Welcome to EconTalk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down the information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives, but every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
Today is July 15th, 2024, and my guest is Sculptor Sabin Howard. He has the sculptor of the soon to be unveiled World War One Memorial in Washington, DC on the evening of September 13th. This is a 58-foot wide 10-foot high bronze wall with 38 figures. It's an incredible project. We're going to discuss the memorial, and then I hope we get to discuss art more generally. Sabin, welcome to EconTalk. Thank you for having me on this morning.
The memorial that you're building, you give it the name of Soldier's Journey. What's the idea behind it? It's a story that would be understandable universally of a father, a dad, and an allegory for the United States. It follows under the idea of the hero's journey, which Joseph Campbell wrote about.
This soldier, this dad, leaves home and enters into the brotherhood of arms, and from that point enters into the battle, leads the battle charge, and then from this horrific experience is Sculpt, which is the focus of the full 60-foot long freeze.
At that moment, that is an allegory for the change in our world for how we were seen as humans, how we saw ourselves no longer under operating in a universe driven by divine God, and it's the beginning of the modern era, and that is what that figure represents. It's alienation, and he is alone. Then the last section is the return home, and he is in the last scene where he hands his daughter, the next generation, his helmet.
She's looking into the helmet, she's dividing the future, which is World War II. That is the story. And of the 38, is the 38 figures correct, or the 38 figures? Yes. How many are the soldiers of those 38? Of the one we're following. The soldier is in, that are six, in family, in being torn between family and the service to country, leading the charge into battle. That's three, four, leading his, after the leading shell shock, that's four, and final scene returning to his home five.
So five, sorry, five. How did this come about? Now, this is going to be a Pershing Square, which is near the White House. A Pershing Tourist Name for General Pershing. American General World War I. You'll commission this, what you have to do to enter, and what's been like since you won. When did that start? How long have you been working on it? Process began in 2015, but ultimately I began working on it in 1982 when I decided to be an artist.
So this was a combination of really a little bit about myself, 35 years of being a classical figurative sculptor, and that's, I did things traditionally, 80,000 hours of working with life models. So that was the way that I entered into the project, and that's the reason that I won the project. It was a blind global competition, and there were 360 design teams that entered, and that was 2015. 2016, January, I believe was January 22nd.
We were announced the winners, Joseph Weichar, who was an architect in training, 25 years old, and myself. And then that was the beginning of a very epic voyage. That competition was run by Centennial Commission. But that didn't mean that we began the sculpting at that moment. We had to go through a very long bureaucratic process that ultimately we passed, but I had to pass through the agency Commission of Fine Arts.
These are seven people that are established by presidents, and you have to go present to them. And so, but before I had that presentation, I had to come up with an iteration. So the full year of 2016 was used as a lab. This is called a lab where I had to create 25 iterations, and I went from each iteration to the next until we finally finished by November and came up with a soldier's journey. That was also very epic.
And then we went to CFA, and then that lasted from 2017 all the way till 2019, when I began actually sculpting the full size monument, and that lasted till January of 2024. And as that was going on, the pieces were being shipped even during COVID over to a Foundry in the UK. It's probably one of the best Foundry's in the world, Pangolin Editions Foundry in the Cotswolds. And they were casting and assembling as we went.
And this is a very timely interview that you're doing with me because today, the two containers containing the full 60 feet of Bronze Wall were delivered and will be picked up by the Crane Company in Maryland, right near Washington, DC. So this is very timely today that this is they have landed on U.S. soil and are headed for Washington, DC, where we will install on September 13th at Pershing Square Park at 719, which is sunset with a candlelit vigil.
So and it means to give you a short trip to call it a 58 foot. Well, and it's actually free is when it's 60, but it is 58. You're correct. It is 58, but 60 because you have the stone on each side, it comes out to slightly larger. It doesn't, it doesn't matter. Okay. When you submitted, what did you submit both in writing and physically? I just didn't say the listeners, by the way, we will put up a number of videos that will let you see what this looks like. It is stunning.
Even in video, I'm sure it's even more stunning in person, but in video, you get a real idea of how extraordinary both the finished work is as well as the process at which there's some videos on that as well. And we're going to talk about the process in a minute. But I'm curious what you submitted. Did you submit a little miniature of the whole thing or of one of the figures or did you describe it? What is the nature of that kind of process in an international competition like this?
The submission was completely different than the way that the project evolved. We began with an idea of what we were capable of. And just to win the project, we had to go to five meetings to present. And I did drawings of, I got, I worked in the same way that I was working prior to this. I worked, I got models, everyday ordinary people that have very specific characters. And then at the beginning, I rented uniforms that were real. I rented real uniforms that are 105 years old, were thereabouts.
And I began taking pictures and came up with an idea. Two drawings. Those drawings took me approximately I think 140 hours each. And then Joseph, Joe did an idea for the park. Now, the reason that we won is twofold. We got a park that was created by Friedberg in the 80s. And it had been a nice place with a skating rink right in front of the Willard Hotel. But at the moment that we were proceeding into this competition, you're talking here, you know, it's a 35 years later.
