Robert Mallary, Visiting Artist Lecture 1964

Robert Mallary gives a lecture at Skowhegan discussing his artistic practice, primarily rooted in sculpture. Mallary works with many different materials including wood, welded steel, plastic, gravel, paint, fabric, and clothing, with combinations of found and formed materials into assemblage. Mallary believes that as the world moves and changes, art will also become fast paced, and this is why it is important for artists to be historically-minded when talking about their work. A theme in Mallary’s work is creating metaphors that deal with construction and destruction. Mallary is interested in taking apart the human body, analyzing it, resynthesizing it and putting it back together. Mallary explains how his work deals with a combination of destruction and decay with construction, formation, composition, and design. Mallary wants all of these aspects to operate harmoniously together. Mallary tells the students that he is not afraid to be vulgar in his work, and that sculpture allows him to do that. For Mallary, American artists and American intellectuals in general have taken a dim view of products of mass culture. Sculpture offers a way to confront mass culture by making it alive and contemporary. Mallary ends his lecture by stating that he believes painting is a medium that seems more thoroughly-explored, mined, and overmanned, whereas sculpture has a lot of explorations that haven’t taken place yet, allowing for possibilities that can open up with technological discoveries.