Alexander Sokolov: comments on Sculpture theory and Academism
Golden Ages
In past millenia and civilisations, sculpture in the 'traditional' form, as representation in 3-dimensions or what is technically the 'Plastic' had widespread use, and was accorded power. To this day it is still true that, in parts of Africa, sacred groves of woodland are still reserved for the use of those elders who direct initiation ceremonies which use sculpted images as teaching guides. Such sculptures as may still be used were first brought to general and particularly artists' notice during the latter 19th Century with the founding of large institutions such as the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. Equally in Greece, terrifying masques were used in drug induced initiation ceremonies.
However before this particular appearance, Sculpture had always held a place within occidental society, and we can at any rate trace a continuous line to that Sculpture which was utilised for religious expression in the romano-celtic and Gothic periods. At this time the works of the Classical world of Greece and even of Rome existed only in the memory within preserved classical Literature, such as Herodotus. Earlier than this all we have is Homer, and still now everyone is familiar with the religious trick played by the earliest Greeks upon the denizens of Troy, and thus at the back of our mind know that, always, public monuments of Sculpture were raised and venerated, as within a purpose for the cohesion of societies. Herodotus speaks of the waxing and waning of fortunes of men, wherein such monuments raised at times as copies of marble monuments in the metal of bronze, served as effective banks in which to store that then precious military substance, which could be later broken down and recast as weaponry.
The evolution from the static profile which dominated Egyptian monumentality of Sculpture to that of the Greeks, with its perceptions and allowance of movement, is considered as indicative of the evolution of human thought and mentality away from the firmest rigidity, one which looked consciously back to an era when gods themselves walked the Earth. To this day no one knows completely to whom the Egyptians referred in these memories, but in part- or at least in the placement of later monuments clues appear to have been left that sculpture in the remnant of the great Sphinx at Giza betoken knowlwedge to which we are still not re-admitted.
In other continents, strange agreement as to a similar celestial meaning come down equally hazily, but without such sculptural form. The waxing and waning of Pre-Columbian civilisations appears to have left geographical manipulations, and the purely Plastic if relatively temporary artistic capacities of these peoples is clear. In China the monumental nature of sculpture resided more in the aesthetic quality of productions rather than in magnificence of size, but this can only be seen as reflective of that land's profoundly ordered philosophical base. In Africa, the civilsations in the west, particularly of Benin, provide clear signal that the transposition from the living into the Plastic of Sculpture was both successful and prized, and portaits attained every much as great a freedom of expression as that to be seen at the same time in the land of the Kmer in South-east Asia.
In all, the nature of sculpture can be seen to have existed within thinking which, in contrary to our present age, did not either exalt individuality or expect constant evolution. Classical societies existed in relative mental stasis and even where, as with Periclean Athens, the evolution into democracy was rapidly cemented, the attendant Phidian monumentalism that raised the Parthenon was both undertaken by myriad un-known sculptors and itself cemented that continuous classical Plasticity which reigned un-changing for nearly the whole following millenia.
Middle Ages
With the permission that gained sway within Christendom, in its first millenia, to allow iconic representations of Christ and then the Saints, after the original continuance of the Judaic prohibition against the worship of images, gradually a new purpose for Sculpture in the West took its place within the precincts of the Church. Power in so far as it lived under a monarchical stamp of 'divine right' equally arrogated itself gradually of the power of Sculpture, and by the second Christian millenium the Plastic art of Sculpture had regained if not the excellence of forms known by the Greeks and before them the Egyptians, then at least its prior function, for the support of power and order.
The emotional impact of high Gothic sculpture, existing as it did within its own developed canons as to proportion, continued for that intervening age when beliefs and a society dependant upon the fixity of scripture only was to be supersceded by distant purely physical influences upsetting its immutable order. The mathematico-philosophical researches of Mohammedanism -with its off-shoot into perusal of the natural order, contributed nothing to the Plastic and only promoted ornament, but in its transport across the oceans of Chinese understanding of rocketry, brought to the West the physical changes that carried the demise of the divine rights of Kings, placed in hitherto secure fortresses. At the Invalides in Paris can be counted where they sprawl in serried ranks, those canon stamped in Arabic that provided this purely physical change and which then drove change within western society, un-ravelling that earlier stasis of scriptural based civilisation.
