An essay on sculpture

by WILLIAM TUCKER

“It is this durability which gives the things of the world their relative independence form men who produced and used them, their ‘objectivity’ which makes them withstand, ‘stand against’, and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users. From this viewpoint the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that – in contradiction to the Heraclitean saying that the same man can never enter the same stream – men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and table.”
Hannah Arendt, “The Human Condition”.

“Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, – possibly: Pillar, Tower? …”
RM Rilke, “Duino Elegies”, Ninth Elegy.

Studio International, 1969, Volume 177, No 907: 12-13

Published in Modern British Sculpture, pages 186–187, catalogue to the exhibition Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 22 January–7 April 2011

The emergence of a kind of sculpture in the last few years that is distinguished from previous sculpture by two main characteristics – that it stands on the ground rather than on a base, and is made of easily available “industrial” rather than expensive conventional materials – raises certain questions about the nature and aims of sculpture, and its relation to reality.

In effect sculpture has become part of the world of artifacts which we inhabit, marked off only by the stated intention of the artist and the context in which the work is seen. Sculpture has always been literally object, in terms both of its three-dimensionality and size: but its subject matter, material, and physical status have tended to remove the work form its object-reality, to make it something rare, special or superhuman: and to mythify the sculptor himself into a semi-divine creator, giving “life” to inert matter.

It is the matter-of-fact “objectness” of sculpture that has become in recent years its prime feature. Of all the arts sculpture is the most liable to human use or disuse. Its continual presence in the world, its permanence as three-dimensional thing, obstruction, if not as valuable and permanent material, makes the fact of its initial coming into existence and subsequent use or disposal a perennial physical problem. By contrast architecture embraces more immediate human function, is capable of development or conversion with changing human needs: whereas poetry, drama, painting, music, film, are essentially occasional arts, to be read, seen, performed when demand arises: otherwise easily shelved, physically out of the way, to be remembered or forgotten as subsequent needs determine. Sculpture is real, part of the physical world, in a manner not shared by other arts, and it suffers the advantages and disadvantages of its position in reality. It is essentially a contingent art, subject to those conditions of reality, especially light, which affects all objects. In the past the monument has been the result of man’s heroic effort to defy these conditions, to make a dominant object whose physical presence will, imagery apart, suppress the competing presence of ambient men and things.

Object-existence, object-life, constitutes a kind of web or net overlaying, underlaying, or entangled with the lives of modern urban men. Objects come into being, multiply and divide: change hands, change uses: metamorphose, submerge, emerge: are subject to life and use processes of man, natural processes of wear and erosion, oxidization and decay: gradual and violent change; accident; human design, modification and redesign; families, tribes, nations, of objects; simultaneous existence of generations of objects, ancestors and descendants; massed, ordered, dispersed; static or in motion; all in a state of continual existence in time and space, constituting a vast process, the complexity of which rivals that of the natural world. The world of objects has been created by man and could not long survive without him; nonetheless it has the characteristics of a separate, identifiable world-complex, the internal processes of which are surely as relevant to us who inhabit it, as those of the natural world were to pre-industrial man. Modern man increasingly objectifies his environment, and the object-nature of sculpture suggests a role in imaginatively articulating this process.

Since the Renaissance painting has functioned as the major medium for change and renewal in plastic ideas. Sculpture has limped behind, virtually paralyzed by restrictions of imagery – the human figure – and material that had remained constant since the Greeks. In the late nineteenth century Rodin discovered that the figure could be dismembered, fragmented even, and in the process acquire a new unity: the power of the part, the figure-element as real in itself, was released. Rodin’s successor, Brancusi, developed the portrait bust – head-as-object – into objects that were absolute, discrete from the world, with only an oblique reference to the figure.

Simultaneously sculptors learned from the Cubist painters that no material and no subject was sacred. Sculpture could be made from anything, about anything. Permanence considered in the strength of the idea, not in the material. Sculpture could be literally made, rather than carved, or modelled and cast: out of the same materials and by similar processes that characterized any commonplace artifact in the world of things.

Nonetheless, the rich possibilities of a new subject matter, new materials and the consequent re-appraisal of the kind of articulation sculpture might have, remained largely untapped after the heroic period of Cubism, until recent years. The persistence of figure as a basic mode of articulation, the use of bronze, carved stone and wood, as the proper materials of a serious sculpture, limited the potential extension of sculpture both in itself, in terms of its own possible structure, and into the world, in terms of a possible new relation with the environment. Picasso’s Glass of absinthe, Boccioni’s Development of a bottle in space, Duchamp’s Bottle rack revealed that sculpture could take both form and content from the object world. Subsequently the Surrealists made objects; but they were for the most part consciously animated or distorted. It was not until the last few years that a sculpture started to emerge that disowned the monumental, the precious, the animate – all these qualities that tend to remove sculpture from the object-world. It rested directly on the ground – was not elevated on a pedestal – and was made from inexpensive, easily available material, the quality of which was unimportant except insofar as it bodied the formal quality of the object, and which in any case was usually concealed by an opaque skin of paint.

The sculpture object was finally freed from the residual structure of the human figure, the inhibitions of expensive materials and complex craft processes. It could be an object among objects, privileged only by its unique configuration, its lack of recognized type or function. Its unity would be its own, not that given by an existing model in reality.

If the bright morning of those hopes has somewhat dimmed, it may well be because neither the artists themselves, nor those who made themselves responsible for publicizing and distributing the work, recognized the revolution that had occurred. The scale and availability of the new work was public, but its content was private. Society had not asked for it and there was no place for it, except for the non-world of galleries, museums and circulating exhibitions. The sculptors themselves were hostile to the problems of public communication, rightly suspicious of the motives of those public organizers whose mission is to cram new feet into old boots. Sculpture in public places, sculpture and architecture, sculpture for schools and hospitals, playground sculpture, festival sculpture, sculpture in gardens, sculpture as environment: anything to make the new work tame and acceptable, to drain of its real power to subvert a comfortable world-view. And sure enough new armies of bronze generals and marble nymphs disguised in steel geometry and vermiform plastic have emerged to reap the harvest of a dead tradition, a temporary and invented public art.

For there is no public realm in our time to which a public sculpture might give visual purpose. Among the arts sculpture is peculiarly prone, because of its literal objectness, to a kind of entropy in terms of human habituation and inertia, both in the artist and spectator: that is, the physical object has a greater initial immediacy than a painting but correspondingly tends to lose its presence with time, simply because it is physically “there” and familiar. It does now seem that the pedestal, tired old convention that it was, did at least secure the “internality” of the object: it is essential that sculpture continue to act inwards, as well as outwards on the spectator and the environment, however spectacular the external effects may be, if it is to remain an art capable of expressing in continually new terms man’s imaginative relation with the physical world.