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PROFILE: NOT SEEING THE WOOD FOR THE TREES
ROGER TATLEY

‘Separate “things”, “forms”, “objects”, “shapes”, etc., with beginnings and endings are mere convenient fictions,’ declared Robert Smithson in Artforum in 1968. At first, this was probably easy to dismiss as the ramblings of a man obsessed with entropy – especially in a year filled with raised voices, when pamphlets and manifestos were on every street corner – but it’s become increasingly prophetic, a guiding, abiding truth for so much of the practice of sculpture that’s followed.

Smithson’s way of thinking has liberated many from the proscriptions of object creation, which had reduced sculptures to the status of commodities for far too long. Sculptures have since done more than slip off their plinths and spill into space, ‘found objects’ become more than isolated readymades. There has also been a shift away from the metaphor-heavy practice that once so overwhelmed much three-dimensional work to approaches that eschew the prescriptive for matrices of personal references. Not only are ‘sculptors’ increasingly reluctant to impose on the viewer a pre-packaged meaning, but many subtly disrupt an easy reading of their work. In every sense the relationships ‘between things’ have become the ‘things’ themselves, and not seeing the wood for the trees has not only become a virtue, but an important aspiration.

The most poetic way to affirm Smithson’s declaration is to create transient artworks, ‘sculptures’ that literally melt into their surroundings. In 1983 David Hammons sold a selection of snowballs, or Bliz-aard Balls, to passers-by from a blanket on a New York sidewalk. Two decades later Tobias Rehberger persuaded one of the world’s largest banks to fund the manufacture of a giant ice palace for the Venice Biennale, which was to glisten and melt in the Italian sun. The fact that it wasn’t built is all the more disappointing because, as everyone who was there will attest, Venice 2003 was a scorcher and Rehberger’s would surely have been its most memorable ‘pavilion’. The difference in cost of these two exercises is a measure of how much corporate and public funding of art projects has developed in 20 years, but it’s also a striking illustration of where we’ve got to in terms of letting go of the notion of artworks as lasting commodities, of sculptures as mere objects.

While melting sculptures clearly present logistical and financial complications, other artists use elements of a similarly ethereal nature as their raw materials. Won Ju Lim cuts and arranges hundreds of interlocking sections of transparent Plexiglas, but the most tangible medium in her sculptures is light. Whether as the yellow glow of desk lamps or as projected images of buildings and cityscapes, it infiltrates, reflects and refracts throughout her work’s interior and exterior spaces. Lee Boroson sculpts with air. His soft forms and inflatable overpasses are merely yielding containers, aquiver with the air pumped through them, generating vivified, breathing spaces wherever they’re installed.

Sarah Sze transforms prosaic objects that might pass unnoticed through our hands (and pockets) into evocative artworks, into drawings in space; but, as fluid as they may feel, her structures are meticulously ordered and considered. As Barry Schwabsky puts it, ‘There’s nothing of scatter art in Sze’s aesthetic’. Sze’s ouevre is the result of a shift from a purely studio-based practice to one engaged with the contingencies of the street and environs of the city. Gabriel Orozco is quick to proclaim that he doesn’t even have a studio, preferring salvaging, trawling, recycling and ‘gathering moments’ from Mexico City to Kortrijk. We’re led to believe that David Hammons spends most of his time on long walks in and around Manhattan, ‘learning from the streets’ and, to paraphrase Martin Herbert, ‘travelling light’. Richard Wilson has always scavenged for larger quarry – slicing, boring, crushing and reconstructing ships, buildings and light aircraft.

Goshka Macuga prefers a form of ‘shopping’ when sourcing her materials, from Glasgow antique shops to private collections. Macuga takes her rummaging a little further than most, borrowing other artists’ work for her pieces, and realigning them within her own contexts. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have been ‘curating’ sculptures and installations for years, thoroughly transforming sheds, rooms and museum spaces into their own worlds. And, though they left Russia over a decade and a half ago, each piece or environment is heavy with a socio-political language borne from living in the Soviet Union. The worlds of Ian Kiaer are gentler, less imposing places. He re-creates biblical and art-historical narratives with the most rudimentary means in apparently casual but formally rigorous landscapes.

