"Exhibition Review: Augusto, Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome.” Sculpture Journal 23.3 (2014): 403-04

403 | Sculpture Journal 23.3 [2014]

Augusto Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, 18 October 2013–9 February 2014; Grand Palais, Paris, 19 March–13 July 2014

Eugenio La Rocca, Claudio Parisi Presicce, Annalisa Lo Monaco, Cécile Giroire and Daniel Roger (eds), Augusto (exh. cat.) Milan, Electa, 2013, 333 pp., 385 illustrations, 32 euros. ISBN 978883709607-0

Like the last exhibition in Rome to Augustus, in 1937–38, the Augusto exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale celebrated an event: his death, the 2,000th anniversary of which was on 19 August 2014. The exhibition was one of numerous cultural events, conferences and exhibitions on the first Roman emperor (http://augustus2014.com/2014-events/). This exhibition (also shown in Paris with the title ‘Moi, Auguste, Empereur de Rome’) impressively drew objects from the Vatican Museums and other museums throughout Italy and abroad including the Louvre, British Museum, Kunsthistorisches in Vienna and Ny Carlsberg in Copenhagen. Despite the extraordinary loan of key objects, the design and layout of the show in Rome missed an opportunity to highlight new interpretive modes of display, especially for ancient Roman sculpture and material culture. However, the

exhibition provided an ideal opportunity for scholars to study the objects closely and make comparisons. The lighting, for the most part, was well adjusted for viewing the varying surface qualities of the marbles: from powdery, weathered (or acid-bathed) surfaces to those that were highly polished or painted.

The first section of the exhibition presented portraiture, from colossal and full-length statues to heads and gems. The second section included sculptures related to cult images, polychrome terracotta panels from public buildings,

fragments found in the Forum of Augustus, silverware, including pieces from the Louvre’s Boscoreale treasure, red ware and their press-moulds, the so-called Grimani Reliefs brought together for the first time, and the Medinaceli/Actium Reliefs. Media and typology determined the placement of objects (all portrait heads together, all gems together, all silver together, etc.). A chance was thus missed to juxtapose diverse three-dimensional objects to evoke the interaction between the various arts of the Augustan world.

In terms of display, one of the most successful rooms was dedicated to portrait heads. Nothing frustrates scholars of Roman portraiture more than not being able to see these in profile and from the back. The room opened with the fragmentary bronze equestrian statue of Augustus from Athens, exhibited in Italy for the first time. Then, chronologically related portraits were set together at varying angles and installed on curved island bases in the centre of the room. The movement of visitors activated the portraits: as heads appeared to turn previously obscured profiles came into view, as if looking through a crowd. The placement allowed visitors to move around the portraits, providing a stunning panorama of the most important visages from the time of Augustus: the emperor himself, Livia, and his extended family. Agrippa’s portrait from the Louvre stood out in its rugged vigour when viewed across from the soft rendering of Pompey from Venice. The striking differences in quality, expression and facial details in the various portraits of Octavian/Augustus were also showcased.

The highlight of the exhibition was the room dedicated to the Augustus of Prima Porta, the Naples Doryphoros and the Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, on view together for the first time. The confrontation between Augustus’ portraits in the two statues highlighted the properties of Greek marble to convey the powerful gaze of the first emperor, whose portrait-type embodied the contradictory qualities of youthful vitality and experience. Besides the opportunity to compare the Prima Porta statue with the Doryphoros, which were placed side by side, the display also allowed visitors to see the backs

Reviews

doi:10.3828/sj.2015.11

1. Augustus of Prima Porta, marble, first century AD, marble, h. 207 cm. Vatican Museums, Vatican City (inv. 2290) (photo: Wikimedia Commons)


Max Seidel, Father and Son: Nicola and Giovanni Pisano Munich, Hirmer Verlag, 2012, 2 vols, 989 pp., 928 b&w illustrations, £120. ISBN 978-3-7774-5101-5

Max Seidel’s first article on medieval Italian art appeared over forty years ago; since then, in the course of his long and immensely productive career, he has written one major study after another, fundamentally transforming our understanding of sculpture in Tuscany during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His new book, Father and Son: Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, is a culmination of his investigations, bringing together in one place many insights from his wide-ranging research. As such it will be invaluable to every student of the field.

The book, however, eschews all the standard elements of a monographic study of an artist. Seidel dispenses with overview and background; and he does not discuss the biographies and careers of the two artists in full or in chronological

order. Thus, for a non-specialist reader, the text could be difficult to follow. This massive and lavishly illustrated book is oriented around the clarification of a single problem: the artistic relationship of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. Traditionally, scholars have stressed that there was a radical break in style between the art of Nicola and of his son, Giovanni. Seidel, by contrast, wants to demonstrate the unbroken continuity of their art and outlook.

