Creating art from excess
Art professor’s Styrofoam robots critique consumer culture
A pile of Styrofoam rises to the ceiling of Michael Salter’s faculty office. With an Exacto knife and Gorilla Glue, Salter will transform the angular white chunks—once packing material for items such as computers and televisions—into massive robot sculptures receiving national and international acclaim.
Salter’s ten-to-twenty-foot-tall Styrofoam robots are so monstrous that the associate professor in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts once constructed them in the showroom of an old car dealership, now owned by the university east of campus. Where Eugenians once shopped for Chevrolets, Salter shaped pieces that mock twenty-first-century excess.
“Ironically, the robots actually critique the very culture of which they are byproducts,” says Salter, who has taught at the UO since 2005 and recently chronicled on a blog a class he taught in Portland in which students created art exclusively with items from the Dollar Store.
Salter works in a number of media, including digital drawing, animation, audio, and an array of print media, as well as found materials and objects such as fifty-five-gallon drums, electric motors, and plastic bottles. But it’s the Styrofoam robots that have been garnering the most attention.
His latest show, titled “too much,” opens November 6 at the Rice Gallery at Rice University in Houston.
This spring, a twenty-one-footer was the centerpiece of an exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art. To get it there, Salter broke down the robot into pieces and shipped it in protective wooden crates. Once it had arrived at the museum, the artist and installation professionals climbed on ladders and a hydraulic lift to painstakingly reassemble the piece, built around a wooden armature. Click here to watch a time lapse video of the process.
Meanwhile across the country, Salter’s robots generated such a buzz in New York that not only is his recent solo show there reviewed in this month’s Art in America magazine, but a dealer also sent one of his robot sculptures to Belgium to be cast in aluminum—not a bad end for the consumer waste Salter gathers from friends and colleagues.
Although Salter once begged colleagues to save Styrofoam for his work, it now regularly piles up outside his office door. Collectively, Salter says, his robots form “a giant monster of evidence” against a culture that never stops producing.
“People buy so much. Every time something ships there’s a piece of Styrofoam to keep it safe and sound,” he explains. “I really look at these pieces as being mechanical and robot in nature. The result is a pretty poignant statement about what we buy . . . and what we throw away.”
(An earlier version of the story appeared in Oregon Quarterly, the University of Oregon’s magazine.)