What do you want to be when you grow up?
It’s the question that English artist Jon Field is asking the community to answer with his new On::View Residency project, “The Desiring Machine.”
“I began thinking that the pandemic has prompted many of us, myself included, to think, ‘What am I doing with my life?’” Field said. “Many of us are thinking, ‘What’s next?’ So I’ve asked people to think, ‘What do they see their future holding? What do they think that they might want to be when they grow up?’ That’s a very loaded question.
“We’re taught that we’ve grown up by the time we’re 23,” he continued. “We’re adult, right? We can vote. We can go in the Wormhole next door and buy a PBR and that we’re fully emerged as adults. That’s, in my experience, not true.”
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
For inspiration, Field is reaching back into art history to a style referred to as Dada, which, according to the artist, is “opposed to reason and sense, and things being rational.” Specifically, he’s reimagining German artist Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, a.k.a. The Desiring Machine, an organic room construction that involved a constant adding-on of elements to create it’s final form, a form that had no initial plan or concrete idea.
“Dada came up at a particular historical moment,” he explained. “It was a consequence of the First World War. It was a generation of artists trying to make sense of a world that seemed to have gone to hell. We are now living 100 years later through another crisis, if not several crises and Dada, to me, seems a way of saying, ‘Well, as humans, we don’t actually know what we’re doing.’”
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
As an addition to Schwitters’ original concept, the resident artist has added an expansive community component to his own Desiring Machine. He’s asking locals to bring in the elements to help create the piece, ultimately removing himself from the idea generation component of the art-making process.
“I’m handing over authority or power really to the members of the community who come and work through here,” Field related. “So the way it develops is unpredictable.
“It can be an object. They can make it. It might be something found. It might be something that they’ve adapted or changed. I’m really not bothered by what the form that object takes.”
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
To participate, one need only e-mail the artist and set up an appointment with him to come add their element to the construction. They will also be asked to take a selfie with The Desiring Machine and upload it to Instagram, along with a few words about their chosen addition, and to tag the residency account @onviewresidency and #desiringmachineonview so that participants are all connected on social media as well as in the physical space.
Importantly, however, those who wish to join Field in his Dada experiment don’t have to be professional artists of any sort. He’s also inviting local business owners and community members to include items, and last week had nearly 50 students from Susie King Taylor Community School stop by for a visit.
“Personally, for me, creativity is one of the key elements of being human,” he said. “And the idea that art is something being done by artists, not someone who is a barista or maybe a six year old in a classroom, seems to be missing out on a huge and wonderful opportunity in life.”
“This project, it’s really to do with community,” he added.
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
On::View Residency at Sulfur Studios expands
Field, who worked for over a decade as a SCAD professor before moving back to his native England two years ago, is the inaugural creative in what might be considered a new generation of participants in Sulfur Studios On::View Residency program. Although he isn’t the first international artist to occupy the space, he is the first to make use of the apartment that Sulfur now includes to attract a wider range of makers to Savannah.
“We got this great space, it’s about five blocks from the Sulfur artists residency studio,” explained Emily Earl, who acts as Executive Director of Arts Southeast, the non-profit that operates Sulfur Studios. “And we’re going to be able to bring in artists from around the world and give them a free place to work and a free place to stay for a month, or up to three months.
“Especially in the last couple of years [due to the pandemic] we had to minimize so many of our activities, like everyone. It gave us time to really think about, ‘Okay, we’ve been talking about really making this residency into this amazing program for so long, let’s figure out how to take the next steps forward.’”
Credit: Courtesy of ARTS Southeast
Credit: Courtesy of ARTS Southeast
Given that the new apartment is within the same community where Sulfur Studios resides, it’s allowing Field to truly connect with the locals, who he considers to be collaborators on The Desiring Machine.
“Altogether, what my idea is, that rather than me being an artist doing a residency, making my work, and showing it to the public, that the public are actually going to be the creatives,” he reiterated. “My role here is not to actually really build or construct or create the work, but to act as a go-between, between school children, members of the local community, [and] the artists here.”
“And that as a consequence of the project, people get to meet other people that they maybe have not had the opportunity to meet before. That they begin, I would like to think, to understand art not as the province of an elite or a special class of person who is gifted and creates in a genius model.”
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
“If you have any doubts about joining in, put them in your back pocket,” urged Field. “Get in touch with me. I’d love to hear from you. The more people, I think, involved in this project, the more successful it’ll be. So come on in and meet me.”
Jon Field’s “The Desiring Machine” will be under construction in the Sulfur Studios On::View Residency space at 2301 Bull St. through March 4.
Learn more at SulfurStudios.org or by contacting the artist directly by emailing him at jonfield1210@gmail.com or by sending him a message on Instagram @onviewresidency.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Jon Field, the latest On:View Residency artist, is asking the local community about the future
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