The book consists of four essays, an introduction and a chapter on ‘Research perspectives’. The first essay addresses the critical fortune of the artists. Reviewing the reputation of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano from Vasari to the present day, the essay demonstrates that most assessments of their art by scholars and critics have been superficial, tendentious and repetitious. According to Seidel, the standard view that ‘an abyss separates father from son’, as Adolfo Venturi wrote, or that ‘Giovanni

of both figures. The back of the Prima Porta figure is usually inaccessible in the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican Museums. It is shockingly unfinished in comparison to the virtuoso carving on the front. Not only does it show clear signs of the sculptor’s tools but it has the remains of an iron dowel inserted in the upper back with which it would have been anchored in its original position, possibly in the atrium of the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta.1 The lack of finish on the back is uneven. The right flank is more highly finished than the left, suggesting that the sculpture was meant to be viewed from the left, as Kähler proposed.2 Viewing the sculpture as it was originally meant to be seen, which the exhibition made possible, provides a dynamic image of the leader addressing his troops.

Most of the sculptures were displayed against neutral, dark beige walls and set on bases painted yellow and white to simulate giallo antico. In the first section, sculptures were also set against movie screens on to which videos showing Roman wall paintings and modern views of Augustan ruined monuments were

projected. Technical problems left most of these screens blank during the first week of the exhibition; later, some of the videos worked, but still did not impress. Some of the backgrounds included monochrome, sketchy chalk drawings; a light blue temple pediment hovered behind the Dying Niobids, a light red aedicule stood behind several bronze lares figures and white outlines suggested the full scale of a fragmentary caryatid sculpture from the Forum of Augustus.

The placement of the objects, typically in the centre of the rooms or at angles, succeeded in presenting ideal viewing opportunities for scholars. But chances were missed to use the display to interpret the objects for the general public. A case in point was the Louvre’s Venus (Fréjus-Type), believed to be the best-known version of the lost original cult statue from her temple in the Forum of Julius Caesar. The placing of the sculpture on a low base obscured the kind, motherly expression of the goddess who was intended to gaze down upon the viewer.

Linda Nolan

1. A. Klynne and P. Liljenstolpe, ‘Where to put Augustus? A note on the placement of the Prima Porta statue’, The American Journal of Philology, 121, 2000, pp. 125–26.

2. H. Kähler, Die Augustusstatue von Primaporta, Cologne, Schauberg, 1959, pp. 3–24, 126.


… repudiated the formal classicism of his father and started what may be termed a Gothic counterrevolution’, as Erwin Panofsky said, can simply be dismissed as unfounded rhetorical posturing.

To give a new and more valid account of the two artists and their relationship, Seidel begins by examining closely the scant documentary records for their commissions, especially the pulpit in Siena Cathedral, which is a main focus of much of the book. There has been considerable debate in the past over the respective roles of Nicola and Giovanni in making this work, and some scholars have contended that Giovanni had almost no hand in its production. Seidel, however, uses payment records to show that Giovanni was, after his father, the most highly paid sculptor on the project. Giovanni made half of what his father did, but 33 per cent more than any other assistant, including Arnolfo di Cambio. Seidel also demonstrates the compara-tively high social standing of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, by showing, for example, that Giovanni was paid about the same as an administrator of the Opera del Duomo, and that Giovanni’s house in Siena was appraised at a higher value than Duccio’s or Segna di Bonavantura’s.

Seidel dedicates almost half of his book to an essay on iconography, primarily of the Siena pulpit. There is a great deal of rich material here. The author proves that the probable audience of the work was highly learned, and

had many ties to scholasticism at the university in Paris. He also quotes from a fascinating contemporary text by Restoro d’Arezzo, which praises ‘savi desegniatori’, that is, ‘learned artists’, for their knowledge and subtlety of thought, and compares the learning of such artists with that of astronomers. Seidel believes that Nicola Pisano was a ‘micro-iconographer’ who represented texts and themes in unprecedented and exact detail. Unfortunately, some of the evidence Seidel presents strains credibility. For instance, discussing their reliefs of the Massacre of the Innocents, Seidel writes, ‘Some of the passages in the sermons, studied by Giovanni together with his father in Siena, inspired him to create masterpieces in Pistoia and Pisa.’ What Seidel leaves in the footnotes is the fact that the sermons he says they studied together were written in Spain in the fourth to sixth centuries, and he does not provide any evidence that these texts were known in Tuscany nearly a thousand years later. Perhaps what Seidel meant to say was that the Pisani studied sermons of this kind, but that is not what he does in fact state. Seidel also seems overly certain that it was the artists themselves, rather than learned advisors, who consulted such works in preparation for making the pulpits.

