Finding his calling
Artist makes discarded cellphones the medium
Forget oils and pastels, marble and cast iron. Artist Rob Pettit works in Sanyo,
Pettit, 26, has spent the last few months obsessed with making art out of discarded cellphones. Working six or seven days a week, the Allston resident has turned thousands of obsolete phones into meticulously arranged sculptures that will go on display this evening in an exhibition at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
One might suspect that he's mocking people's obsession with the ubiquitous devices, but that's not the case.
"I don't mind cellphones. I'm not speaking out against them," Pettit said while he Velcroed phones to the gallery wall last week. "It's just that we come from a time when there were none of them . . . to a point where the majority of people I see walking by themselves in the street are passing time by having conversations on cellphones. It's just interesting to see what an explosion of products [this is], and realizing that every time you get one, it's on the verge of being replaced by another."
People often exclaim, "That's a ton of cellphones you have!" Pettit said. "And it's really just a sliver of the total amount that aren't being used. There's an estimated half a billion cellphones just sitting in people's desk drawers."
Artists have used mass-produced and other "found" objects for nearly a century, from Duchamp's "readymades" featuring a bicycle wheel or urinal to Rauschenberg's "combines" incorporating such items as a bed quilt. Pettit has his own approach.
An Albany native, Pettit graduated from the SMFA last year and tracked down studio space, planning to use his savings to finance a few months of immersive work that might kick-start a career. He was already focused on cellphones.
"I was trying to figure out an object that was highly diverse that I could get for free, and it just popped into my head that I could get my friends' old cellphones," he said. "Then it just became a project of how far I could take it and in how many different directions I could explore this contemporary object."
Early works were wall drawings, obsessively rendered images that used tiny cellphone icons the way Pointillists like Seurat used dots, to create larger images of cellphones or cell towers. One work, "Cellular Growth," is made of 15,751 minute phone images, he said, each drawn by hand.
"That turned into a whole meditative practice where I could just sit for hours upon hours," Pettit said, noting with a smile that the trancelike work helped him quit smoking.
He also began collecting obsolete phones, first from friends and family, eventually by the pallet from cellphone recycling companies. He estimates his stash at about 5,500 phones, which now form the large sculptures at the SMFA - immaculate, flowerlike swirls on the floor and walls, as well as dunelike heaps.
He works with gloves on "so as not to get sick from handling 5,500 phones people have breathed all over," he said. "I think I've found myself having more colds this year than ever before."
He's also hoping people who attend the show will bring their old phones to donate. One sculpture, which incorporates the sounds of ringtones and voice mails, centers on a collection box.
"Whenever a student takes something slated for a landfill and turns it into art they get an A-plus as far as I'm concerned," said SFMA visiting artist Jason Middlebrook. Pettit, a former student of Middlebrook, now serves him as teaching assistant. "All my students are making this kind of recycled art," Middlebrook said. But now "it's an environmental statement, whereas before it was more out of necessity."
As for Pettit, Middlebrook said, "I'm really proud of him that's he's been able to make [cellphones] kind of beautiful in a way, because they're so plastic and sterile."
One recycling company that provided phones also welcomed Pettit's work.
"Even when we get contacted with things like this, where it's kind of an out-of-left-field request, we're always interested, because if it helps get attention to the issue and what we're doing, that's good for us," said Mike Newman, vice president of Michigan-based recycler ReCellular Inc, which sent Pettit a pallet of phones on indefinite loan. Only about 30 percent of phones are now recycled or donated to charity, either for reuse or to be mined for metals, Newman said.
Pettit estimates that his phones, originally costing up to $800 each, were once valued at more than a $1 million. They're now worth perhaps 10 to 80 cents each, according to Newman, for metals such as gold and silver in their components.
A few days before the exhibit, Pettit was still weighing how much to charge for his artwork.
Pettit's own current cellphone - a Sprint Sanyo Model RL4930 - is his 18th. During the interview, at least, he had it set on vibrate.
"When I walk places, I try not to make phone calls just to pass the time," he said. "I never talk on the phone when I'm at the cashier paying for something. I don't talk on the cellphone when I'm on the bus or the train."
Driving? "Yeah, sometimes," he said with a chuckle. "I know how hard it is; I shouldn't."
