Meditation on Duchamps' painting _ the Birth of Nike

Meditation on Duchamps' painting _ the Birth of Nike (painting link)

Some how for me I loved this composition, but when I see the excitement of the painting I think of my experiences with larger gravitational inertia. If you have ever driven an old car down a mountain switchback with body swaying and straining against suspension and forces deforming tires sideways from the rim beads, you get the energy of the painting. In a 50’s vintage car the huge fins whip side to side and the center of gravity is a rubber ball. All you se going down the hill is fins and lamps. My first study for “57 Descending a Switch back” was a small set of Chevy fins cast from a model car and assembled. I just had to build this piece of sculpture. The recognition that it would require a significant group of these fins sent me into constructing a single wing that could be reproduced for the assembly into “57 Descending”

That study became the first Nike, a nice little winged torso of design elements of a cherished collector car. All the ques that distinguish the 57 Chevy from a 56, or a Ford (or anything else for that matter) became the pallet for the study. Assembling these into a composition brought me back to the Detroit studios and I could feel the spirit of the sculptors who labored over these elements for months to get an exciting design. I remembered the cars I worked on and the days and days of re modeling areas to get a form to read just right. Then there is the instant recognition of these thematic details by most of the boomers in America. These design elements are emblazoned on the cortex of a generation like the body of a Goddess was to past generations. And coveting this antique has driven the price of one up like the archeological finds of old empires, long taken down. It seemed to me to be a statement that condensed the history of object worship to our own past! The study now stands by itself as “the Boomer’s Nike” a testament to our perspective on history and covetousness.

The Nike series was now started. This sculpture “the Boomer’s Nike” set me to work using my modeling skills and my meditations on our times and this machine that we have become so intimate with. Why do we love them so? How have they changed us as a species? What does it mean to our world? (A great meditation for a baby boom car guy who spent most of his life in the auto design field sculpting cars)

Next time - How it came to be full size-
Thanks Tj sculpturebytj.com