The most satisfying chapter in the book is the last, on the stylistic continuity of the two sculptors. Seidel begins by reframing the question of their knowledge of and allegiance to ancient art. He says that the classicisms of Nicola and Giovanni must be viewed in relation to contemporary, rather than modern, ideas of Roman art. He finds evidence for such ideas in two written sources especially, Master Gregory’s Narracio de mirabilis urbis romae from the early thirteenth century, and Restoro d’Arezzo’s La composizione del mondo, written in 1282. Based on these texts, he identifies fidelity to nature, particularly the beauty of animals’ bodies in motion, and modelling that arouses a sense of touch as elements singled out in the Dugento as features of classical sculpture, and he cites many corresponding elements in the works of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. According to Seidel, when viewed from such a perspective, the alleged disjunction in the classicism of Nicola and Giovanni

1. Nicola Pisano (c.1220–c.1284), detail of figure from Crucifixion on Siena pulpit, 1265–68, marble, Siena Cathedral (photo: from Max Seidel, Father and Son: Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Munich, Hirmer Verlag, 2012, pl. 34)


The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400–60 Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 23 March–18 August 2013; Musée du Louvre, Paris, 26 September 2013–6 January 2014

Marc Bormand and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi (eds), The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400–60 (exh. cat.) Florence, Mandragora, 2013, 560 pp., c. 350 illustrations, mainly colour, £40. ISBN 978-88-7461-186-7

For enthusiasts of the Renaissance and sculpture, the must-see exhibition of 2012–13 was unquestionably The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400–60, which this reviewer saw at the Louvre in Paris, the second and final venue after the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. As the title suggests, the exhibition was premised on the idea that to observe the first

shoots of Renaissance art, we should direct our gaze not towards painting, which has always garnered the spotlight, but towards sculpture, which has been comparatively neglected. Without the great sculptors of the early Renaissance, such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and Donatello – so the argument goes – there would be no Masaccio, Filippo Lippi or Paolo Uccello – to say nothing of later masters, such as Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci. In a display of good sense, the organizers did not hold too tightly to this thesis, which would have been a challenge to prove in exhibition format. Although paintings were included in the exhibition, their purpose was mainly to suggest that painters and sculptors were in dialogue, not that sculptors were always out in front of painters. How the exhibition dealt with the theme of sculpture’s primacy was to let the assembled sculptures – more than 100 – speak for themselves. They told of an extraordinary moment in history when men blessed with phenomenal powers of imagination and technical skill let loose a revolution in three-dimensional art as significant as any the art world has experienced.

The organizers assembled nearly an embarrassment of riches in loans. No sentient viewer could escape the material’s spell, especially when standing beneath such ravishing works as Donatello’s large and gleaming Saint Louis of Toulouse. Many of the sculptures, including the Saint Louis, benefited from lighting conditions superior to those in their home institutions. Also aiding inspection was the disciplined approach to vitrines and the ability to circulate behind many of the sculptures.

The first room of the exhibition established a useful benchmark for the

disappears. Similarly, Seidel argues that Giovanni only continued and furthered a love for French Gothic art which Nicola had already widely explored.

While mostly stressing the shared interests of Nicola and Giovanni, Seidel does write of their differences as well. In Seidel’s view, Giovanni was more deeply committed to representing human emotion, especially in moments of divine

inspiration. Seidel writes, ‘Everything that in his father’s work involved a too realistic production, whether in portraits or in architecture, Giovanni rejected. His only interest was the human being in all its aspects, especially the wide gamut of emotions.’ The book is a significant contribution to the study of these two great masters of Italian sculpture.

Andrew Butterfield

1. Luca della Robbia (1399/1400–1482), Madonna and Child (Genoa Madonna), 1445–50, glazed and gilded terracotta, 49.5 × 36.8 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts (inv. 29.355) (photo: Detroit Institute of Arts)


stylistic progress to come. It presented a group of works by the leading sculptors active in Tuscany during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Arnolfo di Cambio and Tino di Camaino. The most impressive object in the room, however, may have been an antiquity, the Talento Crater, an important inspiration to many of the featured artists, although that message was not entirely clear from the assembled works, which seemed to owe a larger debt to French Gothic art, represented in the exhibition with two Madonnas, a small ivory and a large wooden statue. The visitor needed to step into the next room and approach two of the greatest treasures in the exhibition, the competition panels for the north doors of the Florentine Baptistery, to see classical sculpture wielding its influence. On the panel by Ghiberti, the boy fated to be sacrificed is unabashedly classical in origin, a point the exhibition underscored with the nearby placement of an ancient torso. The boy is related to the antique in another way. Ghiberti conceived the figure as an independent small bronze – the earliest known since antiquity.

