Sculpture Forum 22 : Clay Figure Critique, Studio School of New York

 

Artists unknown

Two backs were compared several times. The left approaches heaven - the right submits to purgatory.  A nice way to put it,   but more could be said if we saw the entire statues.

Bruce Gagnier

I can feel his stare at the piece,

making it look just a little bit different.

Sculpture Forum 22 on Youtube 

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Conducted with sensitivity, insight, and knowledge - this critique is a wonder to find on YouTube. Good to see visual references to Donatello, Giacometti, and Rodin. Regrettably, the lead critic, Garth Evans , apparently does not believe that model based figure sculpture can become art these days (i.e. something more profound than mimetic entertainment or didactic exercise). And no one in the studio contradicts him - possibly because it’s his show. He heads the sculpture department and founded Sculpture Forum, the producer of this video. Apparently, he has not sculpted from models since his student days, back when “It seemed very strange one day to see a bunch of people making clay replicas…what the hell was going on?!”.

 So the video is frustrating. Several life size figures are well on the way to completion, but even if that happens, we will never see them (the names of the artists are not given). Probably they will just be torn down. Not really intended to be art - just exercise.

 

Bruce Gagnier’s reference to Adolf Von Hildebrand (1847-1921) might illuminate where the critique falls short. “The Problem of Form In Painting and Sculpture” is an iconic text in the theory of modern figure sculpture, and regrettably an English translation was never printed. Some of its ideas, however, were of interest to Marshall McLuhan ( “The media is the message”) and so they may be found on the website that bears his name.

Hildebrand,  Mercury

 

Gagnier relates Hildebrand’s distinction between copying nature and making sculpture. Yet Hildebrand also emphasized the “architectonic” , i.e. sculpture that composes the space humans inhabit, as well as the balance and rhythms interior to the masses. He also spoke of a kinetic (close-up) motor-muscular way of seeing. 

Addressing the satisfaction of these sensations would have made the critique serious - even if it would deny the credit given to the piece which “speaks to the impossibility of arriving, concluding, deciding” with a “record of a moment to moment process”.

Narrative issues were addressed as well - especially when the backs of two statues were placed sister by side - the one said to be “entering heaven” , the other “entering purgatory”. A sharp observation! — but it could have gone deeper if it went on to query whether the pieces feel like they’re actually addressing human destiny as seriously as Massacio’s “Expulsion from Eden “ ( a painting which,coincidentally, Jock Ireland, one of the participants, made into sculpture).

With the dialog on sculpture theory as well as the sharp comparisons, this may be the best figure sculpture class critique on the internet for years to come - despite the shortcomings.