What do you see when you look out at the world? Is it primarily material or is it concept? An underlying organization of ordered elements, or a whirling chaotic randomness? However we see our world, it is very much through the acquisition and use of language, especially speech, that we individually make our peace with it.
Even
though speech seems to be deeply, consciously organized and controlled it also
contains the unconscious, the spontaneous and the unpredictable. One of the mysteries of speech is that
we can begin a sentence expressing a thought without being able to find within
ourselves evidence of having worked out in advance how that sentence will
end. Yet to have begun, to have
been able to correctly place one word after the next to build a coherent
thought, we must have done precisely that. When pointed out, it seems such a small, obvious
observation, and yet it's completely astounding. I was first brought to these thoughts by Meyer Schapiro in
his essay "Abstract Art" of 1957, and I am brought to them again by
the recent sculpture of Richard Clements.
Highly
organized, conceptually and formally, Clements's work demands language, but is
also deeply engaged with mystery and arcane knowledge, even magic. The problem with language in regards to
art, is that because I can call things by words like "sculpture,"
"formal," "minimal," etc., I can be lazy and don't have to
do the work of seeing and experiencing it. With the work in "Day Treadeth on Night," that
would be a pity because I'd only be seeing language, and be cleaving the magic
from the object and its material.
It would be like being given every sentence with its end already
attached and without the possibility for the kind of mystery that Shapiro
points to. Animated by those same
qualities of speech (the unconscious, the spontaneous and the unpredictable)
that surpass language, Clements's work wants to reanimate us who have become
dull to experience. It is an
appeal to see not just with our eyes, but with our bodies; to reconnect with
the material world and really have a look, and feel what's going on. Language is important, but not more so
than material; things like the hard shine of copper, the roughness of sand cast
aluminum, and the soft slumpiness of string.
An
exemplar of Clements's amalgam of language and feeling, and a keystone to one
understanding of the exhibition as a meditation on the way the mind inscribes
itself on the material of the world, are the two brick-like, DAY TREADS ON
NIGHT (After Gill), in clay, and cast plaster.
Imprinted with a contemporized version of the titular "Day Treadeth
on Night," they can be read as the mind stamped on the body, or concept
imposed on material. They look
like Carl Andres after Lawerence Weiner has gotten his hands on them, but their
form and text are an inverted variation of the carved stone Night Treadeth
on Day by the
English sculptor, printmaker, author, and typeface designer Eric Gill
(1882-1940). Gill had in turn
borrowed the text from a poem by the English poet William Morris. For the profoundly disturbed psyche of
Gill (who practiced a form of ascetic Catholicism in between bouts of incest,
adultery and bestiality), night, with all the intimations that darkness
possesses, may indeed have treadeth on day. Clements sees things the other way; not only in the
inversion of the text, but in its sentiment and its method of production.
Whereas
Gill's "brick" is carved stone and unique, Clements's are clay and cast plaster, and infinitely
reproducible. In terms of
sculptural material and process, they are separated by materiality vs
immateriality; the latter pale ghosts of the former. Clements recognizes their disparity in his method of
acquiring and reproducing their common font:
I took Gill's exact fonts and made a computer document of them. His fonts which were once very material in essence, are now immaterial. I got the text laser cut out of Plexiglas, made a wooden brick, placed the text on the brick, took a vacuum mold of it, made a plaster positive, made a negative cast of that, then used it as a mold.
Clements's
description of the complex process he followed to achieve something that Gill
did so directly is honest, but still contains a deception; which is that for
all its procedural roundaboutness, there is more that connects Clements and
Gill in their processes and the work that results, than divides them. Leaving aside subject matter, for
Gill's "direct carving" one could substitute Clements's "direct
fabrication." Both sculptors
make work that is elemental: spare, direct, and unadorned; that concerns itself
with process and the way material is handled, but doesn't make them subjects. And like the Christianity that Gill
practiced (albeit disastrously) as a worshipper and in his work (more
successfully) there is in Clements's work a latent Christianity.
In The
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini created the meeting of body and spirit in a
baroque tableau of marble and gilt bronze. Teresa lies in the foreground, the marks of her ecstasy
inscribed on her body; eyes closed, lips parted, her figure dematerialized in a
cloud of drapery. An angel stands
above her holding the arrow that has repeatedly pierced her body and caused her
transformation. Behind them hard
shafts of sculpted sunlight stream down from above. We stand in front, as witnesses to her transverberation as a
reward for the strength of her faith and the quality of her spirit; and to the
mystery of her passion.
There is
an interesting association with Franz Kafka's short story In The Penal
Colony. Here the needles of a vengeful
secularized and mechanized angel, called "the apparatus," are used to
write whatever commandment has been disobeyed upon the bodies of the prisoners. At the story's end, however, the
explorer, the soldier and the condemned man stand as witnesses to the suicide
of the officer on "the apparatus," and any reward for the faith that
the officer showed in "the apparatus," or its promise of redemption,
never comes.
