ARTS LAURA GASCOIGNE STONY SILENCE
The Royal Academy’s exhibition Modern British Sculpture ostensibly explores sculpture’s relationship with the wider world. But is the reality that the form has lost its ability to engage a wider public?
I
f you walk from London’s Trafalgar Square along the Strand and look up at the second floor of Zimbabwe House, you’ll see a rare example of
modern iconoclasm. Between the windows stand the mutilated remains of Jacob Epstein’s Cycle of Life statues, commissioned by the British Medical Association in 1907 and given the chop in 1935 when the Southern Rhodesian High Commission moved in and decided that their controversial nudity lacked “the austerity usually appertaining to govern- ment buildings”. Photographs of eight of Epstein’s original plasters are now hanging in the entrance to the Royal Academy’s exhibition Modern British Sculpture (until 7 April), around a massive piece of monumental stone which, though familiar-looking, is not immediately recognisable. Seen from up close, stripped of its Union flag, this towering pedestal without a statue makes one think at first of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. It is, in fact, a recreation of Lutyens’ Cenotaph, and its jux- taposition with Epstein’s figures is designed to highlight a central theme of the exhibition: the fundamental opposition in modern sculp- ture between abstraction and figuration. Lutyens’ middle name may have been
Landseer, but the stark geometry of his austere monument has nothing in common with the cuddly lions in Trafalgar Square. All the same, you can’t really call it abstract: it is represen- tational. The plinth is instantly identifiable as a plinth and the catafalque (when you’re not standing right under it) as a catafalque. A catafalque raised on a plinth is a catafalque honoured: Lutyens’ sculpture has an obvious meaning. And the meaning of sculpture, or lack of it, is another theme that runs unacknowledged through this exhibition, a theme which Kurt Schwitters’ padlocked and empty Merz barn in the Academy courtyard – an abstract form occupying space, with no content – might serve to illustrate. As a survey, the show makes no claim to be comprehensive; its principal aim is to show how British twentieth-century sculpture was shaped by global influences, ancient and mod- ern. The first big gallery, set out like the Appian
Way, juxtaposes works by early British exponents of direct carving with the non-Western mod- els – Egyptian, Meso pot amian, Indian, Oceanic and Native North American – that inspired them. We see what Eric Gill took from Indian art, what John Skeaping absorbed from Sumerian sculpture, what Leon Under - wood appropriated from Native American totems and how Charles Sargeant Jagger adapted the vocabulary of Assyrian reliefs to a war memorial depicting Belgian Peasants Assisting British Wounded (1921-23). Given the context, it seems a miracle that British sculpture ever broke the traditionalist mould represented here by Alfred Gilbert’s Jubilee Monument to Queen Victoria (1887). That it did was largely thanks to Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who took the lessons of “primitive” direct carving and applied them in a more “civilised” British way. With their abstract forms rooted in nature, Moore’s reclining women and Hepworth’s “standing stones” exuded the sense of sacredness we associate with sculpture, using a language “suited to a post-war world that wanted monu - ments but yet had tired of them”, as the catalogue puts it. A similar reverence for landscape as hal- lowed ground permeates the work of Richard Long, whose Chalk Line (1984) continues along the British road to abstraction. Meanwhile a very different sort of abstraction had crossed the Atlantic, brought from America by Moore’s one-time assistant, Antony Caro, whose painted steel sculpture Early One Morning (1962) occupies one room. Caro’s sculpture has no plinth and no mass;
as the exhibition guide explains, its lines and planes “frame space rather than fill it”. As far as meaning goes, the promise of its title is also unfulfilled. It is a sculpture essentially about sculpture, and it marks the point at which abstraction became separated from meaning and stopped being of interest to the general public. Despite attempts by some of Caro’s successors to come down to a more everyday level by using ordinary materials – such as the breeze blocks, planks, felt, foam and wire in Tony Cragg’s Stack (1975) – the
Barbara Hepworth’s Pelagos (1946), wood and strings
modern sculpture of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s left the British public cold. A once uni- versal art form no longer seemed relevant. Enter the post-modern Damien Hirst with
Let’s Eat Outdoors Today (1990/91), made of ordinary materials and easily decodable. It’s that double vitrine with the white plastic picnic table, the rotting cow’s head, the hatch- ing flies, the swarming barbecue and the insect-o-cutor. It may be offensive, but it is clearly about something: the inevitability of death and decay, and the impossibility of returning to an Arcadian view of nature. We can argue about whether it qualifies as sculpture – it is three-dimensional – but we cannot argue about what it means. And what- ever we think of Hirst, we have to acknowledge that he has helped to make sculpture popular again.
What he hasn’t done, despite his obsession
with Christian symbolism, is restore the art form’s traditional power to unite people in worship, homage or grief. For that, sculpture needs a sense of permanence. At the unveiling of her Single Form in the United Nations plaza in New York in 1964, Barbara Hepworth expressed the hope that the work would stand as “a symbol of both continuity and solidarity for the future”. Now, with ephemeral notions chasing each other across the Fourth Plinth like idle thoughts, what future does modern sculpture have? For too long it has existed in its own vitrine, the sealed environment of the museum. This exhibition, the publicity tells us, seeks to “highlight certain ways of looking at sculpture by thinking about its relation- ship to the wider world”. In the process, what it reveals is that in the past half-century sculpture has let that relationship go. It will need to work on it – and rediscover meaning – if it wants to re-engage the public.
19 February 2011 | THE TABLET | 25
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40