Nothing Set in Stone

Ball lightning is a rare meteorological phenomenon resembling an orb of electricity observed during thunderstorms. Empirically, it’s hard to study because it disappears in a flash, hissing as it passes through walls and ceilings before it disappears with a bang. Such an object is the stuff of a stone sculptor’s dreams: it does more than just take up space, it challenges it. Enshrouded in mystery and propelled by self-determination, Barry X Ball’s trajectory mirrors such an enigma. The sculptor, who adopted the middle moniker early on in his art practice, spent years experimenting with levitation using magnets and thin suspension cables until he ended up back at the classic monolithic plinth. Contrary to the contemporary museum maxim of forgetting the pedestal, Ball, 68, integrates it, “morphing it from sculpture on a pedestal to a sculpture-pedestal ensemble where it’s difficult to tell where one starts and the other ends,” he says. For a new series, he’s developed a chrome arm hidden behind the sculpture and mirrored to create the illusion that it is floating.

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Ball’s studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn is a creative storm raging in a controlled, corporate environment. A giant robotic milling machine transforms rocks from Carrara, Italy to Baja California into stone sculptures, all while creating new technical jobs. The archetypes of the dusty, struggling, solitary stone sculptor and the underpaid artist assistants are defied in this state-of-the-art facility where 15 staff members enjoy robust employment packages. Yet every sculpture is credited to only Ball, echoing a tradition of individual attribution seen from Michelangelo to contemporaries like Jeff Koons and Daniel Arsham. “I always say to my assistants downstairs, it’s a team effort and we should all take solace in the fact that what we're working on is going to outlast all of us,” Ball remarks. “As artists here on Earth, we're creating a message for the future.”

Hamzat Incorporated: I want to call you Mr. Ball because I have a lot of respect for you—the way that I was brought up in Yoruba culture in Nigeria, you have to respect your elders and defer your gaze. I'm happy to call you Barry, but just know that in my head I'm translating from Mr. Ball to Barry each time. In the back of my mind, there's a part of me that's dealing with this pivot to physics, and there's a joke that I make to myself where it's like Barry X Ball is already doing everything that's possible, so there's no reason why I even need to try. Every sculptor has the dream of an object that is floating, that doesn't need a pedestal. If I had to really bridge my interests in conceptual stone sculpture and my pivot to physics it would be in this: How do I get objects to exhibit quantum properties?

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Barry X Ball: It’s funny that you mentioned that because for the last many years I've been dealing with the presentation of an object in space, and I actually did research into magnetic levitation. You know, that's a minimalist concern; they hated pedestals, hence boxes on the ground or attached to walls. Have you ever had that toy—you get it at the Museum of Natural History—where you align two magnets to get a top that spins in space. I had that as my initial inspiration to see if I could levitate those things. I used thin cables a lot, and then I accepted the pedestal and started morphing it from a sculpture on a pedestal to a sculpture-pedestal-ensemble where it's difficult to tell where one starts and the other leaves off. 

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HI: I remember you told me about the aluminum cast, and I remember very, very specifically how it met with the stone and how it was just like a perfect geometric moment.

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BXB: Pedestals are funny. They inspire harsh reactions. In every museum—from the Roman and Greek section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to other ancient art museums—the maxim is: “Don't remember the pedestal.” And at contemporary art museums that has basically transmogrified into "Do the worst pedestal possible so nobody would want to remember it.”

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HI: Right. 

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BXB: Every once in a while I see a show where somebody really worked on the display. I can think of Prada’s ancient objects exhibition at their foundation in Venice a couple Biennales ago. 

HI: During the first conversation we had, you mentioned that there was a moment when you and your brother gathered a bunch of credit cards and burned them after you had paid off your debts. Where is that plastic mass? 

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BXB: We were up to 50 credit cards at one point. There was a whole period where you could get a six-month amount of money for zero percent interest, and we had a spreadsheet—it's almost like that puzzle where you have one empty spot and when one is running out, you pay it off with the other one. 

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HI: Right, and you use one to pay off the other. 

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BXB: It was like my own personal Ponzi scheme, but you do whatever you have to do to make art. And I do have that little mass around here somewhere. I put it in a little tin can when we did it, and now I have it in a plastic bag. And it's not that I broke out of debt forever. I think as an artist, you do whatever you have to do. If you really believe in it, you go for it. You violate every rule of financial advice. 

