Although "Have a conversation with John Bisbee" is No. 48 on Bowdoin's "50 Things to do Before You Graduate" list, students will be hard pressed to find the living legend of a sculpture teacher on campus anytime soon.
They'll be more likely to find him at his studio outside of Fort Andross, which overlooks the Androscoggin River, with his dog, Bonnie, whom he found at a Bonnaroo festival several years ago.
"When she asks where she came from, I tell her she was on tour with Beck and that she just got tired of it," Bisbee joked. "She's the brains of the operation."
A pigeon also lives above Bisbee's studio that he insists visitors meet, and one might search the entirety of the restored mill without finding a person whose name Bisbee does not know.
A man-about-town (or mill, at least), Bisbee spends 14 to 16 hours each day welding, hammering, and fusing together nails to create a ton of sculptures, literally.
Bisbee, a lecturer in the art department, is in the process of finishing his latest piece?seven cylinders created entirely with nails. Working with 40 boxes of nails that weigh 50 pounds each, Bisbee has welded several sculptures that, when finished, weigh one ton each.
Three of these pieces will be displayed at the Reeves Contemporary gallery in New York City from October 9 until November 8.
Although Bisbee claims to separate his life from what he creates, Professor of Art Mark Wethli, a friend and colleague with whom Bisbee co-directs the Coleman Burke Gallery in Fort Andross, sees Bisbee's unique sense of humor in his latest project.
"There's a certain humor in the idea of reducing the measure of a piece to its physical weight," Wethli said. "But by making each piece exactly a ton, it also introduces a constant that draws the viewer's attention to the great variety of things he's able to create from the identical quantity of iron."
The exhibit will showcase Bisbee's ability to create innovative sculptures with the medium he's used exclusively for the past 21 years?nails. In 1987 he found a bucket of rusty nails and when he overturned it, all of the nails fell out in one iodized clump. He found them fascinating, and has been working with the nail ever since.
"Accidents happened and I followed them," Bisbee said of his nail discovery.
"What impresses me most about his work is that he takes the simplest of premises and then, through repetition, comes up with these very elegant, very sublime works," Wethli said.
Although many artists' works capture impressions of nature, Bisbee's sculptures capture nature's inner workings and principles, according to Wethli.
"It's a lot like certain things we see in nature," Wethli said. "The natural world goes about its work very efficiently. In nature, form follows function?things like birds nests, shells, or seed pods may look beautiful to us, but nature doesn't care whether we find them beautiful or not. John's work is a lot like that. It has an essential quality and it's not made to please anyone, which is very like the things we find pleasing in the natural world."
According to Bisbee, he does not attempt to project meaning onto his works.
"It's not up to me. It's up to the viewer," he said. "Shapes, patterns, rhythms, line density?the pieces have a phenomenal logical life. But it's not narrative stuff. I don't want to shackle these things."
Bisbee believes that all great art should be open to a "myriad of interpretation."
"Frederick Busch [late American fiction writer] said it best?'self expression is for amateurs,'" he said. "If you [the artist] really need to say anything about it it's not that good."
Although nails may be an unusual sculpting material, Bisbee has ceased to notice.
"They're like lines now," he said. "It's just my mark."
"Every idea leads to something else," Bisbee said of coming up with fresh ideas. "If I'm using the same thing I have to do something different every time."
His work with nails is only one of the many facets of Bisbee's creativity and originality that contributes to his prominence at Bowdoin as well as outside Bowdoin.
For the past six years, Bisbee has been organizing art at Bonnaroo, a yearly music festival in Tennessee. Bonnaroo organizers found him after they saw his set designs for the band Phish in 2003 and 2004.
In 2003 at a Phish concert in Limestone, Maine, Bisbee handed out 10,000 rolls of masking tape to concert goers and collaborated with fans as they created an evolving maze of corridors with the tape?a kind of "funnel web city," according to Bisbee.
At the 2004 Phish concert, Bisbee worked with Mike Long '04 and Brian McGregor '04 to power wash, strip down, and varnish 25 maple trees that they then planted upside down at the concert venue in Vermont.
"So when Phish broke up, Bonnaroo bought me," Bisbee joked.
For four summers, Bisbee has organized community art projects at the festival. He and several former and current Bowdoin students help facilitate a community art project at each campsite at Bonnaroo.
"Every city gets security, medics, and a team of sculptors," he said. "We build a city. We're the mayors of it."
Peter McLaughlin '10 has been involved with the Bonnaroo projects for the past two summers.
"The idea is to have some kind of community art project as a center of each of the campsites," he said. "Each one is generally based on a different material."
Bisbee and his team arrive at Bonnaroo a week before the festival begins and collect materials for the sites. Once the festival starts, the team steps back and lets festival goers build anything they want.
"The whole concept is that they be as interactive as possible," McLaughlin said. "They're also loosely based on his concept of sculpture?taking one thing and multiplying it a million times to see what it can do."
When working with Bisbee, there's never a dull moment.
"He's an enigma. He has absolutely amazing charisma," McLaughlin said. "It's like there's this aura around him. He can walk into a store on Maine Street and he will be friends with every person in the store in 10 minutes."
"He's an aspiration and incredible," he added.
Sara Griffin '09 has helped organize the project throughout her time at Bowdoin. According to her, getting concert goers excited about the projects can be difficult, but not when Bisbee's around.
"John is the part that gets people excited about the project. He's really fantastic at getting people to trust in what they can do," she said. "He's so energetic and just fun, and that's what people respond to. That's why everyone knows who he is."
Bisbee has been teaching at Bowdoin for 13 years.
"I think of myself as potting soil," he said. "I create an environment where students are free to risk and fail enough times that they eventually find something."
Bisbee's charisma and attitude toward teaching and creating make his sculpting classes some of the hardest to get into at Bowdoin, even for art majors and minors.
"I heard about Bisbee immediately my freshman year from other people who said it's a must-take class if you can get it," said Olivia Madrid '10, a visual arts major in Bisbee's Sculpture I class.
According to Madrid, Bisbee's classes are loosely structured, but he inspires his students to work many more hours out of class than the five he requires each week. "I end up working more than five hours because it's not about how much you work. You want to stay to see how it will turn out," she said. "Bisbee has a very unorthodox method, but for me, it works. It makes me feel like I'm doing it of my own accord rather than checking something off a syllabus."
Bisbee admires the students who take his classes.
"Anyone brave enough to take sculpture is interesting," Bisbee said. "I think it's the most frightening art medium. It's not material, it's not a conception, it's space. It's a scary thing to fail in space rather than on a page."
"I have the greatest respect for him as a teacher," Wethli said. "He brings students to life. He has the ability to draw people out of themselves. A number of students have chosen to become artists after working with him and many others, even if they've chosen other fields, have found a part of themselves they never knew existed."
As far as Bisbee is concerned, his classes help students reconnect with their deepest roots.
"Creativity is the only thing that separates us. Only we have the ability to metaphor," he said. "When I'm teaching, I'm only trying to teach people to get in touch with their most ancient and distinctive trait."
"I can't believe I get to do it every day. I'm so lucky," he added.
After his New York show opens, he'd like to finish an album he's working on with his band, Bright Common.
According to Wethli, the band's bassist, jamming with Bisbee is "always different, creative, improvisational. Always a great time."
And in the mean time, Bisbee will continue to be one of Bowdoin's most distinctive teachers.