continuous profile (head of drumpf)

The majority of us can't afford original works of sculpture, but 3D printing allows today's sculptors to work in published editions, like traditional 2D printmakers or novelists. This historically unprecedented reality makes it affordable for people to create a serious sculpture collection. 

It's in this spirit that I offer continuous profile (head of drumpf), a sculpture inspired by Italian Futurism and the rise of fascism in the USA. For the serious collector, a hand-built original gold leaf on plaster version is available — serious inquiries only, through Printables Messenger.

However, you can own a “serial” version that you can print yourself! Please see the description of the original 2016 sculpture and digital rendering at my website williamcromar.com.

Specifications of the original work

• Date of original sculpture: 2016
• Media for original sculpture: orange gold leaf on hydrocal plaster cast from 3D print
• Size: 13.5 h 11 w 11 d
• Exhibition history: CRUXspace, Philadelphia PA, 2016
• Publication history: featured in Learning From Fascism, Ara H. Merjian, Art in America, 1 April 2019

Description and context

Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini) [Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini)]: A continuous profile of the face of Benito Mussolini by Renato Bertelli. © IWM. Original Source

The work is a spoof on Bertelli’s famous Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini) of 1933. It replaces the fascist dictator with an open-mouthed profile of a particular President of the United States, changing the material from a burnished black terra-cotta to a polished orange-gold leaf. The work is produced, not by a manipulation on a potter’s wheel, but rather by rotating a bezier curve about an origin axis.

These changes in content, material, and technique shift the metaphor from an all-knowing, all-seeing superman-machine in the Italian Futurist mode to an all-consuming, idiocentric blowhard screaming at everything, seeing nothing.

On publishing via Printables

When Bertelli created his Profilo, he mass-produced it with the blessings of Mussolini. The mass-marketing of this work allowed Bertelli, an Italian Futurist sculptor, to celebrate the rise of Fascism championed by that art movement. The essay by Marco Moretti on this website is a great explainer.

What I'm doing here, of course, is quite the opposite of celebration. But by propagating my work through 3D printing and the distributed culture of sites like Printables, I'm indulging in the same mass-production impulse Bertelli championed, this time updated for the 21st Century.

Printing the work

Bertelli's Profilo was a full-size portrait, 13.5 inches tall, as is mine for drumpf. However, copies were created at scales, large and small. You get to decide: spend a spool and a half of filament on a full-size bust printed on the XL, or aim for a smaller-scale version, such as Bertelli's 2.5-inch diameter paperweight Profilo, on a Mini.

Either way, supports and seams can be a challenge. Using the scarf seam setting is the best way to deal with the pesky seam — I combined scarf with the random setting to avoid zits on my printed drumpf.

For a smaller-scale print — 8 inches tall or less — I recommend using the “SMALL” file, using organic supports, and printing in one piece. To be clear, this is a relative term — the file is still pretty massive to eliminate polygonal faceting in the print.

For a larger or full-size (13.5 inches tall) version, use the “LARGE” version, available here in a zip file. You can attempt a one-shot print on the XL — technically, it can be done, but it takes about 4 days to print. While my risk tolerance is high (or I wouldn't be a 3D printer!), this is too much for me. Here is the workflow I used to reduce risk and seriously minimize the effects of support material on the quality:

• I imported the LARGE file into PrusaSlicer and ignored the warnings about millions of polygons - slow, yes, but it handled it fine.
• I used the cutting tool at strategic levels where a joint would be hidden — under the chin, the nose, the horrible comb-over, for example. I created 3 dowels for connectors at each cut. 
• I ended up with 5 plates: the largest was 1 day 2 hours and 356 grams, the smallest was 9 hours and 126 grams. The total job was 1216 grams and 3 days 17 hours across the 5 plates.
• Because the pieces with overhangs could be printed upside down, the need for support was dramatically reduced, offsetting the extra material used for top and bottom shells.
• Other settings:
  • As mentioned, I used scarf and random to reduce the seam.
  • 0.2 is OK. I printed at 0.15.
  • Enabled extra perimeters if needed, and for overhangs.
  • Infill: it's a massive volume, so i used lightning at 10% with good results.
  • Top and bottom infill patterns: Concentric.
  • Supports: organic with a first layer expansion of 10 mm, and an overhang threshold of 30%.
  • Dehydrate your filament well. Giant concentric prints have adhesion issues. Sometimes I will set the extrusion multiplier to 1.05 under Filaments in the settings.
• Gel super glue did a brilliant job of assembling, using the dowels created by the slicer for alignment.
• If you want something closer to the original gold-leaf version, some post-processing is necessary: sanding, priming, you know the drill. Paint is a more cost-effective finish, but if you want to go whole-hog and apply gold leaf, expect to outlay about $600 — it's a lot of surface area!
• Experiment! Your mileage may vary, and you may well come up with a better way.
   

Cutting and plating for my version on the XL. Note the size of the dowels: something in the algorithm makes them half as large as they should be! I extracted a dowel as an STL later and brought it in to the plate, scaling it to about 195% and this worked like a charm.
 

A final note for non-FDM printing

I've printed drumpf using laser-sintered plastic at a large scale at a brokerage. A quadrant was printed for approximately $400, and this was used to generate a urethane mold for the original sculpture. A smaller-scale SLS print would be quite handsome.

I've also printed it in UV-curing resin, and the model file is particularly well suited for this.