This park had fallen to massive disrepair. It was full of derelicts and garbage. And this is shocking, but maybe it's not so shocking because this is 150 hours from the White House. So it looks like a rubbish pile. So this had something had to be done. And Joseph's piece, Joe Y. Shar's piece in the submittal was the closest of all the 360 teams to maintaining the bones and the structure of that city park. And the directions from the competition were very specific.
We need to create a memorial that will excite people. And we need to maintain that urban park. And his maintained urban park to the most of 160 teams. And on my side, after we had gone to two of the meetings, Edwin Fountain, who ran Centennial Commission, said to me that he really liked the grant memorial in front of the Capitol done by the sculptor Shredi. And I took that to heart and I went and looked at it and I was very intrigued by it.
And I ultimately, I'm going to say that that's the best sculpture that this country has on US soil. It's of a different generation, an artillery wagon being pulled through the mud by horses. It's very kinetic. It's very emotional. And it's exciting. It's exciting sculpture because if you walk around it, it's a scene unfolds that you get pulled into it. And so you can, you get a chemistry that changes in your body. It's a definition of visceral.
And so I saw, wow, you have to change the way that you're working. I worked more from a very elegant, aesthetic, esoteric foundation that looked like Greco-Roman sculpture. So my work was very structural, very quiet, and not as dramatic. And so I entered into the competition with very dramatic drawings. And Joe used a computer to map out like a wall and we put some figures up on that wall. And they loved the idea and it was the beginning.
Now I had to take that and then completely transform that over the next year. I took 12,000 images with bottles and I worked over and over again going back to Washington to meet with Centennial Commission, all lawyers who were not artistically based, but had an idea where they wanted to go. And so this is like a difficult, challenging process because you're working with somebody and they don't understand you and you don't understand them. We're completely different realms.
Artists and lawyers are different parts of the planet. And so we worked in a partnership which I don't think happens often. And then the other thing that does not happen often is most artists and not trying to be disparaging here, but because we need to make a living, we will go along with the client. I did not, I led the team. I said this is how it should be and we had several arguments and I held on to the vision that I needed to play forward.
And the reason I held on to that vision was because I knew that I was doing things correctly given how many iterations I was doing. It wasn't that I was like, I came up with the first one. It's like, yeah, this is it. No, I kept taking in the critiques that we would have that I would do the presentations. And then this panel of lawyers would say, hey, we don't like the way this is. We need to change this.
And I did some turnarounds on the sculpture that I think would have been very challenging for other artists. I went to, I really got pushed to my creative limits. And this sculpture then had to pass through the commission of fine arts, which is this is a very, very difficult thing. They held up the Eisenhower Memorial for 15 years, granted it is a piece of garbage. But they held us up for a year and a half and they don't know anything about sculpture. They were all landscape architects.
So the challenge there and the fact that they sided with the conservation of the park was again a roadblock for us. And we eventually got through. And then okay, then after this is like, I have to sculpt it. So we, you know, this is, this is like, hercules in task. It's truly a hero's journey in itself. Well, I was going to ask you one more preliminary question. We'll talk about the logistics of the sculpting process.
I lived in the DC area for 18 years and one day I was on the mall area, which is quite a large complex of monuments in park and grassland. It's a grass and it's a lovely, it's a very, very, very nice area in Washington, DC. And I don't know how I came upon it, but there's a, it looks like a scene out of the jungle out of Raiders of the Lost Ark in my memory. I'm sure it's not like that. But what I stumbled on was a World War One memorial to the dead of Washington, DC.
It's a small, really hidden away, un-maintained, poorly maintained, and felt overgrown at the time, unmanacured spot. And there was something incredibly poignant about that that in this brutal war that was so horrific, the lives of these people who had been lost there and then commemorated memorialized in this, in this monument was so hidden away and so sad. And there's no, I don't like, there's a lot of the monuments on them all.
I don't like, I don't remember the eyes of our one, but I don't want to offend anyone. I don't like the World War II memorial. I think it's awful. It's artistic, it's horrible, it's horrible. There's many that I don't like. We won't go into them all right now. But there's a few, there's a few that I do like and my question is, as far as I know, you'll know, there's no memorial to World War I on them all.
This is, there's this one I mentioned, which is to the Washington, DC dead from World War I, but there's no national monument. In fact, other than, well, period. So why now? Because of the hundredth year anniversary, who cares about this? I mean, for many people, World War I, I'm with you. It's a transformative moment in human history, a tragic moment in human history. But in America, in many countries, it's still huge. But in America, not so much why now?
Why was there a push to build a memorial to World War I? That's a great question. Edwin Fountain was involved in a project quite a few years before. He was one of the commissioners at Centennial that liked what I was doing and suggested the Shredi Memorial, the Grant Memorial. So he had two grandfather's that fought in World War I. That was first off. He had been involved with buckles, who was Frank Buckles was the last standing World War I veteran. Bear in mind, what you said is 100% correct.
