This show was great chance to see iconic sculptures in certain era at one place from figurative iron sculptures in the fifties to vivid constructions in sixties. Moreover, it was after I saw Colour Is at Waddington Custot, which turned to be rare opportunity to review both sculpture and painting in related formal language.
Specifically, three miniatures from Philip King were fascinating. Different formal approaches to add forms to the same initial structure play visual variations. Adding fragments of natural form onto abstract form somehow reminded me Cezanne’s way of painting and his simplified geometric form.
Sculpture in the Sixties, Pangolin London
William Tucker’s work showed the dimension of sculpture in several aspects. It is the unified form of object and plinth in the contrast of material and volume. The title, Subject & Shadow, connotes the formal contrast as well. The surface of both sides contours each other symmetrically like an object and its reflection. The upper part of the sculpture has a flat surface of cutting into aluminium and vivid yellow applied onto the surface. On the contrary, supporting part has the volume of mass under the smooth white surface which almost seems emerged from inside.
Antony Caro’s table piece is not maquette or model for large scale of works yet has the stance of its own. It has playfulness around where the ground is and how it stands on it. The composition of plane, line and volume is visually perfect and somehow guides to an abstract form of landscape and construction site at the same time.
When I visit art museum and gallery, I usually followed the chronological understanding of painting history. Besides, most art museums show how art has evolved focus on painting. Barnett Newman said in the fifties, “Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.” Then it seemed exactly how it was with David Smith’s sculpture when I visited the Abstract Expressionism at Royal Academy. So this book gives a guide to find missing compounds in the meaning of sculpture in consequences as they do in museums for painting.
The Language of Sculpture
Sculpture has evolved and expanded its language in the relations with painter-sculptors and the Cubist. Even since Rodin, it has been explored the possibility of sculpting as well as the boundary of the plinth. So the language of contemporary sculpture wasn’t only the achievement of Duchamp’s objects.
Richard Deacon motivates me by his idea around as much as his work. Like many artists whose work interact with their perceptive observation, Deacon also has particular resonance in early memory of space; in his case, rock-carved Buddhas sculpture in Sri Lanka which “directly carved into the cliff face of nature amphitheatre”, as he recalls. Sculptural composition between cliff and figures in scenery is undoubtedly immanent in his sculpture about a dialogue between interior/exterior of structures.
With his interest in the imperfect relationship between language and perception, he gives a poetic title of works to think about his work in viewer’s perspective. As Robert Prost said “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”, poetry provides room for driving to something else existing in the world in the translation of visual form. When he explains about his work, Tall Tree In The Ear, in the interview by Penelope Curtis, poetry also embedded in his making process of bending the curves in the same radius, laminating plywood or MDF and how the flexibility becomes rigid again. It is like drawing in the air literally. He observes glueing process when it squeezing out between the things then talks about the way it produces a dialogue from inside out. Observing it in terms of time, the glued side is finished by being unfinished and the clean side is unfinished by inviting addition, potential extending according to Deacon. That makes his lines like drawing in meditation and even when he works with plane sheets of wood; it emphasises lines defining air between inside and outside of the wood.
Richard Deacon
The chair is furniture with function, architecture with structure, personal territory occupying small space, and at times, it presents absence-presence.
“The body extends the chair, and it looks like a centaur.”
The Chair
Photo: Stephanie Berger
The part of performance by Baryshnikov devoted to 40 poems of Brodsky
Baryshnikov/ Brodsky, Apollo Theater, 07 May 17
The image of Baryshnikov stretching his body on the chair in abandoned greenhouse led me to reflect chair objectively and ontologically as a sculptural form. The body with chair transforming into a centaur is the moment holding the figure in the framework of, as Deleuze and Guattari say in What Is Philosophy?, "the flesh, the house and the universe-cosmos” to become artwork. Also, by extending its figure into space, it was visually associated with Boccioni’s “Development of A Bottle in Space”. Only the difference is becoming a centaur is by open space out of the chair when Boccioni’s enclose space within itself.
A chair is a small architecture of one’s intimate space but as it places in the actual architecture, it is both private and public. Nicole Wermers in her show (2015) put fur jackets back of the series of untitled chairs in order to claim public area to personal space. A chair is a well-suited object with her interest in how small twist on an object affects the status of the object.
Like drawers, the chair becomes object and space with function especially in the relation to Bauhaus and modern design of furniture. Its function as furniture for the purpose of sitting associates with gravity as sculpture does for its support. As to artist’s chair, it has often been the evidence of trace, the object of ontological absence becoming the presence, which leads chair to involve frequent subject matter in art.
In Asian culture, sitting on chairs was once modern scenery of domesticity. When sitting on the floor, chairs become the part of inner architecture to explore with eye-contouring. As a child, series of the chair makes expanded space around the frame of them for lying on, hiding around, crawling down and building space. It becomes the architecture for physical experience.
Hanok is a term for Korean traditional house. Unlikely Do Ho Suh, Hanok is not ordinary space of living anymore for most people due to the building cost and modernisation of architecture. Nonetheless, the imagery of Hanok evokes vague nostalgia to many people whether they have resided in the traditional house or not. John Berger suggests the meaning of home as the centre of the world where a vertical line crossed with horizontal line upwards to the sky, downwards to the underworlds and leading across the earth to other places. In the architectural structure of Hanok, I see the spatial quality that a vertical line crossed with a horizontal line.
Principally, the idea of architecture in Hanok is not against the scenery of landscape. Whether it has a different style in the house, temples or palace, it aims to become the part of the natural landscape. The structure of Hanok invites the scenery inside the house like a series of landscape painting as if Cezanne said that the landscape thinks itself in him.
Maru is the unique space in the architecture of Hanok. It has the same role as the living room but not the same space. It is wooden floor communal area opened to an entrance. It is inside the house but opened to outside. So it is inside but outside on the same pedestal level as rooms, not as the ground. When I entered the room for Do Ho Suh’s film: Passage/s and watched sitting on the floor, it gave me the similar perspective in the eyesight. Space experience with three screens around viewers is not alienated but familiar. The noise around the corner and cross-editing of the different places resonate his memory of space in the house, Hanok.
Hanok
photo courtesy Suk Jae Yim
photo courtesy @galleriesnow.net
The missing point for me is in the causal relations from Picasso and the Cubist to expanded meaning of sculpture. That was the era of materials, the making process and subject matter becoming blurred. Also, lines and planes are included and solely worked. Sculpture is not mainly about the realisation of volume anymore. Matisse also structured his sculpture from painting background the way of “adding material, not structuring anatomy”. The language of painting into the language of sculpture has been a consequence since Daumier and Degas. What fascinates me in the sculptural quality of the Cubist is still-life in dailies like window, table and shelves composing with components of the interiors like ceilings and walls. Still-life extends their stance into space like a chair, plays non-functional furniture and translates architecture into sculpture.