New Directions in International Sculpture

Mary Rose Beaumont

The main problem when discussing new international sculpture is i ts sheer diversity.
One may attempt to categorize it, which is fairly futile, since no artist can be
confined within any category. However, futile or not, I am going to map out some
broad areas, if only to make it easier to read the contemporary scene. One can say
with muted conviction that some sculptors incline to classicism, others to the
romantic and organic. More confidently, one can assert that architecture, not for the
first time, has dictated sculptural forms; the best of architectonic furniture -sculpture
is very elegant, the worst resembles childrens building blocks. Installations fall into
a nebulous area somewhere between architecture and performance.

The main problem when discussing new international sculpture is its sheer diversity. One
may attempt to categorise it, which is fairly futile, since no artist can be confined within any
one category. However, futile or not, I am going to map out some broad areas, if only to make
it easier to read the contemporary scene. One can say with muted conviction that some
sculptors incline to classicism, others to the romantic and organic. More confidently, one can
assert that architecture, not for the first time, has dictated sculptural forms; the best of
architectonic furniture-sculpture is very elegant, the worst resembles children's building
blocks, installations fall into a nebulous area somewhere between architecture and
performance.
The sculptor who seems, at the time of writing, to bestride the narrow world like a Colossus
is Richard Serra, whose work defies easy categorisation. From Kassel and Munster, to Paris,
London and New York, Serra's sculptures are ubiquitous. Massive and threatening, they
sometimes seem like bully-boys threatening the viewer into submission. Yet, despite or
perhaps because of the permanent nature of the steel in which they are constructed, they
inspire feelings of insecurity and unease, partly because of the fearful angle at which the
elements are poised, or, as in House of Cards (One Ton Prop), 1968-69 (Saatchi Collection),

where the sheets of steel are merely propped against each other, they make one feel that a
mere sneeze might cause them to slide, slicing off one's feet.
Serra has made many site-specific works which have been variously received.
His Tilted Arc in Foley Square, Manhattan, acted vituperative comment from those who
worked in the vicinity, which was countered with equal ferocity by the artist. His sculpture
for Saint Louis, Missouri, also aroused controversy, but the length of the gestation period
allowed the citizenry to voice their objections and to accept what appeared to be the
inevitable. The situation in Paris was different, Clara Clara should have been installed at
the Pompidou Centre for the Serra exhibition there, but the foundations were found to be
inadequate. The sculpture was moved, on a temporary basis, to the Tuileries Gardens
where, situated on the axis which runs from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe, it proved
to be extraordinarily appropriate. The piece has now been bought by the city of Paris and
re-erected at another location.
For Documenta 8 in Kassel, Serra constructed in cor-ten steel the ultimate in
road blocks. The end of a street was shut off by a 20ft-high wall of metal, with arms of
equal height reaching out before and behind. This double-sided box-like enclosure which
was supposed to remain inviolate, turned out to be irresistible to motorists who parked
happily within its confines. The most successful of the site-specific pieces was at Mnster,
where Serra had to match the genuine rivalry of the Baroque palace courtyard in which his
sculpture was to be installed. The highly ornate palace facade is slightly concave. Serra
echoed this by setting two concave steel wings at right angles to the facade. The sculpture,
perfectly framed in the gateway and complementing the curving forms behind it was a rare
example of art and architecture, separated by 200 years.

A concern with history and with the spiritual informs the work of a number of
German sculptors. It is curious how many women artists suggest in their work the
fragility of life, and the hovering presence of death. Rebecca Horn, in her
performances, videos and installations, always conveys a sense of evanescence
bordering on tragic loss. She sometimes counterbalances the premonition of loss
with an attempt at protection. In 1975 she made Paradise Widow, a feather covered,

womb-like hollow space into which the artist herself retreated during the course of a
performance. Her chosen site in Munster was redolent of death: a mediaeval tower
which had been used as a torture chamber from the Middle Ages until the end of the
Nazi era. Horn, in choosing to work on this site, was not exorcising death but
reminding visitors of mans inhumanity to man. In the dark recesses of the tower,
little steel hammers, illuminated only by night-lights, knocked unrhythmically
against the brick walls. It was as if one had descended into the caves of the
Nibelungen; a spirit of evil and revenge haunted one passage. To emerge into the
daylight brought a sense of relief and the hope of redemption, tempered by the sight
of a snake (the cause of mans fall from grace) in a glass case and a dark pool into
which a single drop water fell with monotonous regularity from the transparent roof
above; a relentless reminder of the passage of time.