Renaissance
It was with the parallel re-discovery of both the graeco-roman Plastic arts, un-earthed from the ruins of Rome, and the humanistic mental experimentation of Plato, that sculpture was apparently re-born in the Renaissance. To what extent Donatello's nude can be seen within such discoveries may be more debateable than that clear education so fortunately thrust upon the young Michelangelo Buenarotti. Between the extra-ordinary Church allowance by a keeper of a Morgue, for him to have free access to cut into the dead flesh of the deceased, and the Platonic expansion upon his strong faith descendant in all from the preceding age of scriptural domination, arrives the flowereing so-called re-birth of culture. With Michelangelo, the Plastic briefly reigns in a perfect combination between his refinement of mentality and his perfect mastery of both human form and its direct translation into the Plastic reality of marble. I say briefly, because like the ancient greeks, it is clear that Michelangelo worked from no more than the guidance of a bozzeto, or small clay model , held together with human hair from the barber-shop, and like the Greeks, that, with this and with the records of his observations of living forms stored in the vocabulary of drawings, using a plumb-line alone did he create his masterpieces. Michelangelo was a direct-carver whose own capacities, from the anatomical knowledge to the philosophic, existed equally on the vital base of the artisanal fearlessness and understanding of his instrument- the pointed chisel. As is recorded, as soon as he would work, it was if snow fell around him, for he had also in his first youth, and independantly of the Medici influence, discovered for himself the secret of stone-carving. It is said that this was learnt from the artisans of the quarries, but one could dispute this, and say that he refined that, as such technique neither continued after him nor is known today in the region.
Almost immediately following the well known exploits of Michelangelo, the Renaissance falls to the apparently competing exploits of the Bernini family, with the young Gian Lorenzo's nearly equally felicitous early propulsion into a mastery of techniques and directives. However Bernini carried with him that seed of disaster for the Plastic art of Sculpture which Michelangelo had himself sown, for, the ability of Bernini to out-do even Buenarotti, came with the abandonment of the freer Greek direct carving method, and a super-imposition of a Plastic of modelling over such direct translation of feeling.
The record of Michelangelo's works, particularly with his un-finished pieces, amongst the Slaves and the Apostles, shows us that his thinking at times supersceded his marmoreal design and design capacity, and one can say that some of these pieces were abandoned not for lack of funding, nor, of course, for that present adulation given to them as works-in-process, but because they were essentially failures, which- if completed, would have literally not stood up. At any rate one can see in the Louvre that the neck of the dying slave sees a perfect compromise between reality of life and that of marble, in which marble is chosen. As to his right leg, this is compromised beyond the frame of the block. Such noticeable purely individual artistic compromises justify comments as to why Michelangelo is interesting, and Bernini is not. That very many of Michelangelo's sculptures were designed to be recessed into special architectural features and niches, is also indicative of that free direct working which makes of Micheangelo an inspiration, for these too sometimes show compromise.
Bernini on the other hand is pure perfection, beyond the humanly possible, and the masterpieces appear to be the result of pre-ordained forms transposed from pre-ordained modelling. The effect is exquisite, and provides us who sculpt with an exquisite death, for nothing can be done to more than feebly attain such perfection, and certainly absolutely nothing can be so achieved in direct-carving. It is said that Michelangelo did not believe in the use of the drill, that is the bowstring-propelled drill, which allows the sculptor of that or any era to have avoided fracturing fine details with coarse chisels. It was the drill however which allowed for that developement, through the gothic, of tomb-full-figure-portaiture whose exquisite draperies flower in the masterpiece of the Pieta .
