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Richard Deacon
For Those Who Have Eyes, 1983

Artwork Info

Artwork title
For Those Who Have Eyes
Artist name
Richard Deacon
Date created
1983
Classification
sculpture
Medium
stainless steel and rivets
Dimensions
60 in. × 60 in. × 78 in. (152.4 cm × 152.4 cm × 198.12 cm)
Credit
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Copyright
© Richard Deacon
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/FC.445.2
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

British artist Richard Deacon offers a tour of his studio and explains why he thinks of himself as a “fabricator,” a word that conveys his role as both a sculptor and a storyteller. He provides insight into his artistic process and delves into his ideas about materials, language, and form.

Related ideas:
Fred Wilson’s culturally-charged collections: https://youtu.be/k1hrrIpCJbI
Petah Coyne’s language of materials: https://youtu.be/sDpSJcv7Rbs

Audio Stories

Deacon describes his process

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transcripts

NARRATOR:

If you think about it, the human eye acts like a portal between your internal reality and the external world. This shape plays with the idea of interior and exterior space too. It has volume and shape and takes up a whole lot of space, but it’s also mostly air — barely there.

 

RICHARD DEACON:

At the time I was using a lot of references to sensory apparatus: the eyes, ears, mouths noses …

 

NARRATOR:

That’s artist, Richard Deacon.

 

DEACON:

“For Those Who Have Eyes,” really came out of being given a whole pile of very thin stainless steel sheet. It was off-cuts from the cladding of consumer toasters or something. It’s very, very thin, very flimsy, but it’s also quite kind of hard to cut and quite hard to drill.

 

SFX: The sounds of a drilling, sawing through metal.

 

DEACON:

…and the structure is almost trying to work out how big a thing you could make out of such a flimsy material without adding any additional support to it. They join together by kind of self-made little cleats cut out of the excess bits of material.

 

SFX: we hear the sounds of this labor

 

DEACON:

I’ve learned a lot about how you stick pieces of metal together and…all that bending, rolling, pushing, all of that was kind of active work and I thought that should be visible.

 

SFX: Final strike against metal, sounds of work fade metal

 

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Other Works by Richard Deacon

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