
Art by Dario
Robleto
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In using dinosaur fossils and meteorite remnants, vintage records
and bones, Dario Robleto’s art invites objects from the past to be in
conversation with the present. He’s a sculptor and “material poet” who
sees the potential for artistry in what others have left behind. But
he doesn’t consider his work “found art.”
“It’s about the transformation,” he says. “It’s about what was
hidden inside of [the object] that only the artist’s touch could have
teased out through alteration.”
His eye for drawing out possibility in the mundane is something he
talks about in his 2014 conversation with Krista, which we’re
revisiting this week. He’s concerned not just with
unconventional materials but also with alternative ways to understand
the history of creativity — not as a lineage of artists but as a story
of human beings, and our heartbreak.
“It’s on these weird edges of love when it’s at risk, and the
things people will do in that moment, that I find tell this beautiful
alternate history of aesthetics,” he says. “I like to say that if you
could put on the table everything anyone’s ever made in a moment of
loss, [that] would tell as beautiful a history of aesthetics and
creativity as the proper art history that we all know. But that
discussion doesn’t happen in art history because the people making it
aren’t artists.”
The writer Elizabeth
Gilbert also reminds us that we’re all descendants of
makers. “The entire world, for better or for worse, has been altered
by the human hand, by human beings doing this weird and irrational
thing that only we do, amongst all our peers in the animal world,
which is to waste our time making things that nobody needs, making
things a little more beautiful than they have to be, altering things,
changing things, building things, composing things, shaping things,”
she says.
If you’ve never thought of yourself as an artist, Robleto and
Gilbert’s words are an invitation to do so. We can all embrace new
ways of seeing and being, regardless of what we seek to create. How
different might the world look when everything is up for pondering and
examining, reinterpreting and admiring? For walking through the world
as an artist is, as Gilbert says, to choose “the path of curiosity
over the path of fear.” In Robleto’s case, it may be to ask, “What
right do we have to forget? What do we owe to each other’s
memories?”
Which is also to say: We’re all involved in the process of
artmaking by virtue of being human and present in this world. It’s up
to us what we do with that material.
Yours, Kristin Lin Editor, The On Being Project
P.S. — For the next two weeks, we’re taking our annual break to
rest, reset, and enjoy the waning summer days. You’ll still find some
of our favorite episodes of On Being in your podcast feed
each week, but we won’t be here in your inbox or on social media again
until early September.
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This
Week at The On Being Project
Our Latest Episode

On Being with Krista
Tippett Dario Robleto “Sculptor
of Time and Loss”
The philosopher-artist on creative
responses to communal loss.
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Recommended Reading & Listening

Listen | “Are
We Actually Citizens Here?” with Annette
Gordon-Reed and Titus Kaphar Dario Robleto talks about the
moral dimension of memory; this conversation with the artist Titus
Kaphar, who is known for reinterpreting portraits of the U.S. founding
fathers, asks similar questions of history.
Read | “Bringing
the Human Heart to Life” by
Ceci Menchetti | Experience One
of Dario Robleto’s more recent projects features the first recorded
pulse waves of a human heart. He brings these learnings into
conversation with a cardiovascular scientist.
Read | “Three
Pieces of Advice for the Creative Life” by
Courtney Martin There’s wisdom for art and life in
Courtney Martin’s 2018 commencement address to the ArtCenter College
of Design.
Find more in our onbeing.org library on Creative
Life.
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