The Language of Sculpture
To understand my 3D objects in terms of sculpture fed my making process in the final term. I have been looking into contemporary fine art through the trajectory of the history of painting so far; there was no principle for me to get the idea about sculpture except the fact it is 3D artwork. Due to my 2D background, I have considered my working progress in the relation of painting and collage. Sculpture, for me, is more about the physical statement. It is, sort of, figurative presence out of a lump like Rodin’s Balzac and Fontana’s Madonna. I didn’t know comprehensible causation of the shift from modern sculpture to the contemporary. Also, the structure of language itself gave me pause. I wondered the reason that only sculpt-ure- has the suffix with the meaning of function or result while another traditional form of art has the form of gerund imposing the act.
"Just as the language of poetry is partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man, it is very conceivable that the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain kinds of thing-languages,
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For an understanding of artistic forms, it is of value to attempt to grasp them all as languages and to seek their connection with natural languages.”
Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and On the Language of Man
The Room Acquires Forms In The Air. I
+Sculpture in the Sixties, Pangolin London gallery
The exhibition showed the transformation of sculpture in the age of postmodernism. It was an opportunity to see figurative iron sculptures from the fifties to vivid constructions in sixties together at one place. The use of material such as fibreglass, metal and how to build them, smooth textures with bright colour on the surface, refined lines in construction rather than mass and volume which were optimistic rather than heavy showed the new visual language of sculpture in the young generation after the war. (▷further writing)
+Richard Deacon and new British sculpture
Then Richard Deacon impressed me more with the poetic aspect of the use of his material, the relationship between space and structure, exterior and interior, and his inspiration in the gap between language and meaning. (▷further writing)
Around 1980 after the era of minimal and conceptual art, new aesthetics brought in sculpture and traditional method and material came back. Sculptural form often engaged with the literal object itself (e.g., Bill Woodrow), on the other hand, it explored the figurative or metaphoric imagery of form in a poetic or sensual way. (e.g., Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor)
-structure the condition of sculptural possibility from the age of Rodin to the logical shift into the postmodern era
-How sculpture expands its category by reaching downward to absorb the pedestal into itself vertically as well as by suspending or intervening into landscape and construction site horizontally
-Explore negative condition of space from Rodin’s Gates of Hell to Robert Morris’ Green Gallery Installation, and Notation of non-landscape and non-architecture implies the ontological absence of sculpture
-Embrace the medium of photography as the category of a marked site on the purpose of mapping architectural experience
“Sculpture is rather only one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities. And one has thereby gained the “permission” to think these other forms.”
+Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field
+William Tucker, The Language of Sculpture
Even though I looked into British sculptures and a critical writing by Krauss, I still felt something is missing in my understanding of expanded sculptural form. In tutorial before Easter Holiday, Mark pointed that my work reminds sort of chair. I wondered at first but it makes sense with the fact that I have been intrigued by the modern design of the chair. Then thinking of chair helped me to associate with furniture and architecture in sculptural form. (▷further writing)
Mark recommended to read The Language of Sculpture and see how William Tucker interprets Duchamp’s object in making a sculpture to think about what makes the real object be the object or non-object/ what makes it can be sculpture. (▷further writing) This book helped me to see the gradual shift in the new language of sculpture, not an unexpected leap of the category of the term. Consequently, I start thinking to sculpt fictional objects inspired by furniture/ architecture in daily life.
2D>3D
-painting, cut-out in the role of sculpture
My process starts with directly shaping planes like Matisse’s cut-out then adding more structures by assembly/glue them, still, it is sculpture. Therefore I decided to develop them further in sculptural qualities of 2D material rather than to hesitate on the verge of terms.
When Easter Holiday begins, I did gallery tour and get to know about the artist Matt Paweski at Herald Street Gallery who is working with plywood and aluminium (aluminium is the material I want to explore afterwards). Interestingly, he also often used a rigid framework and find sculptural qualities through planar and linear approach. However, he reveals final form through many drawings. According to him, the drawing acts as a template, both literally and conceptually for the object he makes from them. For me, developing final form is usually making the process itself. It is cutting and adding more elements on the initial structure inspired by spatial qualities from ordinary materials, objects and structures. It is kind of simplified process of destructing and reconstructing from planes until final form is determined as if painting reveals the illusion of forms by piling up colours on a surface. It is for expanding space in/around objects.