The personality of certain sculptors came into particularly sharp focus in the exhibition – none more so than Donatello’s. Time and again, he emerged as the most innovative and technically proficient of the pioneers. Even the Young Prophet, one of his earlier works, is hard to mistake as by anyone else. How the figure looks to be on the brink of speech or breath is staggeringly original and shows Donatello doing as always, pushing the boundaries of naturalism. This reviewer had difficulty believing that the traditional attribution of the Niccolò da Uzzano to Donatello should be abandoned in favour of Desiderio da Settignano. Displayed in the last room, on portraiture, the Niccolò da Uzzano seemed to fit neatly with all the other Donatellos in the exhibition, sharing their expressiveness and appearing to be born of the same spirit of innovation. The bust looked very much outside the purview of the normally cool and collected Desiderio.

An unexpected highpoint of the exhibition was the section devoted to Madonna and Child reliefs. Donatello’s

mesmerizing Pazzi Madonna presided, even if displayed too low for its perspective to work properly. One wall concentrated on painted and gilded terracottas; the other on glazed ones, with Luca della Robbia in the spotlight. Interestingly, the section carried the title ‘Disseminating Beauty’, and connoisseurs were doubtless drawn to the challenge of trying to figure out which Madonnas were workshop copies and which showed the hand of an individual master. The only agreement is that many of the attributions remain unsettled – particularly as regards the earliest reliefs. A case in point is the Fiesole Madonna, labelled in the exhibition as by Brunelleschi or Nanni di Banco. Given the declaration of uncertainty, should we be so quick to dismiss the traditional candidate, Ghiberti? There would seem to be legitimate grounds for advancing his name based on the similarities between the relief and some of the figures in his two sets of doors for the Florentine Baptistery. A key example is the mother holding a child in the panel of Moses delivering the law on the Gates of Paradise. Both children place their left hands near their mothers’ throats. They are also similar in having tight draperies and the arrangement of pleats fanning out from belly to back.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, produced in English, Italian and French versions, is both sumptuous and rigorous in its scholarship. Twenty-eight essays precede the catalogue entries, which are spread over ten sections, each with its own introduction. The choice to include so many essays carried risks. But the editors, Marc Bormand of the Louvre and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, succeeded in wrangling very tightly focused essays from their contributors. Many of the essays will stand for the foreseeable future as the best summation of their topics, which include the development of the equestrian monument in the Renaissance, the rebirth of portraiture, the emergence of nudity in art and the antiquarian climates of Pisa and Florence.

C. D. Dickerson III


Geoffrey Clarke: A Decade of Change Pangolin, London, 13 September–26 October 2013 J. LeGrove, Geoffrey Clarke RA: A Decade of Change (exh. cat.) London, Pangolin, 2013, 72pp, 28 colour, 46 b&w illustrations, £10. ISBN 978-0-9926582-0-5

You might expect a glittering career for a sculptor who, while still a student at the Royal College of Art, was commissioned to produce a work for the Festival of Britain and, on leaving in 1952, not only had a one-person show at a prestigious London Gallery (Gimpel Fils) but was also selected by Herbert Read (along with Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull) to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. This career trajectory continued with participation in the two major sculpture competitions of 1953 – ‘The Unknown Political Prisoner’ and ‘Football and the Fine Arts’ – commissions from Basil Spence for Coventry Cathedral, and participation in the Groupe Espace 1955 exhibition in the Royal Festival Hall (alongside Walter Gropius and Jean Arp) plus another solo show at Gimpel Fils. However, despite a long and continuous career, with numerous public commissions to his name, in the last decade Geoffrey Clarke has almost been forgotten: for example, his work was not included in key overview exhibitions such as ‘Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties’ (Barbican Gallery, 2002) and ‘Art and the 60s: This was Tomorrow’ (Tate Britain, 2004). What went wrong?

As the last living member of the 1952 band of sculptors who represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and were christened the ‘Geometry of Fear’ artists, Clarke has suffered from the continuous sniping that has befallen Read’s selection. Of course, all these artists endured Clement Greenberg’s slating of this generation when he famously dismissed them as ‘false’ and ‘minor’ in an interview in the January 1968 issue of Studio International. But the lack of continued critical support from Read must also be partly to blame. For example, Read’s seminal Concise History of Modern Sculpture (Thames and Hudson, 1964) includes an image of Clarke’s three-piece, weaponry-inspired

work for Battersea Park in 1962, but has no supporting text (a similar fate befell Robert Adams, Bernard Meadows and William Turnbull). However, unlike the other artists listed above, Clarke has not been the subject of any major recent reassessment of his sculptural achievement. Despite the fact that his sixty-year career covers numerous architectural commissions, major proposals related to land art (reminiscent of Isamu Noguchi’s numerous unrealized projects in the USA), and even a period when he produced conceptual pieces that included smell, the only monograph to date is restricted to his etchings, lithographs and monotypes.