Classicism and the New

The term classical is an all-embracing one, as dangerous and as non-specific as
romantic. In nearly all sculpture which is overtly classical there are romantic
undertones, although the reverse is unlikely to be so. In the strictest sense a
classicist is a follower of the restrained style of antiquity, whereas a romantic ar tist
prefers irregular beauty to finish and proportion, subordinating form to matter. In its
axiomatic that rules such as these are made only to be broken.
Classicism as we understand it today can be loosely divided into three parts:
sculpture which is deliberately archaeological, delving into antiquity, real or imagined,
for its inspiration; sculpture which quotes from classical imagery, which may be unadulterated
or disguised, but in either case subverted; or sculpture which is regular in form and ordered in
execution. There are of course artists who escape any such neat categorisation but whose work
may yet be considered classical.
.

Ulrich Ruckriem's granite slabs are to be encountered everywhere in Germany, in museums

and galleries as well as, more appropriately, in the open. In an interior space these forms seem

almost to crouch, as if unable to fulfill their potential. Outdoors, the stones seem able to
breathe, standing proud in the sunlight. The sheer size of the granite is impressive in itself, and
the fact that the material is so little affected by the sculptor's chisel, gives it a primitive,
Stonehenge quality. In Kassel, Ruckriem erected a Stone Museum on a derelict car park,
which became quite simply a holy place, a place of worship, and a wry comment on the status
of museums in the present day. He accepted the challenge of church architecture in 1977 when
he placed blocks of Dolomite granite at a short distance from the Petruskirche in Munster;
whether in opposition or in harmony it is up to the viewer to decide. Ruckriem's wedge shapes
echo the bays and buttresses of the church, the sculptures leaning towards the building as if to
acknowledge gracefully its architectural priority.

Sculpture as furniture or furniture-sculpture holds the stage both in Europe and America, and
the artist with the highest profile, simply in numerical terms, is Scott Burton. Burton's wood
or formica garden seats, granite or marble chairs, wooden or cast-iron tables, are everywhere,
in and out of the gallery. As objects they are extraordinarily beautiful, since Burton uses his
materials with a delicate sensibility which enhances their intrinsic qualities. Sometimes there
is a quirky perversity in his conception of the sculpture, as if he wants both to confirm and
deny its usefulness at one and the same time. His pair of park benches in Munster are
expansive semi-circles but the seats are minuscule; a formula he repeats in the Equitable Life
Building in New York. In these installations he enjoys combining the natural with the manmade, using his furniture to enclose growing trees and plants. The chairs and tables, and even
the Madame Recamier-style chaise-longue, can actually be used, a rare distinction among the
growing army of furniture-sculptors. They are the late 20th-century equivalent of Gerrit
Rietveld's 1918 Chair, as elegant a piece of furniture-sculpture as can be imagined.

Anne and Patrick Poirier are among the foremost archaeologists of classical antiquity,
constructing fragments of ruins and breathing new life into civilisations long dead. In 1980,
they made a model based on a time-worn Egyptian temple doorway called, nostalgically, Lost
Archetypes, and, at the Bath International Festival in 1986, they made an outdoor installation
of broken columns and a miniature aqueduct which was entitled Archaeological Model. In

1979, they constructed a model of Hadrian's Villa in plaster, back-projecting onto it a

photograph of a sculpted head (a genuine classical remain) of Hadrian's favourite, the boy
Antinous. By associating the real, in this case a photograph of an existing object, with the
reconstructed past, they are combining ancient and modern in a single image.

