the kid at the art fair who asked if I "made" the stone or just "found it"
Kid couldn't have been older than twenty. Points at a piece I'm loading out, thirty pound chunk of basalt I spent three weeks on. Asks if I found it like that.
I said no, I carved it.
He says yeah but did you make the rock or did you find the rock.
I told him I found the rock. Four hundred million years old, I didn't make it. But I sure as hell made what's inside it.
He nodded like I was humoring him and walked off.
Not his fault. Nobody teaches looking anymore. They think if it didn't come out of a machine it must have washed up on a beach fully formed.
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I actually think the kid was getting at something interesting, even if he didn't know how to say it. The question of where the work starts and where you begin, how much is given by the material and how much you impose. It's not a dumb question, just a clumsily phrased one.
But I get why it annoyed you. Three weeks of work and someone reduces it to a found object because they can't read the labour. That part stings.
Naja, but there's a difference between the kid having an interesting question in him somewhere and the kid actually asking that question. What he asked was whether OP found the rock. Which is, you know, a different thing entirely.
The material is always given. That's not profound, that's just how matter works. What you do with it, that's the work. And if you can't see the difference between a glacial erratic and a piece that's been carved for three weeks, you haven't earned the philosophical question yet.
I'd have been annoyed too.
That's exactly it. I've thought about the same thing plenty, where the line is between what the stone brings and what I bring. But he wasn't asking that. He was asking if I found a thirty-pound carved head in a creek bed and called it mine. Those are different conversations.
You're not wrong. There's a real question in there somewhere. But the way he said it made it sound like he thought the rock did the work and I just happened by with a hand truck.
I've thought about the given-vs-imposed thing plenty. Stone gives you a lot. Grain, density, hidden cracks. You work with it or you fight it. But you still have to make the cuts. That's not nothing.