The 2013 exhibition of Clarke’s sculpture at the Pangolin Gallery at King’s Place, London, subtitled ‘A Decade of Change’, goes some way towards redressing this neglect. The display traced his development in using materials from 1953 to 1963, from glass via fabricated iron to cast aluminium. At the same time the show highlighted his change of focus, from vertical totemic figures to horizontally stretched architectonic forms. A similar contem-poraneous shift in concerns can also be witnessed in Lynn Chadwick’s and Reg Butler’s development of volumetric forms and their interplay with linear constructions in the 1950s. The alteration in working methods, from fabrication to casting, that this turn in sculptural emphasis provoked might seem logical in hindsight, but it required the abandoning of one set of skills and the acquisition of new ones. In Reg Butler’s case gas welding equipment was adapted to provide the heat for his patented ‘shell casting’ of bronze, and Lynn Chadwick started to encase his steel armatures with ‘stolit’ in advance of his move to casting. In contrast, David Smith, who had a similar sense of dissatisfaction with sawn and manipulated linear forms at the start of the 1950s, began to cut sheet steel with his oxyacetylene torch and forge the elements into three-dimensional shapes which were subsequently welded together to form volumes, compressions, piercings and dissections. It is perhaps noteworthy that both Smith and Clarke explored the use of blacksmiths’ power hammers in 1954 and 1955. The photograph of Clarke


(reproduced in the Pangolin catalogue) in 1955 working on Symbol, plus the evidence provided by his earlier Symbol for Man XV (1954), indicate how, through abstraction, Clarke explored the medium of steel beyond anthropomorphism and the shadow of Gonzales and Picasso whose directly fabricated, figurative metal sculptures were often reproduced in art magazines of the time.

Not surprisingly, considering the relationship between the venue and one of Europe’s best foundries, much was made in the Pangolin exhibition of Clarke’s development of ‘full mould’ casting by the use of ‘lost polystyrene’ in sand. Indeed, this was pioneering work but it also reflected a contem-porary ‘hands-on’ interest on the part of sculptors in the process of metal casting. Following Leon Underwood’s example, Henry Moore, Reg Butler, Peter King, Eduardo Paolozzi, Kenneth Armitage and Bernard Meadows all experimented with ‘backyard foundries’ during the 1950s. The reasons why this diverse group of established sculptors chose to bypass the conventional professional foundries are still the subject of speculation. However, Clarke’s statements, as well as his background, indicate that his primary motivation was to maintain control over every aspect of his sculpture’s production rather than to turn his studio into an

experimental laboratory and become the ‘space age’ sculptor that he was dubbed.

The small ‘test pieces’ from 1958–59 exhibited at Pangolin indicate the production issues that Clarke was partic-ularly concerned with at the time. Rather than producing maquettes, Clarke was obviously posing problems for himself. How closely can polystyrene elements be arranged before the sand cannot be rammed tight enough? How thin can polystyrene be cut with a hot wire before it distorts under the pressure of sand? How well does the aluminium flow from ‘thick to thin back to thick’ or is this method likely to lead to ‘cold shuts’ and ‘suck’ without multiple ‘runners’? The inclusion of these test pieces and their visual prominence within the catalogue was one of the highlights of the exhibition, reflecting the gallery’s ongoing commitment to revealing developments in sculptural practices made by individual artists which later became part of the canon of British modern sculpture and were adopted by art colleges. Just four years after these small experimental test pieces Clarke was casting 600lb ladles of aluminium to form the large Battersea triptych (fig. 1). Interestingly these sculptures, like Caro’s contemporaneous work, come apart for transport and storage but, unlike Caro, Clarke does not rely

1. Installation view of Geoffrey Clarke: A Decade of Change at Pangolin London, 2013, with Battersea 11, 1962, aluminium (unique) and Battersea 111, 1962, aluminium on the floor(photo: Steve Russell, courtesy Pangolin London/artist’s estate)


on bolted joints but on the simpler pegged joint reminiscent of timber-frame construction and early cast iron structures.

Clarke’s relationship with architecture reflects his biography – he was trained as a stained glass artist and his father was an architect – as well as his sculptural exploration. During the 1960s, his use of cantilevers, changes of level, anonymous yet controlled texture, stacked elements, plus opening and closing forms indicates a profound understanding of architectonic values. The few interior black-and-white photographs in the Pangolin catalogue of the home and studio in Suffolk that Clarke bought in 1954 also show an affinity to Lynn Chadwick. Chadwick, like Clarke, acquired a historic house and

studio in the 1950s (Lypiatt Park, near Stroud). Their approach to interior space and the display of modern sculpture in historic houses, as evidenced in photographic records, is remarkably similar.