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HI: Oh yeah. The way I learned to violate those rules was from my sculpture professor. He taught me that when you go get your supplies at the art store, always get the nicest ones—and if you can't afford it, get a credit card and max it out. My financial habits haven't changed since. 

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BXB: I was not introduced to art really seriously until college. I was raised by what you would call fundamentalist Christians. I was having severe doubts, and I only applied to Bible colleges and then, at the last minute, I threw in an application to Pomona College in Claremont, and it changed my life. I was an economy major and math, so when it comes to money that has kind of helped a little bit. I recently instituted a retirement plan for all my staff here at the studio. I’m happy that my knowledge of finances can benefit the people who work for me because I do have an extraordinary team. I can't do anything I do without them.

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HI: That's fascinating. One of the things that is very impressive for me is your employment package, and the number of people who are employed. As a person who has legally changed his last name to "Incorporated," when I visited your studio, I thought This is sustainable; this art practice will last 20, 30, 100 years because there's a legitimate corporate foundation to the business. That inspired me maybe even more than the objects. I was like, Wait a minute, I can call myself an artist and also be a serious business person. 

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BXB: I never know what people are looking at when they come to my studio. I was inspired by somebody like [Filippo] Brunelleschi in the Renaissance, who not only was brilliant in his engineering of the famous Duomo in Florence but also his organization of the work. He organized how to get lunches up to the people working on the Duomo so they didn't have to take a long break and climb all the way down. He invented a gear shift mechanism to raise the bricks. I mean, he took care of everything! That pretty much is how my studio is: I think about how my employees eat, sleep, live, but also how the whole place is organized to accomplish the work that we're making. You know, it's a business, and it's not so new: [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini had 70-something people working for him. [Peter Paul] Rubens is famous for having had a whole team of painters. 

HI: One of the things that's holding conceptual, figurative sculpture back is this romantic idea of the sculptor carving and polishing this masterpiece. There's this idea that Michelangelo or [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini singularly did all of their work without any help. People try to romanticize classical sculpture and forget the ugly parts of making something beautiful.

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BXB: Let me tell you, all those guys used the most advanced technology of their time to realize their work. I found out about this—you're calling it “romantic,” that's a good term for it—approach to making things when I trained to be a cabinet maker. I arrived in New York with no skills, I felt like I was coming to the Olympics, but I hadn't gone through training, and so I spent the first 10 years here teaching myself woodworking. I found there was a split in the woodworking world between those who were trying to employ every new tool to realize their furniture and others who were locked into this romantic vision of using a hand plane by a roaring fire. Now when I share images of the robot in my studio on Instagram—it's amazing the hostility that I'll get.

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HI: It's so bizarre. I'm just like, First of all, how amazing is it that a robot is carving this? Do you think that it's up to us as sculptors to make it clear that the tools are just part of the nature of our work?

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BXB: The idea that sculptors were solitarily chipping stones and having a grand old time liberating something from a mass is a joke. Going back to the Egyptians, they all found very sophisticated measuring points. Michelangelo himself had this water-bath immersion trick, which when you think about it is very close to a CT scan, analyzing the block in layers to see how much he had to take off. Every robot adds about four human jobs around here, so they're not replacing people. There are hundreds and thousands of hours of handwork after we take the sculpture off the robot.

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HI: Right. People still have this idea of the master with the singular image in his mind. They don’t think of him making multiple models to make sure that physics will allow the thing to stand, and then having people assist him to block out the stone, carve it, and then finish it.

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BXB: We can argue that from a technical vantage point, it's not that different now than it was then. It's the next step in a long chain of things that have been worked out. In my early work, for the first 10 years, I meditated, did research into medieval painting techniques; I read Cennino Cennini's famous book. Then I was 33 years old when Apple gave me a computer under the Apple Seed program, and there was no looking back. I barely caught the digital wave. 

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HI: I was born in Nigeria and there weren't very many computers growing up. I was also gifted an Apple computer, but in high school, and that computer changed my life as well. How has your relationship with the software evolved since you started?

