welded and painted steel, rivets
48” x 15”
painted steel
5′ x 10′
DAVID SCHAFER
WHITE COLUMNS, 1988
David Schafer has, in the past few years, explored one of the most elementary forms of human behavior – play. Yet, in Schafer’s early works play is far from being simply a whimsical imitation of productive adult behavior. Instead, play’s significance lies in the fact that it is an activity, which, through formally similar to adult actions, has no tangible product and lacks any specific meaning. For Schafer, the social value of play, like the value of art, is symbolic.
This concern with the symbolic has, not surprisingly, led Schafer to examine the field of language in his most recent sculpture. Unlike other artists who utilized words and letters in conjunction with disparate visual elements, Schafer investigate the combinatory aspects of language itself, focusing on both the form and the meaning of the letter.
In works such as “Object in General”, the creation of words from letters is left, in part, to the viewer. “Object in General” can thus be read in at least two ways – the letters “E”, “G”, “O”, and “D” stenciled on the piece spell both EGO and GOD, depending upon one’s position. These combinations are accidental in the same way in with a throw of the dice is accidental – chance is to some extent constrained by a structure. This dual reading is further complicated by the mirror reversal of the letter “G”, a dyslexic maneuver that distracts us from the simple act of a three-letter word…
Through these juxtapositions between the visual and the written, each of Schafer’s works presents a constellation of contradictions. Within this body of work, Schafer has created a field of tensions between symbols, words, and the formal structure of the sculptural object, playing between the borders of language and vision.
Deborah Bershad