United States does not give a damn really about World War I. And here's why. World War I was a punch in a nose for the United States. It's not a small number of people that we lost. 116,000. Four and a half million Americans traveled to across the ocean or were involved. And so now let's take those numbers and compare them to what happened in Europe. It's not the same. Europeans faced a decimation of 22 million people.
So this was a complete decimation of villages, families, towns, cities, cultural generations. They did not recover. The world has not recovered from this moment because we change our attitude about who we are as human beings on this planet. We are no longer cohesive, unified, part of a greater whole. The sacred is destroyed.
And it is the beginning of a neilism and if you look to France and you look to the philosophers of the era Albert Camus, Sartre, it is the idea that you are responsible for your life and there is no God and at your end you are buried in the earthworms each you. It's kind of a brutal, brutalistic view of who we are as humanity. And so the United States has served World War I with World War II. We were way more involved than that. And there is something else that we want to talk about here.
It's a great depression. A great depression happens right after World War I. In the 1920s and it's the collapse of our country. And then we rebuilt from that moment, this basement bottom, historical moment, the United States, the Serbs, World War I. Now I feel that Vietnam Memorial was a historical monument for what happened in Washington. You had the Lincoln Memorial and then you had the Washington Monument in place.
And ultimately the mole was not a place where you shared your heroes of war and battle with the country. It was sacred ground but not to the way that it has evolved. We weren't backwards. We went backwards. We went from the Vietnam Memorial to the Korean War Memorial to the World War II Memorial and then all of a sudden now we moved to the World War I Memorial. The Eisenhower Memorial was part of that list as well. I did something because of who I am.
Traditionally I am not only an American citizen. I'm also Italian. I grew up in Italy. So I have two elements to myself. I grew up with the visual splendor of the Renaissance. And you are inundated with beautiful things and culture of elevation of spirit and with the churches and the sculpture and the piazza of Italy. It permeates your mind. And then going back to the United States in the 60s where I was exposed very deeply to the counter war movement by my parents, Vietnam.
I saw things that you don't, you know, we didn't have cell phones back then. And I remember one day picking up the newspaper, New York Times in the hallway. I lived in a big apartment building in the 60s on the Upper West Side. And I pick up this newspaper, that was my job. That would say go get the newspaper. So I opened it or I go get the newspaper. Front page, New York Times.
A horrible image for a little kid to see, you know, this naked young girl black and white with other children screaming coming directly out at you with the clouds of war behind her and soldiers leading up the back of that image. That image was a village that had been nape homes and those civilians, sorry, had been affected. It's the most iconic image of the war. That is indelibly seared upon my mind. I have a deep hatred for war. I have a great love for humanity.
So I was the right person to get this job. Most of the war memorials that are done in Washington, D.C. are garbage and here is why, because they do not show humanity. Our countries are made up by people and human beings. And that is what our country is about. It is we the people. It is not about we the governments and we are across roads again today with where the world, not only the United States, but the whole world stands.
It's like governments versus populists and it is a fight between governments, elites and populists and people. And I am a sculptor for the people. I made a piece that was about unification. It was not about fracturing our society. I made a piece that came from the Sistine Chapel and the last judgment. That was the poster that one day hit me and explained to me where I should go and early on in the process because I was being torn apart by so many voices saying, do this.
Put more biplanes and put more trench warfare and put more machine guns and we would like cavalry charges pulling wagons. You enter into a bureaucratic situation with all these commissions and they are all sculpture experts all overnight and they are telling you what to do. And I was completely befuddled and I had returned back to my studio and one morning I saw that poster and it was like, clear as day right there in front of me, do what you know.
And I returned to the concept of the Renaissance where we are all intertwined as one group. That's what that last judgment is. We all are going to meet our matrix. And I took that compositional element of advancing and receding figures and I took that as the structural launching point and catalyst for the 38 figure composition. So the soldiers that went off to fight in from the United States that went off to fight across the Atlantic were neither Republicans or Democrats.
They were Americans. And so I handled the sculpture with that very term. These are all of the same country. They are not one thing or another. They are all different. Every single figure on that panel that relief is a different individual, different psychology. But they are all cohesively tied together in a unified movement from left to right, in the past to the future. And that was my response.
And that's why this sculpture will stand as something critical in this moment, historically in the United States and also globally. So I was going to say this to the end, but let's talk about it now, which is a nature of arts and you've taken us there. For reasons I don't fully understand, I found myself reading the other day of book by Tulsa, I call What Is Art. Yes. And it's a remarkable book. I want to say one other thing though, you referenced about the damaging aspects of World One.
A book I have referenced recently here on E. Kantoch is The World of Yesterday by Stephens Feig. And he has a remarkable set of pages where he talks about the influence of World One on Art. And basically the nealism that you're referring to is part of it. But it's also the way he describes it, whether he's right or not, doesn't matter. It's just interesting. He basically says, people who lived through World One sought as an extraordinary betrayal.
The deaths of tens of millions of people, really for no purpose whatsoever. And it engendered a remarkable reaction against authority. And the truth is we're still living in that world, that post-World One World. And it launches in Feig's world view some of the credible creativity and changes in the art world. And by the art world I don't just mean paintings and sculpture, but literature, music, and so on.
