#beam drop

For my next project, Beam Drop: Brazil, I’m recreating a piece I originally constructed in 1985. The piece is meant to be both a large abstract expressionist painting and a steel sculpture… constructed by filling in a 10-foot deep pit with loose dirt and wet concrete and dropping 100 vertically-raised steel I-beams into the pit. The process and end result are filmed. Beam Drop is a significant work because the I-beam is the building block of corporate architecture. The capricious way in which the piece is enacted – the serious, rigid, precise process and using the material, steel, in a light-hearted way – is anti-architecture and anti-corporate architecture. Not many artists have used steel. Everyone is very careful because the material has so much potential for danger.