Embodying Code

Barry X Ball was born in 1955 in Pasadena, CA and lives and works in New York.

Barry is participating in Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, a major exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York that will include works by more than 80 artists, architects, and designers. The show will examine creative expression made possible by advanced methods of computer-assisted production known as digital fabrication. I posted about Out of Hand last week. You can look at the work online here

The show has a ton of really cool and very versatile work. Barry will have two sculptures on view, including the first exhibition of his latest work, Perfect Forms.

Barry X Ball works with a team of people specializing in 3D scanning, modeling, and various forms of output often using CNC milled stone and eventually hand-detailing. Lately he has been working with replication, modification, and the “perfection” of the human form both through the works of sculpture masters as in his project, Masterpieces, and through the forms of living people in the contemporary art world as in Portrait Sculptures.

Barry X Ball is very vehement in his belief that he is not simply making copies – he strives in his Masterpieces project to recreate the famous works of art as almost undeniably perfect due to his technology skills and extensive grasp of materials and stone – often recreating the same masterpiece is several different materials. Which is one thing that really attracted me to his work.

Masterpieces, 2008-ongoing

View the series here

While working on this project from 2008 till now, many people have been interested in where he thinks his new sculptures stand in relationship to "Appropriation" and what makes his works more than "copies" as he starts his process off by 3D scanning these masterpieces and eventually fabricates them.

To this he says,

“In general, I have set for myself the difficult task of making new sculptures that are "more perfect" than the "perfect" Corradini, a "Masterpiece" of Baroque sculpture.”

He claims to do this by working on the sculptures totally in the round, giving every inch of it the same level of care and detail. He also employs non-traditional (for sculpture) stones to his my works as he thinks the great masters he is working from used the stone they did only because it was readily available and they were comfortable with it. He seeks to bring something new with different materials such as pink Iranian onyx, and golden honeycomb calcite. He is interested in reflectivity and translucence as adding movement and a dynamic and atmospheric element to the work.

Also, he says “My sculptures are mirror images of their sources. The mirroring, a feature of many of my portraits, is intentional. It is the view that the subject "sees" in a mirror. This feat is extremely difficult (i.e. near-impossible) to accomplish through traditional means of sculptural reproduction (e.g. "pointing up"). It is possible through my use of advanced technology, and I hope, adds a significant element of strangeness, of unfamiliarity, of newness to my sculptures”

He also seeks to completely perfect the work and says of his work Purity (based off Antonio Corradini’s La Purità,1720 – 1725) “I have corrected several of Corradini's sculptural errors. Corradini not only didn't finish the bottom, sides, and back of his sculpture, certain passages of his work are confused. In particular, the layers of his drapery sometimes don't make sense or were not completely resolved. I fixed those problems in my works.” This sounds bit cocky to me (as I also pick up on in a few of his writings and interviews), but he also is in a way restoring these works of art as he accommodates and fixes chips and breaks in the originals.

What’s really interesting is the process of creating these works. Check it out here.

Here is a short video of Barry talking about this project as well as his newest piece in the series, Perfect Forms.

This video also gives a close-up view of the works so you can really get a feel for their texture and material qualities.

Portrait Sculptures, 2000-2011

View the series here

This project began as a spiritual renewal for himself. Barry says, “the extreme labor requirements of producing my work (meaning his previous more minimal and conceptual and abstract works), towards an end that held little of the revelatory unknown, had begun to weigh on me.” He usually has little interaction with his sitters during the whole process which is funny because has said that he chose to do this project to help force him to interact with fellow humans.

His subjects in this series are primarily drawn from the art world – curators, sculptors, collectors, critics. Initially, reference photos and a plaster mold is taken and then a very rough positive sculpture is created from that mold.

To transform my completed models into stone, they are first digitized via cylindrical 3-dimensional laser scanning. The resultant "virtual" models may be digitally manipulated or left as-is. I really like the ones that are skewed and stretched and sometimes morphed with other objects such as this sculpture of Matthew McCaslin with the arms and hands of the artist’s daughter, Soleil X Ball Van Zee as well as the works with the dual-faces and expressions:

The initial stone shaping is accomplished on CNC milling machines. After diamond wire-saw and bridge-saw sizing, the trimmed block was diamond core-drilled to again establish the axis (corresponding to that of the model) that would eventually become the sculpture's impalement wound (meaning how it sits on the stick its installed on). Next followed many days of glacially-slow computer-controlled carving, with multiple passes by progressively finer tooling, on a 3-axis CNC lathe. Hand carving follows and then the piece is complete. 

As a whole, what I dig most about Barry X Ball's work is his joining of traditional art works and mediums with the new media of digital fabrication. I also appreciate his meticulous attention to detail and material and I think the whole process of these two projects is super interesting because of the large team of people he often employs. It makes me think about how masterwork sculptures were usually completed by one person and in this modern example, they are being made to be more "perfect" but at the "cost"(?) of having/requiring a large team/machinery to do it. As far as the content goes, I am really more drawn to the portrait sculptures in the way they are manipulates and skewed in a way that really references modern technology. I think that, paired with the material, is interesting.