This self-imposed exile from the London art world so early in Clarke’s career might also be partly to blame for his subsequent neglect by the critics and explain in part ‘what went wrong’. The extensive Clarke archive that has recently been deposited at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds may well give details of these and other issues and provide further evidence of Clarke’s contribution to innovative sculptural practices during the post-war era.

Robert Harding

Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 10 May–24 August 2014

Cornelia Butler and Luis Pérez-Oramas, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art (exh. cat.), with essays by Sergio Bessa, Eleonora Fabião, Briony Fer, Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, André Lepecki, Zeuler Lima, Christine Macel and Frederico de Oliveira Coelho New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2014, 336 pp., 400 illustrations, £50. ISBN: 978-0-87070-890-9

A persistent desire of the neo-avant-garde was to eliminate the putative schism that separated art from life. Taking their cue (and their source material) from this historical cohort, a number of curators have recently focused on work that prizes interactivity and the demystification of the sculptural object. The latest evidence of this development was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, with an adventurous yet somehow conservative retrospective of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–88), in four massive galleries on MoMA’s sixth floor (with the large installation work The House Is the Body: Penetration, Ovulation, Germination, Expulsion [1968] presented as an afterthought two floors down). The show was a fitting counterpoint

to Gauguin: Metamorphoses, which was also on view. Unlike the Gauguin exhibition, which simultaneously aggrandized and indicted the artist’s place as a straight, white, Western male, the Clark retrospective refreshingly presented a doubly othered figure (that of a Latin American woman) with a rather straightforward, almost formalist regard, although little mention is made of Clark’s aristocratic roots and the freedom that this certainly afforded her. Nonetheless, the exhibition was a stunning presentation – one that, although overdetermined at times, offered a crisp, linear, mostly historical narrative culminating in the bizarre, quasi-erotic and interactive sculptures with which Clark (and the curators) succeeded in eliding that elusive distinction between sculpture and life.

The exhibition opened in a soaring anteroom with two large Trepantes (Climbers, 1965) sculptures set atop a low, wide pedestal and presented amidst detailed wall text that emphasized Clark’s ideals of using art as a therapeutic and holistic tool. A large film projection, in which Clark recounted her own movement towards participatory art, was offered as a foil to the sinewy, organic lines and snarling torsion of the Trepantes – immediately setting up a trajectory from painter to sculptor to shaman. Within the three main galleries, the curators more or


less followed this arc, with one room each for painting, sculpture and interactive objects. The first gallery opened with constructivist-inspired abstract paintings and proceeded to ever more austere black and white works that jutted out past the frontal plane of the canvas into three-dimensional constructions, nicely highlighting Clark’s early formalist experiments. The most effective element of the exhibition was identifying Clark’s sculptures as proto-interactive works by putting two exhibition copies of her Bichos (Critters, 1959–66) series between the galleries that held her paintings and sculptures, inviting viewers to manipulate the works by hand. Playing with these models – metallic origami-like creatures comprised of triangles and quartered-circles connected by modular hinges that folded into a variety of possible configu-rations – felt transgressive and was clearly popular with the public. In the next room, however, beautifully given over to tight clusters of Bichos arranged on pedestals with differing sizes and heights, large signs reminded the viewer not to touch the sculptures. Although a necessary curatorial compromise, the distinction between ‘real’ artwork and participatory object would probably have dismayed Clark.

A rigorous, in-depth catalogue was commissioned for the retrospective, and it is replete with new scholarship that investigates a wide range of methodological concerns, probing the implications of avant-garde sculptural practices in the mid-twentieth century.

Among them, Briony Fer connects Clark’s matchbox constructions to her sensorial and relational objects, drawing useful historical comparisons to constructivist aims and to contem-poraries like Hélio Oiticica. Sergio Bessa’s text provides a psychoanalytic reading of Clark’s life and her ‘terrifying’ childhood, while Christine Macel’s essay documents Clark’s use of psychoanalysis in her practice, juxtaposed against others who also pushed the boundaries of art. Cornelia Butler offers a broad, socio-historical overview that concludes by examining Clark’s underrated impact on younger artists like Jeanine Oleson.

The editors have smartly divided Clark’s own writings into three sections within the catalogue, aligning her lectures and private musings neatly alongside the divisions of the exhibition itself, from formalist painting to crisp geometric sculptures to organic, interactive objects. A convincing, although too-short introduction by Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães relates Clark’s deft employment of the authorial function to theoretical concerns that were as cogent as those of any of her contemporaries (she did teach at the Sorbonne, after all). To give an example of this, Clark examined her Bichos with regard to the tacit relationship between non-figurative sculpture and phenomenology:

There are two types of movements in the relationship between the Bicho and you. The first, purely external, is what

1. Installation view of Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 10 May–24 August 2014(photo: Thomas Griesel © 2014 The Museum of Modern Art)


you do. The second, the Bicho’s, is produced by the dynamics of its own expressiveness … the conjunction of your gestures with the immediate response of the Bicho creates a new relationship.

