artist statement - Bill Clements
I still believe in plasticity and looking. I rely upon Rodin, Giacometti, Brancusi, Agostini, Caro, Speventa, Tucker, and Witkin. It is my goal to make something that looks good, whether or not meaning is readily apprehended. I do not wish to make the one-liners that currently dominate contemporary thinking about gallery art, especially in sculpture. Sculpture as a word and as a discipline has been, in recent decades, raped of meaning in favor of inclusiveness. I believe in the pedestal still, though it is not a popular ideology. I do not believe in commodification of looking This is why we have no censorship of art as degenerate in our current state of incarnate Fascism. Art has been rendered tame by a corporate modeled gallery system. The Radical has been co-opted as the everyday status-quo. I do not believe in painting and sculpture as fashion. The language of sculpture and painting at it's root has not changed. Perhaps what is radical today is to embrace this intrinsic language which, for the most part, has been forsaken for the Hip.