NAME Gary Bates
AGE 61
HOMETOWN
Amsterdam, Montana
OCCUPATION
Sculptor, former farmboy
KNOWN FOR
Creating huge kinetic sculptures
SAYS
“I don’t know if these pieces are going to work. I hope they are.
But you never know for sure.”
WHAT THE HECK DOES
“KETCHERSCHMITT” MEAN, ANYWAY? It’s a made-up word
combining “catcher’s mitt” and “Messerschmitt”
MOST FAMOUS ARTWORKS Will He Drill (inspired by
Western windmills, located at the Yellowstone Art Museum in
Billings) and Wind Arc, a 4,060-pound thingamajig at Montana State
University
Gary Bates’ 1951 Chevrolet pickup truck
bounces and squeaks around the sculptor’s 280-acre wheat farm in
Amsterdam, Mont., which also doubles as an open-air art gallery.
The 61-year-old Bates remembers summer days spent here as a youth,
driving a tractor, when wind gusts regularly ruined his afternoons.
Bates’ teachers and family classified his restless
tinkering with bicycles and farm equipment as the work of an
inventor, not an artist. It wasn’t until he started taking art
classes at Montana State University that he decided he was a
sculptor. Suddenly, driving the tractor in the wind became a source
of inspiration, rather than an annoyance.
“I wanted a way
to like the afternoons,” he says. So, in his early 20s, he started
creating sculptures that would spin and move and celebrate the
wind. He put the sculptures out on the edges of the fields to
entertain him while he drove the tractor. And he made them big, so
he could see them from a mile away.
His interest in jumbo-sized sculpture proved too large for both MSU
and the University of Montana, so Bates honed his craft at the
Kansas City Art Institute. After receiving his degree, he returned
to the farm to build sculptures; the tractoring chores were placed
in the hands of his nephew. Bates has always worked other jobs to
make ends meet. The dozen or so employee stickers on his truck
testify to many summers spent working as a maintenance man for the
National Park Service, something he did until 2001. He only
recently started sculpting full time.
Bates stops his
truck in front of a sculpture he calls Lunar
Ketcherschmitt, the steel of which was cut from the
boiler of a historic hotel. Half the cylinder stands vertically in
the field, acting as a pedestal; the other half, positioned
horizontally on top, rotates gently in the breeze. Bates stares at
it from the truck; he built the sculpture in 1986, but he still
marvels at it as a child would.
“It has a wonderful
motion, don’t you think? It looks like it goes faster and slower,”
he says, referring to the asymmetrical positioning. “It’s exactly
the same speed all the time.”
Bates sees his sculptures
as instruments for telling stories and sharing information about
the land. He hopes his work will trigger people to think about the
planet. He’s not an engineer; Bates builds models rather than draws
blueprints, and he insists that he never really knows whether a
piece will work until he’s built it. He says that’s why he builds
them in the first place, adding that even engineers can’t explain
why Lunar Ketcherschmitt starts spinning.
The next sculpture in the field is
Horizon Seven Ranges, the upturned end of a
railroad tank car with the silhouette of the surrounding mountain
peaks carved into its edge. There’s a barber’s chair in the middle;
sitting in it, you can contemplate the landscape while the chair
slowly turns. Bates bangs on the side of the heavy steel with his
fist, allowing the sound to resonate.
“The joy of this
work is to find that idea, and be able to share it,” he says. “It’s
nothing just to look at it.” His latest idea celebrates rain rather
than wind. Rain Scale, commissioned by Green
River Community College in Auburn, Wash., will be a massive,
horizontal, stainless steel ring perched atop a steel-pipe arch.
When it rains, as it often does in Auburn, the weight of 3/8-inch
of water will tip the 2,000-pound ring into a seesawing motion for
50 minutes, depositing the water into a pond below.
“I
came up with this concept, and it was five and a half months before
I realized why it worked,” Bates says. Between explanations, Bates
starts banging on Horizon Seven Ranges with both
fists, for 10 seconds straight, reveling in the cacophony.
“I am the most surprised person in the world when my
pieces work. That euphoria is unbelievable.”
The
author is a freelance writer based in Bozeman,
Montana.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sculpting a reason to love the wind.
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