Life in the Bus Lane #6

Sculpture is a doing word.

Well, okay, no, technically, it isn’t. Sculpt would be the ‘doing word’, i.e. the verb. Sculpture is a noun and in my dictionary defined as “the art of carving, esp. in stone”. Both words - sculpt and sculpture - are derived not from the person (the sculptor) but from the act; the Latin verb being sculpere – to carve.

I’ve been driven to consider the meaning of the word because on Friday evening we went to The Royal Academy to look at their Modern British Sculpture exhibition, (22 Jan – 7 April 2011). This they describe as “…the first exhibition for thirty years to examine British sculpture of the twentieth century…The exhibition takes a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions…” So far that’s true enough, and I was duly provoked. In this, it seems, I’m not alone. Most of the press reviews have questioned who and what was left out of this exhibition (Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread and others). They may have a point but I found that I wanted to question some of the stuff that was included.

Leaving aside, as we should, the customary awfulness of a piece by Damien Hirst (Let’s Eat Out Today. 1990/91) – [How does he get away with it?] – there were better executed but hardly more engaging efforts by Jeff Koons (One Ball. 1985) and by Julian Opie ( W. 1988). The Koons piece had a basketball floating in a glass case containing distilled water. The Opie was an empty cabinet made from glass and stainless steel. How much of any of these works was actually by the hands of Hirst or Koons or Opie is, to be polite, ‘unclear’. “Carving” certainly did not feature in their production but the real deficit lies in the sparsity of creative intelligence behind them. Like so many of the most recent works shown in this exhibition they were blindingly obvious, or downright bland or simply daft. At least when R. Mutt produced his famous urinal* he knew he was taking the piss.

It was an effort to make it all the way through to the end of this exhibition. Symbolically, perhaps, the show seemed to arrive at its own dead-end anyway. The final piece was a long grey chamber, wedge-shaped in plan so as to create a false-perspective. Within this box-like structure, the floor was strewn with rags or discarded clothes and a blinding light shone from the far end towards an expanded-metal grille covering the wide end. The grille cast a lattice of shadows on the gallery wall. That was it. I was too indifferent to note the name of the artist or the title of the work. If there was a caption which offered any explanation of this nonsense, I couldn’t be arsed to look for it. ‘Tedious. 1999.’ would have sufficed.

The only way out was to return back through the sequence, revisiting the rooms in reverse order. This was surprisingly cheering, and I began to wonder if that wasn’t what the two curators** had intended. Had they stumbled upon what Baldrick would have announced as “A cunning plan”? Were Curtis and Wilson saying to us, “Here was a journey, the progress made was varied and frequently illusory but the journey may have been necessary nonetheless…Perhaps we should take this opportunity to re-evaluate the activity of sculpture…before it disappears from public view up its own fundamental orifice…?”

So I turned around and went back and felt better for doing so. My mood began to lift with Rebecca Warren’s Helmut Crumb. 1999 and then came the brilliantly-lit white rocks of Richard Long’s Chalk Line 1984. A dangling piece by Urs Fischer (Untitled 2000) caught my eye. The creative simplicity of this blew away the excesses of the Damien Hirst effort. Fischer had sliced in two, vertically, a pear and an apple. He had then clamped together one half of each of the fruit, using a cross-head screw, and suspended the resulting apple/pear fusion on a length of nylon fishing-line.

I don’t get Anthony Caro. When coming through and when going back I really tried to ponder the bright orangey-red metalwork of his ‘Early One Morning’. On both occasions it looked like a piece of over-designed farm-machinery intended for the brave-new-world of post-war Britain. I think I got the point of the installation originated by Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, An Exhibit. 1957. But what I found most satisfying and – dare I say ‘sculptural’? – about this piece were the small, rectangular, blocks of cast acrylic which secured the multiple hanging planes. These fixings were exquisitely designed. The same item could be used vertically or horizontally. They were intended to be unobtrusive but the manner in which they reflected and refracted the colours of the hanging surfaces fully integrated them within the entirety of the piece.

It is the process of making that led me to begin by claiming sculpture to be a doing word. The sculptor’s intended representation has to be formed and the manner of its formation is inseparable from the meaning of the work. In one of the final rooms I had seen Rasheed Araeen’s First Structure 1966 close by Tony Cragg’s Stack 1975. Cragg’s piece was intricate, interesting and fully engaged. Araeen’s was a vacant cube of which my abiding memory is of the desperately poor quality of the welds where the pieces of metal had been joined together. Sculpture isn’t a craft activity, but it certainly involves skills in both thought and execution. If a rough finish is shown that must be deliberate and part of the meaning of the piece as a whole. Nowhere was this requirement more in evidence than in the first room of the exhibition; the room bearing the title ‘Theft by Finding’.

Here were displayed carved objects from the British Museum alongside early twentieth century pieces by Eric Gill, Charles Sargeant Jagger and others. Everything in this room seemed carved to perfection. All the free-standing objects can be enjoyed from all sides. Often the backs are as interesting as the fronts. That’s probably what it means to be three-dimensional. None of them exhibited the poverty of execution to be seen later in works such as Sarah Lucas’ Portable Smoking Area 1996. It is salutary to consider how well the Museum pieces compare alongside some of the great works of modern sculpture included in this exhibition – Jacob Epstein’s Adam 1938-9. Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure 1951. and Barbara Hepworth’s Single Form (Memorial) 1961-2. If they’d let me pick something for my desert island, it would have been Fragment of a Running Leopard… and that, it seems, was made at Halicarnassus (now the city of Bodrum on the Aegean coast of Turkey) in about 350BC.

So there we were; back to the beginning of the exhibition if not back to the beginning of time. And it begins – the exhibition that is – with a full-scale model of Edwin Lutyens Cenotaph 1919/20. This simple, elegant, structure was designed to be a plinth to be situated beneath an empty tomb. Its tapering corners are said to be angled in such a way that their projecting lines would intersect at a point one thousand feet above. One of the advantages of living in London is that you can leave this model, walk out of the RA, stroll down Piccadilly, turn into Haymarket and on into

Trafalgar Square

. At the top of Whitehall, we caught a 159 bus and moments later we were passing the Cenotaph itself.

I have always known of this monument since my childhood but I don’t believe I’d ever really looked at it before. The replica in the exhibition seemed huge – literally Monumental – because it was housed within a gallery space. Viewing the real Cenotaph from the top-deck of the 159 you see how surprisingly small it is. The scale becomes human, as it should. And its monumentality belongs to that imagined meeting point one thousand feet in the air…

*Marcel Duchamp Fountain. 1917

**Dr Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, and Keith Wilson, Sculptor.

Next week: “Calm down dear.”