Dada in Szczecin. A conversation with Jim McAninch

Jim McAninch is an American sculptor based in California who explores the relationship between nature and contemporary culture. His works transform everyday items into objects that are, on the one hand, precious, unique bronze pieces that belong to the art universe; however, on the other, in a way as rough and austere as their aesthetic, they challenge the value of both things similar in origin and the two worlds to which they belong – the artworld and the industrial world.

The sculptures consist of raw casts of objects found on the street, which the artist assembles into compositions primarily using intentionally left-over castings of venting structures. In this way, we can confront a remarkably pertinent and direct commentary on the visibility of ideological and systemic structures that maintain social constructs. McAninch was educated under the masterful supervision of David and Eleanor Antin.

I met him for an in-depth conversation at the STAR Gallery on Koński Kierat Street in Szczecin, where his exhibition Bronze In New Boxes took place as part of the city’s Open Workshops 2025 festival. It was an opportunity to talk about the details of his artistic practice as well as the theoretical background that he philosophizes about minutely, along with numerous historical references mentioned in McAninch’s artworks.

A: Tell me about what started this series of objects.
J: All of these everyday-use things were found on the street by Roland, then put in a box and mailed to me. Our collaboration took place over twenty years ago.
A: That’s a very long-term project. For this exhibition here, in Szczecin, did you have to sort of dig them up from your studio?
J: It was even worse, I had a friend in Szczecin and he’s had them stored in his farmhouse since 2004, which is the year that the series was last exhibited at shows in Berlin and Wroclaw. I asked my friend to come to Wroclaw and take care of the objects after the exhibit, but then I was working and didn’t have the money to travel to get them back. I hadn’t talked to him in fifteen years, so after I retired, I contacted him and was like, “Hi…” (awkwardly) “Did you melt my bronze artworks down?” Everybody thinks that bronze is a material that lasts a long time, but I think it was estimated that around 95% or 99% of all bronze has been melted down at one point or another. In its own way, because of the value of the metal, it’s ephemeral. It just takes a little longer to melt than ice does. It’s often been melted down to make weapons.

A: So instead of an organic disintegration process, it’s mostly due to human activity?
J: The cultural factor of the value of the material is greater than the value of an idea.
A: That has an element of grief to it.
J: Yes, there is definitely a sadness. I think I wanted to be an existential artist in the fifties, so there is a certain kinship with those works. All of the objects have travelled from Berlin to California in boxes. Now, with Amazon, we’re strangely often purchasing things through images. I’ve not met anybody, but there’s also the myth of Instagram art – people see something on the internet and are like “I want to buy that!”, and I often find there are a lot of paintings that look much better in photographs than in person.
A: White cube enhances this phenomenon as well; the size and evoked impressions seem grander in pictures because of its void-like space. With Instagram, it’s similar in terms of artificing reality.
J: Yeah, with the seductive and also corrupting power of the white cube to make things seem more important than they are, people buy pictures and not the thing.
A: My first thought upon seeing the exhibit was that the objects look very rough and raw. I’m always curious how the initial emotional response and the formal side of the work tie with the message.
J: It isn’t this logical in my mind when I’m doing it, but when I look back, there is a fairly structured process. It’s all a very similar technique for the most part. I made one wax mold for the door handles, but the rest is a process called the rapid burn-out. What other than that, some of these items were plastic, like a brush and a comb, and so the first idea was the question of the material transformation.

A: You’re like an alchemist, then. I mean that plastic, for example, has a very different social status than bronze.
J: Indeed, however, I think the preciousness of bronze is a problem. Historically, throughout the 20th century, when Picasso, for example, became famous, or even before that, once his works were in bronze, the value was increased just because of the material. Essentially, it became a financialization process. It was a way of minting money for the gallery regardless of the idea. Also my argument with this practice is that there’s no evolution between the initial object and the final product. If Picasso gave you a lump of poop in a special shape, it must look exactly like that when it comes back in bronze, so it’s all about the replication of an original. All these works changed rather radically along the way, because process art has always been an influence for me, I mean I came in the age of process, not in the age of product or object. A lot of the elements were accidents where the metal simply leaked out of the containment. Moreover, just as a general idea, I decided to keep all of the plumbing— and this is something that I started in the eighties. If you were casting something like a half-melted candle, you needed a circulatory system to make the bronze plow in and out. It resembles to me root branches, but if this were a traditional work, all of the excess would have been cut off. It’s a metaphor about support systems.
A: Because the support systems are usually invisible?
J: Yes, or consciously removed, so there’s also an ecological metaphor, at least in my understanding. The choice is to change the material, and then there’s the question of what’s the most direct way to make it into bronze.
A: How about the imperfections of the process?
J: Theoretically, if I wanted all of them to come out perfectly, I would have had to provide even more metal for the parts away from the source to be cast entirely. If you look closely, you can see the points where the metal simply cooled and refused to flow any further.
A: But in the mechanical reproduction, you would have this cast in a mold perfectly, and this is an organic part of craftsmanship and artistry, right?
J: These exact sorts of accidents are interesting to me, and my tolerance for failure is far greater than replication. There are other times where you have a vision, but your friends tell you: “Hey, I can see this is not what you intended, but it actually works”, and then I do feel in a sense that the process is speaking. There’s a certain autonomy of the object. I think these works are a bridge between man-made and familiar, and something strange.

