above and beyond

Paul Gauguin - Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1898)

abstraction is "the essence, or real sense of things"

Apollonius' sculpture known as the Belvedere Torso may have been of a satyr and originally it was certainly a complete figure. The Greek ideal of beauty was grounded in wholeness, and a partial or unfinished figure would have been unthinkable in ancient times. Apollonius' statue contradicted earlier Classical ideals of moderation both in its focus upon excessive muscular development (hence, imbalance between mind and body) and in an attention to anatomical details unbalanced imaginative overall design.

After the torso' rediscovered in the Renaissance, it gained partial-figure concept developed by Rodin, who in turn had derived his inspiration from such ancient fragments as the Belvedere Torso. Constantin Brancusi stripped his body to a point where its shapes have been generalized into a few cylindrical volumes. (Despite its title, the ambiguity of its gender creates of this sculpture a kind of "impartial" figure.) Simplification to the point of absolute reductiveness was the means by which he thought his art could approach the essence, or "real sense," of things (and naturalistic sculpture isnt real?). At a certain point in the process of reductiveness, as Brancusi found, the body can become associated with other, nonhuman shapes of a botanical or technological character, depending in part upon whether the material was wood or bronze. (This piece can be exhibited successfully even if inverted, something wholly impossible in naturalistic art.) Thus a plurality of associations, which broaden the frame of sculptural reference, are possible. Brancusi had no desire to emulate what he called the "beefsteak" of the Belvedere Torso or the sculptures of Rodin. His final surfaces are the outcome not of modeling but of rubbing and polishing. By reducing the torso to elementary but kindred and still sensual shapes, he was able to achieve sculpture that was for him perfect in its proportions and over-all concordance.

Hans Arp's Human Lunar Spectral has certain affinities with the Belvedere Torso and yet remains suggestively ambiguous. The torsion of the former recalls the flexibility of the Greek work but lacks any definite evidence of spine, pelvis, or muscle. There are also affinities in the lower portions of both; but Arp's form gives no hint of a skeletal or muscular substructure. Both Arp and Brancusi helped introduce into modern art a "sculpture without parts." Unlike Brancusi's torso, that of Arp seems capable of growth or swelling and contraction, thereby having greater reference to organic life. Rodin had defined sculpture as the art of the hole and the lump, yet as something always tied to the body's configuration.

Arp gave a purer and more obvious demonstration of sculpture as a logical succession of pliant concave and convex surfaces enclosing a volume. The rightness of this sequence is measurable not against the standard of the human body but only in terms of the sculpture itself.

Sculptors since the Egyptians and Greeks had frequently used the human body to personify some aspect of nature. (The Greeks used reclining male figures as river gods.) Modern sculptors such as Arp and Henry Moore have tended to see the body in terms of nature and to fuse qualities of both into a single work, thereby suggesting the unity of all life.

Woman receives a new life and serenity in the work of Henry Moore. In terms of the problem of disparate and unevenly distributed shapes referred to previously, Moore transformed the body to effect a more satisfactory sculptural balance, consistency, and continuity. When Moore reduced the size and definition of the head, eliminated the feet and hands, fused normally distinct or unconnected body parts, and introduced a great hollow in the middle of the torso, he was not motivated by a superficial desire to shock. His rephrasing of the body and investing it with a tissuelike surface created strong and fluid rhythms that for him suggest linkages of man and nature. His reclining forms of wood and stone seem shaped—that is, smoothed down—by the corrosive and abrasive action of the elements. The reclining pose had been traditionally associated with tranquillity and dignity, and these connotations were still honored. The living body possesses many openings, and Moore's use of hollows derives from mixed associations, from esthetic and sexual reveries centering on the inner cavities of the body, the womb, as well as fantasies and inspiration from caves and holes in wood and rock. His personal image exalts qualities and processes sensed, if not seen, in the body and elsewhere in nature.

- Albert Elsen

a big step toward abstraction

One of Rodin's most dramatic contributions historically was his demonstration that parts of the body were dispensable in a finished sculpture. In 1900 he exhibited publicly for the first time a small headless and armless study made for his John the Baptist. Some years later he enlarged this work and gave it the title Walking Man. Inspired by his study of the fragmented figures of antiquity in museums, Rodin became convinced that a complete work of art did not presuppose an entire figure. He cited the example of portrait busts and pointed out that in Greek fragments we can appreciate perfect beauty (a premise to which the Greeks themselves would have objected). When Rodin eliminated the head and arms from his sculpture, he also removed its identity and the traditional means for rhetorical expression. As pedestrian a subject as a man walking now took on the aspect of universal drama, and for the first time biological man became the central artistic concern. From certain angles the Walking Man, in full stride and with the upper part of his torso tilted forward and to the right, appears about to topple over. The powerful legs suggest a pushing off from the back foot and a receiving of weight and downward pressure on the front foot—a simultaneous condition that is impossible in life yet believable in Rodin's sculpture. Like Michelangelo, Rodin was willing to adjust anatomy in the interest of artistic plausibility. When asked why he had left off his figure's arms and head, Rodin replied, "A man walks on his feet."

Alberto Giacometti's take on the walking man

greek vs gothic sculpture

The Spear Carrier shows the relation to man to the world as one of self-confidence. It represents a frank extension into art of man's own ego, and signifies its creator's concern with the here and now, not his speculation on vague, mystical subjects or death. What in Homeric times had been remote, distant, and feared was brought within man's ken and perception. The Classical nude thus reflects a man-centered world, one where man is the focus and measure of all things.

The Classical Greek figure without clothing must be termed "nude" rather than "naked." The latter term suggests shame, self-consciousness, an unaccustomed state. The nude figure instead is one perfectly at ease without garments. For the Greeks, the ideal of nudity separated them from the barbarians. They had no sense of sin or shame in respect to the unclothed body.

The balance and rhythm of the Spear Carrier signifies not only control of the body but the training of the mind and the Apolline values of moderation. The Classical view of beauty depended upon a subtle manipulation of opposites. The fifth-century "beauty pose" showed a condition of rest tempered by movement, a balance between perfect energy and perfect repose. The artistic device that permits the capturing of this dualism was counterpoise; that is, for every movement in one direction, there is a countering tendency in another.

In form and meaning, the figure of Isaiah is the antithesis of the Spear Carrier; in purpose, however, the two are similar. Both are concrete realizations of human beliefs, which presented the viewer with ideal modes of being in the guise of heroes greater than himself. The Christian figure testifies to the existence and superiority of a spiritual world transcending the mundane sphere of the viewer.

The spear carrier is an athlete in the usual physical sense; Isaiah, an athlete of the spirit. The movement and proportion of Isaiah was directed in its appeal less to the eye than to the mind. There is an excitement in the prophet's pose, a sort of spastic and unself-conscious total gesture that mirrors his spiritual intensity.

The rational attitude and sensory experience of the Greek artist, which he animated his optimistic figures, was alien or untenable for his Gothic counterparts. The bodies of the Gothic saints comprise refuges from the uncertainties, tensions, and anxieties of the natural world. There is no hint of the repose and relaxation emblematic of man's concord with himself, with his society, or the world. The Gothic world could not accept the outlook of the Greeks.

Similarly, Donatello's Mary Magdalen sculpture is a merciless study of the body made less than human, first through self-indulgence and then through a self-denying asceticism. He renewed the late medieval dichotomy between inner truth and surface beauty (status change). The Magdalen has become a living corpse, like a medieval reminder of death and the wages of sin. Only the zeal of the convert animates the leathery flesh of this skeletal figure, holding out the same hope as baptism. The spiritual intensity imparted to the sculpture by Donatello transcends its physical repellence and makes the work esthetically compelling. The slight gap between the hands creates a life-giving tension that complements the psychological force emanating from the head.

- Albert Elsen

contemporary art exists to illustrate theory

In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

Why? I experienced a flash known as the Aha! Phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time. The fogs lifted! The clouds passed! The motes, scales, conjunctival bloodshot, and Murine agonies fell away!

All these years, along with countless kindred souls, I am certain, I had made my way into the galleries of Upper Madison and Lower Soho and the Art Gildo Midway of Fifty-seventh Street, and into the museums, into the Modern, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, the Bastard Bauhaus, the New Brutalist, and the Fountainhead Baroque, into the lowliest storefront churches and grandest Robber Baronial temples of Modernism. All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer—waiting, waiting, forever waiting for . . . it . . . for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there—waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not "seeing is believing," you ninny, but "believing is seeing," for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

- Tom Wolfe

postmodern art: shock the bourgeoisie

Robert Mapplethorpe - X Portfolio (1978)

Chris Ofili - The Holy Virgin Mary with elephant dung (1998)

Andres Serrano - Piss Christ (1987)

real-fake

what to say at the MOMA

Hyperreality and simulacras blur what is real and what is replicant. In managing perceptions of real and fake, this artist makes the viewer question the fabrication of social assumptions, hierarchies, and privilege.