And in Tolstoy's book, which he wrote in 1897, which is describing a period about 20 years before the end of World One, is a very similar theme without World One though, which is that modern art has lost its connection to the human soul. And he has a very narrow definition. It's a condemnation of what we would call modern art, even though it was 1897, it had already started.
And in his view, he has a very narrow definition, which is art is an emotional feeling inside the artist captured in the art itself and then shared then, if the art is successful, by the listener viewer reader. So it's the transformation, it's the communication of the artist's feeling. And that feeling is then experienced by the recipient of the art. And to me, that's very similar to what you're saying.
Your goal is in this culture to take your view of a bunch of things, not one thing, but of war or one in particular, but it's toll and impact on human beings and allow us as the viewers of that art to feel what you experienced captured in bronze. Is that a fair representation? Yeah, very much. Thank you for saying that and bringing up Tolstoy and historical, a historical writer that is passed through the ages and his validation.
Let's look at what is validated, what is important, what is seen as culturally a gold buying a treasure. And Western civilization holds that torch. And this project is in direct lineage to a very rich history that is we can go all the way back. You can go back two thousand years to the Greeks to Hellenistic art. It is a direct lineage to that. I am not inventing what I did at a whole cloth. I am not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
To make the sculpture, I looked at historical pieces like a caravaggio, the painter from Rome, Michelangelo, Hellenistic art, Canova, the neoclassical sculptor Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael Pusand, the French sculptor. I did not come to these compositional moments from zero. I looked at things and then I went and got the models. And then I posed the models using those historical moments in history as launching points. So ultimately I am already working in the same way.
And here is what differentiates modernism and let's call it Western civilization in more traditional art. There is a separation of all of us in modernism where there is no cohesive unification. And if you take the figure and you sculpt or paint the figure as a single figure with no interaction with anything around it, ultimately you are doing an alienated figure because you are alone. Do we live alone? No, we do not. We live in communities. We are more similar to a pack of dogs.
And now I am not making a joke here. One dog is injured in a pack. The rest of the dogs will do things to keep that dog healthy and safe and protect it. To bring it back to health. Why is that important? Because that is what we need to do is a race. It is a human race instead of subdividing and killing and fracturing each other. It is destructive. It is a very modernistic way of approaching things. If you are in a marriage and you insult your wife, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
It is destructive to you. So I made a sculpture that like Tolstoy talks about, it is about elevating us under sacred values. Now I am not saying to go back and deal with values as they were 500 years ago. We have transformed. We were in a different time. That would be archaeological. But I am saying, read your history. It is an umbrella that unifies a race, a country, a world, and read the history.
Because then you can be educated to recreate in this very moment something that is contemporary and understandable. It has to be universal. That is the problem with the modernists. They are making things that are not universal. They have a complete disregard for history. Because ultimately the way they are proceeding is destructive. They are cutting off themselves from the past and not educating themselves. What I am saying, you need the past to know what is possible.
Also so that you do not repeat the same mistakes. Unfortunately, we are repeating the same mistake right now. This very moment when you have a bullet to assassinate a presidential candidate in the United States, or you have at least three global wars going on. What is the difference? It is a complete, you know, groundhog day. We are enter words walking into World War III. And it is so obvious. I don't think people want war. Civilians do not want war. Governments are the proponents of war.
And then the propaganda that is used to justify those wars is completely, it is lies. I think there is a very interesting moment that we are having here because this is the propaganda that the government uses is internal warfare to control people. And so a piece of art speaks about the truth. It is about light. It is about rising to the occasion. And it is different than reality because it is art.
And so I am saying let's return to the way art used to be in which let's take an example of Michelangelo's David. It was the symbol for a city state Florence. And city of Florence was fighting pizza. Pizza was way larger than them. And they made the sculpture to elevate their citizens and say this sculpture represents you. This is your potential. This is what you can be. And that is what I am doing with this sculpture.
I am making something that shows the potential of the United States not only, but also of everyone on the globe. So that is my answer to you. You have been called the American Michelangelo. I don't know. I mean that is a nickname that is a heavy burden to bear. But obviously from what you just said, you talked about the influence of Michelangelo, DaVinci and others. There is, I hope this doesn't insult you.
There is, in what I have seen of your work and certainly this work, it is not at the edge. It is in the usual sense the word in the art world. It is not avant garde. It is very much in a very, very old tradition. And you are in that sense swimming against the tide. The art world, as I understand it, is obsessed with the novel, the avant garde, the edge. In fact, the whole job.
In modern art, the modern artists will often say that their job is to make you uncomfortable as opposed to say elevating you, the term you use. How does do you interact with other artists? Do you have a reputation among them that is pleasant or unpleasant to you? How was your work perceived? This is an interesting thing you are asking me. Modernists stipulate that you need to be edgy. You need to be the first one to ever do something. Guess what? I followed exactly what they told me to do.
I followed exactly what the modernists told me to do. I am doing something completely contrarian and radical to what is established right now in the art narrative of 2024. I am a complete outlier. There is no one else doing exactly what I am doing. I am not being archeological.