Sculptural qualities of real objects
--architecture and furniture
While I have interests across different fields like architecture, design and fashion in the structural aspect, I didn’t specifically reference them so far. I concerned where the fine line is between fine art and design or something else. I unconsciously set the rule in the hierarchy of genres and what my work should be like concerning with already blurred border in fine art. Still, some of my works bring to a particular era of furniture design or an architectural model.
Structures and spatial qualities of inner architecture in the studio
I wanted to look facts in the face and embrace it as investigating sculptural qualities of real objects.
So I planned to create inscape of studio space derived from furniture and architectural structure in it. Choosing the reason that objects related to actual daily space on behalf of the objects from the certain era like Bauhaus, I wanted to make them living rather than undead for final work. (When my flatmate saw the picture of my work Down The Stairs, she said it is like “Berlin in winter”.) Also, Bauhaus was for people’s living in their time.
“… a tension between haptic implication and optical distance, and sometimes an ambivalence between a social offering and a cool withholding. Both kinds of ambiguity are active in The Dailies, and they are heightened by the ontological ambiguity of the constructed motifs.”
Hal Foster, Dailiness According to Demand, 2016 October Magazine
Thinking to show as a group of work, I tried to make every piece of work count in their own right rather than using a number of repetitive forms or overwhelming size which was my initial idea for the final piece.
Consequently, I decided to keep the same scale of human-sized furniture and work on several pieces at the same time.
Gestalt
-Curve, Cut the corner, asymmetric form
Reflecting on the first plywood piece, Down The Stairs, it could remake easily in anywhere because all the components are rectangular and I left schematic drawings with measurement afterwards. It doesn't mean that I am against the idea of post-production, but I had to revise my frame due to my affection for labour-based process and expectation to find energy in the process. I cut the corner out of rigid rectangular frame for the air to breath in space. I used curve like shaping paper with scissors but in this case, with ban saw. Especially for the curve, I thought the fluid shape of objects from visual reference: Nicole Wermers’ Awning Sculpture and Anthea Hamilton’s reoccurring digital transformation of legs, and simply, spring.
Material and method
-DIY with plywood
-Carpentry machines I used: ban saw, circular saw, jig saw, sander.
I have the strong attachment with wood at the moment, especially plywood. I intrigued by its property: its grains, layered planes, flexible/solid, nature colour and texture, which associates with my painting background as well as functional material for furniture and architecture.
“The wood works simultaneously as structure, as plane (representing fragments of the dismembered picture plane), and as volume…”
William Tucker, The Language of Sculpture
The layered sides and various grains of plywood suggest the possibility of space extension from it like a contour map.
Balance and Gravity- Axis, stacking
Assembly- glueing, Joint, puzzle
With a practical problem of sharing studio space, I avoided fixed final form of sculpture. As a result, I spontaneously think about how to assembly them and to make it stand using gravity and considering the axis of structures. Furthermore, using balance and assembly kept making process and structure at some degree of simplicity. The other way, it becomes sort of strategy to develop added structures for some pieces of work.
Bringing functional compartments into a visual form of sculpture is also modern language in sculpture. According to William Tucker in his text of The Language of Sculpture, through Picasso and Cubist construction, it became accepted “to literally ‘make’ a piece of sculpture to assemble it out of parts, as a craftsman would a table or a chair.”
+The sculptural in the realm of illusion
Sculptural form in poetry
A passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude
Apart from its actual contents in the novel, the transfigured image of Remedios out of ambience, nature and objects is described ethereally and poetically, in a way of revealing sculptural form around spaces. It came to my mind and brought poetic inspiration in making process.
“The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever.”
Sculptural form in painting
David Batchelor, Colour Chart 58 (2012)
This Series of work by David Batchelor especially caught my eye because it is sculpture itself projected onto the 2D surface. A red volumetric lump directly poured on top of simple black rectangular signifying a plinth. Its unique texture created by the property of the liquid material as it dries also let it be sculpture.