Charles Simonds builds tiny dwellings in terracotta, thereby inventing a wholly imaginary
civilisation and the appearance of fragments of an ancient city on a platform, usually at tabletop level. There are no figures, although by implication there are traces of a vanished human
presence. To begin with, Simonds constructed his clustered architectural pieces outside, in
rough areas of New York, Paris and Dublin. In 1978, he was invited to build a dwelling in a
hollowed-out wall at the Venice Biennale, but in the nature of things, these constructions had a
short lifespan and he was forced indoors to build in more sheltered spaces. These buildings
usually take the form of classic geometrical shapes, such as circles and pyramids, but also of
convoluted labyrinths and spirals embodying sexual overtones. Religion and ritual are integral
elements in his work. A classic example is Ritual Tower, 1980, which resembles a ruined
Mayan temple set in a lunar landscape. Interestingly, Jackie Ferrara constructed a huge
stepped edifice in red cedar in 1981, based on Mayan temple architecture, for the Laumeier
Sculpture Park in St Louis, Missiouri. The difference lies in the fact that Charles Simonds is
inventing a civilisation that never was, whereas Jackie Ferrara is building a new structure
which stems from an ancient prototype. Recently there have been signs that Simonds'
classicism is breaking up; organic and natural forms are increasingly evident, as is indicated
by Rock Flower, 1986, which is formed from irregular, flame-like curves.

A Romantic Vision
In his essay 'British Romantic Artists' included in Aspects of British Art, published
by Collins in 1947, John Piper wrote: 'Romantic art . . . is the result of a vision that
can see in things something significant beyond ordinary significance: something,
that for a moment seems to contain the whole world; and, w hen the moment is past,

carries over some comment on life or experience besides the comment on

appearances.'
In the same year Geoffrey Grigson wrote: 'Romantic artists of all
countries share a tendency to be emotional and unintellectual about their art, to mix
their art intimately with their religion, which was often of a personal, unorthodox,
mystical kind.' Piper's statement still holds true 40 years later, but Grigson's seems
hopelessly dated - trapped in the era of neo-romanticism, of which he was a leading
exponent. Artists are not, with the possible exception of the naive or 'outsiders',
unintellectual, and the word passionate would be an improvement on emotional.
Religion seems to be now, as then, out of place, although the personal, unorthodox
and mystical are still valid.

Francesco Clemente was born in Naples and, although he now divides

his time between Rome, New York and Madras, he retains the spiritual link with the
past which is inherent in Southern Italians. On the one hand there is the inescap able
presence of Pompeii and Herculaneum, a constant reminder of a past civilisation, and
on the other there are the churches with their dark interiors and paintings of saints
and martyrs. (Caravaggio spent some time in Naples when he was forced to flee fr om
Rome after killing a man in a brawl, and it is there that he painted the great
altarpiece in the Church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, showing The Seven
Acts of Mercy.) Clemente stirs into this folk memory of pre-Christian art and
Neapolitan Renaissance art as knowledge of Hindu iconography and an interest in
metaphysical systems. It is the human body, usually his own, which forms the core
of his work. In Madras in 1983, with the help of local artisans, he created a whole
battalion of little figures, each 68cm high, in papier-mch and clay. Each figure is
identical and - a surreal touch - they are the same from both sides. They have the
appearance of having just been resurrected from an earthy grave and seem, in John
Piper's words, 'to carry over some comment on life or experience besides the
comment on appearances'.

Mimmo Paladino was also born in the south of Italy, near Benevento
and his works carry within them a sense of an indefinable antiquity, of prehistoric
rites and rituals whose meaning we can only speculate on. A Surrounded Figure,
1983, combines references to Chinese tomb sculpture with suggestions of Egyptian
wall painting, particularly in the Anubis-like creature which leers fawningly up at
the seated figure. Evil is disturbingly present. In 1984, Paladino made a huge bronze
portal entitled South, which was exhibited outside the Italian Pavilion at the 1988
Venice Biennale. Covered with human and animal figures, rods, poles and a
conflagration, it would seem to be Paladino's modernist version of Rodin's Gates of
Hell.

German artists have always been drawn to Mediterranean culture, and

therefore inevitably to Italy, but they have tended to take from it the romantic and
the mythological, rather than the classical aspects of its earlier c ivilisations. Markus
Lpertz has lived and worked in Milan, from where he could look both eastwards to
Greece, and to the riches of her cultural past, and westwards to France, where once
again the figure of Rodin must be invoked as the begetter of new poss ibilities for
20th-century sculpture. Lupertz's Shepherd, 1986, draws on the classical prototype
of the 6th-century BC Attic sculpture, The Calf Bearer, in the Acropolis Museum in
Athens, but he has interpreted it in a rough, deliberately anti -classical manner more
in tune with Picasso's Man with a Lamb, 1943. The meaning of Lpertz's sculpture
is ambiguous: is the lamb being brought to the slaughter, as the calf was in the Attic
sculpture, or is it being protected from harm, as is Picasso's? The challenge of
Rodin's Burgers of Calais inspired Liipertz to make a series of Burghers of
Florence in 1983, a work comprising painted bronze heads, at once coarse and
humorous, ranging from the Prince to a gaping tourist. Liipertz is a ruthless
appropriator, but the images he represents are incontrovertibly his own.

Landscape and natural forms played a large part in the sculpture of the
1980s, perhaps because of the increased interest in the environment and the

knowledge of the perilous state of the world's resources. Richard Long's activities
take several forms, but they are all aimed at one goal, that of self -identification with
the landscape, sometimes in the most ephemeral way, and of making a record of it.
Long takes lengthy walks, sometimes as close to home as on Dartmoor or in Ireland,
at other times as far afield as South America or Nepal. He always logs his journey
carefully on a map. At various stopping places he gently rearranges the landscape,
building a cairn of stones or treading a track through a field of daisies. He
photographs these 'interferences', knowing that, after his departure, nature will
reassert herself and wipe out all traces of man's presence. In the gallery, Long
displays the maps and photographs, with a few framed gnomic phrases, whilst o n the
floor is a circle or line of stones, slate or slivers of wood. The physical presence of
these natural objects is very powerful, representing where the artist's foot has
trodden; the floor pieces are often complemented by imprints on the wall made by
dipping his hand into the mud of the River Avon, near where he lives, and making a
kind of mandorla or sacred circle.

David Nash is also entirely dependent on nature for both his materials
and his inspiration. He lives in a remote part of North Wales, pri ncipally using wood
for his sculptures. He too 'interferes' with nature in the mildest way, perhaps tying or
grafting trees so that they will gradually form a sculptural design, or he will place a
boulder in a mountain stream which the movement of the wat er will displace or
erode. Nash never cuts down a living tree, using only wood from fallen trees to form
his sculptures. The principle of growth is important to him, and many of his works
continue to change long after they are made, cracking and expanding. In one series
he created stoves in different materials, recording them in photographs. The ceramic
and wood stoves survived as shells but, as might be expected, the ice stove melted.

Wolfgang Laib uses basic organic and fragile materials - milk, pollen,
rice - which are for him full of symbols and possess an energy and power which he
says he could not create himself. His rice houses, which are laid directly on the

floor, are wooden structures covered with metal, pierced with a small, round hole
and filled with rice to the point of overflowing. Laib says: 'They have the form of a
house and also of a reliquary of the Middle Ages or of a Muslim tomb, which
contains the bones of saints.' They also contain an implicit comment on the world's
starving millions. In 1977, Laib made his first Pollen Piece. From mid-February, he
collects pollen from the meadows and forests surrounding his studio and stores them
in small jars, keeping the types of flowers separate. He says: 'Pollen has incredible
colours which you could never paint.' They are extremely beautiful, which is his
avowed aim, but one cannot help having a nagging doubt about the deprived bees.