Constantine Brancusi was a 20th century Romanian artist often referred to as the father of modernist sculpture. His works are characterized by their separation from naturalism, adopting instead, a uniquely expressive sensibility. In addition Brancusi’s work nearly always favored an ambiguous relationship between the sculpture itself, and the forms he chose to use as their bases. His dramatically simplified forms and repeating structures often make reference to the elemental or infinite. This is, perhaps, most evident in Brancusi’s, Endless Column, 1918. In the sculpture, a series of carved wooden pyramids stack repeatedly upwards, end to end, for nearly eight feet. It’s as if the material reality of, Endless Column, eventually stops, while a metaphysical material continues on indefinitely.
This series of work is named, Mechanical Advantage, after the phenomenon whereby the force applied to a machine is made (often exponentially) greater through the engineering and use of the device. The six images in this series re-imagine Brancusi’s sculptures with a few playful additions.
The mechanical advantage in these works is twofold. First, the works acknowledge the advantage that is granted through the canon of western art. Often, Eurocentric sensibilities are celebrated in this narrative, while those that fall outside of these categories find themselves in the margins. For better, or worse, the canon is the beacon, which dictates much of the way we interpret art.
The second advantage is the technology, which grants access to Brancusi’s work. The Internet supports a vast of archive imagery, which reinforces the notoriety of canonical figures, but also provides the resources for the re-imagining of their works. Software allows for the reconstruction of coveted artifacts, and for the sake of Mechanical Advantage, with slightly more quotidian ends.
In the end, the works in Mechanical Advantage are not an attempt at erasure. They recognize and celebrate the objects that represent a significant part of the lexicon of art history, but they’re also a reminder that sometimes the only difference between the sacred and the profane is a little bit of context.