I would say that what I have done is, in some ways, very edgy because I am taking a stand against a very corrupt system that is driven by financial gains and the whole ideology that you buy big pieces of valued art because of their monetary value. It is the other companies that will actually inflate and create a false market by doing a very wicked system behind the scenes when something goes to auction. Do you think those numbers are actually not discussed behind closed doors?
No. The collectors brought in and then they are going to bid on that piece and then that creating the value and then now all of a sudden the rest of the series is going to be worth it is going to be a completely inflated number for a piece of crap. I am doing something that goes, no guys, I am not okay with academia. I am not okay with the critics. I am not okay with any of these people that are saying this is a status quo.
That sense is very much swimming, it is the tide and I am not exaggerating. I am pretty confident that your memorial will be immortal, that people will be looking at it and being moved by it and ideally uplifted by it and challenged by it for a long time without the edginess of modernity and in its tradition as you have outlined it. Let us talk about the process for a minute.
It is not going to be easy because we do not have visuals and I am sure you can talk with this for a very, very, very, very, very long time.
When you see this for the first time, even on video and you see these bronze figures and you start digging in as I did and the process of one of those figures becoming going from a model and by a model we are talking about not an economic model and not a theoretical concession about a physical human being, like a fashion model, but not a fashion model, a human being dressed in a World War I uniform or the dress that a wife of a World War I soldier would wear.
Somehow turn that figure of that person who you have posed and you turn that into a piece of bronze that is exquisite. It is exquisite in every version by the way. There is clay and there is wax. Give us some brief flavor of how you go from this person who is impersonating a soldier posed by you or a woman impersonating a wife posed by you or the daughter. How do you get to the bronze? How do you do that? This is the meat and potatoes of cooking a memorial sculpture.
The average hour per figure was 650 hours of looking at a model and creating it. This is also completely different in the way the world is operating right now. It completely fights modernism. I am saying the value of human beings in a creative process is so much greater than you are being told by the art world.
The regular MO today is to use technology which is computers, photography, 3D printing where you set up all these cameras and they go off at the same time and then you have a three dimensional shape. This is not human, it is technological stuff that leaves a mechanical fingerprint. You need to have a human fingerprint in the creative process because the way that we perceive our reality is human, it is not mechanical.
Yes, we have five senses but we have so much more in terms of our consciousness in our history and all these things that aid in how we perceive reality. You need to be educated first and foremost as a figurative sculptor and that is decimated as well because of modernism. It is not taught in schools anymore. The way that I am working comes from, let's call it old fashioned, but it is not really old fashioned because am I old fashioned as a human being right now?
No, I am still perceiving my reality. I am still very unique in how I perceive my reality. That perception of your reality is what drives how you look at the model because you don't just copy the model, you are translating. This is a huge thing that has been ignored by the art world. When you translate something, there are specific ways of doing it, they are not all the same. I am giving certain values to the way that I look and then put it into clay.
It is an educational basis built upon the anatomical structure of the body and the architecture of the skeleton and the tenets of Renaissance art. It is not just take that sculpture and copy what is in front of you. I look at the model and I give you an example. I look at the model dressed in the costumes and I want to make those forces and movement in the gesture and morphology look like it is dramatic and moving forward.
From that, I am going to diagram on the clay and I am going to look for the high points of all the forms pushing outwards into space. I add the clay so it looks like it is expansive and full. That already is a philosophy of a soul, a human being because all the forms are convex. They are not sunken in, they are not concave. Machine will not see that stuff. By diagramming, you are already drawing and designing because when you draw, that is not real. It is like writing.
It is a composing, it is a visual narrative of what you are seeing. My education then gives me a way to organize all this information coming at me. Anybody can draw it. 19, I could not draw it at all. I picked up a book called Drawing on the right side of the brain and I started doing the exercises and that was my launching point. Then I learned, there are so many levels of knowledge and learning that have been taken out of our training system.
This sculpture to me is shocking not only to myself when I look at it because I did something that is from a different age but it is this age when you look at it. Your brain cannot compute and that is exactly the same thing that everyone else is saying. It is like, I did not know this could still be done today. It is very, very modern. I left the process of how I add the clay to the surface. I did not smooth it out.
Every single little piece of clay that I put on is my process and that is not what was done in the Renaissance. You were supposed to hide your process because you were working for the church and you were a craftsman. Here I am showing my process to the audience and it is very alive and invigorating. That is pretty cool. Well, it is more than pretty cool. You have at this point you have a clay figure.
I just have to say as a footnote, when my wife and I realized that our daughter liked to draw and was good at it, we decided we should learn how to draw. We had no art education. Basically, I had taken art but I had been given bad grades because obviously I was not good at art so they just gave me a C. I assumed I could not draw. Then I asked a friend who painted for a recommendation and he told me to get drawing on the right side of the brain. I recommend it to listeners.