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gutter/trough, 2012, copper, mahogany, 10cm x 15 cm x 350cm
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I know that part of Clements's inspiration for gutter/trough was the aisle running between the pews, and the light filling St. Paul's Cathedral in London. But even before I knew, I was thinking of his work's relation to Christianity and Teresa. gutter/trough reminds me of that "light" behind Teresa and so many other saints; like a trough of hard light brought down and made manifest, like the spirit being made manifest in the flesh. This may seem a stretch, but there is something in Clements's work that warrants it, and that bears explanation.
The
Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria contains the particularly evocative story of the Breaking of
the Vessels. According to Luria, ten vessels, meant
to contain the emanation of God's light, were unable to do so and six were
shattered. As their pieces fell
through the void, they trapped within themselves sparks of the divine light
which became shrouded in layers of darkness. These "husks,"or "complexes" as they're
called, compose the world in which we live. Our task, and opportunity, is to extract the sparks from
their husks and thereby redeem the world.
The thought is beautiful and poetic. The quality that relates Clements's work is the way it so readily offers
itself up to projection. In this
way it's a redemption. It can
happen very quickly while looking at it; you're already not in this world,
you're beyond it. You're seeing
all the other art, and all the other things it reminds you of. Like seeing all the vessels already
restored and full of light.
gutter/trough is a "U" shaped
length of copper, a section of round pipe that Clements cut in half by
hand. The elements of directness,
engagement, and craftsmanship are important. Open on one end and capped on the other, the capped end is
lifted up off the floor on two mahogany wedges. In terms of transporting a flow it gives the sense of being
unidirectional, of having a beginning and an end. Or at least it makes me want to believe it has a
beginning. It makes me aware of
how I've been conditioned to read subtle cues to natural forces like gravity
and the flow of liquid, but also to read the form in terms of its resemblance
to its prosaic relatives with a use.
In his
short essay about an abstract painting by Richard Diebenkorn, John Updike says:
Turning the pages of a book or magazine, we expect meaning; but in an actual environment, a museum or an opulent home, we settle for thereness. Abstraction removes painting from the secondary realm of imitation and enrolls it in the primary order of mute objects.
If you
invert St. Paul's vaulted Nave with its gilt detailing, it's possible to
imagine it as a copper trough.
Bernini gives us predominantly meaning, Clements opts for abstraction
and gives us a vision of thereness.
Beyond Clements's gutter lies another gutter full of light.
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The Olympics, 2012, steel, sandstone, 46cm x 31cm x 46cm
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Untitled (The Olympics) is obviously not a representation of the Olympic symbol, even if that's where our thinking is pushed. There are three circles not five, and the rings are not shown flat. The games are brought to mind (the circle is doing something of a little gymnastics routine, showing itself in three positions to its fullest effect; and the games are more of a three ring circus than athletic competition), but so are the Chinese Linking Rings. The magic of the Chinese Rings is the mystery of how they fit together and come apart. (Untitled) The Olympics reveals there is no magic by revealing its construction. We can see the legs that hold the rings aloft and the seams where the steel is cut and joined. What Clements is really giving are the three most obvious ways to show a circle: flat, upright, and receding at forty-five degrees. If careful we can imaginatively reconstruct the experience of how the rings are made. What we cannot experience, though our minds tell us otherwise, is that perfect geometric figure called a circle. In Sartre, Iris Murdoch says:
The circle does not exist; but neither does what is named by 'black' or 'table' or 'cold.' The relation of these words to their context of application is shifting and arbitrary. What does exist is brute and nameless, it escapes from the scheme of relations in which we imagine it to be rigidly enclosed, it escapes from language and science, it is more than and other than our description of it.
This is
the claim throughout "Day Treadeth On Night," that there is what is
elemental in the world, and there is what our minds inscribe upon it. Clements feels the same about death as
he does about circles, but goes one step further. Death is something we believe we see (like a magic trick, or
a circle), but it's not truly an experience because we never have it. We can be brought right to very edge of
experiencing them, but always fall short.
And because we can't experience them, they don't exist.
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The Judge, 2012, sand cast aluminium, 25cm x 17cm x 1cm (each)
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The Judge is a cryptic work that focuses on the direct transference of experience into a language, and is as close to a literal amalgam of reading the marks inscribed on a body (in this case the body of the earth), language, and mystery as Clements presents. The title is related to geomancy, or "earth divination," an arcane method of obtaining information and inquiring about the future. The method that Clements draws from is based on the interpretation of groupings of marks drawn randomly on the ground. Arranged into a chart of sixteen figures, the Judge, the final figure, generally represents the answer to whatever has been asked.
Displayed
on the wall like two pages of an open book, The Judge is made of two tablets
covered in a language of symbols (comparable to Tarot or the I Ching) unknown
except to initiates. On their
surfaces are a series of raised, diamond shaped spots. The surface from which they protrude is
covered with rows of diagonal lines, like rays of raking light or sunshine, and
bring back to mind the light of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, and the slant of gutter/trough. But the shape of the spots and the diagonal lines are not decisions
by Clements, but the results of their fabrication; The Judge being first cut in plastic on
a CNC machine and then sand cast in aluminum.
