Today we're meeting up with Geof Oppenheimer, who grew up in DC, spent time in San Francisco, and is now based here in Chicago.

Just makes art using a wide variety of materials and approaches, including photography, sculpture, and video, thinking about how images and objects are not neutral presences, but are invested with the social and political structures that created them and that surround them.

Recent work, such as The Embarrassing Statue, bring together disparate materials like a leaf blower, a brass plated armature, a pair of pants, and a marble pedestal to consider the human figure and the dehumanizing aspect of the labor it performs.

For the assignment today we're going to be thinking about sculpture, and how it can represent our values and engender a wide range of emotional responses.

Hi.

I'm Geof Oppenheimer, and this is your art assignment.

I came to be interested in sculpture because sculpture is in life.

Like, there's-- we walk around things all the time.

It wasn't so alienated as, like, a painting, which is always a kind of presumed world over there inside the frame, where sculpture is made from the things we walk around about every day.

And it just seemed a lot more accessible to me, and was also capable of communicating a lot more, because it's something we all share.

Even the videos I make, and the photographs, it's all sculpture.

I think sculpture is a thinking process as much as it is a medium.

Like, sculpture is just a way to think through objects in space, and the kind of social legibility of objects.

And once you have that, you can apply that to any way of thinking.

And so there's videos that are sculptures, just as easily as there's videos that are not sculptures.

It's just dependent on how you use the tool.

One of the hardest and most interesting things to do with young artists is to teach them that regardless of the type of work they do, whether they're a painter or a sculptor, is that art is a really broad world, and is capable of inducing a variety of reactions, and sort of states of mind.

It doesn't always have to be affirmative.

You know, it doesn't always have to make you feel good.

Although that's an important thing for art to do.

I mean, this sounds like a really romantic idea, but I think art should reflect experience.

And so I don't know about you, but I often feel uncomfortable, you know?

Or I'm often embarrassed, and so I think it's a great productive challenge to do in an art assignment, is to make something that makes you feel uncomfortable.

Art can produce lots of different responses.

For your art assignment, I want you to make an object that is embarrassing.

Out of a material or group of materials, make something that makes you uncomfortable.

So Sarah I feel like we might get a lot of, uh, poop jokes in this particular assignment.

Yeah.

Well, and I think bathroom humor can be OK if well played.

I mean, Paul McCarthy is an artist who for the past few decades has been making pretty brilliant work that makes me blush quite a bit.

Yeah.

The giant inflatable poop.

But for me, what's embarrassing is so personal and so subjective.

I mean, what embarrasses me might not embarrass you, right?

And it's also something that I think changes so much over the course of time.

Like, what embarrassed you 100 years ago is different than what embarrassed you 50 years ago, or now.

Yeah.

And also, embarrassment is not just personal.

It's also social and political, and historical, and that's part of how, like, our embarrassment's changed.

But one thing that I think has always been embarrassing is the human body.

That's true.

We all have a body, so it's not really surprising that artists have used that as a vehicle to communicate ideas.

And you can go back, way back into art history, to the ancient Greeks or earlier, to think about the way the human body is depicted in art.

The ancient Greeks were preoccupied with the idea of the perfect human body, including Polyclitus, who made sculptures like this, Doryphoros, or spear bearer, in the 5th century BCE.

It was a naturalistic but not realistic depiction, as a soldier would have certainly been wearing clothes, and it wasn't of a particular person, either.

It was an idealized figure, meant to demonstrate the perfect mathematical proportions of the body.

And thus was unleashed on the world classical sculpture, which would be copied by the Romans during the Renaissance, by 18th and 19th century Europeans, by Americans, and so on.

The idealized figure held its sway for a long time, but by the end of the 20th century, artists like Martin Kippenberger had pretty aggressively picked this ideal apart.

In 1989 he put a male figure into a gallery, but it wasn't a confident, virile specimen.

It was a series of slight, downward gazing replicas of himself, titled Martin, Into The Corner.

You Should Be Ashamed Of Yourself, made after an art critic called out his drunken and provocative behavior.

Kippenberger's ashamed sculpture, like Geof's embarrassing sculpture, plays with the long tradition of the heroic figure, and dramatically undercuts its power, asking us to ponder who exactly is experiencing these feelings.

Is it the artist, is it the sculpture, or is it us?

I think this culture that you're making for the assignment can be figurative, but I think a more challenging thing is to think about what are the kind of forms and materials that are embarrassing, or make you uncomfortable, that don't rely on a kind of representational form?

It can reference things, whether it be the figure, architecture, or control, but maybe need not look like those things directly.

I think in doing this assignment, you should take the prompt as a way to think about your own experiences, and speak to what you know.

What are the materials or forms that are embarrassing?

Like, are you going to go get some terry cloth?

I find terry cloth an incredibly embarrassing material.

That's what I would do.

You know, is it squishy?

Is it hard?

Is it sharp?

Is it-- you know, bulbous?

What are in the things that, in your own experience, engender those reactions?

I think that's a good way to think about art even outside this assignment.

Like, speak to what you know, and trust your own sort of subjective experience.

It's an inherently subjective field.

The goal is to be acute in your own subjectivity.

I like that ambiguity.

You know, I think it's productive, because I-- I mean, I look at it.

I made it.

I still get embarrassed looking at it.

Like, I feel like you're looking at something you're not supposed to see.