Sculpture: Offshoot and Couplet

Music: Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend

Created by Kerry Butowicz, Vanessa Retallick and Jacob Carver

Artist Statement:

by Kerry Butowicz, Vanessa Retallick and Jacob Carver

“Who Gives a Fuck About an Oxford Comma?” is an audio-visual response to the sculpture “Offshoot & Couplet” by Cris Brunch. The sculpture was incorporated into a music video for the song “Oxford Comma” by Vampire Weekend and was photoshopped into original and sourced photographic stills of different relevant locations such as famous and/or local libraries. The stills were then synced up with prominent rhythms, notes, or lyrics in the song.

This response presented several challenges, including photoshopping a complex sculpture, working with a variety of background images with different resolutions and compiling the stills into a cohesive video.

The objective in creating this response was to confront the notion that the environment and installation location of a work is integral to the work itself and the experience of the viewer. The home environment of “Offshoot & Couplet” is in Western’s Communications Facility. The work itself is about grammar and syntax. Therefore, we chose the synonymous locations of local and famous libraries and conference rooms. The choice of background song was intentional as well, as the song deals with issues of grammar and (mis)communication.

About the Artist

Cris Bruch is a Seattle based artist born in Sugarcreek Missouri in 1957. Raised in the Kansas area, Cris pursued his Bachelors of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. In addition to his BFA in ceramics/sculpture he also earned a Masters of Fine Arts and Master of Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Bruch produces works that are often large scale and made from non-traditional materials. These non-traditional materials have included: recycled metal roofing, birch plywood, crushed corn, toy Lincoln logs, and more. With performance driven art Brunch focuses on issues that surround the American consumer, homelessness, culture and economics.

Bruch has acquired many awards recognizing his contributions to the art community. In 1989 he was awarded the Northwest Major Works Award from the Seattle Arts Commission. 1990 he received the Betty Bowen Memorial Award. Recognizing him as an outstanding artist working in the northwest, Bruch was awarded the Neddy Fellowship for the Behnke Foundation in Seattle, bestowed by the University of Wisconsin in 2001.

Bruch’s latest work was his 2016 exhibition described as an “eerie and elegiac ghost town” by the Seattle Times. His work called “Others Who Were Here” at the Frye Art Museum reflects on the dust bowl that his grandparents and great grandparents experienced. His works based on historical and personal experiences were on display from January 30 through March 27 2016 and included Agra, Harrow, Pent and Wide Open. Within his work Bruch identifies his inspiration in some, but not all, of his pieces. In other pieces there are clues to lead the audience but ultimately his work is to make the audience ponder.

Bruch created both Offshoot and Couplet in 1992 in Seattle, WA. During this time in Seattle, there were more than a few artistic happenings. According to a New York Times article written in the same year, Seattle was in the midst of the grunge music phenomenon (http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/style/grunge-a-success-story.html?pagewanted=all). Bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney and Pearl Jam dominated the music scene, as well as the social scene of Seattle. Along with music, Seattle saw the second installation of Hammering Man outside of the Seattle Art Museum, according to Jeffrey Carlson, Collections Coordinator for the SAM (http://samblog.seattleartmuseum.org/2015/09/the-hammering-man-is-the-worker-in-all-of-us/). The Hammering Man was made with thin metal forged into the shape of a working man. That material is similar to what Bruch decided to make his work out of. Both the style of art and music that was around in 1992 shaped both how the artist created the piece and how viewers now see it.

Grunge music is heard by most as a heavy-hitting, no holds barred style that can prove slightly dangerous to see live at times. With Offshoot and Couplet, the artist’s choice to use metal could be reflective of that style, showing how language can be beautiful, as well as hard-hitting. With metal, there is an industrial feel to what the piece is, which in turn, can also be felt through the style of grunge music. On top of this, the style of metal being used in art had already made its way to Seattle a year before. In 1991, the original Hammering Man was created in front of the SAM, but subsequently fell over, according to the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/10/arts/museum-by-venturi-opens-in-seattle.html). With the news of this fall spreading through the city, the material was pushed into the limelight, providing ample time for Brunch to discover his medium.

As such, the artist states that the bandings’ overall qualities are what inspired him to write upon his sculpture. He was “led to thoughts about grammar and syntax, about the tension in language between meaning and nonsense”. It is therefore fitting that the sculptures were installed in the Communications building on campus.

The sculptures are displayed indoors and are hung similar to a gallery installation of photographs or paintings, rather than placed upon the ground. When thinking about the language-based focus of the work in relation to the installation, phrases such as “hanging on every word”, or “having your head in the clouds” come to mind, since one literally has to look straight up in order to see the works from the bottom floor, and the works are even with/above the skyline when looking at them from the 2nd and 3rd floors.

In regards to shape, the topmost sculpture is not strictly representative, perhaps reminiscent of a deconstructed umbrella, whereas the bottom sculpture reads more like a flower attached to a bulb. A parallel can be drawn back to a phrase in the artist’s statement referenced above, about “the tension in language between meaning and nonsense”, where the topmost sculpture is more abstract (nonsense), and the bottom sculpture has a more recognizable shape (meaning).