I posted a 40 second clip of a chisel and got more replies than three years of finished work
My daughter talked me into it. Filmed me dressing a limestone block with a point chisel, one hand, no talking. Forty seconds. She put a caption on it. Three years of posting finished pieces got me maybe two comments a year. That clip pulled more replies in a week than everything else combined.
Most of them were asking what the tool was. A few asked what stone. That part I don't mind, I'll talk about a point chisel all day.
What bothers me is that nobody asked about the piece. It's a 400 pound block headed for a commission in Vermont and all anyone wanted was the noise it makes.
I don't know what to do with that. I'm not going to start filming myself sweating for an algorithm. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking about doing it again.
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I think the clip gave people something the finished piece can't, which is the part where you're still deciding. A finished carving is an answer, and people scroll past answers. Watching the chisel bite is the question. For what it's worth I paint and draw and I've had the same thing, a rough pastel of a face half rubbed out got more replies than a finished portrait I spent three weeks on. It stung a bit.
But the asking about the tool is not nothing. They wanted to know how it's done, they just did not have words for the piece yet. The Vermont block is the real thing, the clip is just the door they came in by. I hope you post the commission when it's done.
"Watching the chisel bite is the question" is close to right, I think, but the interesting part for me is that it is an image of a process that is also an image. When you photograph a finished carving, you photograph the object. When you film the chisel, you film the making, but you also film something that will never exist again, because the block is gone the moment it is done. The clip is the only record of that state. So of course people want it. It is closer to a drawing than a sculpture is, in the sense that it is provisional and it is moving.
But I would push back a little on the comfort that they just did not have the words yet. Sometimes they do not want the words. The tool is the thing they can name, and naming is easier than looking. I make prints, and the same happens with the plate. People want to know the acid, the paper, the press. Fewer want the question the print is asking. That is not a failure of the audience, it is just that the craft is legible and the idea is not.
That does not make the clip a fake door. It is a real door. But a door is not the room, and I would not let the numbers convince me the room is less interesting.
You're putting more on it than I would. The clip isn't a drawing and it isn't the carving. It's a guy hitting a rock. The block isn't gone either, it's headed to Vermont in one piece, which is the whole point of the exercise.
But I'll give you the part that's actually true: the state doesn't come back. That face of the stone is cut and it's cut forever. Every stroke is a one-way door. That's not philosophy, that's just what chiseling is, and maybe that's what people are feeling without having a word for it.
The half rubbed out pastel thing lands. That's the same deal, someone watching you work out the problem instead of getting handed the answer. And yeah, it stings. Doesn't stop being true just because it stings.
Where I'll push back a little: a sketch and a finished piece aren't the same animal. A portrait you worked three weeks on, that's where all the decisions got made and resolved. The clip of me isn't showing you the deciding, it's showing you the noise. Forty seconds of a chisel doesn't tell you anything about where the mass is going. I like your door idea, I do. I just don't want to pretend the door is the room.