Most of my sculptures have been memories remade, recombined, and filtered through my current experiences. Looking back now at why I built sculptures of sinks, I can remember sinks that I knew as a child, a recurring dream of a roomful of sinks with water flowing through them, the fact that a friend was dying of AIDS. But when I was making them, my considerations were for the most part sculptural and formal ones.--Robert Gober Robert Gober's fascination with domestic objects dates back to the early 1980s, when he began to create sculptures based on beds, chairs, cribs, and sinks. Subconscious Sink contains the basic elements of a large old-fashioned sink the artist knew as a child. Mounted on the white gallery wall, the sink's gleaming plaster form almost appears to be materializing in front of our eyes, as if it is emerging from our own subconscious. However, it's clear at first glance that this is not an ordinary sink. Most notably, the back splashboard rises to an illogical height, splitting near the top into two identical halves. Furthermore, where there should be faucets and plumbing apparatus, there are gaping holes, rendering the sink useless. As implied by the title and his own words, Gober is addressing larger psychological issues through this familiar household fixture. For example, our inability to clean ourselves at this sink has been compared to the larger inability of our immune systems to eradicate deadly diseases such as the AIDS virus from our bodies. The split splashboard is also rich with associations, implying a past division stemming from childhood or a discord in one's home environment. Walker solo exhibition: Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, 1999

"I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent. . . . I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself."--Claes Oldenburg After settling in New York in 1952, Claes Oldenburg became interested in making art that broke away from traditional forms (such as painting) and venues (such as galleries). During the late 1950s and early 1960s his performances, Happenings, environments, and other works drew on the growing consumerism of American culture, including advertising, comic books, and television, and he became associated with the newly developing Pop Art movement. The sculpture Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag and a companion piece entitled Giant Soft Ketchup Bottle (1967) were inspired by an advertisement in a 1965 issue of Life magazine. In typical fashion, Oldenburg transforms the object by greatly enlarging its scale and using unexpected materials. Caught spilling from the bag in a frozen free fall, the fries are transformed into a satirical emblem of the basest level of American culture--greasy fast food to go.

My works are in a constant state of change. I'm not interested in reaching an ideal state with my works. As people walk on them, as the steel rusts, as the brick crumbles, as the materials weather, the work becomes its own record of everything that's happened to it.--Carl Andre, 1968 Carl Andre's floor pieces feature symmetrical, or near symmetrical, arrangements of raw industrial materials: bricks and slate or metal tiles. His placement of the tiles on the floor emphasizes the geography of a room. As in the work of other sculptors who are described as Minimalist, such as Donald Judd, Andre uses symmetry, repetition, and simple geometric elements. The placement of the sculpture remains paramount, yet even this is de-emphasized to the point where the work becomes as conventional as a tile floor. This particular piece is unusual in that it is not completely symmetrical. One of the large metal tiles is cut at an angle, which sits up against the architecture of the gallery so that the line of tiles is at an angle to the wall. This method of composition relates the work to painting: the architecture of the room functions in much the same way as does the edge of a canvas.

Joseph Beuys produced Filzanzug (Felt Suit) not just once but a hundred times. He called editions of the same work of art "multiples." This challenged the idea of art as a unique product to be purchased by a limited number of people who could afford it. By producing more than one version of Felt Suit, Beuys made his work available to the many people who couldn't afford a unique painting or sculpture. The artist viewed multiples as "vehicles of information" that were vitally important to spreading his ideas. He believed that people who owned multiples were staying in touch with him and thus could extend the life of his own concepts. He also envisioned his multiples serving as stand-ins for himself and as objects that would always spark debate, regardless of where they traveled. Beuys had strong opinions about the role of money in society. In an interview for the publication Art Papier in 1979, he said, "Money and state are the only oppressive powers in the present time . . . . There is no other power and as long as people go to vote and go to the polling booths and say yes, yes, yes, to this system, this system will survive. And so we go radically another way and push against this. Radically." While Beuys needed money to live and to support his ideas, the capitalist system of profit troubled him. In his view, money should serve to allow creative living, not as an objective in and of itself. He spoke of his art as production, and emphasized that money from the multiples he created helped support causes such as the Free International University, which he founded.

Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, a city in northwestern Germany near the Dutch border. He grew up in the nearby towns of Kleve and Rindern, the only child in a middle class, strongly Catholic family. During his youth he pursued dual interests in the natural sciences and art, and he chose a career in medicine. In 1940 he joined the military, volunteering in order to avoid the draft. He was trained as an aircraft radio operator and combat pilot, and during his years of active duty he was seriously wounded numerous times. At the end of the war he was held in a British prisoner-of-war camp for several months, and returned to Kleve in 1945. Coming to terms with his involvement in the war was a long process and figures, at least obliquely, in much of his artwork. Beuys often said that his interest in fat and felt as sculptural materials grew out of a wartime experience--a plane crash in the Crimea, after which he was rescued by nomadic Tartars who rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt to heal and warm his body. While the story appears to have little grounding in real events (Beuys himself downplayed its importance in a 1980 interview), its poetics are strong enough to have made the story one of the most enduring aspects of his mythic biography. On his return from the war Beuys abandoned his plans for a career in medicine and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture. He graduated in 1952, and during the next years focused on drawing--he produced thousands during the 1950s alone--and reading, ranging freely through philosophy, science, poetry, literature, and the occult. He married in 1959 and two years later, at the age of 40, was appointed to a professorship at his alma mater. During the early 1960s, Düsseldorf developed into an important center for contemporary art and Beuys became acquainted with the experimental work of artists such as Nam June Paik and the Fluxus group, whose public "concerts" brought a new fluidity to the boundaries between literature, music, visual art, performance, and everyday life. Their ideas were a catalyst for Beuys' own performances, which he called "actions," and his evolving ideas about how art could play a wider role in society. He began to publicly exhibit his large-scale sculptures, small objects, drawings, and room installations. He also created numerous actions and began making editioned objects and prints called multiples. As the decades advanced, his commitment to political reform increased and he was involved in the founding of several activist groups: in 1967, the German Student Party, whose platform included worldwide disarmament and educational reform; in 1970, the Organization for Direct Democracy by Referendum, which proposed increased political power for individuals; and in 1972, the Free International University, which emphasized the creative potential in all human beings and advocated cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines. In 1979 he was one of 500 founding members of the Green Party. His charismatic presence, his urgent and public calls for reform of all kinds, and his unconventional artistic style (incorporating ritualized movement and sound, and materials such as fat, felt, earth, honey, blood, and even dead animals) gained him international notoriety during these decades, but it also cost him his job. Beuys was dismissed in 1972 from his teaching position over his insistence that admission to the art school be open to anyone who wished to study there. While he counted debate, discussion, and teaching as part of his expanded definition of art, Beuys also continued to make objects, installations, multiples, and performances. His reputation in the international art world solidified after a 1979 retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum, and he lived the last years of his life at a hectic pace, participating in dozens of exhibitions and traveling widely on behalf of his organizations. Beuys died in 1986 in Düsseldorf. In the subsequent decade his students have carried on his campaign for change, and his ideas and artwork have continued to spark lively debate. FURTHER READING Adriani, Götz, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas. Joseph Beuys: Life and Works. Translated into English by Patricia Lech. Woodbury, New York: Barron's Educational Series, Inc., 1979. Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. Translated into English by David Britt. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Temkin, Ann. "Joseph Beuys: An Introduction to His Life and Work." In Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys. Philadelphia and New York: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, 1993.

"Perhaps the best thing would be for people to examine their own reasons for liking the same stories I do. Maybe that's enough."--Larry Johnson In his work, Los Angeles-based artist Larry Johnson references various media and autobiographical experiences such as advertisements, conversations, and magazine texts. In much the same way as a movie clip, the "scene" authored by the artist in Untitled (I Had Never Seen Anything Like It) is dependent on creating a context of time and space that suggests a larger fiction. Through his use of photography, text, and a modernist color palette, Johnson at once affirms and complicates the nonlinear dynamics of language, his own love of images, and the pervasive influence of Hollywood on the imagination.