modernism, freedom, sculpture

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Modernism, Freedom, Sculpture Author(s): William Tucker Source: Art Journal, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter, 1977-1978), pp. 153-156Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776186Accessed: 29-08-2015 09:22 UTC

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William Tucker, Passage, pine, 90" high, 1976.

Modernism, Freedom, Sculpture WILLIAM TUCKER

The practice of sculpture at this point in the decline of modernism is open to criticism from almost every quarter. For the moment critics of all tendencies have joined with

popular philistinism in asking the question "What's it all for, anyway?" and apparently received a dusty answer.

I am not here to present a case for the defense of

sculpture-some sculpture-now. This article has to do with criticism, not with making apologies or justifications for this or that kind of work. But the persistence and renewal of activity within sculpture, against the grain of history-this phenomenon clearly offends many observers. The question they ask-"What's it all for?" is a plain one, and an honest one. It demands an honest answer. The artist is asked, not "What are you doing?" which implies that the questioner is in ignorance and wants an explanation, and further that there is already an understanding between questioner and artist that what he is doing is worthwhile and merely needs interpretation. No, the sculptor is asked "What is what he has already done for?" Here the questioner no longer pre- tends ignorance: the thing is finished, already done, the questioner "knows" it, has seen such things before. There

is no room for interpretation. So the questioner, his conven- tional role elided, asks "What is it for?" that is, "What is its use?"

Plainly, this is not meant literally: the questioner does not

really believe the object has a physical or mechanical purpose, as has a piece of furniture or a machine. He knows this thing is a sculpture, there is no secret about it, rather the opposite: the thing is proudly and obstinately a sculpture. So the question is really a far more general one: what need is there for sculpture. He asks how does this thing which he knows, or thinks he knows, "sculpture," relate to "reality" -the needs of history, social needs, political needs, and so on.

The fact is, practically every object and every activity in the modern industrial world has a purpose, a use. They answer a need, they are "for" something else. The only things for which this principle of utility would surely not obtain-works of art-are increasingly made and regarded in the light of this principle. In the heroic age of early modernism, an ideal of completeness and self-containedness was set up for the art object that would remove it from all

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possibility of use. Such works, so their makers thought, would generate their own authority, an authority not de-

pendent for example on a represented subject. The subject was first neutralized (by the Impressionists), then, apparently, disposed of. With its roots in the world severed, the modernist work was free to ,flourish independently. But

paintings, and more especially sculptures, differ fundamen-

tally from music or literature in that the work is the physical object. The object has a specific location in space and a duration in time unknown to the poem. Paintings and sculpture exist somewhere, are someone's possession. This inevi- table characteristic of being and belonging has thrown doubt on the genuine capacity for freedom of the sculptor or

painter in modern Western society. The greatest artists can be depicted as the servants of the rich and the powerful, implicitly supporting the social and political structure in which they lived, however much they protested against it, even within their work.

Rilke chose a work of sculpture, and a contained, apparently "autonomous" sculpture at that, as the vehicle for the realization of human freedom, in his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo," written in 1906:

We knew not his unheard-of head Wherein the eye-apples ripened But his torso still glows like a street lamp In which his gaze, merely turned down low Persists and gleams. Or else the curve Of the chest couldn't blind you, and in that twist Of the loins there'd be no smile, returning To the centre of virility, Or else this stone would stand short, disfigured, Under the shoulders' transparent plunge And would not glint like the skin of beasts And would not explode from all its edges Like a star: For here's no place That does not see you. You must change your life.

