Craft
Ben Smit
May 5 – September 17, 1999
Ben Smit, Craft, 1999; 20' x 7'; aluminum, wood, neon
Artist Statement
Although a U.F.O. is in itself not banal, it is a household word. The notion of an Unidentified Flying Object, with its attendant extra-terrestrials and alien abductions, is readily available in Pop culture. The term ‘flying saucer’ was first coined in June of 1947, in a newspaper account of businessman and pilot Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine luminous saucer-like discs flying over Mt. Rainier, in Washington State. It is an old idea; an old idea of the future; an historical future.
The desire to construct a spacecraft comes from my enthusiasm for the commonplace. My earlier work has dealt with recreating everyday objects in unexpected materials in an attempt to create a new way of looking at things.
By locating the saucer in a park, in a metropolis, I intend to reinvest this everyday idea with new meaning merely by its being there.
I hope that to chance upon this craft, newly arrived in the world, will confirm for a brief instant our childhood belief that, hey, it's just like the spaceship I remembered.
Of course, upon second glance, it will be noticed that this crude construct, limited in technological sophistication, is a cartoon (of an idea), a child's concept of a flying saucer, a functional cipher. The idea realized is at once unreal. It could never be what it pretends to be, could never have been airborne, let alone have traveled through time and space…but perhaps for that nanosecond of first glimpse, that hyper drive-by sighting, it is possible and will always be possible within the inner space of the imagination.
