Holy Vacuum Tube, Batman

So why no three dimensional art?

Sure the South Coast is full of painters but why are the sculptors few and far between?

Sculpture is an ancient and demanding discipline, the stock and trade of many great artists. Italy has them by the flock and even the modern art folks have produced a practitioner or two. But here on the South Coast the three-d guys are scarce as hen's teeth.

It is true that our landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes make painting the choice tool for a working artists, but even with the deck stacked against sculpture artists are a maverick breed so there ought to be one or two.

It is a strain of Puritanism that keeps the flat work guys in the majority? Sculpture almost cries for the human body, nude, or even naked or better yet nekkid. So is it squeamishness that keeps the artists away from the the bronze?

Can't be, there are nudes showing up in many juried shows around the area, even the venerable Expressions West show at the Coos Art Museum has a coupla nudes. (They are very good nudes and most tasteful and sensitive so you can bring Aunt Louisa from Boston and she won't rip a stitch or snap a support garment.) So the flat art guys don't shy away because there are naked people being used as a subject. Why no sculpture?

The Student Art Show had a coupla sculptures and yes, they were nudes, so the kids don't have any inhibitions about the subject. Hmmmmmmm?

We are guests in the land of ours. Oh our government made a big show of writing treaties and promising “Til the wind no long blows”, but the folks who were here first got a pretty rough deal. Now of course they are taking it back one dollar at a time in their casinos, but the point is they were great sculptors. Their transportation, their fishing equipment, even their honorariums were sculptures. (Totem poles, get it and for the record, the most honored postiton on the totem pole register was the bottom of the pole. So like most expressions swiped from other people, “Low man on the totem pole”is all wrong. He's the Big Guy.) So the original artists of the South Coast were not afraid of three-d.

Even the television folks have gotten into the act, they are making three-d televisions, because they have made the sets so good that they never go out anymore and with solid state electronics the only reason to buy a new set is if it has brand new bells and whistles so every year or so the TV guys way over the Pacific make some new gimcrack and tout it as the neatest thing shince sliced bread, to make you suffer television envy and go out and buy a three-d television. (They can't seriously think three-d is a great advance in movie making? Think Vinnie Price and the House of Wax although, Phyllis Kirk did do a pretty good bosom heaving considering she had no bosoms to heave, but that's another story altogether, and she was better in the television version of the Thin Man which was not nearly as good as the original Thin Man.)

So if everybody is doing it why hasn't sculpture become a force on the South Coast? We have everything which would make a Renaissance sculptor drool, we have whole forests of wood, great slabs of stone and some wildly exotic compounds that Michelangelo never heard of, (Don't be silly, we have Amazon is the stuff isn't right here in our own backyard so we can search the world and have it here overnight by FedEx.). So where is the three-d art?

Anyone out there? Does anyone care? Draw me a map, show me a sign and if not blaze a trail. Sculpture is an ancient tradition which should be a vital part of any art community..