Of course it is the poem which makes the sculpture say "You must change your life." But there is no intrinsic reason

given beyond its inaccessibility why sculptures, physical objects, should not also become as effective vehicles for action as books or plays. That it could happen, as in the

inspirational role of Tatlin's Tower for the progressive artists of post-1918 Europe, was recognized by the Soviet Govern- ment, who subsequently took such pains to remove Tatlin from history-not by destroying him and his work as the Nazis might have done-but by quietly and effectively can-

celling his public existence, "as though he had never been." In practice the physical existence of the art object re-

mained a useful hypothesis for modernist art. Many writers and artists could claim it in the knowledge that their own field was comfortably secure from the contingencies of the actual physical world, the world you and I live in, move in, and see in. One might have imagined that the sculptors especially would have recognized this danger (or opportunity) for their art, the most physically exposed of all. Yet only Brancusi, and perhaps marginally Matisse and Giacom- etti, seem to have understood the dilemma the modernist

assumption had created for sculpture. Their contemporaries and successors as one man-including the constructivists- continued to pretend as sculptors have always pretended

that a sculpture is not really a thing, that it is not really in the world, but is somehow protected and reserved by being an image of something else.

Brancusi alone confronted the problem. In the face of it he did not reject the practice of making sculpture altogether, as did Tatlin and Duchamp, at the same time discarding its

representing function: rather he brought the business of

representation and the fact of sculpture's physical existence

together, with infinite patience and subtlety, until at the

great monuments at Turgu Jiu he achieved a marvelous

equation between them. If these sculptures are the touch- stone for many artists working now, it is because they resist

specific interpretation, yet attain a grandeur and nobility that recalls but does not imitate the greatest sculpture of the

past. The Table, Gate, and Column are still, at the level of

recognition, objects of use. There is no question as to what

they are: the question what they are for is not avoided: rather transcended. They simply, are: and they are what they are.

The silence of Brancusi's last 20 years can be variously explained. Yet even had he the physical opportunity how could he have equaled or surpassed Turgu Jiu without

abandoning the protection of the already existing things within which the drive to reality had become manifest?

Now, 40 years after the realization of this enigma, the utter lack of necessity for sculpture, celebrated by Duchamp and Tatlin, is a commonplace. What then is it for? If I were

offering a defense, in formalistic art-historical terms, I could

say that sculpture has lagged so far behind painting, for

example, that there are any number of holes to be plugged before sculpture can develop as various and articulate a formal language as painting. But-contrary to general belief-I am not and have never been a formalist, and the idea that the function of works of art should primarily be to advance a language of art seems to me increasingly uncon-

vincing. All we have in this situation, if we put aside the arguments

from language and from history, is that acknowledgment of the truth in the question: that sculpture is in the world, and that in the world's terms it is useless, for nothing.

What the conscious persistence of sculpture now might show is that there are artists who believe that sculpture has

nothing necessarily to do with modernism and can do without the threadbare cloak of its idea, which was generated in painting and poetry: that sculpture's relation to man and the world is utterly different from that of painting and

poetry. For sculpture, existence, worldly existence, physical existence, precedes the idea. L. B. Alberti, writing in the

early Renaissance, with an unprecedented imaginative leap, described the origin of sculpture thus: "I believe that the arts of those who attempt to create images and likenesses from bodies produced by Nature, originated in the following way. They probably occasionally observed in a tree trunk or clod of earth and other similar inanimate objects certain outlines in which . . . something very similar to the real faces of Nature was represented. They began therefore by diligently observing and studying such things, to try to see whether they could not add, take away or otherwise supply whatever seemed lacking to effect and complete the true likeness . ."

In other words the sculptor recognizes the existence of the lump of wood, earth, or stone-the thing-by perceiving

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in it an image which he then modifies. Now, if we strip away from this process the element of representation, the image, we are left with the original act, the act of recognition. The

thing's being is exposed: the making of sculpture is then not

synthetic-a construction, a structure, as of buildings-but rather a recovery of recognition, an uncovering and a disclo- sure of being.

The everyday world is so full, so closely packed with the known and the nameable that it requires the utmost pressure and effort to find a gap, a fissure, and slip something new, something unprecedented, into existence. Of course I am not speaking literally here: at a superficial level nothing is easier to make than a coherent, "convincing" three-dimen- sional object, and to set it un among other objects, as

sculpture. When I talk of the close packing of objects, I am

speaking of the resistance of the physical, tangible, known world to something as physical, as tangible, but unknown. This new and unaccounted-for existence poses a threat. What is at stake is the perceptual and conceptual coherence of each man's world.* When the unfamiliar is glimpsed, quickly give it a familiar name. The psychic mechanism is as old as man: and it applies equally and everywhere to artists as well as spectators: to create likeness, rather than acknowl- edge unlikeness-which is, the new.

