Arthur Ganson – Sculpture that’s truly moving

Arthur Ganson is a renowned kinetic sculptor. Ganson makes mechanical art demonstrations and Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes. Ganson was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1955. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.

Arthur’s work has a lot to do with happiness. He started out as a young boy making things for people as a way of showing love. When he was a child he started to explore motion as he loved the way things moved. He started out by making little flip books. In college he found himself making fairly complicated and fragile machines and this really came about from having many different kinds of interests. In high school he was interested in programming computers and later on was interested in becoming a sorgeon as it ment working with his hands in a very focused and intense way. So he started taking courses which helped him create art and making them very precise with his hands and coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system and also working with wire made everything that he did both visual and a mechanical engineering decision at the same time.

My favourite design of his was the wish bone that was made to walk across the table. He engineered basically constructed a mechanical solution to just make a wish bone walk across a table. He says this reminds him of a cowboy who was sitting on his horse for too long. I found that quite humorous. He describes this sort of work as pupetry where his the puppeteer and he control and designs the objects.

Im my opinion his work doesn’t really mean anything, but all his work is just simply inspired by movement. In a nutshell, Arthur Ganson loves solving mechanical problems.