Anyone who has tried to think directly in marble, mightsay that the productions of Michelangelo even supposedly created from no more than bozzeto and plumb-line, after drawings, do suggest that his vaunted antipathy to both drills, and the copying of models (the technique of which is called 'pointing' and which is purely of mathematical nature and interest) are myth. It would appear that he found the necessity for both too great, and abandoned his earlier direct method, under the pressure which his own trajectory had set upon him.
As to Bernini, with his complex mastery of movement that made marble flaot and defy very gravity, the intense beauty of the creations coupled upon the un-assailable mental compositions of Michelangelo to leave such stamp upon the world of Sculpture as to have almost shut the door to genuine feeling thereafter. The succeeding age of the mannerist and the Baroque avail of the technico-mathematical transposition from modelling, and slide ever onwards towards the ends of figurative Sculpture in the mid-19th Century Salon Art.
The 'Pointing method' in Academism
These last personal views stem purely from the fact of my particular difficulties and only partial solutions for my personal sculptural trajectory, and, that clear criticism, which emanated from Paris in the mid -20th Century analysis made by the famed portraitist Marcel Gimond. The only basis of difference I could hold with Gimond's very much clearer analysis, is that being as I am emotinally attached- as almost a masochist- to the delights of direct-carving without even the use of a bozzeto, I believe Gimond would not and could not have made these last related observations, for he indeed modelled in clay prior to that subsequent mechanical transposition.
As any marble sculptor in any continent, which is largely all sculptors in all contents whose work has reached any note, worked in this mechanical 'pointing' method, after preparatory composition in clay, I should digress to explain what this actually entails, for such sculptors would have naturally claimed that all the 'artistry', or capture of life itself, takes place in the modelling of the clay.
In physical terms the pointing method involves, as I say, the relatively repeatable and thus 'liquid' prior reflection in clay of those observations from life- or of whatever desired intention the sculptor requires to fix into marble. When this is finished, a Rodin, who worked in this manner to great effect, will have an artisanal worker- because he has reached that level of financial liberation- to whom the original will serve as 3-dimensional template. The secondary stage will be the fixing of that finshed form into the harder more durable medium of plaster, simply that the modelling be protected. This fixing is even more liquid, and of no artistic consequence whatever, but simply invloves a two-stage process of casting the original clay, and then filling that cast with further plaster to make a faithful and equal plaster equivalent.( The practise of bronze sculpting only differs slightly from this, in so far as a hollowness faithful to the exterior of the clay is to be created and filled to that orignal exterior surface.)
The subsquent plaster cast is then ready to be 'pointed'. If it is a small work like a portrait, two convenient tables are arranged, and upon one a mass of marble is placed of greater than the over-all volume of the plaster cast head. The existing cast head is placed upon the other table, and thereupon careful association based upon positioning in the dimensions is fixedly registered from that final positioning of the cast. The measurements are simple reverse engineering, as we know say, of all necessay points upon the surface of the cast, and the extremities of hair, ears, chin or nose, can then be simply drilled to their exact associative depth within the marble block, as the apparatus of the 'pointer' is dupicated from the chosen and exterior 'fixed'-that is elected, positioning. It is the template making with rather nore triple dimensional depth than that which a carpenter will need to fit wood into indetermined space. The given verticals and the horizontal duistances therefrom are simply copied at the exact 'points' from that chosen exterior reference, and the entry to the final depth is drilled repatedly.
The resulting drill-holes should of course not pass the required final copied surfaces, and at the Musee Rodin in Paris , the visitor can- when alerted to the method, precisely see where such points of work-manship by the Rodin assistants did in fact exceed their proper depth. At any rate , you may as well know that this is the method Rodin used through-out, and such is the manner in which his vast body of works, all so refined and liquid and accomplished in marble, were created. The drill points can be few or many , and they are then followed to their depths without that necessity and creative inspiration that must drive and underly the works of a 'direct-carver', that is one who battles as if in the darkness, and for whom the resistance of the block is only tempered by his capacities for an almost faith-driven belief in the possibility of as yet invisible success.
