Anish Kapoor

In my last post I found it very interesting that the work of Lee Bontecou was compared to that of Anish Kapoor’s in reference to his use of voids in his works. Although some critics and philosophers would try to compare Kapoor’s uses of the void to the presence of a “time-of-war” influence or some other political, historical or cultural agenda; this is not the intention of Anish Kapoor. In researching his work and what he has to say about its context in comparison to critic’s explanations, the work is often misinterpreted.

My initial interest in the works of Anish Kapoor are his use of materials and the presence of the artists hand, or better yet the resonance of how the sculptures were created. Though the transformative properties of Kappor’s chosen materials are important…his works address themes beyond material concerns and seem to hover between this world and an alternative form of existence. I can relate to Kapoor’s struggle with defining the alternative form of existence that he alludes to in his work. It is very difficult at times to express to the viewer what your material choices have to do with the conceptual presence of the work. I feel in my own work I am constantly looking into my material and thinking about the “alternatative existence”, in my case being some other worldly or alien artifact that some how has a life of its own. In commenting on the unknown Kapoor states:

“The process of being an artist is to recognize that the unknown is a workable reality. I’ve often nothing to say as an artist, and I feel that’s a crucial port of the equation, yet I know certain things keep coming up. Allowing space for there to be nothing to say, for me, is a really important condition. So, I’m shifting the project into a kind of psycho-physical space in which I try to take the witness of an inner life in material. I try to take this process seriously, it’s where the real work happens.”

Jan Garden Castro comments on this same notion in Kapoor’s work and is supported by Kapoor recounting Paul Neagu’s realization that “the purpose of being an artist was somehow not to make more-or-less interesting objects, but that the language of the eye has psychological, physiological, philosophical, even metaphysical implications. That felt to me what I was looking for.” Sandhini Poddar’s essay on Kapoor quotes that his recent work is “mental sculpture” and that Memory’s monumental void is more central than its mass.

Although I am not directly involved with the use of the “void” as a way to deal with inbetween spaces, I feel strongly about Kapoor’s interpretations of this space and learning what it means to work with the unknown. I am also interested in his use of technology as a tool and a means to create objects; specifically Greyman Cries, Shamman Dies, Billowing smoke, Beatuy Evoked, cement installation. Jean De Loisy comments on the creation of this piece in his essay Le vray cul du diable. to emphasize the work’s distance from the hand, Kapoor employs an intermediary to transform his vague geometrical sketch into a computer program attached to a cement-mixer. This in turn is connected to a machine adapted from the food industry that excretes cement paste like a printer…This lends his works a spaciousness and an aura that propel them beyond the status of objects: they become instead the release button of a mental shutter.

Anish Kapoor Bibliography

Cole, Ina. "Modern Sublime." Sculpture June 2007: 23-29. Web.

Cole, Ina. "Transcending the Object." Sculpture Jan.-Feb. 2010: 23-27. Web.

Kapoor, Anish, and Homi K. Bhabha. Anish Kapoor. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009. Print.

Lee Bontecou

In response to my aesthetic use of spheres and bamboo in my work it was suggested by Jeff Beekman that I take a look at the work of Lee Bontecou; specifically her use of line in space and her love for spherical elements in her sculptures. The works seem to share similar qualities formally, and it has been interesting spending time with what she has to say concerning her work.

One of the few women artists to achieve broad recognition in the 1960’s, Lee Bontecou created a strikingly original body of work in sculpture beginning in the late 1950’s and continuing to the present. Throughout the early 1960’s Bontecou’s work evolved with ever-greater complexity as she continued her formal experimentation. References to airplanes, the wings of birds, and other anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic elements began to reverberate more evidently within her sculpture and in numerous drawings. Her relationship to the art world is unique and it is continually her aesthetic that draws in artists and enspires them to date.

Working quietly and privately for the last twenty-five years a time during which she declined and even ignored invitations to participate in exhibitions or to show her work, Bontecou has remained an enigmatic figure in the art world. A 1994 exhibition of her sculpture and drawings, organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, rekindled interest in her work, introducing it to a younger generation of artists who found it powerful and intensely compelling.

I find my own research into her work to be much the same. Her use of the combination of many elements in space co-existing in some way that is still esthetically appealing is something that I feel I will always continue to explore in my own work. Her work has inspired me to explore options in drawing, something I have not done enough of as of late. It is also very useful to see her reliefs and her ideas that they are neither paintings nor drawings but some sort of quasi existence.

Like many of the artists that inspire me Bontecous has a preoccupation with nature and science, as well as investigations of surface. In a series of drawings made in the 1980’s and 90’s, she experimented with scale, color, and various drawing strategies and surface treatments. I am also drawn to her use of orbs as a linking with cosmic bodies as the sun and stars, and by extension with light and reasoning. Still dealing with a spherical element her most recent works deal with the eye as a primal metaphor for discovering and interpreting life.

In thinking about space, and the use of voids in work an interesting correlation was made between Bontecou and sculptor Anish Kapoor by Donna de Salvo. Kapoor’s Untitled 2001, for example, presents a rectangle of blood-red fiberglass with a massive central void. The void opens up in such a way as to make the surrounding space part of the work. Kapoor’s sculptures are the embodiment of human concerns that readily acknowledge the technological present to which Bontecou once alluded.

