Can Art Save The World? Late Artist Bobby Anspach Never Lost Faith

Can art effect change?

It’s a question frequently posed throughout the art world, and while fervent believers, cynical detractors, and nearly everyone in between have lobbied one position or another, a concrete answer has yet to be formed. For American artist Bobby Anspach, he had his doubts—but also faith.

Anspach’s first institutional solo exhibition opened this month at Rhode Island’s Newport Art Museum, “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change,” which traces his focused pursuit of a transformative art form, one that could inspire radical and world-spanning change.

The show is curated by Taylor Baldwin, a multidisciplinary artist who is also the Graduate Program Director of Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Baldwin worked closely with Anspach at RISD while he was a student at the college. While enrolled at the school’s MFA program, Anspach produced the first iterations of his “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” sculpture series, examples of which are the crowning jewels of the exhibition in Newport. The works are physically and psychologically immersive, comprising, variously, pom-poms (tens of thousands of them), lights, tents of expensive fabric, chandelier-like domes, hospital beds, tapestries, sound, and a range of other found or repurposed materials.

Anspach was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1987. He received his BA from Boston College in 2011, studied at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and earned his MFA from RISD in 2017. Frequenters of New York’s Spring Break Art Show will likely remember his 2018 or 2020 “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” installations, which also made appearances at a pop-up space in Beacon, New York, in 2021, and a Walmart parking lot in Newburgh and on Fifth Avenue outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022. While these happenings should have marked the beginning stages of a career just taking off, on July 5, 2022, Anspach died at the age of 34.

The artist’s untimely death adds a layer of poignancy to the exhibition. “At the center of the show is an artist who isn’t here,” Baldwin said during a preview walkthrough. Despite the artist’s existential absence, his vision and voice are very much present, which remain still as an open-ended invitation for change, one that operates on the individual scale but with a view toward the collective.

The show’s opening gallery space offers context for his specific line of artistic inquiry, and the techniques and experiments he undertook to hone his approach to the more monumental places for eye contact sculptural pieces. Small-scale pom-pom sculptures that appear straight out of a Dr. Seuss book are juxtaposed with a range of paintings, including two large-scale canvases coated in a thick layer of metallic glitter save for the bottom right corners where the glitter has been seemingly wiped off to reveal “Bobby A.,” reflecting themes of discovery, self, and the subconscious.

Other paintings in the space highlight Anspach’s preoccupation with ideas of flatness, depth perception, and iconography. One canvas shows a technicolor, semi-abstract landscape, replete with a field of pom-poms, a blazing sun, various text, and the rendering of a pumpjack, the device used to extract crude oil from underground wells. While not visible from the front, along the right-hand edge of the canvas, it reads, “It’s going to get really bad, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Concern about climate change and the devastation it has and will wreak was a core element of Anspach’s creative drive. “He was profoundly motivated by the sense that the world was off track about climate change, and the fear of the end of the world,” said Baldwin. “This painting is walking through a lot of that content, the fundamental motivation for the vast majority of his work was this urgency … feeling this sense of obligation towards saving the world.”

As Anspach’s biography goes, he had his own transcendental experiences that catalyzed what could be described as this overarching, world-saving project. Long devoted to the practice of meditation, the artist had also experimented with psychedelics and undertaken several silent retreats. While he did not personally ascribe to the religion of Buddhism, from his MFA thesis, he describes it as an important framework, and alludes to the fact that the type of experiences and facets of consciousness he was tapping into were elements that predated him by thousands of years.

Baldwin noted, “He believed that he had experienced a truth through deep meditation and far-out thinking. He understood something fundamental about consciousness and the separation of self that would essentially convert anyone into that sense of obligation, and because he knew that truth, he wanted to make sure he could share it with as many people as possible.”

Another central aspect of Anspach’s practice was his belief that art could change its viewer, bringing to the surface of consciousness a sense of empathy, understanding, and responsibility—to fellow humans and the world at large, universally threatened by issues like climate change, nuclear war, wealth inequality, and health crises. With such great conviction, however, comes some degree of uncertainty.

