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Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Does Sculpture Exist? Or The Search for Traction

posted by on January 17 at 18:35 PM

When I started researching this essay about the Olympic Sculpture Park, I found myself thinking, hmm, sculpture—what’s that again? Nobody really uses the term much anymore. Everything is an installation. Or a site-specific work. Or multimedia. “Sculpture” was like something you buried in a trunk years ago and forgot about, and rediscovering it, taking it out, and turning it over in your hands is a surprisingly refreshing thing to do.

In a podcast that’s going online tomorrow morning with former Stranger staffer and Western Bridge director Eric Fredericksen, he talks about visiting the sculpture park for an early tour with the artist Steven Brekelmans. Brekelmans has a piece called Kit Bashing in WB’s new show of the same name. The piece is a drum set made of balsa wood and tissue paper. Spotlit in a corner, the drum set looks like it’s just waiting for the guys in the band to come out from under the stage and play it. Yet it also looks existentially alone and unplayably fragile, the cymbals distorted by the delicacy of the materials (you can’t get that metallic curve from balsa wood and tissue paper).

Walking through the park, Fredericksen says it never occurred to him that Brekelmans was a sculptor in the tradition of the sculptors in the park—several of them titans of the 20th century. Brekelmans may not have considered it, either, though at least for the time he was making that drum set, he was a sculptor. This is a symptom of the “post-medium” condition, in which artists work in any and all mediums. In this world, the term “sculptor” can be considered an insult, a way of diminishing an artist.

Artists are supposed to be defined by their ideas, not their materials, and yet the materiality of art, in truth, is going absolutely nowhere. What else is the art market other than an exchange of art objects? It’s in a frenzy. And there have been recent exhibitions (Thing at the Hammer in 2005 and The Uncertainty of Objects and Things currently up at the Hirshhorn) that propose a renewed respect for the category of sculpture. They defy the conventional wisdom that sculpture, having become anything and everything in the 1960s and 70s, collapsed into nothing and died.

The brilliant writer Johanna Burton (who doesn’t even let the materiality of Duchamp’s readymades off the hook—an issue Rosalind Krauss skirts by categorizing them as not-quite-sculptures) takes on the brave task of defining sculpture in a Hirshhorn podcast recorded Oct. 30 called “The Current State of Sculpture.” Burton contrasts sculpture today to sculpture in the “expanded field” of the 1960s and 70s:

Sculpture was not architecture, not landscape, but increasingly relying on even while challenging both. Today, sculpture may be defined as opposed to other things: a particular aptitude for troubling easy consumption, though of course hardly fully. Sculpture is not painting, one would say, or film or photography, but I actually think the contingencies between these mediums is more complex and perhaps the distinctions between them not so obvious as one might think.

Rather, I’d like to distinguish sculpture precisely from that word that it is usually assumed intimacy with: installation—installation, perhaps the most ubiquitous term in art today. Installation acknowledges the viewer as central to the work, provides or professes to provide or satisfy an experience, where sculpture continues to posit itself as central to the work. It’s glad you’re looking at it, but it really doesn’t need you.

Or, as Miami sculptor Mark Handforth said in the podcast, “installation is like taking the net off a tennis court: where’s the traction?”

Is this search for traction a retrenchment of old-fashioned ideas about sculpture? Or is it just paying attention to activity that’s been going on under the noses of curators and critics for all this time but was out-shouted by the novelty of installation and the rebellious lure of mixing things up? Is sculpture coming back the way painting did? In a different way?

Uncertainty curator Anne Ellegood told me in a phone conversation why she wanted to mount a sculpture show in the first place.

Whenever things start to be a bit of an assumption—that artists are working post-studio, that they don’t really make things anymore, they travel around the world and cook dinner for people, they make web sites, that’s true, and that’s interesting, but I wanted to say, what about all these artists that are interested in creating autonomous objects? What about these artists who really identify themselves as medium-specific, as ‘I’m a sculptor’? What does that mean today? I think the commitment to the object is a really interesting thing. It’s a very traditional thing in some way, but today, it’s almost a riskier position to put yourself in, as opposed to being all over the place.

Thursday at 7 pm, the Frye Art Museum is using the occasion of its Erwin Wurm exhibition to talk about the state of contemporary sculpture. Rene de Guzman, director of visual art at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, is coming to talk with Frye curator Robin Held, and I’ll be interested to hear whether their conversation accommodates any of this old-new tension, or simply reiterates the performative tenets of Wurm’s practice, which in many ways are precisely what Ellegood means by “all over the place.” Wurm’s work is smart, but how does it connect to younger artists like Handforth, or Nathan Mabry or Aaron Curry of LA?

Here are some photographs by Mabry that cracked me up as I was thinking about the sculpture park, and below them, a gallery “setup” by Mark Handforth (he told me he prefers not to call them “installations”).

NM_IYF13_Website.jpg

NM_IYF14_Website.jpg

NM_IYF15_Website.jpg

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RSS icon Comments

1

Jen, you may also enjoy these for a chuckle:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/36211486@N00/sets/462348/

Posted by Noel Black | January 17, 2007 7:22 PM
2

How does a net provide traction? I have never stepped, skidded, or otherwise engaged in frictional interaction with a net. But maybe that's just me.

I am not happy with the idea that what you label the work (other than the decision to classify it as art and not craft or utilitarian object) has such an enormous impact on the work itself. What's wrong with "installation"? Drawing a line between sculpture and installation at least attempts to communicate something; rejecting a perfectly good word in favor of "setup" is just pissy.

Posted by annie | January 17, 2007 7:37 PM
3

I've listened to that podcast a couple of times, and I think you might have erroneously attributed the quotes; I believe it was actually Charles Long who derided installation art, and the grossly arrogant comment about sculpture has Rachel Harrison written allover it-I really think that it was she who said it.
I have to say though, reintroducing some delineation to the mediums is refreshing. I am TIRED of installation art. And I actually get the 'net' comment-there is something to be said for parameters. But, to assert that anything other than the viewer completes a work is horse****.

Posted by dmk | January 18, 2007 6:33 PM
4

Jen - would love to get your comments on the discussion going on over at the Olympic Sculpture Park photo group in Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/36699021@N00/discuss/72157594479395673/

http://thestranger.com/blog/2007/01/sculptr_on_flickr

Posted by B Mully | January 18, 2007 9:40 PM
5

It's rare that you get two writers - in this case one quoting another - so specifically ignorant about their chosen (even professed) focus.

The point of reference here is the hardly obscure essay "Art and Objecthood", by Michael Fried. A nearly thirty year old essay, it should be said.

In attempting to oversimplify and co-opt Fried's central, landmark thesis on what he termed "theatricality", Burton gives uninformed Graves just enough rope to (publicly) hang herself with.

Posted by George Metesky | January 19, 2007 7:54 PM
6

Does any object exist as art without the viewer? I am old enough to have been taught that the function of art is communication, regardless of the medium. This sense of the word communication covers everything from sitcoms to Kurosawa, from Archie to Proust, from Post It notes to air raid shelter signs. Without a viewer, the process of making art is onanistic: satisfying but not communicative.
What makes discussions like these interesting is the tension between intent and perception. This is the crux of the experience of art as culture, and the history of art in the past century can perhaps be seen as a dialog seesawing back and forth between the intent of the artist and the perception of the viewer. There are a variety of argumentative positions on the importance of intent, but without the perception of the viewer I don"t believe you have art.

Posted by David Grill | January 20, 2007 12:02 AM

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