It changes the way you see the world. It does not just teach you how to draw. It is a beautiful book but it also teaches you to look at the world differently and it was a transformative experience for me to do something that I did poorly but could get better at and then in the process of doing so, look to the world differently. I strongly recommend that book. You have a clay figure. Is the clay figure the full size of the statue to start with? The figure that is going to be bronzed or smaller?
The clay can't just stand up on its own. You need to build an armature and we built an armature and from the armature was this foam thing. The foam was enlargement from the little model that I had made. I made two models prior to that transferring to drawing to a model and then the model was I used computers to enlarge it. I used it for the grunt work. I did not use it for the sculpting. The core is a foam piece with the clay on the surface and then you are... I redesigned the whole sculpture.
All 38 figures on the fly at over-lifesized scale. They are approximately 6.6 to 7 foot 2. So you are adding a clay to the foam and I am cutting and moving limbs. People do not do that because they do not have the confidence that I do. I have very highly developed drawing skills because of... I do have a talent unfortunately but part of it is I practice. My perseverance is I would say off the map. I mean to make something like this a Renaissance type sculpture in a modern era.
Do you know how stubborn you have to be? Yeah. It's like you are producing a wall and you have to support a family through what you're doing. So this is bordering on a... Insane. Insane. It's a bit of an obsession. And here's my question. Anyway, we should finish our narrative and we'll come back to my question if you remember. But you take the clay figure and then you wrap it in wax? No, it has to be cut apart and brought to a foundry.
So we had underfigures apart to transport them to a foundry. Because of COVID normally they will come to your shop and make a mold. What is a mold? A mold is a liquid that you put onto the clay. So you take this liquid and it has a catalyst in it. It's a silicon. It goes directly onto the clay and it makes an imprint of the clay. And all right. So this is a floppy material. Let's say it's a rubber. Ultimately. It's a rubber shell. That's it. It's been... Sure, no. Yeah. And now this has to be...
So because it's flops, you need to build a hard shell around that to contain it. So now you have these two shells directly built onto the sculpture. You take them off the sculpture but you have the imprint of the surface. Now with these two shells, you fill them with a slurry of wax. You cover the surface, it's about a quarter of an inch to 3-8-7-inch. No more than that. So they're hollow. You take the shell off. You now have an exact duplicate of the clay in a different material, wax. Hollow.
You take that wax sculpture and you attach tubes to it. These tubes will be how the bronze runs into the sculpture. Now you take this whole thing and you put it inside a dipping tank. And the dipping tank is a slurry. It's called ceramic shell and it covers the inside and the outside. It goes into all the cracks and it picks up all the detail. You put it in a burnout kill now. The wax evaporates and that's why it's called lost wax. Now you have a void where the wax was in this ceramic shell.
It's a mold and you fill that void by pouring liquid bronze into those tubes that now will cover the whole structure. Then you go to knock out where you knock off all the ceramic shells. Very hard. Sementlite. And you have a raw bronze. The foundry that I use, Pangolette, is so good that we got my actual fingerprints. My actual fingerprints think about that in the bronze. The sculpture means people can open your eye found if they're repreated. They will be able to. Now we just started.
Now you've got to reassemble everything. So each figure has maybe eight pieces. Congratulations on your true physical nature of never losing one. Now, they're level and use technology in that process, but ultimately it comes down to one thing. Human beings, human beings, driving the technology, not technology driving the human beings. I am averse to AI. It's complete nonsense.
You can't do what I did using AI because of this, my mind and how it translates reality and then recreates it in art, same with the casting business. The thing that's crazy about this for me as an outsider is art is an extraordinary thing by itself. Representing a creative vision from the brain in a medium, and there are many different mediums. They're all interesting. There's marble and there's canvas and there's legos.
But bronze is got an enormous craftsmanship, heart to it, way beyond the ability to draw that must have taken you decades to master. This was not like you didn't just go and say, I've got this clay thing, we turn it to bronze. I mean, you had to, there's a lot of learning, I assume, along the way. Oh my God. It's a, we did something that is, I'm literally a dinosaur. It's we are extinct. What I do is extinct. What the foundry did is extinct.
They are relying on technology instead of human manpower to do this. And we're going back to a craftsmanship because wrong way who runs the foundry, he's been in it for 40 plus years, exactly like me. And then he now he has second generation coming in. His, the sons of the workers now work there. It's incredible. So that it's handed down. What I learned was handed down to me back in the 80s and that I put it into practice.
The act of looking at a model, it's so you have to troubleshoot all day long. So you said about the drawing. Okay. I want to put this into context of what sculpture is. sculpture is drawing on steroids because you have to draw three dimensionally in the round and then all those different angles and views have to link up so that you, your drawing skills are at the utmost level to make a really, really good sculpture. And that it's just not being taught and people are not practicing it.
And then no one has the skill level because it comes, I have a very European mindset that in the beginning I was learning how to do it. So I didn't have to be creative, even though I was being creative. It was like I was following in the footsteps. So I didn't have to elevate my ego. And so it was like I was learning in a way that I feel a lot of Americans don't have the patience to learn because they're looking at like, well, what about me? What about my creative self?
