Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 1
“The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others’ ideas to be realized. ”
- Mel Chin
Fritz Horstman
Peter Richards is Senior Artist Emeritus at the Exploratorium – a museum of science, art, and human perception in San Francisco. He has made many community-based and community-inspired projects, mostly on the west coast. I worked with him on a project a little over a year ago in Connecticut, during which we talked about all manner of things, including topics that come very close to Mel Chin’s quote. I called Richards to be sure I wasn’t misremembering anything. That I found commonality in the two artists’ ethics was no surprise to him, since he knows Chin from projects they’ve worked on together at the Exploratorium.
Richards began receiving commissions for public art in the 1970s, when public art was just beginning to define itself in the terms by which we now understand it. Those terms reference too large a topic to fully explore here, but I will say at the very least that the public artist/commissioner relationship was being renegotiated in a way that created a new parity. This was also the time period when Richards began working at the Exploratorium, where one of his main tasks was coordinating the artists-in-residence. Selected artists were asked to build projects that furthered the museum’s mission of making science accessible. Richards’ role was to work from the museum’s side of the relationship to be sure the artists’ projects fit the aesthetic, ethic, and purpose of the commission. When he then took commissions of his own, he had a unique understanding of the collaboration that the commissioning community needed to have with the artist.
Richards stopped making gallery-ready objects in the 80s for a combination of reasons. A large part was the energy he was putting into the Exploratorium and public commissions. Those two combined formed a new aesthetic and ethic drive, which held the community’s invested interest to be of greater importance than any self-expression. He describes his public artwork as a way of creating equity: a successful artwork may lead to another person’s successful endeavor – artwork or otherwise. This, I think, comes very close to the Chin quote. Both artists take a long view on the possibilities of their creative efforts. Both have decentralized the self within their practices.
Richards has slowed the pace of his public commissions in the last few years. In the time that adjustment allows he has begun to mummify the tools in his studio. Using the basics technique of Egyptian mummification he is wrapping hammers, wrenches and tin snips in gauze, preservative and a cementing compound. This is not an artist preparing for the afterlife. It is instead an equally poetic and potentially practical act. He is reacting to the fast pace at which modern technology makes its tools obsolete – printers that are only good for a year, telephones that must be replaced every two years, etc. He wants to be sure that the truly useful tools like his hammer will be preserved for future use – his or someone else’s. This comes at Chin’s quote from a very different tack. Richards is physically creating an artifact that either through its poetic import or actual usefulness may aid in the realization of another’s ideas. That may be far in the future, or it may be right now, as I consider what those wrapped implements could do to fix my writing desk; or the far more compelling notion of spreading Richards’ complicated helpfulness by telling someone else about these strange mummified tools.
Volume 1, Issue 1
“The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others’ ideas to be realized. ”
- Mel Chin
Fritz Horstman
Peter Richards is Senior Artist Emeritus at the Exploratorium – a museum of science, art, and human perception in San Francisco. He has made many community-based and community-inspired projects, mostly on the west coast. I worked with him on a project a little over a year ago in Connecticut, during which we talked about all manner of things, including topics that come very close to Mel Chin’s quote. I called Richards to be sure I wasn’t misremembering anything. That I found commonality in the two artists’ ethics was no surprise to him, since he knows Chin from projects they’ve worked on together at the Exploratorium.
Richards began receiving commissions for public art in the 1970s, when public art was just beginning to define itself in the terms by which we now understand it. Those terms reference too large a topic to fully explore here, but I will say at the very least that the public artist/commissioner relationship was being renegotiated in a way that created a new parity. This was also the time period when Richards began working at the Exploratorium, where one of his main tasks was coordinating the artists-in-residence. Selected artists were asked to build projects that furthered the museum’s mission of making science accessible. Richards’ role was to work from the museum’s side of the relationship to be sure the artists’ projects fit the aesthetic, ethic, and purpose of the commission. When he then took commissions of his own, he had a unique understanding of the collaboration that the commissioning community needed to have with the artist.
Richards stopped making gallery-ready objects in the 80s for a combination of reasons. A large part was the energy he was putting into the Exploratorium and public commissions. Those two combined formed a new aesthetic and ethic drive, which held the community’s invested interest to be of greater importance than any self-expression. He describes his public artwork as a way of creating equity: a successful artwork may lead to another person’s successful endeavor – artwork or otherwise. This, I think, comes very close to the Chin quote. Both artists take a long view on the possibilities of their creative efforts. Both have decentralized the self within their practices.
Richards has slowed the pace of his public commissions in the last few years. In the time that adjustment allows he has begun to mummify the tools in his studio. Using the basics technique of Egyptian mummification he is wrapping hammers, wrenches and tin snips in gauze, preservative and a cementing compound. This is not an artist preparing for the afterlife. It is instead an equally poetic and potentially practical act. He is reacting to the fast pace at which modern technology makes its tools obsolete – printers that are only good for a year, telephones that must be replaced every two years, etc. He wants to be sure that the truly useful tools like his hammer will be preserved for future use – his or someone else’s. This comes at Chin’s quote from a very different tack. Richards is physically creating an artifact that either through its poetic import or actual usefulness may aid in the realization of another’s ideas. That may be far in the future, or it may be right now, as I consider what those wrapped implements could do to fix my writing desk; or the far more compelling notion of spreading Richards’ complicated helpfulness by telling someone else about these strange mummified tools.
