Page 26 - Studio International - July 1965

Gio' Pomodoro The act appropriate to sculpture

by Toni del Renzio

1 The recent sculptures of Gio' Pomodoro demonstrate the demonstration by the history of music that harmony
Grande Fra11ura 1962
Bronze with almost exemplary clarity the inadequacy of form is merely a convenient term for the tolerable simultaneity
67x30cm. and content as terms in the discussion of the dialectics of sounds. Coherence arises from the view of the prac­
Marlborough Gallery, Rome
of art. Not only is this dichotomy a crudely idealist tice of art as a praxis, that is to see art as operational
2 formulation, whether Hegel is stood on his feet or left rather than conceptual. This seems the point of Harold
Ouadrato P1cco/o 1 964
Bronze on his head, but it is also an expression of that malaise Rosenberg's studies of action painting, 'What matters
24x25cm.
Collection: Semrha Huber. Zurich we call alienation which results from the ambiguities always is the revelation contained in the act'.
men feel in their internal and external relations, the The history of modern painting and sculpture has been,
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'Press,one· 1 964 sense of pursuing goals they have not freely chosen. the in a sense, the history of the attempt to overcome aliena­
Chrnese rnk on card inversion of ends and means, the segmentation of tion, even though, paradoxically, it has led to almost
70 x 100 cm.
Prrvate Collection. Rome activity into mutually exclusive and competitive spheres, arcane expression. What saves this expression, gives it
subservience to seemingly alien forces that are fre­ its meaning, is the coherence of its role, its structure and
quently no more than the materialisation of social the relations of this to the socio-cultural structure with
relations. For more than a century, to Marx as well as which it interacts. Thus Gio' Pomodoro reJected the
to the young Lukacs. it has appeared that the integra­ metaphysics of sculpture as an object and with it all
tion of art with social reality would reveal that life, too, those concepts of sculpture that appear to perpetuate
could possess the coherence of a work of art. alienation. No longer content to envisage sculpture as
Nevertheless, one of the most difficult problems with an 'assemblage' of objects, traces of objects, signs, all
which we have been confronted is to understand the of which still retained something of that metaphysics
coherence of a work of art, of, say, Pollock's Blue Poles, and something of the anecdote, he created his one­
Brancusi's Muse Endormie or Le Corbusier's chapel at sided surfaces which are both the consequence and the
Ronchamp. If one opposes coherence to alienation, means of transcending the object. Further, these
not only does it follow that form and content are not surfaces with all their baroque modulation had to be
separable in the work of art, but also that the work of generated by methods other than the traditional pro­
art must be more than an exercise in 'pure form'. cedures of the sculptor-modelling in clay or some other
Coherence is not equivalent to abstraction, lyrical or malleable material and carving stone, wood or some
otherwise. The Platonic arguments for abstraction, other resistant material-since this again offered a way
favoured in the 'thirties, finally reduce to a pathetic to avoid the metaphysics of sculpture as object.
belief in the universality of the laws of harmony, despite His aim had become to achieve in sculpture something
Photo. Marianne Adelmann

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