I would not pass judgment on someone who would have to make that decision [of whether to have an abortion].”
“Britney Spears,” says Edwards, “commands a ton of attention for doing almost nothing. If she goes to the grocery store, it’s in the news the next day. But when we’re called to task on what that interest in her really is, then it’s revealed that people all of sudden don’t respect her.”
In regards to the controversy stirred by Monument to Pro-life, Edwards says, “The sculpture is rather tame compared to what you see on TV every day. I have three kids, and I can hardly watch a TV show with them anymore. Any time something like this is depicted in art, it’s considered exploitation. It’s considered as publicity. Art is held to a different standard.”
For Edwards, the most troubling consequence of the sculpture’s sudden notoriety is that, despite the countless interviews he has given, he is not able to discuss it as a work of art. “I can only talk about the sculpture as a pro-life subject, or a commentary on Britney Spears, or about birth or motherhood or animal rights or pro-choice. Talking about it as art alienates the general public. They don’t feel comfortable talking about art or understanding it.”
Lincoln Capla, the co-founder and director of Capla Kesting Fine Art, discusses the sculpture’s impact on Edwards’ career: “The piece is going to start at $135,000, and there’s an edition of five of them. So hopefully he’ll get enough out of this to continue to maintain his work, and continue to not have to take on projects that he doesn’t want to take on. I think he made the break he needed for himself.”
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Protest Kids: Misadventures in the Screen Trade
Following a Williamsburg Film Crew
By Matt Hampton
“I feel like homeless people come by and ticket me.”
It is February 1st and Kevan Tucker, the young director, is inspecting the windshield of his dilapidated Ford Taurus.
Tucker, 23, is on his way to the final set of callbacks for the character “Brooke” in his independent film debut, currently titled Unidentified.
The callbacks are held on Powers St, in a rented rehearsal space above Savinos Quality Pasta. The building is squat and wide, with an alternating brick design. It resembles a paisley cummerbund.
During auditions, Tucker paces a distinct patch of territory and mashes his fist into his beard. He studies the actors like a painting. After a cold reading, quick and without preparation, Kevan tells the actors to play the scene as if they are the last remaining lemmings at the edge of a cliff.
“All the lemmings are gone,” he says, “and this may be a bad idea.”
In the course of the callback, actors will also be told that they are cocaine addicts, siblings, characters in a trashy romance novel, and evil geniuses plotting world domination.
“I want you guys to beat the shit out of each other,” Tucker says, “in a metaphorical way.”
Six weeks later, the crew of nine, including actors, is on their way to Washington D.C. to shoot the final scenes of the film. The filmmakers have chosen to attend demonstrations commemorating the third anniversary of the Iraq War.
Essentially, the scenes are to be shot in the throes of a protest. This represents a considerable challenge, both logistically and physically. Producers Mitchell Kase and Tim O’Neill have to consider obtaining shoot permits for a protest march down Embassy Row, past buildings owned by over 30 individual countries, the US Navy, the CIA, and the Vice President. Once these tasks are completed, the crew permitted, the hotel rooms paid for, the necessary equipment rented or bought, and transportation begged, borrowed or taken outright, all that’s left to be done is shoot a movie.
After a wake-up call at six thirty in the morning, the crew readies themselves relatively quickly, though with only two hotel rooms, arguments arising about the shower, equipment, and “who used my toothbrush” make late departures an inevitability. Equipment is divvied into separate backpacks. Charged batteries must be retrieved from the bathroom, under the desk, beside the coffee machine, and in the hallway. Hotel towels are appropriated to serve as padding for lenses.
The crew, streamlined after some early departures, is on Daniel French Drive in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. Several hundred protestors surround them, though it’s not an unmanageable group - there are almost more signs than dissenters to display them. Some have brought costumes and puppetry with giant papier-mâché heads, frozen in grimaces, crying eternally.
There is a black coffin, on its side a sign that reads “>2300 Americans Dead.” Protestors let ash run through their fingers onto the ground and ring bells with measured solemnity lending the procession, a mile-long march to the Pentagon, a designed funerary air.
The processional moves over the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and a man on a bicycle turns, looking into the line choked at beginning and end with cameras and microphones on extended boom poles.
“Thank God the press showed up,” he says, “there’d be no one here.”
The crew keeps in contact with walkie-talkies, as the two cameras present split up and move to separate ends of the protest. In moments of chaos that the weekend’s protests have produced, the lines of duty become blurred and the crew merely does whatever job needs the most attention. Steve Gifford, a co-producer, is acting as a cameraman, Lauren Shannon, an actor, is now the set photographer.
Once the processional reaches the gates of the Pentagon, a tangible urgency sets in. Tucker grabs Gifford by the shoulder and physically drags him to the barrier between police and demonstrators. He points. At the end of his finger is lead actor Jay Sullivan. Gifford has been strapped with the 25-pound camera rig for the better part of two hours, and exhaustion is apparent, but the stern expression Tucker is wearing is motivation enough to keep Gifford and the rest of the crew hard at work.
