Steve Chambers, By Hand
Texas Architect Steve Chambers Collaborates with Artist Stephen Lapthisophon on Conceptual Art Piece for DB12 Based on Chambers’ Vintage Tool Collection
I am a residential architect and have had my own firm for 36 years. I learned to design in architecture school using freehand sketching and manual drafting. And though others in my profession often use computers to assist their design, I still begin with the sketch…by hand. Often, I look down at the blank piece of paper without a definite sense of what the design wants to be. And then, as my hand moves, ideas begin to flow. Homes are one of the last areas of architecture where we encourage the hand of the craftsman to show in the finished product.
All of the tools in my collection are analog. They reflect my respect for the craftsman’s handwork. Some tools exhibit the ultimate in accuracy of their time. But, none are electric or electronic. All require the fine-skilled touch or trained muscles of man to perform.
Several years ago, I visited marble and stone factories near Verona. We were shown many large computerized machines used to craft the most intricate designs into materials. They could sculpt a Roman Corinthian column with perfect mathematical proportions. I questioned the company representative demonstrating the equipment, “can you program the slight variations and inaccuracies that reflect the human hand?” He looked stunned. “Why would one want that?”
In my architectural practice, we program our computer equipment to reproduce the freshness of hand-drawn working drawings, removing the sterility of the machine. To see the human hand in craft and art touches us in a way that perfection does not.
Stephen Lapthisophon, artist and educator working in the field of conceptual art, critical theory, and disability studies asked Dallas architect, Steve Chambers, to participate in a collaborative work of art called interlude-tools for Volume 2 of DB12, which is entitled by hand. The online Dallas Biennial (DB12), which could also be read a “Dallas Biennial One, Two” is run by artists and studio mates CJ Davis, Michael Mazurekand Jesse Morgan Barnett. This group of Dallas artists pushes the boundaries of what we’ve come to know as the Dallas arts scene. The DB12 manifesto states that “DB12 is an amalgam: part event, part research, part data, part publication. It will comment on, and create discourse in, notions of objecthood...” Their vision is that DB examines “the question of what an international exhibition might look like without the constraints of location and time.” Consequently, art that we usually experience in the bricks and mortar of Dallas, a museum of museums, is absent its context. What is left in this online exhibition is a glimpse into the conceptual processes of experimental artists where ‘place’ is rendered abstract.
Stephen Lapthisophon, MFA, curated and wrote the description for Volume 2 of DB12. Lapthisophon writes that “this ‘exhibition’ exemplifies the idea that the work need not be made physical. The exhibition is also not even in a place. But it does need to be “made.” How we make things and how we think about how things are made is the starting point for this event. The second volume/exhibition orients itself around the utterance—by hand. This by hand notion is explored through the various ways that our hands act to ‘control’ or work with the multiple devices or tools we interact with every day. These ideas find an origin in the speculation done by Martin Heidegger on hand work and tools. Our tools and the nature of tools have undergone a transformation over time. Art and its objects reflect that change.”
T-squares dating from the 1850s to a more modern one used by Richard H. Chambers, Steve’s dad, in late 1940s.
Stephen Lapthisophon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. His early work combined poetry, performance, sound art, and visual arts with postmodern philosophical concerns. Lapthisophon has taught at Columbia College in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and the University of Texas at Dallas. In 1994, he suffered a major deterioration of his vision because of an optic nerve disease, and became legally blind after intensive medical treatment. His subsequent work as an graphic artist, installation artist, art theorist and sound artist has been marked by this experience and he seeks to emphasize the sense of sight in aesthetic culture. Stephen is “more and more drawn to create pieces involving a commentary on the sensory world as understood through food, cuisine, cooking, and interaction through food and the art audience.” He currently teaches art and art history at The University of Texas at Arlington.
Mike Mazurek is an artist who also lives and works in Dallas. He teaches design and sculpture at the University of Texas at Arlington and has exhibited work in Santa Monica, Chicago and Dallas and numerous installation sites in West Dallas. Most recently, he co-founded the Dallas Biennial and curated its first exhibition, DB12.
In the 10th of the Sentences on Conceptual Art, Sol Lewitt remarks: “Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.” The DB12 Volume 2 by hand online exhibition reveals that tools are often the proof we have that ideas really do exist, and with tools, ideas are made real.
To view all artists in Volume 1 : http://dallasbiennial.org/artists-2/
To view all artists in Volume 2: http://dallasbiennial.org/volume-2/ (interlude-tools is found in Volume 2)
A collboration between Stephen Lapthisophon and Brad Tucker is now on view at the Dallas Museum of Art.
All photography is the property of and credited to Michael Mazurek.