And so I was not thinking that I was like, I want to learn how to do this. And I took it in the context of I want to be the best violinist. So I need to learn how to play this instrument so that I am like Paganini on that violin. I will kill everybody else. I am better than everybody else. I will be the equal to the Renaissance and that art. That was what was in my mind. I couldn't give a damn about what my fellow art student or fellow art, you know, here was doing.
The competition is not with my peers, my competition is with history. And so it's like that, that was my, my, I had to jump that high. And so that's not an American mentality. Well, it's a little bit reminds me of Hemingway who said you have to read other authors. So you know, you have to know who to beat. He had a very competitive form. I don't know if that's, I don't think that's exactly what you're saying, but it's definitely I'm a spirit about it.
He was more of an embracing of my, I call them my guides. They are my guides. They have guided me through life because I go look at what they have done. And I have this kinship and this bonding with someone of 500 years ago. And it's like, that is my brother. I am doing what he is doing now. And so it's like, I feel I'm more of a family. And we had not like Hemingway. It's like I'm seeing now. It's not competition. It's like, yeah. You are my masters and I am following in your footsteps.
How can I be of service to you? And ultimately, I, that's the biggest thing I learned from doing this project was I took away. I am in service of something larger than myself and that is incredibly empowering because it attaches you to the sacred because I believe in something larger than myself and my puny little ego. It's like I'm in service of things that are universal and cohesively holding thought, process and culture and Western civilization together.
That's very powerful if you're part of that element. Yeah. Reminds me of our, you know, Agnes Callard on the program said a long time ago, reading is if you learn how to read, you learn how to talk to dead people. But that's sort of the way I hear what you're saying. I mean, I've had the privilege of standing in the presence of David in Florence, Michelangelo is David and for me, it's a religious moment. It's not just a cool thing.
It is a very cool thing, but it is, it is small or religious in the sense that as you said, it connects you to the universal human aspirations to be something grant to aspire and boy did Michelangelo aspire, oh my gosh. And to be able to, you could talk to Michelangelo in a way I can't. So, you know, I'm jealous, but I was going to say one other thing though about strange skills.
So there's this physical part to sculpting that that goes beyond the normal drawing, et cetera, because you've got to represent in the physical what you've imagined in your mind. But there's this other weird part of this project that is obvious when you watch the videos that give you some of the background, which is you are not a lone sculptor with a block of marble and a chisel revealing what's inside. And of course, Michelangelo wasn't either.
He had lots of helpers when he painted the Sistine Chapel and it's not, but we have certain romance about the great artists working alone. As part of this project, there's an enormous army of people that you're working with. You have the people who are doing the modeling. You have the people who are doing all the intermediate steps you describe to get it ready for the founder. You have the people at the Foundry.
You also have the bureaucrats who are saying, you know, I don't like the way that looks or why aren't you doing this. There's a management human HR, human resources, managerial aspect to your artistry that to me, looking as an outsider, must have been remarkably frustrating at times because human beings are flawed, human beings make mistakes, human beings have issues, they have needs.
And while you're trying to keep this enormous 10 foot high, 58 foot freeze in at the center of your consciousness, you've got a lot of headaches, I assume, for managing that enormous team. So, am I right? Was that an important part of the job? Very, very, very focused and on the same page. So correct. And saying that I went from a mom and pop business to be running an organization and it was big boy world. It's like you are, I had to hire sculptors.
I fired so many people because I started firing people when I took ownership that I was the leader of this project and I was given the task of seeing this baby through of getting let's say the bowl to the end zone. I'm correctly. And a lot of the sculptors that I brought on did not have the capacity to learn and criticize their own capacity in sculpting. So they got fired and I took a wander to fire people in the beginning then at the end. At the end, I only had one sculptor Charlie Mostow.
And the sculpture changes from the beginning to the end. It becomes more raw, more emotional because you guess what? I'm the one sculpting and Charlie has learned how to sculpt in the same process that I did. Then they're the models. I went to the beginning of the sculpture I used, actors that I used to do the drawings and the compositional ideas. Coming out of Brooklyn, actors are, you know, they're actors. They're actors. I don't need to say any more. They act in how to part their character.
They're not the real deal. The end of the sculpture, those figures or veterans. This is very, it transforms a process because it was a four year process. Went along with the story. I was like, what do I need to do in my head to fix this problem-solve it? I went and got Navy SEALs, Marines, Rangers. I had one Marine who worked with me for two and a half years at the end and I asked him I grilled him all the time.
He opened up because there was a trusting that I learned about the military and what soldiers go through. And the more I learned, the more I was fascinated with the idea of how when they enter into battle they are this. They are all at each other's backs protecting each other. And if one of them goes down, it's way more traumatic than either you or I can realize. And then that family goes down. And then you have this ripple effect from one death. It's like, it's huge. It's a whole community.
It's so many people that are affected by that one death. And those faces that you see at the end carry the history of those unique individuals that each and every one of them was a combat veteran. And each and every one of them suffered the traumatic effects physically and psychologically from war. And it's painted on their face. That's a wrong way of saying it because it's not surface. It's inside. It's in their body. It's in their cells.
