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Manifesto:
“Bring me a sword... Cut the baby in half! That way each of you can have part of him.”
1 Kings 3:16-28, The Judgement of Solomon
Financial Trust Fall
An artist’s first collectors are always taking a risk! Early adopters are vindicated by the follow-on interest of the general crowd. King Solomon’s Baby is a financial trust fall. The first purchasers participate in something like an inverted pay it forward scheme - relying on pay-it-backwards engagement from the people who come after them.
Sculptures Get Bigger…
Monumental works are by their nature too hard to move, too inconvenient to store, too demanding to install. The spectacle of the piece works at odds to collection and display. King Solomon’s Baby proposes a new solutionist approach to large-scale sculpture.
…But They Don’t Scale
Significant portions of art-historical philosophy have been predicated on the notion that individual artworks do not scale to a mediated audience. You can’t repost the Benjaminian Aura, baby! A distributed audience cannot have a direct experience of a localized sculpture. Making the audience an integral part of the work, meeting them in the environments they exist within–these are inherently incompatible with static sculptural works, right up until you pull out the saw and get to cutting.
Consumption and Distribution Shape Meaning
As soon as a work is released into the world it ceases to be the work the artist conceived of; it is fertile ground out of which a mass audience cultivates what will become its empirical meaning: its context in time and space—the associative, accretive development of its cultural presence. King Solomon’s Baby relinquishes its physical form to public consumption.
2D Meta
1000 slices become thin to the point where each slice of King Solomon’s Baby becomes a painting: planar, and suited to wall display. Big sculptures, of course, are largely consumed in 2 dimensions already - the number of people who have seen the Gelitin rabbit as a photograph online dwarfs the number who have seen it in person, surely by several orders of magnitude. King Solomon’s Baby’s transformation of the three dimensional into the two dimensional is not unique - it is a commitment to an existing paradigm: the hegemony of images. The camera is the blade that cuts the thinnest possible slice. 1 reply
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