There are some in this survey who gladly use ‘traditional’ sculptural materials, but subvert their associations. Yutaka Sone carved a white marble rollercoaster, its cars forever suspended at the moment just before they should plunge downward, and surrounded it with lush foliage. Subodh Gupta – a man who has spent years using cow dung in his sculptures, installations and performances – cast bundles of migrant workers’ essential possessions in bronze to emphasise how much more precious the original tightly-bound belongings were.

Some works in this issue contain such bizarre, inexplicable components that a straightforward written description of them seems laughable: Paul Etienne Lincoln ‘milks’ a bear holding a sugar beet, to the strains of tango music; Roger Hiorns cultivates blue crystals over a BMW engine and models of Chartres and Notre-Dames cathedrals. It’s not as if we don’t all have recollections of exquisitely absurd combinations of elements – Paul Thek’s Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box (1965), for instance, has thrust itself into my mind forever – but Lincoln and Hiorns accommodate as many readings and allusional side roads as you could possibly care to go down.

There’s a great deal of play in this survey. Not mere insouciance for the sake of it, but the construction of games where intrigue and value lies in the nimbleness with which serious territory is explored without solemnity. Andreas Slominksi creates devices to scare people in parks at night or trap all manner of beasts. Tobias Rehberger persuades Cameroonian carpenters to remake Rietveld chairs and Thai mechanics to copy Volkswagen Beetles and Porsches. Damián Ortega prefers his Beetles disembowelled, rendering them useless but spectacular. Whereas Ortega creates modular, scientific structures out of tortillas, Mathieu Mercier stacks boxes of garishly-packaged products in accordance with Rodchenko’s spatial principles. Mercier also emulates Mondrians with cheap flatpack shelves and coloured plastic D-I-Y objects, but, as Mark Rappolt asserts, he may be playful but he’s never prescriptive.

Ronald Jones also uses tricks of association in referencing past artists’ work, but his games are utterly serious. His sensuous, alluring replicas of Brancusis and Arps, complete with signature pedestals, are revealed as the magnified shapes of malignant cells of cancer sufferers or of those with immunodeficiency viruses. Producing a figurative sculpture in a durable medium is a genre that has had little currency within the avant-garde since the 1940s and, superficially at least, the works of Charles Ray and Keith Edmier seem to be most out of place in this survey. Ray is a master of using scale and barely-perceptible movement to manipulate encounters between his work and it’s viewers, without our ever being quite sure of the messages behind that manipulation. Edmier takes us underwater in Victoria Regina (First and Second Night Blooms) (1998) and allows us to be small children again as we approach Fireweed (2002-2003). He also takes us back to our childhood by creating generous works in which his projected memories – from descriptions of absent grandfathers to junior high school crushes – merge into ours. Edmier and Ray make sculptures that simply don’t function in isolation.

The shift from creating isolated objects to dense assemblages is most evident in Isa Genzken’s unusually eclectic career. Iwona Blazwick walks through some of it with us – from the plinth-based pre-cast cement sculptures of the 1980s to recent clusters of figurines, shimmering surfaces and splattered paint. Another curator who’s contributed to the magazine is Alison M Gingeras . As two of the lead-essayists in our recent special painting issue dwelt at length on her Cher Peintre exhibition, we felt it might be rewarding to set her curator’s eye on sculpture for this one. To have her curating a hypothetical exhibition across our pages is an unexpected pleasure.

It’s always tempting, with a disparate group of artists like this, to try to establish common traits or threads, while glossing over each of their qualities and obsessions, to justify one’s selection process, and I’ve already been guilty of that. If it would have been vainglorious to attempt to present an holistic overview of contemporary sculpture within a tome, to do so through only 21 profiles in a magazine would be folly. What you have, therefore, is our shamelessly subjective selection of artists that we feel represents a taste of some of the many strands of contemporary sculptural practice. I’m sure you’ll find that it’s the richness and breadth of the writing that make this issue unique, and we are indebted to all the writers who’ve poured themselves into it. JJ Charlesworth has painstakingly gone through each of the 21 artists with me and (having not been directly involved in their selection) listened to, and occasionally countered my arguments for their inclusion. Not only has he brought many of their practices into his lead essay, but he’s done so within the context of a vast subject with rare lucidity. But don’t take my word for it, turn over the page.

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