Industrial Materials

Industrial materials are seen throughout Chinati’s collection. Donald Judd’s Chinati installations are made from concrete and mill aluminum. Roni Horn’s Things That Happen Again, Pair Object (For a Here and a There) (1986–1988) is composed of copper. Dan Flavin’s primary medium was fluorescent light and David Rabinowitch explored cold rolled steel. Many industrial materials are found at home, from plastics to metals, rubber to glass. Discover industrial materials and get playful with your creations!

What are industrial materials?

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This week we are investigating industrial materials. Industrial materials are human made materials that are used for fabricating a wide range of objects and structures. Several artists incorporate industrial materials into their art. In the 1960s, Donald Judd was one of the first artists to primarily use this material to create his objects. Judd experimented with many different industrial materials throughout his career, including aluminum, concrete, galvanized and stainless steel, plywood, plexiglass, iron, among others. To Judd, such materials had a sense of objectivity, ahistoricism, and practicality. When discussing materials in an 1987 interview with Paul Cabon Judd says: "…I think that the basic thing is often simply because I like the material, the quality of the material, as it is, I start thinking of what I could do with it. A lot of the materials were selected – the metal, the galvanized iron, for example, and plywood, too, before the galvanized iron – for their lightness and ability to define a volume without being massive. Then I could make a fairly large thing that was still light. I wanted to get away from the idea of weight and mass; I was more interested in volume. So plywood is good for that – and then I realized I could make a nice big box out of galvanized iron. It was thinner, and I liked the zinc on it, the surface, a lot, and it made an even bigger and lighter volume. And it’s really thin." #chinatiedu #chinatifoundation Judd, D., Judd, F., & Murray, C. (2019). Interview with Paul Cabon, 1987. In Donald Judd interviews (p. 605). New York, NY: David Zwirner Books.

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Photo scavenger hunt

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Ready to discover industrial materials in your world? It won't take long, as these materials are everywhere! Today's project will take you on a photo scanvenger hunt to snap pictures of industrial materials "in the wild." In 2014, Chinati exhibited freestanding glass sculptures by Larry Bell in a temporary exhibition titled 6 x 6 An Improvisation. For the exhibition, Bell assembled 32 same-sized glass panels to form 16 same-shaped standing units. The units were made from alternating kinds of glass: clear, dark gray, and partially coated panels. Bell developed the coating process in the sixties, initially for smaller sized cubes. Through a thermal evaporation process, a very thin layer of nickel-chrome is laid onto the glass with the result that they can become reflective like a mirror. Glass has been of interest to Bell since the early sixties when he began using it in smaller works, predominantly cubes. Its properties of transmitting, absorbing, and reflecting light have been a driving force in creating works ever since. Share your photos with us at #chinatiedu #chinatifoundation

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What can this do?

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What industrial materials can you find in your own home? Today, our scavenger hunt turns homeward, as we discover industrial materials of our everyday lives. How can you manipulate or transform these materials? What are their unique properties? Bridget Riley's joyful and colorful work, Bolt of Colour, 2017 used acrylic paint as a media. It took hundreds of liters of paint to make the work and for Riley, the uniformity of color, opacity and texture is incredibly important. Making the large volumes of paint consistent in color and density was no easy task and had it not been for the industrial paint making techniques we now have, the task would have certainly been different. Acrylic paint is a synthetic paint invented in 1934. Unlike oil paints, which traditionally use natural materials such as linseed oil as both the binder and vehicle, acrylics paints most often use water as the vehicle for an emulsion of acrylic polymer, which serves as the binder. A polymer is a long chemical chain made up of smaller, often identical molecules. When fully assembled, it has the potential for added strength and stability as it locks into a tightly ordered structure. Pigment is suspended in an acrylic polymer emulsion, once the water has evaporated, a final acrylic paint film of a stable polymeric structure, locking the pigment into place, is left. Though it can be thinned when still wet, once dry, acrylics become water resistant and can be long lasting. #chinatiedu #chinatifoundation

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Serious play

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Ready for some serious play? On our last day exploring industrial materials, produce a playful artwork! At first glance, industrial materials may not appear to be very playful, but as an artist you can re-work or re-imagine media to express anything! In studying materials, it can be fun to flip expectations upside-down to figure out just how far you can push a material and to discover more about its expressive capabilities. Roni Horn's Things That Happen Again, Pair Object VII (For a Here and a There), 1986–1988, is made from solid copper. When approaching Horn's installation from the outside, the viewer immediately notices what appears to be a single, floating copper disk. Entering the building, the disk reveals itself to be a truncated cone; turning left, one discovers another identical truncated cone on the other side of the room. The copper objects were hand-lathed to duplicate mechanical identity. A fun fact about these pieces: copper is very fragile, picking up any touch, nick, or scratch. To conserve their surface when Chinati is closed to the public, the pieces are covered with plastic boxes, which are placed over them with extreme care. It's like their own little sleeping huts! We'd love to see what you make with your industrial materials! Share with us at #chinatiedu #chinatifoundation

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