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BRUCE BEASLEY AN UNREPENTANT MODERNIST


BY MARTI LOVE - BERKELEY, CA PAGE 35 • SPRING 2011


‘AN UNREPENTANT MODERNIST’ IS HOW BRUCE BEASLEY DESCRIBES HIMSELF. BEASLEY BELIEVES DEEPLY THAT EACH ART FORM MUST USE ITS OWN PARTICULAR LANGUAGE TO COMMUNICATE. THEREFORE, THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY IS WORDS, THE LANGUAGE OF DANCE IS MOVEMENT, THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC IS SOUND, AND THE LANGUAGE OF SCULPTURE IS SHAPE. HE BELIEVES THAT ANY OF THE ART FORMS OUTSIDE OF POETRY AND LITERATURE THAT NEED WORDS TO COMMUNICATE ARE SIMPLY NOT USING THEIR OWN LANGUAGE EFFECTIVELY, THEREBY IMPOVERISHING THE VIEWERS OF VISUAL ART IF THEY ARE TAUGHT TO HAVE VERBAL / INTELLECTUAL RESPONSES WHEN THEY LOOK AT VISUAL ART. THIS CERTAINLY PUTS HIM FIRMLY IN THE MODERNIST CAMP WITH NO CONCESSION TO POST MODERNISM’S NEED TO EXPLAIN THE VISUAL ARTS IN TERMS OF SOCIAL-CULTURAL CONTEXT.


Born in 1939 in Los Angeles, Beasley discovered metalworking in Jr. High School when the boys all had to take shop classes, and the girls all had to take home economics. He moved on to building hotrods during the hey-day of the mid 1950’s Los Angeles car culture. He toyed with the idea of being a professional hot rod builder but his older hot rod mentors told him: “Go to college kid, full time hot- rodding is a dead end.” Deciding that the emergent rocket program was the professional extrapolation of building hot rods, he went off to Dartmouth College in 1957 to study engineering. Frustrated with the math and engineering courses, he took his first art class. It was a drawing class and the final exam was to complete 20 drawings outside of class. “I don’t really know what possessed me,” says Beasley, “But I asked the professor if I could do 5 three-dimensional models instead. You wouldn’t think that any great talent was being discovered if you saw those pieces, but that I could make something that had not existed before and that had some little glimmer of human emotion was


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