Process

Video

Self Portrait of the Artist in Perpetual Maintenance

1988
Assemblage with laser, motion sensor, electric meters and cast ceramic in propylene glycol
58 x 44 x 7 inches
Collection of John Little

This was the first work that I consciously distressed in order to give the appearance of passing time and past trauma. I recall setting the white freezer door on fire in my driveway to remove the paint. These were lean days, before I could afford a sandblaster. Artist Benito Huerta was my neighbor at the time. He and ceramicist Lebeth Lammers created the plaster negative of my face, which was then immersed in antifreeze. The chamber is a metaphor for enduring the physicalities of existence. A laser light, distributed throughout the piece emanates from the eye of the demon and projects via a mirror into my ceramic eye. This light carries with it the idea of total experience as a preparer and teacher. The laser was reclaimed from a scrapped grocery store scanner.

BRUDNIAK

Steve Brudniak’s Self Portrait of the Artist in Perpetual Maintenance shows the artists face gleaming behind a porthole inset within a heavy metal door, which is illuminated by a mirror laser reflection triggered by some electrical apparatus beyond my comprehension. Brudniak’s bolted, riveted, cable connected sculpture looks somewhat antique, as though the parts came from some turn-of-the-century planetarium or the boiler room at Los Alamos. It also looks serious and reminds me of a quote by Joseph Beuys, “I am a transmitter, I radiate out.”

JIM EDWARDS

His rust (he is a master of rust) and heavy hinges, monstrously insulated feeder cables, that wonderful thin cherry-jello laser in “Self Portrait,” bouncing from mirror to mirror to gold face, turning it to Edwardian clubroom anecdote, the Idol’s Eye, is the oddest orientalization of a metaphor that began as cryogenic. The parts function like actors, let’s put on a show, and the viewer who is me knows and doesn’t care that for Brudniak this piece is its undertext. We’re perfectly happy to be different from the maker, envy-free.

GERALD BURNS