By RUTH HARDINGER and C. MICHAEL N0RT0N
Driving along curvy mountain roads past exquisite valleys of farmlands and rolling horizons, we arrived at Christy Rupp’s studio home in the Catskills. Built on a slope facing west and sheltered behind huge spruce and pine trees, her summer studio is a large pole barn with exposed wooden beams and walls. The work space enjoys views of a slope leading to a pond. Our dogs and hers raced straight to the pond and jostled with sticks.
RUTH HARDINGER: Sticks. Materials. You employ both natural and manmade objects in your sculptures. This arc-shaped band of plastic points looks like a centipede or somebody’s out of control moustache.
CHRISTY RUPP: It actually is made of Pop-Up turkey timers. I wanted to reanimate these plastic surrogate probes into living organisms, like worms. The Pop-Ups are so giddily consumer-friendly, things one can buy to relieve us of the responsibility of keeping time.
This work next to it, this egg-shaped rack encrusted with iridescent beetle wings, is a point-of-purchase display for the turkey timers. I made this display rack to be very precious, the enthroning of a mundane object.
We walk across the room to a huge stash of chicken and turkey bones cleaned and sorted carefully according to size — thighs, ribs, wings — like a cache from a natural- history museum, which she’ll adapt to make her bird sculptures. The bones are frequently collected from friend’s dinners or local barbecues.
C. MICHAEL NORTON: Your sculptures, which mimic bird skeletons, have a humor in that they are somewhat deformed.
CR: I don’t intentionally make them whimsical, but it’s bone refuse from the meat that I work with. This Ivory Billed Woodpecker’s head is actually a turkey knucklebone carved with eye sockets where the tendons used to be. I cut and assembled it with other fragments to approximate the woodpecker’s elongated head structure.
RH: What drew or inspired you to make these birds? I remember the life-sized 9-foot-high Moa bird skeleton sculpture you made and understood it to comment on its being extinct.
CR: These sculptures are a series called “Extinct Birds Previously Consumed by Humans,” again all life-sized, which includes a variety of large and small species of extinct birds, retro-fitted from fast-food chicken bones.
Dodo birds provide a great illustration of extinction caused by man. They were depleted from Mauritius in the late 17th century. There was nothing inherently “faulty” with their adaptation to their habitat; their niche was destabilized by the arrival of man. As in the case of most extinct birds, the cause is habitat destruction.
I wanted to contrast the reverence we ascribe to extinct birds with the indifference we hold for innumerable chicken-product animals that are manufactured for our consumption.
My ideas about this work were sparked by an interest in the hype surrounding avian flu. Remember about three years ago people worried about an unstoppable pandemic that would sweep across the globe from Asia? More than 150 million domestic ducks and chickens have been sacrificed throughout Southeast Asia, China, Russia, and Eastern Europe in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus in order to provide a clean product recall.
Asian flu is like a lot of diseases — we don’t understand how or why they are jumping species. Habitat destruction is changing our relationship with animals.
These works grew out of my thought about the futility of a human trying to repair the holes we tear in the environment.
RH: In making your birds, would you say that the original natural form is the guide, but you have some improvisation in how you recreate the idea of a spine or skull?
CMN: These wings are like the wings of skeletons, but they have a curious absurdity, even impossibility. In the way ribs are indicated with a few bones, they are simultaneously awkward and graceful.
CR: My works are made by human hands, although I do attempt to make them anatomically accurate. For me, this process reflects the preposterous notion that humans can put things back together — re-engineering our errors against the planet.
CMN: (gazing at Audobon-like detailed anatomical prints): Are these drawings that you did?.
CR: That’s a good question. It’s a real bird and not a computer graphic. They take an X-ray and pivot it in space to get the image.
CMN: Like an MRI of a bird.
RH: How do you use these in your work?
CR: By observing the variations in the anatomy of different species, you can get a glimpse of how birds interact with their environment. Some social species, like the Carolina Parakeet over here (gesturing to the small sculpture) have large brains because they are constantly receiving each other’s feedback, paralleling language.
My work here is not about extinct species, but how we treat animals that still exist now.
Take the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, famous because she was the last one of the species, became a charismatic star at the Cincinnati Zoo, dying in 1914 after 17 years of lonely captivity. A chicken is no less a spirit or an organism than the last passenger pigeon or the last dodo. And yet one is ascribed great value and the other is of less value.
CMN: What’s up with the geodesic dome of wishbones?
CR: Somebody sent me a bunch of wishbones. I was trying to construct a sphere using the wishes and hopes of my friends. I really didn’t plan on taking three years to get this accomplished.
RH: This frog you made out of credit-card solicitations you got in the mail —
CR: Frogs are an indicator species, they indicate conditions of habitat … The frog population is declining, and nobody is really sure what the problem is.
RH: Like the bees.
CR: These problems have multiple causes. We know we are changing the world’s habitats. So I was thinking about balancing, and about the indicator species, how it’s tied into the concept of credit.
Rh: Over-borrowing against what we can support – it’s as though the frog is on borrowed time.
RH: You make prints, drawings, work with textiles, it seems that your art is not centered around a material or medium.
CR: I think of myself as an artist, and I am trained as a sculptor. I don’t really make images. My work comes out of welding, because the steel frees you up from gravity. You don’t have a sense of what a thing weighs. That’s what I really like about it.
RH: Did you go to school in Buffalo where you were born?
CR: I went to Colorado, and studied art there. During the spring of the late ’60s. when the Kent State murders happened, people seemed to need to rearrange themselves. I dropped out and went to Europe, and later resumed college at Colgate in upstate New York, and then I went on to RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] for an Art Ed degree. After that I taught high school full-time for a while, and then decided to get an MFA. I went to Maryland Institute’s Rhinehart School of Sculpture. The sculpture school was in its own anti-conceptual bubble.
CMN: Funny, that’s the way it was for sculptors, I got my MFA in sculpture also.
CR: It was all about sanding and grinding. It was really a struggle back in those days to raise issues, talk about politics. But the positive impact of being there was learning about casting and fabrication.
CMN: I see handling and gating systems in the making of the chicken-bones pieces. Applying the concepts of how you’d cast bronze to how you put these works together.
CR: In this work, I was trying to duplicate nature while acknowledging the ridiculousness of that endeavor. I love making objects. It’s my challenge to work sustainably.
CMN: One of sculpture’s biggest problems is that you’ve got to figure out how to get away from the technique, so that the work becomes about the art and not the technique. So what happened after grad school?
CR: I went to New York and got involved in Collaborative Projects (COLAB), a group who were mostly interested in film, performance, and working together on multimedia projects. It was a time of state support for artist collectives.
RH: The art world then was not on today’s economic scale.
CR: I think we were lucky that we started working in New York City at a time when there was a human scale.
RH: I always thought of you as somebody interested in cultural critique. Your work is very frontal.
CMN: It combines social and cultural functions — how the proximity between the social and the cultural is having consequences.
CR: I pursued a study of the environment early on in my work. The wolf is at the door.
Christy Rupp is represented by Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York City, where a solo exhibition of her work will be held in early 2008.
For further information please see www.frederieketaylorgallery.com/ You can also visit www.christyrupp.com.
Ruth Hardinger and
C. Michael Norton
are artists who also
write about art.
