A LEGO Brickumentary Page #8

you are now members

of the Guinness World Records family.

I'd like to present this certificate

and congratulate all of you.

- Yes!

- We broke the record.

In Melbourne,

Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida

built a working car

almost entirely out of LEGO bricks.

It's not going to set

any land speed records,

and it doesn't go all that far,

but just the mere fact that

it does go is quite something.

Andrew Carol, an engineer at Apple,

studied the remnants of a Greek device

used to determine celestial events,

which was found at the bottom

of the Aegean Sea.

Then he reconstructed it from,

you guessed it, LEGO bricks.

At conventions, fans get together

to build great ball contraptions,

or GBCs, which deliver balls

from one module to another.

The GBC is a collaborative effort

to make a kinetic sculpture,

if you will.

In this case, if you watch,

when this ball hits, two flip off.

And they're timed

so that this gate double flips.

Even Google's Larry Page

used LEGO bricks.

Actually, in college I built

an inkjet printer out of LEGOs.

Page and Sergey Brin even built

their first server out of LEGO bricks.

In England TV host James May

decided to build an entire working house

out of LEGO bricks.

So, the LEGO system can enable people

to make real, working stuff.

Sometimes, however,

the goal is more cerebral.

What do you think that is?

How great is that?

You going to take a picture

with your cell phone?

Well, I didn't see it at first.

My sister pointed it out to me.

And I'm a preschool teacher,

and I am drawn to LEGOs.

I'm from Indiana, we don't see

things like that in Indiana.

So, it's unusual.

People are so familiar with LEGO bricks.

Most everyone you know

has snapped a few bricks together,

and so that makes the art accessible,

it makes it relatable.

When I first started

going to galleries and saying,

"Hey, I do LEGO art."

They kind of looked at me and said,

"Oh, okay, is that cars

and trucks or castles?"

You know, they have a set notion

of what LEGO art would be.

I order tens of thousands

of bricks every month.

This is how it is.

This is how I get my bricks.

In fact, I spend over

six figures annually just on LEGO.

There's probably

3 million bricks in this room.

I've made a career from a child's toy.

I've been told at times I'm a sellout

because I use this

commercial brand to create my art.

But it's a brand that I chose

because I believe

there's nothing I can't build out of it.

Growing up, I had a lot

of LEGO bricks as a toy.

It was something my parents encouraged.

They let me have a 36-square-foot

LEGO city in our living room.

It was when I was about 10 years old,

wanted to get a dog.

Asked my parents, "Can I get a dog?"

"No, you're not getting a dog."

I tore down my LEGO city,

used those bricks to create

my own life-size LEGO dog.

It was really my first time in realizing

it's not what's on the front of the box.

You can actually create whatever

you want out of this toy.

I got out of college, and I had

societal pressures to get a real job.

And I ended up going to law school.

I was doing corporate law.

And I would come home at the end of the

day and I would need a creative outlet.

And sometimes that was drawing,

sometimes it was painting.

But once I started

doing sculptures out of LEGO,

I really had found my passion.

And it got to the point where I was

working full days at the law firm,

and I would come home at night and have

a slate of commissions to work on.

And I decided to make that change,

to leave the law practice

behind, and go be an artist.

An artist who plays with toys.

You know, I don't know if this is...

if I've broken through.

I don't know if an artist ever can feel

like they've broken through

because I keep setting

bigger and bigger goals.

Nathan has been offered

his biggest opportunity yet.

He's been booked for a one-man show

in New York's Times Square

and is prepping over

a hundred pieces for it.

The New York exhibition, I think,

will be the biggest show of my life,

a culmination of years' worth of work,

as well as the largest

solo LEGO art exhibition ever.

And there's a lot of pressure.

The show will feature

Nathan's original creations

as well as LEGO replicas

he is making of classical works of art.

For Nathan, this is the opportunity

to prove himself as a legitimate artist.

I'm worried that the venue

that's taking a big risk on me

feels like this is a failure.

I'm worried that, you know,

will they actually get it

when they see it

in the exhibition format?

And really, what's

the public going to think?

Thousands of miles away in Germany

another artist, Jan Vormann,

has taken LEGO arts to the streets.

I really like to work with objects that

everybody has a preconceived image of.

The good thing with playful

elements in the work is that

people get attracted by it

rather than repulsed.

If I use a material which people like,

they are more likely to start

interacting with me.

So now it has different aspects to it.

On the one side,

the sculpture installation,

where it's just there

to be visually perceived.

And on the other side,

a performance kind of action.

It looks like a lot of fun,

but Jan's work has serious undertones.

Most of the times

I tried to find locations

which have a kind

of historical background

or political meaning.

Today we are here in the very back

of the Anhalter Bahnhof.

This used to be the main

train station for Berlin.

This is also a place where a lot of Jews

were deported before the war ended.

The Holocaust is an event

that's omnipresent in my mind,

so I think about it a lot.

You don't necessarily see it in my work,

because I don't want to add like,

visually dark and heavy subjects.

So my idea to use

the plastic construction bricks

was to add a kind of colorful

part of contemporary times,

a material that everybody

worldwide has the same feeling on it.

Some people call this type of art

"EGO bombing,"

but Jan prefers to call it "patchwork,"

and he's bringing the patchwork project

around the world.

For me, it's a kind of hopeful thing

to see that we actually share

this common culture.

Whoa...

Okay. What happens when

the thing you want to build

isn't the thing that you

want to build but rather

a representation of the thing

that you want to build?

Okay, I think I just confused myself.

What if the thing you

want to build is just an idea?

Could LEGO bricks be used for that?

In Denmark, when a rising architect wanted

to submit for a major commission,

he looked at how modular

building techniques

had become in his home country

and thought of his favorite toy

as a child.

In Denmark, because of the labor wages

and because of the bad weather,

you want to minimize the time

at the construction site.

So everything has to be

like prefabricated elements,

put together in interesting ways.

So in a manner of speaking,

Denmark has become

a country entirely built out of LEGO.

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