Bontecou, Lee, Ann Philbin, and Salvo Donna M. De. Lee Bontecou: a Retrospective. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003. Print.

Castro, Jan G. "New York." Rev. of Knoedler Gallery. Sculpture Jan.-Feb. 2008: 73-74. Print.

Chattopadhyay, Collette. "The Uncanny Eye." Sculpture Mar. 2004: 29-33. Print.

Matthew McCaslin

My interests in materials and my definition of what can be thought of as material in my sculptural practice has grown quite a bit in recent years and an artist that I have most recently discovered that is an excellent source for research in these matters is Matthew McCaslin. I am drawn to his use of old technologies in a contemporary way in terms of use and concept.

In talking about his materials: lighting and plumbing fixtures, coaxial cable, electric fans, light switches, VCRs, and video monitors, McCaslin states, “I find low technology’s simplicity beautiful.” McCaslin turns the American minimal-industrial aesthetic on its head. He is less interested in the mystique and the strict principles of Minimalism than in the aesthetic of the materials themselves, especially with respect to two specific issues: How can these materials be employed in sculpture, and what do the materials themselves suggest to the viewer? He seeks to transform building materials into lines, shapes, and circuits of sculptural signigicance. In most recent years he has also employed video and sound into the works.

I would have to say I share McCaslin’s views on the relationships between humans and technology. He feels that, like anything manmade, technology is subject to complex patters of use and function, innovation and obsolescence. Technology’s failures are akin to humanity’s and vice versa.

I have been very interested in both video and sound as of late and especially the layering of these as a means to engage the viewer and cause moments of contemplation within the work while at the same time being aware of my materials that will project these mediums to my audience. McCaslin contrasts the static character of the material with the continuous flow of electric power generating, among other things, an unrelenting backdrop of noise and a flood of nearly identical picture sequences shown in constant repetition. They are aesthetic models of complex energy constellations reduced to an experimental situation.

Yet another theme found in Matthew McCaslin’s works is that of nature. A parallel to my own interests as well. His video installations since the early 1990s have an inevitable yet uneasy coexistence of technology and nature, tow opposing entities that are nonetheless linked in today’s contradictory climate of industrial conquest and vigilant conservation. McCaslin’s thoughts on this matter are an excellent source for my aspirations to combine my media works with a sculptural material and esthetic that reads to the coexistence of man/nature and technology.

Harper, Glenn, and Twylene Moyer. A Sculpture Reader: Contemporary Sculpture since 1980. Hamilton, NJ: ISC, 2006. Print.

MacCaslin, Matthew, and Konrad Bitterli. Matthew McCaslin: Works - Sites : [Ausstellungsorte: Kunstverein St. Gallen, Kunstmuseum, 24.1. - 19.4.1998...]. Ostfildern Bei Stuttgart: Cantz, 1997. Print.

McCaslin, Matthew. Matthew McCaslin: Ausstellungen = Exhibitions. Ostfildern [Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1994. Print.

Antony Gormley

My initial desire to research the works of Antony Gormley stemmed from my love for the casting community and searching for artists that are using similar mediums in the public eye of the contemporary art world. Wanting to work with the figure in a contemporary way Antony Gormley’s writings on the human body are an excellent recourse.

Antony Gormley understands the human body as a place of memory and transformation. Most of his early works are based on the process of casting his own body, which functions as subject, tool, and material. His more recent works deal with the body in abstracted or indirect ways and are concerned with the human condition. Making unexpected connections across ideas and disciplines, these works have moved the domain of figural sculpture beyond the confines of the physical body to include interaction with the surrounding world, whether that be the matrix of community, space and energy, memory, or built form.

I have been especially interested in one Gormley’s largest projects Inside Australia. The project consists 51 Insider sculptures installed over a 10-square-kilometere area on the dry bed of Lake Ballard in Western Australia. The sculptures are all made from digital scans made of people who lived in the town of Menzies, Western Australia. The figures were made into polystyrene forms, which in turn became sand molds into which molten stainless steel (with trace elements of minerals found in Lake Ballard) was poured. I specifically appreciate this project because of its use of technology as a tool to be used as a means to an end. The end result being a cast figure that is a inner-core or inner-life of a person from this desolate landscape.

I have many ideas of ways to work with the figure and though they are not completely related to Gormley’s ideas of the body as a vessel or the interior experience of the body; what he would call “the Insiders”, they are closely related in many ways. A lot of layers are occurring with my thoughts on figurative works: elements of nature, combined with the post-human body, and process, all being exposed to the viewer in a Zen-like experience. Gormley comments on similar topics in an interview: “There are two ways of connecting with the elemental and one is technological and the other biological, and I think they are both valid, and both necessary.” His work he says, calls upon the active participation of the viewer; it tries to allow things and materials that already exist to become eloquent rather than generating expressive forms in their own right.

Hutchinson, John. Antony Gormley (Contemporary Artists). New York: Phaidon, 2000. Print.

Gormely, Antony, Michael Mack, and Richard Noble. Antony Gormley. Go%u0308ttingen: SteidlMack, 2007. Print.

Jongh, Karlyn D. "Being the Void." Sculpture Mar. 2010: 27-31. Web.