What sculpture can learn from the experience of modernism is that sculpture itself, once it had recognized itself, has no particular container, no announcement as it were of its own arrival. Both architecture and painting (and music for that matter) are in some sense withdrawn or protected from the sudden and violent intrusion into consciousness offered by sculpture when the habitual flow through consciousness of objects carrying habitual meanings is suddenly chal- lenged, without the expectation created by the fact of the wall or the rectangular canvas, the fact of the building. What is the fact of sculpture? There is no fact in advance of the particular sculpture. It goes without saying that the vast proportion of contemporary sculptures never even attain this preliminary status, but succumb to an idea of sculpture, that might offer the framework of support painting and architecture enjoy.

Someone will no doubt object at this point that this framework is exactly what I have advocated in the past-the "condition" of sculpture, the "language." Well, if I have insisted on the conditions for sculpture's existence, the

language which sculpture speaks-it is not to lock sculpture into one style, one material, one structure. On the contrary, I have simply said that for sculpture to be sculpture it must arise from certain conditions, and the way in which sculpture has appeared under these conditions in the last century (it is the centenary of the first showing of Rodin's Age of Bronze next year) may be thought of as constituting the beginnings of a "language." But the achievement of Rodin and Brancusi is no more explained by the language account of history any more than the achievement of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart is

explained by the development of musical notation and or-

* Nietsche in Twilight of the Idols, page 51, wrote "to trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying, and

gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown-the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states .. ."

chestral responses in the 18th century. Or for that matter that any of these instances can be "explained" by the social and economic conditions of the cultures in which they were made. That both these ludicrously narrow accounts should

polarize the discussion of art today seems to me due if anything to the dominance that criticism has acquired over the making of art in the last 20 years, that alienation of art from the conditions of its being.

The critic concerns himself with the work as it is, its effect: the artist with its origin. For this reason I first tried to redress the balance of critical writing about modern sculpture by calling attention to its making, about which I knew

something from my own experience, perhaps something to which other writers on sculpture have generally not had access. But this approach I realized was only an approach: to deal with the coming into being of sculpture and to

ignore the nature and problems of its being could be at best a limited and technical venture.

So, if I mentioned earlier sculpture's present and necessary exposure, this is firstly to be understood in relation to the general fear of exposure among sculptors. I spoke a moment

ago of sculpture concealing itself as an image. Today, instead of the classical images of men and women, gods and animals, or the images of perfect order with which the constructivists for example replaced them, sculpture presents itself as an articulation of architecture or landscape: while the propo- nents of formal abstraction resist exposure by the erection of certain conventions-for example, in material and structure-into immutable limits: within which only "small discov- eries," as Peter Fink has described them, are possible. Each of these postures answers the question ("what is it for?") in advance by postulating a general idea for sculpture before its particular existence. Sculptors have sought essential foun- dations for their own art, as the lump for Rodin, the block for Hildebrand, and their successors in direct modeling and carving: the ground and the unit of repetition for the sculpture of the last 15 years. Yet modern sculpture has failed to come up with a final and irreducible form-the need for which I suspect springs from a desire to find a basic structural equivalent for the figure-and must fail if it is to survive because there is no such form.

When I began by saying that on all sides sculpture is exposed today, this is what I meant: it has no significant social use, nor has it had for the last two centuries. It has no aesthetic "use," if that is a possible term, because the logical and inexorable development of avant-gardism has simply declared its existence redundant. And attempts to find an appropriate aesthetic niche within which sculpture might hide until the storm has past are doomed, because sculpture can find no final formal ground on which to build a convinc-

ing justification of its continued existence. To put it simply: the practice of sculpture today is unnec-

