If you’ve driven past one of three iridescent sculptures on the medians of Avenue of the Stars in Century City and imagined them moving, you weren’t seeing things.
Artist Jeffrey Laudenslager’s pieces are kinetic sculptures that consist of geometric shapes, joined and balanced so that wind alone will activate them.
His 22-foot kinetic sculptures entitled, “Chalice,” “Orpheus,” and “Medusa” conjures epic and Herculean proportions – made of titanium and stainless steel, their spinning hooks balance on a single thin beam.
The shining edges, which are heat changing the titanium, light up Avenue of the Stars as they pirouette on top of a single beam.
“My assistant, his welds are so good, that we don’t grind [the edges] off for a couple reasons,” Laudenslager, 69, said from San Diego this weekend.
One, the metal is very thin and would weaken the work if melted more. And two, the iridescence is a sort of signature for Laudenslager’s work.
“You can look at his welds and understand this was done by a particular individual. It’s almost better than signing my own sculpture,” he said of his monumental titanium and stainless-steel wind-driven works.
For the past 15 years, Laudenslager has designed his kinetic sculptures on a CAD (computer-aided design) software program.
“I can animate things so that I can show a moving object to a client,” he explained. “With the same program I can derive all the necessary information to cut the parts out for the sculptures. And I can send that electronically to a company that cuts parts out for me.”
From there, his assistant Daniel Camarena manufactures the pieces to create moveable feats in their Encinitas studio. Laudenslager explained that his designs are meant to take on dynamic yet graceful configurations. Often, you won’t see the sculpture in the same place.
“Like a yin-yang type symbol or a circle or a bulls-eye or squares or any number of things like that,” he said. “But as the individual components move, they just take on all sorts of different characteristics and looks.”
He calls his sculptures “benign movers” because unlike most kinetic sculptures that use rapidly spinning parts with smaller components, he prefers the slow-wielding control of his larger elements.
“I like them to move a little bit more like tai chi,” he said.
This preoccupation with human gesture is a common theme throughout Laudenslager’s work. Rather than a mobile, the artist likens his sculptures to dance.
“I began using the figure as a basis of early work and that quickly became quite abstract; but the gestural, human qualities remained,” he explained. “An extended period of ‘illusionist’ sculptures played with masses which defied gravity and retained a bit of narrative quality to them as well.”
He’s become increasingly interested in the levitating appearance of discreet parts that make up entire sculptures.
“I wanted to see things float and move,” he said.
This is what the last 15 years of artistic production has been devoted to: making his art practice as precise, visually satisfying, seductive and beautiful as he can achieve to.
But Laudenslager’s mind works on a different spectrum than most sculptors. Rather than a drawer or a painter, he’s more of a computer designer.
He can think his way through complex three-dimensional actions and visualize moving geometric shapes not yet seen by the eye.
He most admires the artist George Rickey, often called the father of kinetic sculpture.
In his spare time he enjoys fishing with his three children and five grandchildren, walking and contemplating, reading. But even during those precious free hours, he’s most always imagining the next sculpture or configuration.
“Basically, my art is so deeply ingrained in what I do, I’m almost always doing art in my head,” he said.
Usually, one sculpture tends to develop from another, a growing system of stainless steel and titanium roots.
Then, he does his work directly on SolidWorks, his 3D CAD software program.
With no formal training in the arts save a couple art history classes, Laudenslager’s journey from rural San Diego to internationally acclaimed artist happened haphazardly.
“Ironically, I’m not from one of those families where I was taken to the Metropolitan Museum and exposed to a lot of culture,” he said, explaining he didn’t think of art as much of anything until his late teens, early 20s.
In retrospect, he admitted, what he was doing with his imagination and creating small objects inside a barn that his engineer father supplied with tools and materials, it was art.
During his adolescence, Laudenslager wrote poetry daily and fancied T.S. Eliot and the haikus of Matsuo Basho over Picasso.
But it was after a full-tour in Vietnam that the 21-year-old Laudenslager’s perspective shifted. Once in country, he requested to not carry a gun despite being in a combat zone. He thought he’d be jailed, or even killed by the enemy. But he made it out, despite the constant anxiety of being a pacifist caught in someone else’s war.
“I think that alone was kind of a watershed moment; I realized my own personal destiny is actually something that I can determine for myself just by strength of will,” he said.
When he returned, he began to make objects again and experimented with woodcarving, stonework and configurative type things. He met artist friends and read up on art history and methods. Throughout this process, he continued to develop his own personal style.
The only thing left to do was figure out how to sell his art to help the work pay for itself. With sculptures having appeared in exhibitions in Rome, Madrid, Basel, South Korea, and Croatia, as well as in many American museums over the last 40 years, its safe to say he figured that part out.
“It was never from a business perspective, but form a practical perspective: if I’m going to do this thing, I need it to be not a drain on my family or me, it has to be a positive,” he reflected.
Though good with his hands, Laudenslager’s methods have developed and evolved with time. Though he wishes he were defter in painting or sketching, he’s found that his mastery lies in other artistic qualities.
“Even though it’s a bit more mechanical and intellectual, I still find what I do is very sensual. And in the final terms when you’re watching these things move so rhythmically and gently, there’s a certain kind of sensuality and gentleness to that.”