Personally I would not suggest that those who direct-carve even produce a bocetto or rough model, as in my experience the impossibility of continual comparison between a vacancy and a real form distracts the attention from where it is really needed, which is at the block of marble alone.
It should be said, before returning to the history of sculptural Art, that it was the essential emotional vacuity of the pointing method that led to the great 20th century revolution in Sculpture, championed and led by the Rumanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and fitfully continued by the later Henry Moore. Remember also that, when and if you pass the portrait busts of elderly worthies, that the marble was not carved, but was squeezed by drills and in cold precision by hands following the mathematics of a template, and realise that what came to be called Salon Art, that art acceptible and pleasing to the audience's eye, was criticised by these revolutionaries as if 'sqeezed' from a tube as if 'fossilised' in contrived emotionless marble perfection.
Criticism from Paris concerning successive Academism
The aforementioned sculptor Marcel Gimond possessed that mastery of expression so effective within the French language and it is un-fortunate that his 'Refutation of the errors of Sculpture' is both un-available and forgotten. As the Plastic art of Sculpture had lagged behind the leading literary and poetic driving forces of the Renaissance, even today expression through the language of the Plastic trails far behind the expressions of Literature. Gimond himself was recognised in his time, which was that of the Paris in full renown as artistic metropolis of the 20th Century, as both a plastician of the spirit, welcomed as much by by the Salon as by the Cubists, as he was recognised as incisive commentator. It is from him that all but the comments concerning direct-carving here derive.
The analysis of the modern state of sculpture, one which has not in truth largely altered since the 1960's, is nothing welcome, but may be of truth. It begins speaking of that academism which even at the out-set of the Renaissance had in literature at least claimed too strongly the Mean of Ideal Beauty, enunciated further by such as Firenzuola in the 16th Century, whose descriptions cap several previous centuries of a literary conception of beauty.
Academies developing from the Renaissance were literaray festivals of poetry and drama ,and the move away from Latin into the vernacular gathered the attention. By the mid 16th Century the humanism had been displaced by the new face of Counter-reformation and the ascent into Italy of the Inquisition.
Gimond attacks philosophers as thereafter arrogating to themselves an authority to compress upon the as yet un-esteemed sculptors these literary based ideals and directives towards the Mean of Beauty, of interjecting theories without their having the slightest knowledge of Sculpture's fundamentals. However, whilst parading the visible achievements of Chaldeans as of Greeks, of romanesque Christ as of Egyptian pharaoh, Gimond's purpose is to attend to the contemporay condition of Modern Sculpture and of the modern spirit.
The long history of imitation of graeco-roman sculpture saw sculpture misconstrued, and this imitation replace every much as did the roman imitation of the greek, that essence of true sculpture which is its lyrical transposition of nature into the defined and particular world of the Plastic. In replacement of this barren path, those in the 19th Century worthy of their Art stove to escape from these absurd constraints. Dragging in their wake imitators, these outbid their masters so much that this very reaction ended with a systematic reversal of the previous academism, and its replacement with another, the sterile pleasantry of the Salon.
However with the anti-Salon revolutiom, as soon as it was decided that art is less imitation than a creation, then nature itself was adjudged un-important, so heralding arrival to a new Academism, one constructing itself upon the ruination and revolution proceeding from Brancusi. Gimond is careful however not to mention modern names. In this phase a total liberalism is the rule, and the work of art becomes as if of itself a fact, as worthy as all other such 'fact'. Museums become the equivalent of grand Stamp collections, where time and place of issue dominates, as if Art lives in a.constant state of progression. Whereas in Classical civilisations personality was deemed inherent without having to ostentaiously detach itself from other work, in the modern Sculpture so much is this done that it come into the danger of losing all personality by so much abusing it.
