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| Recreating the artist's hand By Greg Thomas [ greg@hmbreview.com ] Published/Last Modified on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 10:43 AM PDT In his 30th year constructing and coordinating art installations inside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kent Roberts’ take on the commercial scene is marked by a certain jaded familiarity. “I see the whole politics of it,” says the 62-year-old Moss Beach sculptor, who works as chief preparatory and exhibition design manager at MOMA. “It’s not a pretty picture.” An idealistic relationship between art and artist implies boundless creative license and absolute control. As an insider in the “gallery system,” Roberts makes a point that adhering to budgets, timeframes and popular trends doesn’t always allow room for ideals. Given a longstanding personal and professional relationship with the art world, he has “mixed feelings” on the subject. “It can be enjoyable to be in that (commercial) arena, but if you’re an artist and you work here you sometimes think, ‘Why are they getting all the money and all the attention?’ … But then, on the other hand, you get to meet some truly great artists,” Roberts said. It’s Roberts’ job to assist them in bringing their creations to life inside MOMA. During a string of all-nighters in 1996, Roberts and his crew assisted minimalist sculptor Richard Serra in his latest creation. It involved 13,000 pounds of molten lead. One cauldron at a time, workers liquefied the metal; Serra intermittently splashed it into the corners of a sterile white exhibition chamber, one ladle-full at a time. “I’m sort of the liaison between the artist and the workers,” Roberts said. Before his artistic proficiencies landed him a job at MOMA, Roberts pursued mechanical science. He studied engineering in college and, after graduation, served a two-year stint in the U.S. Navy as an administrative officer onboard an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. A G.I. Bill stipend helped him through four years of art school at San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a master’s degree in painting and sculpting. The two paradigms – mechanics and art – converge inside Roberts’ office at the museum as much as they do inside his personal studio, a warehouse space in the Dog Patch area of San Francisco. The bayside enclave harbors rusty shipyards, abandoned factories, and run-down warehouses, some of which are inhabited by artists and independent professionals. Components of that setting prevail in Roberts’ creations. Fascination with bridges, barges, airplane wings and smokestacks replaced an attachment to “airbrushed realism” a long time ago, he says. “How do humans make things?” is a philosophical query fueling Roberts’ passion for engineering creation. The need to pay the mortgage grounds him in the work world. Living expenses might also be steering the direction of contemporary artists, he says. “When you come out of art school, you either become a successful artist or you teach,” Roberts said. “Some people don’t like teaching. I didn’t like the teaching all that much.” After art school, Roberts worked as a part-time art instructor at junior college and as a gallery worker around the Bay Area. In 1979, three years out of the art institute, a friend hooked him up with a gig at SF MOMA. Roberts joined a crew of trained artists who made a living assembling and hanging the works of other, more successful contemporary artists. He’s kept busy on his own projects as well. Roberts has permanent installations in Portland, Ore., San Jose and San Francisco. Currently, he’s working on a 25-foot stainless steel sculpture of a ship’s skeleton in the city’s Marina District. Today, Roberts reflects on three decades of splitting time between building his own catalog and reconstructing other people’s creations. Parallels between contemporary artists and Hollywood film directors run thick, he says. Both employ the hands of several assistants in bringing their visions to reality. The “artist’s gesture,” the unique brushstroke that defined painters like Vincent van Gogh, is in general decline these days, he says. The transition begs the question, who is the true creator of the art people see in museums? At MOMA, Roberts’ crew is often instructed to generate or recreate entire works for an upcoming exhibit. In many instances, artists send digital renditions of their pieces, and Roberts is responsible for transferring them to the wall. What visitors see is sometimes literally a “paint-by-numbers,” Roberts said. Roberts is leaning in a similar direction with his personal sculptures. He sometimes contracts metalwork and woodwork out to custom manufacturers. Eliminating the artist’s fingerprint makes the sculptures “purer,” he says. At the same time, he acknowledges that, “some people would say just the opposite.” |