In 2014 Dave and I made something together.
I built the structure. A free-standing form out of wood, angular, panelled, standing on its own legs, meant to be walked around rather than hung. Then I handed it to Dave and he did what only he does. He filled it. Spools, discs, rings, coils, hundreds of small salvaged parts hot glued into a composition across every face of it, and then he painted the whole thing so the wood and the objects became one surface. Deep red over purple.
That is the honest division of labour. I made the armature. Dave made the work.
What he wrote at the time
Dave writes. He has written something for almost every piece he has made, and he has been doing it for over a decade. In November 2013, while we were making this, he wrote a poem about it. It went up on his site with the photographs and it has been sitting there ever since.
it is hard to change a pattern, that is comforting and pleasing to your self.
trying to expand your skill while maintaining that which is unique.
working together to create trust and cooperation.
[…]
looking beyond the individual person
to let a joint project take hold.keeping some of the past
yet placing the new idea in the frame.in forging a bond of new and old,
a new understanding grows in cooperation.David Stahl, 11/7/13
He titled it “in cooperation.” I have read it a hundred times and I do not think I understood it until this week.
How it came back
I have been rebuilding Dave’s sculptures as three dimensional models you can turn in a browser. Three of them are done. I went looking for this one, and it was not in the archive.
Not misfiled. Not under another name. Not there at all.
The archive was built out of four places: two cloud drives, a laptop, and my working folder for this year. This piece had never lived in any of them. It went from a camera straight into a blog post in 2014 and stopped. Fourteen years of consolidating Dave’s work and the one thing we made together was the thing that fell through.
I found it by searching his own website for the word collaboration.
Made again
So I rebuilt it. Four photographs from that 2014 shoot, four real angles around the piece, into a reconstruction that comes back as an object with volume. You can turn it. You can look at the back, which nobody has been able to do since it was photographed.
And you can stand it in your own room at actual size, two feet tall, through a phone.
Tap the button, then point your camera at the floor and stand back. It arrives at its real size, two feet tall, and you can walk around it. It is a large file, so give it a moment on a slow connection.
To stand this piece in your own room at its real size, open this post on a phone or tablet. The button needs a camera, so it does not appear on a computer.
The part I did not plan
Read his poem again with this week in mind.
Keeping some of the past yet placing the new idea in the frame. He wrote that in 2013 about gluing salvaged parts onto a wooden structure. It also describes exactly what happened twelve years later, when the same object was rebuilt out of old photographs using a tool that did not exist when he wrote the line.
In forging a bond of new and old, a new understanding grows in cooperation.
He was writing about the sculpture. He was also, without any way of knowing it, writing about this.
That is the thing about keeping an archive. You are not only preserving the work. You are keeping the artist’s own words next to it, so that years later they can turn out to mean something the person who wrote them could not have meant yet.