And their face is morphed because of the combat that they suffered. And then I use that reference, that human being, that history as a complete reference to make the sculpture. And it's very real and honest. It has tremendous integrity to combat PTSD, what we call today, not any different than shell shocked 100%. Same thing. Same thing. Different floor. That's the thing. It's a sculpture that is historical because they wear the actual uniforms of the era, but it is universal.
And any veteran who served in Afghanistan or Iraq or comes from the UK or Italy or France or Germany or Israel will understand. It is the soldier's journey and it is a very modern thing because it's never been done before. It is the first time that the soldier's story is done and encapsulated in one sculpture. And here's proof of how far they work. Look at my thumb. See how large it is? It's from all the clay that I put on. I was going to say I can imagine, but I can't.
I want to close with, I'm going to have trouble putting this in words. I apologize if I ramble a bit, but I want to try to get at something I think you're trying to get at. It's hard to express it. I was in, I was in Prague the last few days. I came back last night. Never been to Prague. And when you go to Prague, there's a big Jewish presence historically in Prague. And most of the Jews who built the Jewish presence in Prague were murdered by the Nazis.
About 80,000 Jews were murdered of the 120 that were there at the beginning of the war. Some people got away, but most of them didn't. And we've preserved the synagogues. Some of them are still active, but some of them were quite beautiful. Some of them are quite simple. They were built 900 years ago. They're still there 800 years ago, it's beautiful. But they're museums. They're not, although they're used some, many of them are literally museums. They are not in working order.
There's no vitality. It's an historical monument. And as a Jew, that's very sad because of the murder, because of what was lost. And there's a certain irony because Prague is the city of Kafka, a Jew, a tormented Jew. And whatever role Jews played in the life of that city is, again, even though there's still some Jews there and there's still Jewish life, it's centrality in the culture of Prague is dead. So that's it. Unfortunately, you can feel that in a lot of European cities.
I felt it in Vienna. But at the same time, I go to a church. And you walk into a church, it's again, it's centuries old. It's a magnificent monument to the divine. And we happen to hear music in that church of Bach and Pasha-Bal and Vivaldi, which of course is music that was mainly inspired by the divine. And of course, the Christians have mainly left Prague. It's just the Jews. They didn't get murdered. But the role of Christianity at the heart of Prague is gone.
And what's left is a shell, the church, the music played in that church that's centuries old. The shell is the Jewish cemetery in the center of Prague. It's an amazing thing to see. But it's a cemetery. It's not alive. And I couldn't help but be struck, especially in that church, where there's quite a bit of stature and I was thinking about you and thinking about this upcoming interview. That much of Western art was literally sacred. You use the word sacred. It was literally sacred.
It was an attempt for human beings to capture something much greater than themselves, whether it was the music of Bach or the grandeur of a medieval cathedral, which they were even longer than you did, or even more years to build those monuments. 100 years. 100 years. And now we look at them and we're an of them. But all the life that built that art is drained from it in many ways. And that art, the architecture, the sculpture in those churches, those were done to elevate human beings.
Many horrible things happen along the way. Thank you. It's a complicated picture. And I'm not going to whitewash it. But something is gone. And I'm curious how you, with your view of the sacred and your respect for the Renaissance, how you think about that? And it's not really a well-formed question, but say whatever you like in response. My response to that is you are spot on when you say something has been lost.
And it is the definition of what we are as humans and the act of being human and living your life for the acknowledgement of the sacred. I see this sculpture as the beginning of a new movement, an artistic movement. And I am so encouraged by how many people have said, oh my god, you can still do this today. So I am doing a documentary with my wife Tracy Slatton. She used to have a documentary because she filmed every single day. It's heroicdocumentary.com is a website.
This is why I bring this up because people, if they can see the inside of my studio, they can see how human it is. And they're going to be surprised that this is something that can be translated to other arenas, not just sculpture. There's a movement to bring back the idea of how do you use your hands, how do you become a plumber and electrician, how do you build a house, all these things craftsmanship, putting things into the physical realm. We're on the move.
And I'm not the only one here on the planet. We're all coming out and talking about human beings versus technology or AI and human beings are the ones with the power. We see the world 80% through our eyes. Huge amount of data that goes into our brains, far surpasses a computer. And in that process of looking at the world, we have something that machines do not have. We have a heart, we have a brain and we have hands. Machine is completely mechanical and mathematical data driven.
It's not a conscious human being. It's not a human being with a soul. The respect for humanity is what you just spoke about. There was a respect for human beings and what they were capable of. And I am saying, I am bringing that back. Now maybe this is a fool's errand, but I will do that till I die, till I meet my maker because that is my mission and my Dharma in life. And that's my response to you.
I'm not the only one who is a proponent of making things by hand for the sacred and being in service of something larger than oneself. So thank you for your time with this. I really appreciate it. My guest today has been Sabin Howard. Sabin, thanks for being part of Econ Talk. Thank you very much. This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
For more Econ Talk, go to econtalk.org where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The Sound Engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goiette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.