Sullivan stays in character as moments of cinematic drama unfold before the eyes and cameras present. Aging protestors climb awkwardly over the barriers in acts of civil disobedience and are arrested in a quiet and orderly fashion. Sullivan backs into a Spanish-language television reporter and she shoos him out of her shot. Sullivan and Shannon recite lines, trying to be heard over the chants and bullhorns of the now 200-odd protestors. Protestors yell “Peace. Now.” and sing “We Shall Overcome,” but the 200 voices only travel so far.
“Do it again, do it again, do it again.” Tucker shouts, struggling to position the various players of cast and crew like life-size chess pieces. This goes on for over an hour, until the protestors feel they’ve said what they came to say. They trickle out slowly. At the edge of the Pentagon parking lot the small film crew continues until the batteries run down.
The Capitol building has a front lawn like any other house in the country, a half-oval with a few trees. Saturday morning the crew is there in an unforgiving wind.
The actors, Sullivan and Shannon, have collapsed onto the grass. They recite dialogue and ad lib jokes. The cameras almost never stop rolling. Catching every conceivable moment on camera, every smile and every passing glance has become habit.
The young director, foregoing a jacket despite the cold, watches from his patch of ground about 5 yards in front. The actors run the final scene of the film again and again, clinging only to the feeling of the dialogue, not necessarily the words. After one such run-through Tucker pipes in before the cameras can be cut.
“Alright,” he says, addressing his actors, “do it again like two English gentlemen.”
For more information about the film, go to www.theunidentified.net
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Brooklyn Gives Downtown Dance Another Chance
By Jessica Williams
G-train Brooklynites and artistic directors Marisa Gruneberg and Ashley Singletary, a.k.a. White Road Dance Media, recently presented ‘Character Assassinations,’ a series of nine choreographed performances that caused something you don’t often come across in liberal Brooklyn – audience members leaving at the site of nudity.
“More Pink” displayed nudity as a comment on the practices of exploiting women in the 70s porn industry, but it was unclear whether it was the sight of naked flesh or dead-on ‘assassination’ that led to the walk out. ‘Character Assassinations’ was born out of fascination of the artists, both former English majors, with the peculiar word combination now popular on network television. “We threw the term around, using it as ruining someone’s literal character, what they have to say, and then killing it,” said Singletary.
They decided to conceptualize a list of personalities that needed to be spoken to in today’s society. The result was an onstage expose of the socialite/trust fund baby, the beautiful pageant girl, pill-popping soccer moms and the male rock star hipsters. The end product revealed four humiliating existential crises. Indifferent to their surroundings, dancers repeated absurd habitual phrases awaiting a climactic exhaustion that stopped each in their tracks.
Gruneberg and Singletary choreographed four pieces each and collaborated on one more for the show, which they performed alongside a 13-member dancing family, most of whom have been with the company since its 2003 inception. The choreographers’ history, however, goes much further.
After meeting at the University of Southern Mississippi, Gruneberg and Singletary have worked together for seven years and moved to New York upon graduating with double majors in English and Dance. With support from family and friends, the creative duo carved a name for themselves into the vast and often harsh display place that is the New York dance scene. Their latest production marked their third annual evening-length work.
When not uncovering the ways of silly people, Gruneberg likes to research and play with informed structures incongruously. Using a sad personal experience combined with inspiration from Coney Island postcards circa 1950 for the piece “High Tide”, which was recently selected for the Dance New Amsterdam festival this June, she elegantly mixes emotion and the human condition of separation as stiff dancers mechanically execute classical ballet jump steps before returning to a still, quiet place against the backdrop. The costumes resemble old-fashioned china doll dresses.
Singletary, on the other hand, finds power in narrative compositions. “I never want to alienate my audience. I want them to leave and say, ‘I got that.’ That is the greatest compliment to a choreographer.” Praising the controversial yet widely emulated German choreographer Pina Bausch as a brilliant influence, Singletary wants to completely break down every aspect of a character and ascribe a specific meaning to each gesture and motion in order to render human events as art on stage. In this way, both Singletary and Gruneberg approach their work from the same angle as film directors. Modern film, theatrics, music and visual art liberally combine and add the accoutrement to their superfluous, dynamic movement.
Like most mixed-media dance artists, White Road Dance Media presents work throughout lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Ashley remarks, “In these areas, there are so many innovative artists and building owners willing to support [you]. They are wonderful to work with and willing to let you express yourself with no types of regulations and rules, especially in Brooklyn. You can’t always just rent a theater and do what you want if a theater doesn’t want you to present that. I rarely go see a show that I absolutely love that isn’t downtown or in Brooklyn.”
Both plan to present another show again next winter by extending some character roles found in “Character Assassination” and examining them further. “High Tide” was selected for DNA’s RAW material performance series June 8, 9 and 10. More information about this series can be found at www.dancespace.com.
Triskelion Arts is located at 118 North 11th Street, 3rd Floor in Williamsburg.
