The modern role of the sculptor as we think of it, as an intellectual activity, is almost 500 years older than Modernism. The first sculptors emerged from the background noise of anonymousness in the earliest moment of modernization, the relatively recent period of the early Renaissance. In 1450 Filippo Brunelleschi, in contrast to the unrecognized craftsmen of medieval guilds, was celebrated in a biography as a creative individual and an intellectual. That biographical moment was a first, and an important first. Brunelleschi was the first is a new class of artist-polyhistor. The "Renaissance men" garnered attention as individuals on merit of being artist-engineers and artist-scientists. The role of engineer and scientist has differentiated as those fields, and art it self, became more complex, sophisticated and specialized, which is why the artist has not lapsed back into anonymity, and has remained the subject of biographies.
The next great intellectual watermark for artists as biographical entities came at the middle of the 19th century, as image production became increasingly mechanized, requiring less and less specialized technical knowledge on the part of artists, the artist-theorist emerged. Artists like the painter Gustave Courbet and Auguste Rodin began to think seriously about the nature of their work. The impulse to theorize flowered in the early Twentieth Century. As the revolutionary mass politics of Fascism and Communism, but also theosophy and psychology fired artistic imaginations.
Gustave Courbet, The Artist's Studio (1855); Auguste Rodin, The Thinker (1902)It should not be surprising then, that in order to differentiate themselves from the field of irresponsible and uncredentialed artist-polyhistorians, the first critical theorists begged, borrowed and stole from architecture. Because of that relationship, the job of Modernist artists were imagined as little more than a research arm of architecture.
In 1960 the critic-theorist Clement Greenberg defended and justified Modernist Painting as deserving of the same respect afforded earlier European masterpieces. This was done by tracing a historical narrative of aesthetic progress echoing the technical progress of architecture and science. Greenberg recast the surrealist action painting of the New York school as more advanced than, not only their European forebearers, but also their more highly esteemed peers in Paris. His essay was crucial to convincing American audiences, collectors, that "American Style" painting was more important than Pablo Picasso and other European modern masters who still dominated the markets and imaginations in the years just after WWII.
He did so with serious, historically based reasoning and academic language. To make his case he stripped painting down to its atomic essentials, perspectival space and narrative were literary and theatrical elements that were not native to painting. "Enclosing shape" and "flatness" were, according to Greenberg, this Modernist discipline's home field advantage. It was by any measure a spectacular rhetorical success. Wealthy American collectors, who were crucial for supporting the Parisian artworld before the War, were swayed and began to collect art from artists who had been working in obscurity. The Museum of Modern Art began, for the first time to show New York artists, and Life Magazine and other popular American magazines began publishing exposes of American artists fingered by Greenberg and others. The sculpture of that period was, by any account, still the least theoretically developed, and therefor least important of the new American Modernist art.
David Smith with Australia (1951); Anthony Caro, Table Piece CCCLXXXVIII (1977)
Geenberg had traced out a particular reasoning to justify the importance of American Painting, it was materialistic and, without his meaning it to be, it turned out to be radically reductivist. Greenberg insisted to his dying breath that his theories were never meant to be prescriptive, but in practice that is exactly what they were. It didn't take artists very long to decode the Greenberg formula - Frank Stella scored an early show at MoMA of concentric rectilinear black stripes on raw linen and curiously heavy wooden stretchers. This was flat painting that was all about the relationship between brush, paint, and stretcher.
If Greenberg was the first great critic-theorist, Stella was the fist great artist-interpreter of the newly emerged critical theory. Greenberg's reaction to seeing his ideas materialized were telling. Stella, following Greenberg's direction, had turned the Modernist painting from a game of picture making into a game of object making. His reaction to the black paintings was ambivalent, he was outright opposed to what happened next. Stella's young studio mate was the sculptor Carle Andre who would go on to be one of the five canonical Minimalists - artists who's work was dismissed by Greenberg as "objects just nudgeable into art." His protege, Michael Fried, attacked the "objecthood" of the new work, And Andre's fellow Minimalist, the critic-theorist-artist, Donald Judd valorized it as "specific objects," and Morris as "objects" falling between the polarities of size range of the monument and the ornament: "useless three-dimensional things."
Frank Stella, painting stripes (1964); Carl Andre, Lever (1966)
The problem, for Greenberg and Fried who were protecting their role as theorists, and the opportunity, for artists like Judd and Morris who were reasserting their role as theorist, is that these "objects" required "reading" - and that required that artists once again be acknowledged as polyhistorians. None of this has anything to do with medium, but has everything to do with the people manipulating the material - the fight (and it was a fight) was over authority.
