Bronze and Oil Stick

Joseph Havel at Josh Pazda Hiram Butler gallery

Joseph Havel’s sculptures are made of clothing items cast in bronze and welded together. This method of making bronze statuary is called the lost wax method. It is a difficult and labor-intensive method, and Havel stretches the lost wax method to extremes. Havel’s sculptures are related to assemblage, or as critic Karen Archey called it, “combining crap with crap.” Karen Archey’s formulation caused minor controversy when she made it, so artist Tom Moody made a list of reasons why assemblage had become the default art technique in our time, including “Everybody's broke and there's always an abundance of trash”, “Genuine love of trash culture and its byproducts”, and “Avoidance of known art materials”. While Havel may love using quotidian materials as the subjects of his sculpture, he is absolutely not avoiding a known art material. When Charles Jencks described postmodernism in the 80s, he made a point of describing postmodern architecture as both very modern and willing to look backward to the beginning of human architecture. With many of Havel’s sculptures, we have the contemporary (assemblage) coexisting with the ancient (lost wax method of bronze casting). The very act of casting an artwork in bronze is to manufacture a luxury object, so if Havel casts a torn corrugated box in bronze (as he does in Crumbled), he is creating a valuable artwork. The act of casting these humble assemblages into bronze is a kind of alchemy. Havel transmutes trash into art.

Joseph Havel, Crumbled, bronze with patina, 2022

A torn corrugated box is a synecdoche that means “trash.” By casting it in bronze, Havel freezes something that is typically temporary. We usually welcome this temporary nature—that torn box will end up in a landfill or incinerated. It will be rapidly removed from our sight. But like a Roman statue at the Museum of Fine Arts, Crumbled might still be viewed 2000 years from now.

Part of the appeal of all nouns become verbs, Joseph Havel’s current exhibit at Josh Pazda Hiram Butler, is the inclusion of a bronze sculpture that I can only describe as a stunt. In Wash (King Size Bed Sheet), Havel has cast a full-size bed sheet somehow standing on its edge.