In Aspach’s thesis, he describes his concern over people’s willingness to open themselves up to his work and his personal ability to convey the message. “I am aware that there have been a lot of people who have come along claiming to know the truth. And that some of them have done a lot of harm to a lot of people. And I am aware that there is a tremendous degree of suspicion towards anyone who uses that word.”

Nevertheless, Aspach forged on, making numerous versions of his “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” works, two of which serve as the foundation for “Everything is Change,” accompanied by soundscapes produced by composer and Aspach collaborator Eluvium.

Set up in adjacent spaces, one is designed to hold an individual and the other two people.

In the solo work, the viewer lies on a medical-style bed under a meticulously constructed amalgamation of decorative materials, lights, and a carefully placed mirror for the participant to gaze up into their own eyes, with the intention of inducing a state of deep introspection.

In the other, two viewers sit inside a tent lined with countless pom-poms and drenched in otherworldly lighting behind a contraption that blocks one eye of each participant, obliterating the ability to perceive depth. Staring into the eye of the person across with perception flattened and fully immersed in Aspanch’s high-craft creation, the sense of physical presence, space, time, and intimacy are extremely heightened.

These are just two examples of a sculpture project that the artist had essentially dedicated his entire practice to. Through numerous iterations, he tinkered, refined, and experimented, all to find the perfect formula for communicating the truth he held so sacred in the most effective manner possible.

Of the series, Baldwin wrote in the show’s accompanying essay, “He once told me that if he finally made this one sculpture right, he wouldn’t ever need to make another one. He would be done. He told me that this sculpture, if he was ever finally able to fully make it right, would save the world.” Although Anspach’s pursuit of making one sculpture “right” was cut short, those that he left behind remain as fascinating entry points to the new world he envisioned.

Like other pieces from this body of work, the eye contact works ask the viewer to suspend any preconceived notions of what is in favor of what could be, not only in a physical sense—though that plays a significant role—but a psychological one. Here, the viewer experience is as much, if not more, the work than the sculptural construction itself, at once a catalyst and index of change. A common denominator between both iterations is a degree of vulnerability and the stripping back of the ego.

Both during Anspach’s lifetime and posthumously, works from the “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” series have been installed in a range of venues, from a parking lot to an art fair. The Newport Art Museum is a first of its type for the series, set within the historic John N. A. Griswold House, built in the iconic American Stick style. Formerly a private residence, it has a decidedly different air than the typical museum white cube, bringing another dimension to the experience. Under an opulent painted sky full of stars and coffered ceilings, and upon intricate parquet floors, the installation speaks to the artist’s desire to meet people where they are, a desire that lives on.

Historically, these participatory sculptures have elicited strong emotional reactions, necessitating time and space to collect oneself and reflect on the experience. Considering this, the museum commissioned Lauren Rottet to design what has been dubbed a restorative space, which functions as an extension of the exhibition itself. Using elements of architecture, interior design, and light, the gallery room invites visitors to rest.

Complementing the exhibition is the debut of a ten-minute documentary in an upstairs gallery space comprised of archival footage of the artist revealing portions of his life and studio practice, narrated with Anspach’s own voice. Also playing is a stop-motion animation he created while attending RISD, underscoring many of the themes that later came to define his practice on the whole.

Part of what makes Aspach’s work so successful is its accessibility. Despite his lofty aspirations for change and the profound conceptual underpinnings of his work, he consistently places the viewer’s experience and understanding at the forefront. No inscrutable performances or nebulous references, the meaning of his work is clear: to unite humanity and save the world, one mind at a time.

Somewhat ironically, Aspach’s ability to achieve this accessibility could be attributed to his doubts about the overall endeavor, which Baldwin says was a recurring topic in their discussions at RISD; doubt in art’s ability to effect change, doubt of audiences’ willingness to open their minds to new ways of thinking, doubt around his own capacity to convey his truth. His faith, however, ultimately outweighed his doubts. “Through these moments of doubt, Bobby always seemed to choose to believe that (as cliché as it sounds and of which he was fully aware) art could change minds,” Baldwin wrote. “He chose to believe and to hope that the work he was making would impact people in meaningful ways. And that is what I would call artistic faith. In this sense, Bobby was one of the most faithful artists I know.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com