A: Do you also intend to put the familiar objects in unexpected contexts in similar ways to dadaists or surrealists?
J: My own personal textbook example of Dada would be this: I have a dog that I love very much, and one day, as I was pouring dry cement into a bucket, which to him looked very much like dog food. He was looking at me kind of hopefully, but clearly saw how pointless it was, and then looked back up at me like “what the fuck”. That, in a sense, is dada. Generally, a dada object is what it is – doubly redundant, like Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. It concerns recognition and distancing, when surrealism – I had an interesting discussion with an artist in Berlin about this – tends to generate a kind of space of access, where you float in this mesmerized dreamscape. Dada, I see it as a strategy.
A: I read recently that surrealist objects, because of the excess of materials and meanings, could be classified as kitsch objects, and it makes me think I wouldn’t say the same about Dada objects.
J: Yes, I saw a great show in Berlin recently, called STRANGE!. The curator covered a great number of works, some of them very maximalist, and also did an intervention of covering artworks, which is a great metaphor in the sense that we don’t want to speak straightforwardly, because of consequences, as in active self-preservation, but also in the sense that covering up allows us to say other things, or even brings more attention to the matter, since it’s more evocative in the times when we can find everything everywhere. It activates the mind.

A: It might be naïve or superficial, but I feel art is a pretext for, most importantly, connection and communication.
J: I agree. I had a teacher who said art is a communicative-like mean. It’s like communication, but it is not – somehow it has an intent and a direction, but it might not have unambiguity, because then it’s propaganda.
A: You said some of the works from this exhibition were made over twenty years ago. I’m wondering if there are any new pieces, and if some transformation is perceptible.
J: This is actually a newer piece. These are two rats that walked into the same mouse trap at my house. I basically put them in my freezer, then they were put in plaster, and I cast them in bronze, so they wouldn’t burn up in the kiln. The structure is the metal from the original trap. I spent way too much time looking at art history, so later on, it made me think about how bronze was often used to commemorate victory, but also the defeated, fallen soldiers. It’s oddly like an echo of, for example, Mesopotamian reliefs of war champions surrounded by dead bodies of their victims. The creepy part of it I somewhat have a distance from; I haven’t done any other dead animal, though. All of the works are direct casts. There is a great story of Donatello, when he participated in a sculpting tournament of who could carve the most lifelike drapery. He does the sculpture and they’re looking at it, and they realize – he just took a drapery and burned it up.

A: But your body of works refers more to consumption and automated, globalized mass production instead of manual work, despite the analog form, no?
J: Yes, but all of this work is somewhat in opposition to the digital space. I think it is slightly an argument even of these boxes that exhibit photographs of the other sculptures, I simply love how noble a frame the box becomes here. Strangely humble. The works framed are Moon Goddess and Don Quixote Meets Robocop. There’s a sculpture by Donatello that I studied called The Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata, which is ,,honeyed cat”. It depicts Erasmo da Narni, who was a war leader in fifteenth-century Italy. When he died, Donatello got the commission to make a monument. As you can see, I directly copied some of the elements – the diagonal weapon and the stance. This was the largest bronze that had been made since Marcus Aurelius, and since it wasn’t an emperor, but a mercenary, I think he was making a point. At that point in Italy, the mercenaries would get an offer and go into the middle of a war, but if proposed higher pay, they’d be on the other side; and they became a little bit like kings.

Interwiev and photos: Alicja Kamiński-Szuper

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