“What’s your first impression of these sculptures?” my
professor asks our group as we stand in the vast Hauser & Wirth gallery
littered with Thomas Houseago’s latest exhibition, I’ll be your sister.
“Monumental” was my first thought and consequently my uttered
response. Looking around the space
you could not help but be slightly overwhelmed by these larger-than-life-size
plaster and bronze sculptures.
“Are you sure monumental?” the prof. questioned. Silence. I wasn’t sure if this was my first test or if it was simply
a probe for the class to look at the sculptures again. “This may be too soon in the course,
but do you guys know of a maquette?”
Monumental was right to describe these works but in a
different way than I had realized before the professor’s remarks. The works were large, yes, and somewhat
overbearing, but they did not feel right.
Each had the appearance of a not quite finished model, a maquette, for a
sculpture that was to be made in its likeness. With this notion in mind, the scale, not to be confused with
size, of the pieces presented a new interaction for the artist. As Robert Smithson so eloquently
stated, “Size determines an object, but scale determines art.” Rather than the pieces feeling larger,
the viewer felt smaller, as though having been shrunk down in the artist’s
studio. Connecting with the
semblance of a maquette, each piece seemed to evoke the early stages of a
sculpture’s life. Each, if not
eight to twelve feet tall, would appear to be an example of what a piece would
look like if left in the planning stages in the artist’s studio with disjointed
limbs, contorted poses, and unpolished exteriors.
Using mostly cast bronze, iron rebar, and plaster, the
pieces seemed to evoke a structural integrity that remains a strong theme in
modern erected works. The central
work in the exhibit, Striding Figure (Ghost),
2012, was predominantly made of bronze rebar bent and molded into a visceral,
de Kooning-esque figure that loomed over the viewer has he strode forward, one
foot placed in front of the other.
A contrapposto posture and rigid stance recalling the portraits of the
Egyptian pharaohs commanded the audience’s attention, but as he leaned slightly
forward over his stride, the viewer felt vulnerable as well as awestruck. These attributes, however, were
complemented by the viewer’s ability to look directly into the inner mechanics
of the piece. The rebar formed a
sort of skeletal structure that gave the piece its shape. Structural honesty seemed to be of
utmost importance for the relationship between the piece and its audience.
Like the central figure, the surrounding bronze and plaster
constructions held a similar pattern of connecting the viewer with the art’s
inner construction. Each plaster
cast, which incidentally was laced with impressions from the artist’s hands as
he pressed and molded the plaster into the desired shape, called for the
audience’s participation to see it to its core. Breaks appeared in the sides of each work leaving various
sized gaps for viewing the bronze configuration of holds in the inner workings
of the piece. Many of the gaps
were large enough to be noticed but small enough that the viewer was forced to
take it upon him- or herself to find the best angle to view the skeletal
material.
In the adjacent gallery space of the Hauser & Wirth lot,
Houseago’s Special Brew continued
this sculptural experience of structural honesty and connection with the
naissance of sculptural practice.
This collection housed a few more figurative giants, each employing the
same call for a deeper look at its inner care and each having disturbingly
uncharacteristic nuances that made the viewer question whether it was ready to
be seen. Among these were a
protruded head, a contorted arm, a mask-like face, an unsound and misshapen
pedestal, and wooden blocks used for support as though they were found on a
studio floor and shoved in open gaps to hold the piece together.
Large panels leaned up against the stark white walls of the
main room, each covered with primitive carvings and erections of what appeared
mostly to be sculptural examples of sketches of body parts. Two showed piled tube-like slices
reminiscent of the tubes of clay used in the earliest training of sculpture
making in visual arts courses. Each
panel evoked the drawing practices of artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, but,
at the same time, had a grotesque quality that one would find in a post war
image like Leon Golub’s Napalm Head
or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.
These pieces tied into the theme of presenting the
traditionally early stages of artistic production, as artists often use drawing
as practice, study, and precursor to their “finished” works. Additionally the panels draw on the
notion of scale. These eight and
nine foot panels seem like they should be fixed into something, whether a book
or a building, but whatever this thing may be, it’s scale is unfathomable and,
like the figures of the first room, overwhelming.
Visceral, regressive, and arguably primitive though these
sculptures are, they create a need for the viewer to connect with them, to
question them, and, most importantly, to understand what they are made of and
where they came from. It is almost
like seeing the entire process of the sculpture’s creation sitting in one
sedentary piece, while the piece is still very much alive in its interaction
with the world around it.
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