That Cubist devolution borrowed from the Primitive and tribal arts allowed the super-civilised to feign to recover long-lost ingenuities, to claim to represent the present state of an un-quiet and anarchic society through imitation of the apprent trembling of savages, children and even the insane. Saturated with a rapid and discordant knowledge of these societies, artists lacking in critical spirit accepted as true that which they had not had the time to assimilate. Incapable of seeing beneath the superficial qualities that which characterises master-pieces from all ages and civilisations, the harried modernists believed themselves capable of re-inventing Sculpture completely anew, where each sculptor existed for himself and chiefly to vie distinction from his fellows. The illusion arrived that genius can supply everything and that strength of technique was as evil as the previous Academism. Gimond does not mention the name Picasso, but evidently described him. This was regression and denial of culture, the misunderstanding of deeper qualities. It was the promotion of only the most superficial qualities of forms that are alive within nature's model, and but the creation thereby of a new Ornamental Academism. The seeds of individualism sown in the period of Pericles and of the Renaissance were reaped in a new Academism of the horrific, and the Salon Academism of the pretty was but replaced with the conformism to its opposite.
Art, which is less the manner of making than the expression of feeling, lives within the necessity to find rather than to search, but as the Public became increasingly immune to the contrived shock, the research for its own sake becomes ever more exalted, and we reach towards that Academism of today.
Gimond states that the artist must, however, break through novelty when this has become yet another academism, knowing that culture strengthens talent, and that there is no spontaneous creation of Art. The confusion of originality with individuality leads to the present where every artist vies to distinguish himself from his colleagues by means of the very process of work, thus furnishing sculpture that is closer to ornament than to spirit. Driven to innovate at all costs we live in the panic of decadence, and end by tring to assimilate Sculpture to the other Arts, confusing the possibilities in Music with those of Sculpture, taking as literal the metaphors- of musicality in the planes, rhythms and profiles. Whilst there is affinity between the Arts of poetry, music, painting and sculpture, deriving from their diversity within the unity, their balancing, and their linkage of rhythms, yet there are distinctions. Music is the mode of expressing the imprecise and the infinite, and of all that cannot be brought into the realities of the Plastic, and as to Ornamental Art, as Gimond says it is the only art that expresses itself without clearly defining the form itself. Sculpture is alone in being the one art that is capable of being intellectualised in the Plastic of three dimensions.
The new Academism that appears throughout the continents to now dominate, is ornamentation attempting to impose into three dimensions that abstraction and symbolism from Music, of its rhythms transposed into the planes. But this assimilation can only move us in so far as the volumes and rhythms and planes are assembled with view to an expression, and whilst all sensations are obliged to pass through our brains, and abstraction has always been legible within this essential, to separate sculpture from nature is to make a countenance without a content and to destroy their mutual validity. The Plastic is the relationship between form and feeling, and life itself is the relationship between form and spirit, and only an abuse of words allows us to say that abstract sculpture is living because it is composed of rhythmic signs symbolising movement.
Conclusion
A cursory glimpse into some ot the most influential purveyors and claimed defenders of the Art of Sculpture today reveals that the new Academism has, if anything,, increased the force of its grip since Gimond's era. In balance it also has to be concluded that the grip of an essentially anti-sculptural Academism as described, can be seen to reign supreme very much due to the poverty characteristic to any alternative or reaction. That Sculpture epitomised by cast figurative bronze , where mass appears absent and the spindlyness of limbs barely reflect either plane or rhythm, exists as if entirely ignorant of Alberto Giacometti's experimentations. As alternative to the Academism, this widespread weak figuratism by its own weakness serves to retain as only contrastingly refreshing the relatively dynamic if sterile Academism. The weakness of this figuratism may well be related to the absence of both the technical understanding for the values of the Plastic, and the relative absence from the scene of truly refreshing and plastically advanced direct-carving. Thus it becomes necessary to direct the attention, howsoever under-ground, towards an understanding of those values helpful to the realisation of the truly Plastic.