BREAKING MOLDS, BRUCE BEASLEY, SCULPTOR

Bruce Beasley is a sculptor.  His shapes are far out.  Don't expect to see Venus de Milo or Michaelangelo's David coming out of his shop in Oakland.  Do expect to find it in Beijing at the Olympics.

How does a sculptor of images that don't resemble humans, or other living creatures, do that, I wondered.  Recently I didn't have much good to say about a leaden work by Richard Serra that I viewed at SFMOMA some time ago and which may account for the rarity of my visits to that repository of creative thinking.

I have enough problems of my own thinking creatively in the medium of my choice, law, Conlaw in particular.  Creativity is no stranger to me, or at least the need for it.  So I encourage it by reading, painting, drawing, just enough of the latter two to realize how hopeless it is.  So I read a lot.

Here's what Mr. Beasley says in a recent S.F. Chronicle interview, attached below:

Whatever the material, Beasley doesn't imagine the piece whole; he finds it as he goes.

"I like to take shapes that alone don't carry any emotional feeling, but by their intersecting of each other, start to talk to us emotionally," he says.

"For me it's really analogous to music.

The composer doesn't invent notes.

They're all there on the piano.

It's the repetition of the notes, and their relationship with each other, that makes the difference between something that's noise and banal and something that's profound and moving ...

I want you to see these penetrations, because there are wonderful secondary shapes that happen.

I think of them like chords in music."

A wall of shelves in the studio is lined with skulls: zebra, giraffe, alligator, rhinoceros, shark, buffalo, moose, human. An elephant skull sits downstairs, near a dangling skeleton of a female Homo sapiens.

"I don't ever make anything that emulates them, but they're sources of wonderful shapes," Beasley says.

"Nature is the source of all shapes.

People tend to think that the geometric stuff I do relates to architecture and mathematics, but I don't. It's more about crystals and plate tectonics and geology."

So that's what's going on!

Well, it helps a bit, I suppose, to know what's going on and how it might be better appreciated.

My theory is that if I don't appreciate a work of art, the problem is with me, not the artist.  I just haven't educated myself to appreciate what is going on.  I lack the context.

In art, the context can be great.  The same goes for Conlaw cases.

You could read Marbury v. Madison (1803) until you're blue in the face and not understand what it means until your guide through the jungle explains it to you.  It's probably the biggest Conlaw case around.  Chief Justice Marshall does legalistic pirhouettes all around the mulberry bush before pulling this rabbit out of a hat that seems, on the surface of it to be so self-effacing that you have to admire his restraint and modesty.  But beneath that velvet glove lies a set of brass knuckles sufficient to bring down presidents.  Richard Nixon was the first.  For what Marshall had done was to arrogate for himself and his court, the U.S. Supreme Court, the power to overrule acts of Congress, acts of the President, acts of the lower federal courts, acts of the state courts, and even treaties entered by the president with the advice and concurrence of the Senate.

That's what I call power.

But you never see it coming when reading Marbury.  When done you barely know who won.


I asked a student volunteer to brief the case before the class, which he bravely and nearly ably did.


"That was great," I said pleasing him and the class.  "Who won? I asked. 

Did Mr. Marbury win, who sued for delivery of his judicial commission issued by Pres. Adams in a midnight rush to get into office as many Federalist judges as possible the evening of his last day as president, or Mr. Madison, the Secretary of State under the new president, Thomas Jefferson, who refused to go through with the appointment of the enemy opposition?"


The good student guessed wrong, alas, resulting in a lesson learned for all of us.

You can't always tell the meaning of something without a scorecard, or a guide through the jungle.

At a later class, I introduced a reproduction of a lovely painting by Winslow Homer.  He had reported on the Civil War as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly, a news magazine back east and had seen terrible things.

The painting, done in 1872, of barefoot rural schoolboys roughhousing in the sunshine in a grassy field by playing crack-the-whip in front of their one room schoolhouse with girls and other kids casually standing by, watching, is called "Snap the Whip."  What does this have to do with Conlaw?

Well, that painting became the most popular painting in America in the late 19th century.  Reproductions appeared in many homes.  It struck a chord with an exhausted people, drained after losing 600,000 fellow Americans in a terrible bloody war where man stood in front of cannon and fell in piles on both sides.  Today we lose one, two, or more American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan and feel it as a terrible loss, which it certainly is.  Civil war era Americans lost 10,000 soldiers on one side in one day of one battle, and not only once.

The painting, "Snap the Whip" must've seemed a breath of fresh air, the dawning of a new age of hope for the people of this country, after all they'd been through.

Brown v. Board (1954) is like that.  You can read the opinion and it seems like many others, legalistic and dry of the human drama and emotion that went before it, in it, and after it.  To Americans it meant a new breath of freedom after not only centuries of slavery, allegedly abolished after the Civil War, but of Jim Crow, the legalization of white supremacy and the reduction of blacks to continued second class citizenship for the century following that war.  We're still climbing our way out of the pit of racial prejudice.

Brown represented a new declaration of equality for blacks, because then had new law to point to, and to whites, who victimized themselves while victimizing others.  Being a victimizer has this recursive effect.  I'm betting that this becomes the reason to abolish the death penalty, not for what it does to the person executed, but to the people in whose name it is done.   It will take some creative legal and political artistry before this happens, I believe.

It takes a long time for basic attitudes to change, and unless the creative types, whether artists, poets, writers, political cartoonists, dancers, demonstrators, lawyers, judges, and political leaders are willing to break the mold, it doesn't happen.

Can you think of a few mold breakers?

A sand mold is traditionally what molten metal is poured into when casting a shape.  You break the mold to extract it for shining up.  You lose the mold, but wind up with a treasure.

Chief Justice Marshall broke the mold when he decided Marbury.

Chief Justice Earl Warren broke the mold when he led the court to decide Brown.

Do we have any  mold breakers today?  On the current court?

Time will tell.


The full article on the sculptor Bruce Beasley follows: