In my previous posts on Paul Crowther’s recent book Theory of the Art Object I have sketched his general account of art forms and given particular attention to his account of the spatial arts of sculpture, assemblage, and installation. Very briefly and crudely summarized, Crowther claims that each art form involves a characteristic manner of making; a characteristic rhetoric, that is a way of addressing and soliciting attention from a viewer; and a characteristic version of a ‘poetics of finitude’ wherein the viewer is offered conceptions of self, world, and their interrelations. (See my previous posts for fuller and more accurate summaries with some explication.) Crowther takes account of novel kinds of spatial art of the last half-century in adding accounts of assemblage and installation as art forms distinct from sculpture. To see whether and how his account contributes to the understanding of distinctively contemporary art forms, I now consider the work of the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone, in particular an early work of his that presents some challenges to understanding that are not unusual in contemporary art.
Penone’s work as an artistic sculptor begins in the late 1960s and continues to the present. From early on he was associated with other Italian artists in the movement Arte Povera, which like other contemporaneous movements globally attempted to make artworks that were not strictly bound to the prevailing artworld institutions of studios, galleries, and museums, and that consisted of materials not traditionally accredited as vehicles of artistic meaning. In a sense, much of Penone’s work uses wood, but to say so invites misunderstanding, as his primary materials are not woods but rather trees, and the elemental forces of gravity, wind, and light that shape them and render their appearance accessible and attractive. After his years as a student in the 1960s, Penone’s sculptural work proper begins with the series Maritime Alps in 1968, works that individually consist of what Germano Celant calls “direct interventions on trees and landscapes” in the woods near Penone’s parents’ home. (Celant, p. 41) The works survive primarily in photographic documentation: Penone weaves together saplings (I Have Interwoven Three Trees); Penone loosely wraps with wire that marks the points where he had first clung to a tree (The Growing Tree Will Remember the Points of My Contact); and likewise a kind of signature work involving Penone grasping the trunk of a tree with his right hand, then installing a similarly-shaped steel hand in the very place Penone had grasped (It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point); etc.
Despite the non-traditional character of Penone’s works, Penone identifies himself as a sculptor, and this self-identification is unproblematic in the broad context of contemporary art. Why is that? One reason is that Penone has worked out a plausible and attractive re-conceptualization of sculpture that draws upon well-established and durable conceptions of sculptural activity. Such durable conceptions include the idea that sculpture is to be contrasted with painting and drawing as three-dimensional to two-dimensional art forms. Another conception is that sculptural making divides into two great sub-classes, carving and modeling. In the former the artist treats the material as containing within it some already articulated and determinate form, and knocks away the unnecessary covering materials with an instrument that is harder and/or more powerful than the worked material; in the latter the artist treats the material as something relatively formless and indeterminate, and (as with carving) gives form to it with something relatively hard or powerful, whether it be the artist’s hands shaping the material or a form into which the material is pressed or poured. As Georges Didi-Huberman puts it in his monograph on the artist, Penone re-conceptualizes all materials as fundamentally temporal, ‘like a river’, so that their character qua shaped is recognizable yet unfixed and subject to development and decay. This re-conceptualization maintains contact with sculpture’s traditional three-dimensionality. And the further conception common to carving and modeling follows in train; as Didi-Huberman quotes Penone himself: “The stone itself is fluid: a mountain crumbles, becomes sand. It is only a question of time. It’s the short duration of our existence which leads us to deem a certain material as being either “hard” or “soft.” Sculpture is founded upon the approach of a hard element and a soft element—in this case it’s the chisel which penetrates into the wood.” (Didi-Huberman p. 51) And accordingly nothing in this re-conceptualization resists Crowther’s conceptualization of sculpture in its three-dimensional nature, its aesthetic address to a viewer, and its so-to-speak native range of instances of the poetics of finitude.
But consider another piece from the Maritime Alps series: My Height, the Length of My Arms, and My Width in a Stream. Like the other pieces in the series, it exists as a photographic documentation. The physical piece was a frame of the dimensions indicated in the title and, as likewise indicated, placed on the bed of a shallow stream; the photo shows the water moving over the frame, placed in a stream barely wider than itself. This work seems to be very much a part of and artistically consistent with the other pieces in Maritime Alps; yet it seems to me that it does not evidently fit in with Crowther’s conception of sculpture. Both Celant and the art historian Elizabeth Mangini seem hesitant to refer to this piece as a sculpture; Celant refers to it as an ‘intervention’, and Mangini as an ‘object’ or ‘event’. (Mangini, p. 22) One way of putting the difference between the relevant conception of artistic sculpture and the conception embodied by the piece is that instead of showing the result of bringing the relatively hard and/or powerful force to the relatively malleable material, it stages that process. The conceptually prior stage of the artistic process seems to be something like this: (a) Penone has conceptualized the piece; (b) he has translated the dimensions of his body with arms extended into a frame; and (c) he has placed the frame in the stream. (a)-(c) do not express the sculptural process as given in Crowther’s conception. Rather, the piece in its ‘finished’ form presents that process. Why does this matter?
It seems to me that the staging of a process as traditionally conceived is a characteristic aspect of works in contemporary art; consider, among many possible examples, Richard Serra’s works that aim to present various verbs (‘to mark’; ‘to grasp’; ‘to fold’; etc.) that express aspects of artistic making. One might agree that Crowther’s conception may be invoked as part of the explanation of any number of works of contemporary sculpture, yet also think that further explanatory resources are needed to make sense of the distinctively contemporary aspect of such works. What might further be needed for explanation? Consider a work from the dawn of contemporary art, certainly vastly better known from verbal descriptions than from actual viewing, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). This work of course consists of a faintly smudged piece of paper that is the result of Rauschenberg spending weeks erasing a pencil and crayon drawing by Willem de Kooning, a drawing that at Rauschenberg’s request de Kooning donated for that purpose. Seemingly it is an instance, far from unique, of recent art whose meaning is exhausted by a verbal description and an evaluation of it as a neo-Dadaist stunt. But its meaning is much richer than one might initially think, and grasping the piece’s range of meaning and recognizing its distinctively contemporary kinds of meaningfulness helps illuminate a surprising range of contemporary visual art. In a monograph on Rauschenberg he art historian Leo Steinberg puzzles over the piece at length, and comes to see its significance it what it expresses about the trans-personal and cross-generational nature of artistic making under contemporary conditions. Asked about the motivation for the piece, Rauschenberg explained: “I was trying to make art, and so therefore I had to erase art.” (quoted in Steinberg, p. 21) Although Steinberg claims with repeated viewings to find the piece “ever less interesting to look at,” nonetheless “the decision behind it never ceases to fascinate and expand.” (p. 22) One part of its significance, so Steinberg suggests, is in the ways it illuminates the interactions, mediated by works and their making, between members of the same cross-generational practice. So the work of the earlier practitioner is a gift to the later practitioner, whose work in response returns the gift. The later artist to a degree repeats the gestures of the earlier artist; here this repetition is made literal in the way Rauschenberg’s strokes of erasure follow de Kooning’s strokes of marking. The other part of its expanding significance is the way that the piece marks a decisive break. The gestural power of de Kooning is part of an historical continuum displaying a “virtuoso capacity for three-dimensional visualization” that is unbroken since Michelangelo. Rauschenberg’s piece marks a break and announces “the ineluctable obsolescence of the power of mind and hand embodied” in a Michelangelo drawing, an obsolescence evident in the world of digital art, installation, and video. (ibid)
And mutatis mutandis for sculpture: perhaps part of what is missing from Crowther’s account with regard to sculpture is the recognition that sculpture, like all arts, are essentially historical phenomena; and further that part of the distinctiveness of contemporary sculpture is that among its basic bits of ideology is its seemingly paradoxical historical sense as something ahistorical that makes sense in part because it is after a long and venerable tradition. Later Steinberg notes that “[i]n retrospect the most clownish of Rauschenberg’s youthful pranks take on a kind of stylistic consistency,” and the Erased de Kooning Drawing comes to seem as a prefiguration of Rauschenberg’s mature conception of the ‘flat-bed picture plane’, that is, a conception of a picture as not the visual analogue of vertical, upright human perceiver, but rather as a metaphor for and instance of a plane that has been worked upon as a horizontal surface, and only turned vertical as a convenience of display. (pp. 36-8; for his classic account of the flat-bed picture plane see Steinberg 1972)
Steinberg’s insight that it is only in retrospect and in light of the Rauschenberg’s later work that Erased de Kooning Drawing takes on a fuller sense points to another dimension of meaningfulness in contemporary sculpture is left unexplicated in Steinberg’s monograph; so for illumination one turns to the account offered by the literary historian Philip Fisher in his book Making and Effacing Art. Fisher notes that modern works of art arise within “a culture of intellectualized criticism”. In the early twentieth-century much of this criticism is provided by artists themselves in the forms of manifestoes and other verbal explanations. Later this explanatory verbiage is supplied by a cadre of professional critics, whose essential task “is to historicize the present, to imagine it as the future’s past, and by that act to give or deny value to the individual work or artistic career.” (Fisher p. 90) This historicization becomes “a peculiarly modern form of content”, and so the “production of horizons for seeing works goes hand in hand with the manufacture of the works themselves.” The chief mechanism through which artists self-historicize is by working in sequences or series, what Fisher calls ‘the strategy of the future’s past’ wherein the individual work of art becomes “a step within a sequence that anyone living at that moment of the future will think of as its past.” (p. 91) Fisher’s own account of the Rauschenberg piece is largely limited to its destructive aspect in announcing the obsolescence of the past, but he also recognizes that interest of Rauschenberg’s act “depends on the trap that it designs to capture the idea of series and succession in art.” (p. 99) This further recognition by Fisher echoes part of Steinberg’s point, but crucially adds the idea of the work existing in a series, “an immensely satisfying short-term rational structure” that can imitates the technological model of a ‘breakthrough’ in offering what Fisher calls (following George Kubler) ‘Prime Objects’, striking works of invention that become exemplary for further practices. Putting Steinberg’s and Fisher’s accounts together, one might say that Erased de Kooning Drawing is one of the Prime Objects in Rauschenberg’s oeuvre, one whose significance was unavailable at the time of its making and initial display, but which gains ‘in retrospect’ its fuller meaningfulness by virtue of the role it comes to play as a kind of manifesto object, a ‘horizon for seeing’ that guides attention to Rauschenberg’s work. The reader will have guessed that I am suggesting that Penone’s My Height, the Length of My Arms, and My Width in a Stream plays much the same role in the Maritime Alps and indeed in Penone’s work as a whole.
If this suggestion is plausible, then my further suggestion is that the example of Penone permits us to see the sense in which My Height, the Length of My Arms, and My Width in a Stream is a work of sculpture. It is an ‘expanded’ sense, though not in Rosalind Krauss’s sense as explicated in my first blog post on Crowther’s book. The work is integral to the sculptural series Martime Alps, with the individual work and the series of which it is a part illuminating each other. It is by playing the role of Prime Object that this ‘intervention’, ‘event’, or ‘object’ becomes a sculptural work. The example suggests a further dimension of meaningfulness that will need to be added to Crowther’s account of sculpture, along with a historical dimension, in order that it captures the distinctiveness of contemporary work: the concepts of series and oeuvre.
In my final post on Crowther’s book, I will contrast his account of sculpture with a recent alternative account offered by Robert Hopkins, itself based on suggestions from Susanne Langer, and then by way of conclusion reflect on the role of genre in explanations of contemporary visual art.
References:
Germano Celant et alia, Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within (2013)
Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)
Georges Didi-Huberman, Being a Skull: Site, Contact, thought, Sculpture (2016)
Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art (1991)
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1977)
George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962)
Clare Lilley et alia, Giuseppe Penone: A Tree in the Wood (2018)
Elizabeth Mangini, Seeing Through Closed Eyelids: Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture (2021)
Giuseppe Penone, Giuseppe Penone: writings 1968-2008 (2009)
Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg (2000)
----Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972)