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BXB: One thing I want to always make sure is that I am not the bottleneck, that my personal knowledge doesn't hold the studio back. I hire people who are specialists. I have a digital sculptor I work with, Dave Cortez, who is legendary. From my early computer work, I have a good conceptual understanding of how we make things, and I'm super involved. Right behind me is the most powerful computer we have. When you're employing the robot, everything has to be thought about and controlled: the way the arm moves on the machine, introducing more variables, etcetera. There's nothing like working at a really high level with a group of people to realize something new that nobody's ever seen. The reason we make art is to make something that surprises us. 

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HI: Are you drawing inspiration from anywhere art historically for them?

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BXB: Oh yeah. The interesting thing is I had a show at Site Santa Fe over 15 years ago, and I wanted to show the historical panoply of references and inspirations in the catalog. I had everything from Benin bronzes to Egyptian to Renaissance references. This is before I started my whole masterpieces project, which is riffing on historical works, starting from 3-D scans

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HI: Are your “Scholars' Rocks” a part of that?

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BXB: They came at the same time as the portrait sculptures. I showed two of them at Site Santa Fe, and I'm actually getting back to them now. I can say that I have never made a sculpture through the traditional way of making from a block of stone by hand. 

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HI: You heard it here first.

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BXB: I could do it, and I did all the handwork, the detail carving, on all my first stone sculptures myself. To me, the “Scholars' Rocks” are like natural ready-mades. 

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HI: Exactly. 

BXB: If you think of [Marcel] Duchamp selecting an industrially produced object and recontextualizing it—putting a urinal on a pedestal instead of in a bathroom or putting a wine-bottle rack on a pedestal—he was acting almost as a connoisseur rather than a maker. He identified beautiful things or provocative things. Same thing with the Chinese tradition, it is almost like they were saying "God's a better sculptor than any human could ever be, so all we have to do is find a nice rock, and put it on a pedestal.” And that tradition became really interesting because particularly beautiful ones started to be replicated. They would rate the rocks, and if one wasn't quite beautiful enough, they would fix the part that was imperfect. I try to work the natural qualities of the stone I'm working with into the figurative works I make, and I've selected every stone that's gone into my sculptures. I just made an expedition way up in the Rocky Mountains to get this beautiful golden, honeycomb calcite. I'm organizing an expedition to Baja California, where we have to take Earth-moving equipment to get the El Mármol onyx. Then I will go to the stone region in Italy. They have stones from literally all over the world stacked in giant blocks, in a rainbow of colors and crazy textures. And the first thought I had when I visited was Why aren't artists exploring more the expressive possibilities of this material? 

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HI: Right, and then they only pick the white stuff…

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BXB: Yeah, and only pick the white marble! That realization started my whole approach of linking the material and what I do with it. I've started to look back and ask myself how did I get here? Besides my bizarre religious upbringing, I did grow up in the Southern California of the '60s, where everything was new. Every house that everybody lived in was less than 20 years old. I went to public school, and everybody had more or less the same socioeconomic level there. It was the heyday of the Southern California aircraft industry. My father worked for an aircraft subcontractor. Almost everybody's dad worked in technology in a way. And on a weekend night, you would see the fathers in their labs building everything from boats and cars, motorcycles, mini jet engines. They would be welding, and you had this idea that you're on the edge of the new world, that the future was being created, and it was wonderful. I loved that part of it. And my grandfather was an auto mechanic to pay the bills—he was a minister, but the church couldn't pay him enough. That was a formative experience, helping my grandfather work on terrible old beater cars that we had, making things. He welded while I built my own motorcycles and worked on cars. 

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I think that fascination with and amazement of the world has always fed my art, and I want to understand it on a deep level. There's a lot of pessimism going on about everything from global warming to the politics of the moment and the wars. I'm optimistic about the world, and I think my art gets made out of that spirit. To me, I'm still a kid filled with wonder and excited about what I'm doing, excited about living and believing that we can create an incredible future. I always say to my assistants: “It's a team effort.” We should all take solace in the fact that what we're working on is gonna outlast all of us. Everybody will forget all of the fashionable things of the moment, but we still go back to what the Egyptians did at their high point, what the Africans did, what the Europeans did. We're creating a message for the future. That's what we're doing as artists here on Earth.