AESTHETICS FOR BIRDS: Presumably mathematics as well as its philosophy requires creativity, but before that creativity can be usefully employed one must have already mastered a rather imposing set of technical skills. Do you find that LEGO sculpture is much the same?
ROY T. COOK: Definitely, and much of it is, in fact, mathematical: LEGO bricks have a very specific, and very precise, geometry: a stack of five one-stud bricks, connected stud-to-slot is (not including the stud) exactly the height of six of those same bricks stacked on their sides. And pretty much every LEGO element is designed in terms of this ‘unit’ (i.e. one sixth the height of a standard brick). This opens up a lot of possibilities for creative building, in terms of using this geometry to ‘fit’ pieces in upside down, etc., where they aren’t ‘standardly’ meant to go. And of course, there is a lot of specialized terminology, such as SNOT (studs not on top) used within the community to describe these techniques. So there is a whole set of technical building skills and background knowledge that adult fans of LEGO (or AFOLs) gradually master – techniques that go well beyond the basic brick-stacking utilized in official sets.
ROY T. COOK: Well, I think the primary disadvantage of working in LEGO is cost – LEGO bricks retail for anywhere from 5 to 12 cents per piece, so a single 30 x 40 inch mosaic can often run well in excess of $1000 just for raw materials. In addition, unlike other sculptural media, where you just need enough metal, or stone, or wood, or a big enough piece of the same, with LEGO you have hundreds of different shapes which are (or have been) produced in dozens of different colors. Each different project is likely to involve very different parts and colors than the one before it, so a well-stocked LEGO studio/workspace is going to require a huge amount of bricks. I estimate that my own collection comes in at something like 2.5 million LEGO elements (note: I didn’t pay retail prices for most of this). The corresponding advantage, however, is the reusability of the raw materials. If you get sick of a particular work, you can take it apart, and eventually those pieces will get worked into some future project.
|Model of Minnesota State Capital Building by Roy T. Cook
photo courtesy of Amanda J
|Model of St. Paul Cathedral (St. Paul, Minnesota) by Roy T. Cook
Photo courtesy of Amanda J
Nathan Sawaya’s travelling exhibition The Art of the Brick (http://brickartist.com/) is notable in this regard. His sculptures focus primarily on reflexively embracing, exploring, and interrogating LEGO itself as a medium and a means for exploring the constructed nature of our world, and only secondarily on explicitly representing ‘things’ found in that world (and further, where the works are intimately concerned with representing particular ‘things’, this is usually tightly interwoven with consideration of the means of representation). The majority of works exhibited at AFOL conventions – even those that do embrace self-referentiality or other sophisticated expressive techniques – usually focus in the first instance on straightforward representation of real or imagined ‘things’, and only secondarily on the medium itself. Of course, this isn’t an all-or-nothing distinction: Sawaya also built a much-blogged-about life-size model of Han Solo in carbonite, and works as aesthetically ambitious as anything Sawaya has done do occasionally show up at fan conventions. But Sawaya is notable for being the first adult LEGO builder to produce an substantial body of work in LEGO with a consistent, aesthetically significant, overarching theme.
|Untitled by artist Nathan Sawaja
photo courtesy of brickartist.com
|Halle Berry mosaic by Roy T. Cook|