essary and unjustified. This does not mean that it is unjusti- fiable: the point is that before attempting to find any justification this bare fact must be recognized. Of course, it may be that the practice of painting, of the visual arts as a whole, is equally vulnerable. But the redundancy of sculpture is more obvious, and felt more acutely. Whether sculpture goes or stays, its fate will be decided first. The question is- will the sculptors, the makers of sculpture, take any part in

deciding its fate? To imagine that they can do so by simply

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continuing to make it, so long as they can find some support for doing so-some patron, some critic, some gallery, some school-seems to me pure self-deception. The issue is not fundamentally a social or an economic one: nor is it one of

psychology, or even of aesthetic. If sculpture is to continue, that is if it is to have an

authentic existence, not merely a contingent existence, then it must demonstrate in itself its own need to exist. It is not merely a matter of being, much less of surviving, but of a questioned and an affirmed being, because being itself is at stake-that is, a conception of being that extends beyond the mere fabrication of artifacts.

The future of sculpture is not an aesthetic problem. The

necessity for sculpture is not an aesthetic necessity. The problems of relation-relation within the individual work, relation of the work to the onlooker-are, considered in themselves, mechanical and trivial. The only relation worth

considering is the relation of the work to reality: that is, the world in the most general sense, not the particular place, particular onlooker, particular society, but the individual

sculpture's relation to reality. And as the conscious individual realizes his "form," that is his self and his identity in reflection, in decision and in action, the individual sculpture reaches out for and gains identity in its own form over

against reality. Considerations of structure, scale and material, and so on, the physical and perceptual properties of the work, cannot be separated and analyzed, except in terms of the works answering its exposure to reality in its identity. Moreover, to reduce sculpture to any one of these formal

properties, even with the best intentions, to gain a better

understanding of what it is, and how it came to be there, is

inevitably to misconceive it in terms used and even contami- nated in other areas immediately adjoining or superficially analogous-painting, architecture, music, engineering, the

study of perception, etc. What is urgently demanded is the introduction and estab-

lishing of terms appropriate to sculpture's present situation, which will throw light on that situation, what is original and

challenging in it, and which might move both the ambition of sculptors and the perception of sculpture from the technical to the human.

For example, the terms "exposure" and "identity" carry an understood human meaning, but there is no full equivalent for either in the present critical vocabulary. Terms such as "open-ness," "spatiality," or "form," "originality," cover

only a small part of the implication of "exposure" and "identity," and moreover create expectations quite foreign to the work conceived in these terms.

One word which has dropped out of use completely in connection with sculpture, since the time of Rodin, is "statue." One can easily appreciate how this came about: how, with the concentration of modernism on the technical, the term which describes process as well as product-"sculpture," the making and the thing made-became the universal term: even when the kind of making-carving-had no relation to the actual process implied by the word. The use of the word "statue" has become equally indistinct; it is restricted now to denote pre-modern, usually Western, public figure sculpture.

In consequence we have no word which embodies for

present-day sculpture its standing, its being rather than its

becoming, how it is rather than how it got to be there. The statue is a thing set upright: it stands against gravity and

against sight. We encounter here the implication of resistance, a with-standing. And a standing in time, a continued resistance to earth's pull, against which structure is given meaning; a ground of stability, a sufficient permanence to meet, embrace, and give form to the onlooker's perception. But the fact of structure like the fact of perception, however

objectively pursued, will not of itself yield sculptural truth. The sculpture forms the median term, a physical and perceptual link between the human onlooker and the world. It is

responsive to physical and perceptual laws but is reducible to neither.

If sculpture is to transcend the merely physical, the merely perceptual, or any mere tension or interaction between them, it will be by becoming a metaphor for the human. The existence of sculpture reflecting human existence, sculpture's condition reflecting the human condition. Sculpture's exposure and aloneness, its identity and its resistance, its

ambiguity and its decision-every aspect of its being can and must be identified in terms of human experience. Inevitably rooted in the physical and perceptual, sculpture to survive must recover the mythical. U

William Tucker, a sculptor, is author of Early Modern Sculpture, and is currently teaching at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He is now a resident of Canada.

This article grew out of a conference in May 1976 held at the A.I.R. Gallery, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, England.

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modernism, freedom, sculpture

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