We can see that Clark, in 1960, was already thinking about the possibilities of making sculpture that engages the spectator as an active participant; appropriately, the next entry addresses Caminhando (Walking, 1963), the artist’s first well-known work that directly requires the viewer’s involvement to complete it. Within the exhibition itself, one encountered Caminhando in the final gallery. A documentary film showed Clark creating iterations of the work by cutting and gluing paper into an endless, intertwined Möbius strip. Caminhando, however, was produced earlier (1963) than some of the Bichos in the previous room, and its placement disrupts the exhibition’s chronology, preventing the viewer from making the direct relationship between the Bichos and Caminhando that Clark (and the catalogue) make explicitly. I would argue that Clark does not abandon art, as the title of the exhibition suggests, but instead invents and intervenes in the artistic process with a distinct regard for formal ideals. She does so from a spectatorial point of view and from a creative one, fusing these two ends, an approach borne out of constructivist tendencies. The result is a hybrid object that straddles aesthetics and experience.

The last room was Clark’s apotheosis, filled with wearable objects that ranged from hazmat-inspired rubber body suits connected at the torso by a hose; goggles with multiple sets of articulated mirrors; textured and padded rubber gloves designed for handling ping-pong balls; and the ghostly (and ghastly) looking

Sensorial Masks (1967). All of these items, when donned by the viewer/participant, aspire to reframe one’s sense of experi-encing the immediate world. This is where Clark, although not completely abandoning the production of traditional sculptural objects, ultimately arrived in her artistic practice: a quasi-shamanistic, somewhat psychoanalytic and highly inclusive body of work that posited sculpture as an extension of the body to alter our lived experience. At various times, museum facilitators were present to help viewers use exhibition copies of the sensorial works – a truly bizarre experience that, if only momentarily, let me forget I was in a museum. This is the crux of the exhibition’s proposition: that Clark’s sculptural practice ceded aesthetics to the higher aims of therapeutic intervention. The logical steps towards relational aesthetics and today’s participatory frameworks are readily evident, if not preordained.

It is no small irony that the curators, by realizing this end within the sanctified confines of MoMA, have fetishized and idealized the sensorial objects, transforming these therapeutic artifacts into collector-grade high sculpture. Yet Clark did craft these objects with a keen eye to their aesthetic qualities. Indeed, the large, gridded agglomeration of carefully looped elastic bands, used for the participatory action Rede de Elásticos (Elastic Net, 1973), was draped limply across the wall and struck me as redolent of Eva Hesse’s contemporaneous roped webs of latex and fibreglass. Such is the ever-present difficulty – and the ambition – of mounting an exhibition that attempts to showcase the abandonment of art within the very museum that effectively serves to codify as ‘Art’ the objects within its walls.

Randall Edwards


Andrew Patrizio (ed.), Stone: A Legacy and Inspiration for Art, with contributions by Jake Harvey, Joel Fisher, Jessica Harrison, Noé Mendelle and Sarah Coulson London, Black Dog Publishing, 2011, 208pp, 223 illustrations, £24.95. ISBN 978 1 907317 37 8.

Stone: A Legacy and Inspiration for Art is the outcome of a research project conducted by a number of scholars and practitioners principally based in Edinburgh. The authors travelled within the British Isles, Italy, China, India and elsewhere, with the aim of documenting and reflecting on practices of quarrying, carving and other forms of stone work. The book’s chronological framework is similarly ambitious, ranging from contemporary artists whose work engages critically with stone, through to some scattered remarks on ‘prehistory’.

Over recent decades there has been a very broad shift, across a range of disciplines, towards the kinds of questions of materiality and skill the book seeks to address. This has lent real force to sculpture studies when it has led to a deliberate consideration of sculpture’s place within wider social currents, and has demonstrated how a focus on material, as a site of diverse meanings, can complicate, expand and even destabilize the object of study.1 Arguably this has been most illumi-nating where it has thought through

the inseparability of the epistemo-logical from the ontological questions generated by materials – that is (of course within a field of resistances), the ways in which both embodied and verbal knowledge constitute materials rather than simply confronting them ready made. Materials in this way emerge as essentially dynamic, historical in their nature and – rather than self-evidently just ‘there’ – formed in a network of changing, and often contested, cultural determinations which are no less a part of materials’ substance than the particles that rub off under our touch.

