Amanda Wojick’s presentation was pretty incredible. She really brought sculpture forwards for me, which must be a feat; taking something that should really be experienced in three dimensions, in space, and communicating it through a flat projection slide. I personally really enjoyed the works of Yayoi Kusama and Petah Coyne. But what I got out of this presentation was mostly a vague description of what a sculpture really is compared to a painting or a drawing. A sculpture is defined by its opposite, by not being flat. So, technically, you cannot fully experience a sculpture by looking at a flat representation, or even just looking at it from one point across the room. In my opinion, sculpture has been kind of perverted by the art community, or perhaps it has been that way all along. A sculpture is supposed to be a three-dimensional object in space and to fully understand and appreciate the work you need to interact with it. And yet, you are not allowed to touch it or even get within a foot of the piece. Seeing a sculpture in real life, and interacting with it from different perspectives, is so much more. You build the vision of the sculpture in your head. If you fully understand a three-dimensional object, you know how it smells, feels, how heavy it is. You know what it looks like from the back and from the side and from a distance. You become really familiar with it. Something similar to this is the experience of becoming familiar with your own face or the faces of your friends. You know what they look like from every angle and your understanding of them is considerably different from the single photo you see of someone in a newspaper. For example, imagine looking at a photo of the ocean or the Sears Tower (Willis Tower, whatever). You cannot fully comprehend the incredible magnitude of these objects unless you see them yourself. Imagine looking out from space at the planet! You cannot get that extraordinary enormity from a two-dimensional photograph. I think that an important part of ‘seeing’ is experiencing, being there and really seeing something and understanding it.
“The Observer looks at the Object” is, as discussed, a kind of ridiculous statement. A person is never just looking at something, you see it, label it, judge it, like it, hate it, are attracted to it, are repulsed, all mostly subconsciously. James Elkins writes an incredible stream of consciousness, illustrating the process so many of us take for granted: seeing. An interesting thing he mentioned was the violence of looking, the deeply personal and harmful way people ‘see’. What this reminded me of was the way people categorize. Everyone does it. They see something and have to put it into a category. For example, you see a balloon and you classify it into different containers: round, light, red, childish, latex, etc. Or you could see a person and put them into different categories: fat, thin, feminine, masculine, white, black, asian, intelligent, stupid, young, old, attractive. I think this is what violent seeing is. Viewing someone and taking that information you have gathered and making judgements about that person. Of course, this is the only way a person can actually comprehend the world, by putting labels on things. This is a bird, this is a machine, this is food, etc.
What I noticed right away in Richard Serra’s work was the massive, heavy, masculine aura of those intense planes of steel. Works like Charlie Brown and Torqued Eclipses really are very very imposing and they present themselves like that in the space they are in. You can walk in and around Charlie Brown and be intimidated in almost the same way you feel going into a large government building or a cathedral. I like how he relates his work multiple times to being in the presence of a ship. When I was in England, I went to Portsmouth and saw the HMS Victory and if you have never seen a ship up close, it is an incredible experience: completely overwhelming and powerful. Sculpture has the ability to take you up as it transforms a space. Louise Bourgeois, on the other hand, is incredibly light, dreamy, ‘sensitive’, ‘discrete’ and feminine. Her work is so light it brings you to a dream-like place that acts like a balloon, taking you up to a higher place. Even the pieces If Richard Serra’s work is dark and intimidating, Louise Bourgeois is light and dreamy. The ability to manipulate a space so magically is a byproduct only of sculpture.
So, to sum things up, I want to give an example of an incredibly talented artist manipulating a space, and thus, manipulating a person. Frank Lloyd Wright, as you might have known, is an architect with a gift for manipulating space, similar to the way Richard Serra manipulates space with his work. A couple of summers ago, I visited Taliesin (East) in Spring Green, WI. Taliesin was Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer home and studio and is a beautiful work of art, to say the least. On our tour, I found it amazing the amount of thought Wright put into manipulating walls, ceilings, windows and the negative space between them to make the rooms come alive. This window was put in this particular place because it gave you a very particular view of the valley. There is a certain amount of stairs here and this wall is here because of this, and etc. What I thought was especially interesting was a space just in front of the theater/performance hall. Just in front of the entrance doors, the ceiling was slowed low, near your head, and gently sloped up, outward towards a foyer. The tour guide mentioned that Frank Lloyd Wright did this on purpose to manipulate a person to move towards the foyer and not to stay in the dark cramped area. People feel uncomfortable in smaller, darker places, so Frank Lloyd Wright used that to move people around the space he created. I do not have any photos of that space, but here are some photos from Taliesin to get an idea.
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