Some players create beautiful things every time they task. I always wind up doing exactly the opposite.

Part one - Blind sculpting - Nov 2008

The VDNKh is one of my favorite places on Earth. I cannot think about it without crying. It is everything that is good about the world, and everything that is bad about the world, frozen in concrete and bronze and mounted in a tacky plastic snow-globe. It is beautiful. It is grotesque.  If you are ever near, see it, before they decide to tear it down and build condos.

For decades, the north gate to the complex was guarded by the 25 meter tall sculpture, originally constructed by Vera Mukhina for the 1937 Paris World's Fair. It's one of those works of art that, even if you've never heard of it and you have no idea what I'm talking about, I can guarantee you've seen it. It has been used in everything, from Soviet films to US political cartoons to brilliant sots art. Like you, I've seen it countless of times, and yet I regret never having actually seen it, as it has been in pieces in a warehouse since 2003.



After a few minutes looking at online photos, I set out to reproduce this sculpture while blindfolded.

Being inexperienced with modeling clay, I over-estimated its structural integrity and under-estimated its weight, and chose a wire much too thin to support the sculpture. I had been thinking, "rebar," when I ought to have been thinking, "scaffold." Or, perhaps I ought to have been thinking, "choose a work of art that can actually be made from clay." The whole thing was in danger of collapsing under its own weight during the construction, and bits of it fell off several times. That made things a lot harder than they needed to be. Among other compromises, it forced me to join the pair of figures together along one side.  And, I picked the wrong side.  Instead of comrades striding into the valiant future, we have a drunken pair of dancers falling into the bandstand.

Working with clay when blindfolded doesn't really feel all that much different from working with clay when sighted. It's harder to place objects in relation to each other, since you can only really fix the locations of one or two places at a time, I was surprised at all the small irregularities and cracks where pieces were joined.  I also tended to exaggerate features and lengths - bringing everything up to finger tip scale, and creating horribly misshapen human figures in the process.  On the whole, though I was not at all surprised upon taking off the blindfold.  The finished piece looks more or less like I knew it would look; recognizing the flaws in a sculpture by touch is a whole lot easier than trying to fix them.



On the whole, I wasn't particularly happy with the finished task. The sculpture was bad, but not really terrible enough to be interesting. Boring, that is, rather than horrible. And the video didn't turn out the way I intended. At best, I think you can see what I was aiming to achieve, but that isn't really a satisfying outcome.

While I contemplated whether and how to try to salvage this praxis, I left the statue sitting on top of my refrigerator for weeks instead of displaying it publicly. I never even got around to taking proper photos of the thing. Then, in the chaos of moving out of my apartment in December, I knocked it over and broke it into quite a few pieces. I threw it out, undisplayed.

Part two - Blind pastel - February 2009

I decided to make a second attempt at this task, so as to satisfy the public display requirement.

In this case, a reproduction of the Portrait of the Wife of Vitaly Komar with Son and a Portrait of the Wife of Alex Melamid (1972). I won't bore you with my analysis of the original, except to point out two important features: (1) I like it and (2) it's a simple enough design that I might be able to reproduce it if not blind-folded.



I decided to do this task on a whim, at a time when I had no internet access, and thus it had been several weeks since I'd last seen an image of the original. I was quite worried about all the details in the skyline, but as you can see I needn't have spent so much time on it. Despite running into several technical problems with the pastels and paint marker, I managed to create an absolutely flawless reproduction, indistinguishable from the original in every detail.

I hung the finished portrait on the wall where I work.

Part three - Blind woodworking - March 2009

As I paged through the Komar and Melamid website in search of a copy of the original Wives portrait, I was reminded of Trans-State. Blind woodworking seemed like a deliciously silly idea, and an opportunity to add something new to the tasking while blindfolded canon. (I realize the original artwork included a lot more than just the wooden artifact - but I didn't feel like writing letters to the U.N. while blindfolded.)



This time, I'm afraid there's no video. (For good reasons, which aren't worth discussing here.) You've only my word that the piece was constructed while blindfolded, starting with some planks from a discarded pallet. I worked on it off and on for a few minutes a day, placing everything in tool cabinet drawer in between sessions so as to avoid seeing it.

Saw cuts were the most difficult part. You can't touch the saw blade while it's moving and instead have to line things up, remove your hands to a safe location (very carefully accounting for the position of each finger), and then rely on spatial memory to orient the saw while cutting. Perpendicular sections weren't too hard - I squared the boards to a saw-horse by touch and aligned my body to the same. The angled cuts were much harder, and the first few turned out terribly. (At the time using a mitre saw felt like it would have been cheating, which in retrospect sounds rather odd.) After a bit of practice, the last two planks turned out reasonably well.

To properly abut the sign planks to the mast would have required doing detailed work with scary tools. I wimped out, and decided to just hack away at the thing with drywall screws and an electric screwdriver. The result isn't pretty, but it worked, despite some confusion arising from split wood and knots.

Blindfolded sanding is more or less identical to sighted sanding. Blindfolded spray-painting is obviously rather difficult. I cheated a bit by turning away from the work and aligning my hand to the can nozzle while sighted, so as to avoid spraying in the wrong direction entirely. I missed a few spots, but I did manage to avoid painting anything that ought not to have been painted, which I consider a success.

Finally, I displayed the finished work outside.