A particular set of questions about knowledge and skill lies at the basis of Stone: A Legacy and Inspiration for Art, and the publication offers very much that is of interest. Among other things, the careful descriptions as well as photographs of tools allow us to see carved stone objects as the result of several quite distinct processes. Likewise, the extension of consideration of skills beyond the immediate contact with the artwork – to blacksmithing, for example – marks an important move away from a conventional view of the isolated and self-contained artefact towards what are more open and interdependent networks of making. Yet for something that, on the surface, places such stress on the preservation and transmission of knowledge – signalling its own

1. Andrew Patrizio (ed.), Stone: A Legacy and Inspiration for Art, page spread(photos: Jake Harvey. Courtesy Black Dog Publishing)


profound responsibility to capture and communicate a vanishing body of skills – the book is remarkably taciturn and enigmatic. Much of the more thoughtful discussion becomes limited by its largely monologue delivery, sealed off from other recent discussions (something only broken down in any significant way in the final essay by Jessica Harrison). There is an emphasis on sharing and dialogue, yet the primary mode of address seems to be that of the closed statement. What are puzzlingly presented as the ‘theoretical and philosophic’ contributions refuse any such dialogue, and instead utter solemn intonations along the lines of ‘The cleverness that leads us astray seems unconnected to the hand’; ‘Time is condensed in the depth of the stone’; ‘Speed is not preferable.’ Underpinning this, I would suggest, is at some basic level an untested conviction that both materials and the skills exercised on them are stable, that they can be the object of such universal statements. Stone is at once eternalized and deadened, and reduced – in a way that is quite at odds with the book’s geographical and chronological expansiveness – to a kind of constant material that exists somehow outside its temporal and spatial manifes-tations. The effect is to separate material from the real and fundamental processes of its materialization.

In a way that thus seems to condense the book’s problematic certainties, it sets out at one point a series of closely cropped photographs of different, single hands. Over four pages, arranged in repeated grids of nine frames, we are prompted to scrutinize these images. But for what? One’s gaze tries to sound out the traces of something larger – in the hands’ different complexions, in the occasional piece of jewellery, fragments of clothing in odd sleeve-ends, and in the lines of the skin, the signs of repeated stresses, the ossified grip on a tool not shown. This kind of attention, though, itself comes to pieces in a kind of petrifying effect. The hands’ gestures and the larger economies they occupy are foreclosed as they become ciphers of a flimsy identity removed from any of the specificities – personal, social, cultural, political – that the images fleetingly promise. Precisely as Roland Barthes observed in his brief essay on the photographic exhibition The Family

of Man: a two-stage mystification – first the assertion of the plural, of diversity, followed by a magical production of unity, where, here, stone itself becomes the substance of a transcendent and unreal community. We see, as the caption tells us, ‘Stone workers hands’ [sic] – but framed in what is, in the images and in the prevailing rhetoric of the text, a mode of address that (again to paraphrase Barthes) escapes history. A 51-year career as a marble-carver in Pietrasanta (to take the one figure from these grids that may be identified – indirectly, through a later captioned image) is brought to a pretended equivalence with the lives of workers in the most dissimilar conditions in the quarries of Sichuan or Peenya. The real differences between a freely chosen exercise of skill and skills exerted under duress, between quite incommensurable microeconomic models of production – between a ‘post-industrial’ world and the forms of labour that exist, in other places, to sustain such a myth – are abstracted in an empty claim about communing with stone.

Yet, in this sense, it is not only difference that is obscured. Perhaps more pressingly, what is lost is the real nature of the connections that in other lines traverse these hands – the actual interdependency at the larger economic scale between the so-called ‘survival’ of craft skills in ‘advanced’ economies (where ‘survival’ conjures an illusion alternately of mere fate or of individual triumph) and the most exploitative industrial processes of production elsewhere. The book’s outlook rests on a fantasy. We were, the text says, ‘overwhelmed by the profound sense of serenity and pride rooted in the soul of everyone we met working with stones, regardless of their financial background or working conditions’. This may have some truth as a statement about the project’s authors. However, at best it tells nothing other than an unwill-ingness or inability to see anything beyond the bland universals that make up the soul thus imagined; and at worst it marks a moment of complicity with those structures that prevent exactly the kind of understanding a project such as this might hope for.

Richard Checketts

1. Some of the more salient examples would be Michael Baxandall’s approach to the materiality of limewood sculpture in Renaissance Germany in relation to a constellation of different forms of practical consciousness within that culture; or Suzanne Butters’ account of the necessarily interconnected technologies of porphyry carving and the tempering of steel tools in Medician Florence; or (with different points of emphasis) Michael Cole’s, Philippe Morel’s and Pamela Smith’s work on the associations between the materials of sculpture and various forms of ‘active’ matter in early modern philosophical and scientific writing.

"Exhibition Review: Augusto, Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome.” Sculpture Journal 23.3 (2014): 403-04

Documents

Transcript of "Exhibition Review: Augusto, Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome.” Sculpture Journal 23.3 (2014): 403-04