The tablet
on the left reproduces the patterns of single and paired spots that represent
fourteen of the sixteen geomantic figures. It's absurd to say that geomancy's binary code of ones and
twos anticipated our own system of zeros and ones used by computers, but from
its figures the future was foretold and information gleaned by the translation
of digital language to analog experience.
On the
right, Clements has mimicked the geomantic table on the left with one of his
own design made up of corresponding sets of twos and threes. The two sides mirror one another so
that if the tablets were folded together, for every single spot on the left
there is a corresponding pair on the right, and for every left side pair, a
right side triad.
In both
cases Clements has aestheticized the table and its fancies of prognostication,
removing it from the realm of language and the cerebral, and returning it to
visceral experience. This is made
clear by his decision to omit the two figures from the geomantic table that he
considers less visually interesting, a row of single spots, and a row of
pairs. He does so because his interest
in geomancy is as a language used as a tool to bring order to experience, and
what that language looks like, rather than the specifics of how to use it. Geomancy may be nonsense, but is it any
more so than the systems we write on top of the world? Do we have any more surety that ours
are right?
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Untitled (spinning beads), 2012, archival inkjet print, 39cm x 29cm
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So many of our daily activities are composed of simple gestures that when noticed are those of making art or can be of making art. Untitled (spinning beads) is a photograph of Clements spinning a string of beads, which aren't discernible at all. The beads, which only read as lines, draw a picture of an amorphous ovoid through which we see the ovoid of Clements's face and head. Close to identical in shape, the registration of the ovoids is slightly off. The shape made by the beads is also the shape of Brancusi's polished ovoid heads in marble and bronze. What this creates is an overlay of ways of understanding ovoids: a reference, over a concept, over an experience. In a paraphrase of Camille Paglia, every time we describe an experience, we are fingering our worry beads like a rosary, saying a prayer that the world as we see it is really there.
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Untitled (cut leek), 2012, brass, leek, 37cm x 12cm x 9cm
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Untitled (cut leek) is made of a simple sculptural gesture, a cut. One half of the leek is then rotated 180 degrees and the two pieces put back together to create an angle; the whole thing laid over a short, brass heptahedron that reinforces the angle. A leek is an interesting object all by itself: in its transition in color from white (a color that has sculptural associations with marble and plaster, including their memorializing function of death) to green (which is vegetative and life); and in its transition from a circle to a flat, fan shape. With the appearance of the head of the leek being "thrown back" over the peak of the brass, it's possible to make the connection with Alberto Giacometti's Woman with Her Throat Cut (a singular sculptural example of the subject), and from there to The Ecstasy of St. Teresa insofar as both have been described for their combination of eroticism and pain.
.tiff) |
Untitled (horseshoe), 2012, string, steel, dimensions variable
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Two circles of string, one long and under tension, one short and at rest. Untitled (horseshoe) is as simple and direct as a demonstration. But the long circle isn't really a circle, it's been stretched and held wall to wall in the shape of a rectangle, like the beginning of the string game Cat's Cradle before the string is looped onto the middle fingers to create the cradle. Draped over the top length of string, the small circle slumps there at the mercy of gravity, its lower section resting on the string below so that it flattens out, and runs parallel with it.
Given the
repetitive theme of language and writing, the rectilinear string could be a
reference to the area extending across a newspaper, or to the lines of a
child's primer that guide their writing.
The string at its center could be an image of some kind. It looks like a fanciful animal with
ears (I think of Jonathan Borofsky's self-portrait with big ear drawings) or a
bull, less so the folded circle that it is. Maybe its a humorous take on an attempted "O" that
got outside the lines and couldn't support itself. It also looks like a horseshoe.
Often hung
over a doorway, the symbolism of a horseshoe is as a charm, an attempt to
control the vagaries of fortune.
Presented open side up, it is a vessel, so that good luck is captured
and held for those within; open side down, luck spills out blessing those that
pass beneath it.
Untitled
(horseshoe)
is a vessel, a portable horseshoe and lintel assemblable anywhere. In the iconography of "Day
Treadeth on Night," it is also a sagging "O" of Untitled (The
Olympics), a
linear section of gutter/trough, or a string of beads at rest. More broadly, it's the one pliable material in the show, the
one on which ideas are most easily imposed. It gives a simple demonstration that beneath the many ways
we may organize the world, there is an unchanging material on which our ideas
work.
When I
began thinking of Day Treadeth on Night, I was confronted with two mysteries: there was
no evidence within myself that I could find of where I would end up; and as a
whole, the work posed a very constant frustrating of my desire to organize it
into a narrative. Yet at an end I
am, having finally stamped myself onto Clements's material through perception
and language. Perception, that
wall that separates humans from everything outside of us, is the primary
example of our minds inscribing themselves on the elemental materiality of the
world. It is built up of
individual bricks like Night Treadeth on Day, and Day Treads on Night
(After Gill). Onto this wall are inscribed our
individual concepts of organization, utility and understanding, like graffiti,
each of us with our personalized tag.
Through language we make known to ourselves what we perceive.
http://www.richard-clements.com/
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