Much is made about the art of the period as an example of the "
death of the author" (often by the artists themselves). Confusion is inevitable for anyone looking back with any honesty on that supposed biographical rejection. The language used was obviously depersonalized ("objects"), but no group of artists has ever spoke more, or more forcefully that the Minimalist. Artists weren't rejecting their role as authors of meaning, they rejecting the denuded role of charismatic craftsmen of cartoonish doodads that they had been relegated to by the Modernists and reasserting their claim on the role as serious thinkers.
Robert Morris I-Box (1962); Donald Judd, Untitled (1972)
That split, between looking at paintings as pictures, and looking at objects in the ways Greenberg had insisted Modernist Painting be looked at - as objects, is one of the most rehearsed moments in all of post-war American art theory. One of the most well know and widely accepted readings, is Hal Foster's, who points to that shift as the "crux" between Modernist and Postmodernist art. But there is a nagging problem with Foster's reading, very few, if anyone at all, think of sculptors working in the Minimalist tradition (in order of appearance) like Richard Serra, Mia Lin, Rachel Whiteread and Terra Donovan as Postmodern artists. Although there does seem some ongoing embarrassment about calling them sculptors, that is what they clearly are.
Of all the real-time theories of Minimalist art, the one that has aged the best was articulated by the artist-theorist Robert Morris in a series of essays (that began as a satirical lampooning of Greenberg's academic style). Morris', Notes on Sculpture, are clear, well reasoned explanations of Minimalist art written during the sixties. Besides being as well written and reasoned as Greenberg's theories, one reason they have aged well is Morris never abandon the title of sculptor. I studied with Morris, and he once asked one of my classmates "Am I Modern or Postmodern?" He may have been teasing my friend, but certainly his minimalist work and theories do not fit well within the category of Postmodernists art, that is typified by a rejection of all things Greenberg. Morris, like Greenberg kept an eye on history by way of George Kubler's useless things, and kept the door open for sculpture as an ongoing practice, not just a transitional crux.
Robert Morris, Box for Standing (1961); Rachel Whiteread, Dark (2010)
Of the readings of Greenberg that have emerged more recently (and while a discussion of Modernism does not necessarily hinge on Greenberg, any discussion of Minimalism does) Theirry de Duve's book, Kant after Duchamp, gets to the real crux of the issue: Had Greenberg been more consistent a proponent of purism in sculpture as he was in painting, he would have made a point of following a tendency in the history of modern sculpture towards the ‘essential conventions’ of the medium equivalent but opposite to that which he deemed prevalent in painting. He would then have closely watched the reduction of the sculptural practice to questions of matter, tactility, mass, and weight, which are ‘essential’ to sculpture as flatness is to painting. Had he done so, even skeptical as he was with regard to the kind of minimal art that had its origins in monochrome painting, it is probable that he would none the less enthusiastically have endorsed the art of Carle Andre or of Richard Serra. But he hasn’t.
Consider the two of the sculptors Greenberg and his ilk did support and the mediums they are associated with, David Smith - fabricated brushed steel, and Isamu Noguchi - sheet stone. Had you met these guys at a party and asked what medium they worked with you would have asked exactly the right question. Both are strongly associated with the materials they used and the novel ways they managed to use them, Smith's ground steel surfaces, and Noguchi's slotted assemblage of stone slab. These men and an entire generation of sculptors they worked along side were not artist-theorists. Instead of concerning themselves with their place in the world they aped the "truth to materials" ethic of Modernist architects (Always loudly proclaimed, but very unevenly practiced), turning their studios into laboratories for producing proof of concept chotchskies.
Isamu Noguchi, Kouros, (1945); David Smith, Cubi III (1961)
I try not to hate on sculpture, and especially not on whole eras of sculpture, but the pseudo-labratory material investigations of Smith and Noguchi into novel uses of material is a period I have very little affection for. Theirry de Duve had the chance to meet with Greenberg and discuss his ideas (I covet), It is interesting to read his explanation of Greenberg's failure to recognize the importance of Minimalism:
Leaving singular aesthetic judgment aside, the reason [Greenberg was not a consistent proponent of purism in sculpture] is probably that Greenberg has always been convinced that sculpture never had to fear its proximity painting in the way painting had, for its own survival, ‘to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture.’ If sculpture had anything to fear, it would more likely have been its excessive proximity to architecture; that is why, according to him, the tradition of the monolith was driven to its ultimate conclusion by Brancussi after whom the best modernist sculpture (David Smith and Anthony Caro included), far from fencing off the pictorial, incorporated openness of form, textural effects, color, and, more generally the opticallity that characterized modernist painting.
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