Page 25 - Studio International - October 1966

British sculpture : the developing scene

Barry Flanagan Michael Bolus
No 1966 No. 51966
Painted steel Painted aluminium
Height 8 x 19 x 22 in. 2 ft 6 in. x 4 ft 6 in.

David Annesley
lntumescence 1966
Painted steel

The essence of sculpture is surely its worldliness, its very mirror image m the spectator's response. David Hall
existence in the world, being made of the stuff the world is writes:
made of, yet separate from it, marked off by its complete­ Sculpture has always seemed in some way concerned with
ness, 'thingness': this thingness is not just abjectness, other­ the apparent physical involvement by the maker and the
ness, in the sense of being separate from human existence, awareness of the physical actuality of the object in the
but its sheer lack of use, of necessity, of recognisability, context of its situation ..•
detaches it from the thing-world: it must become subject My concern is to arouse an environmental change in the
and central: still, but active, in relation to the human mind of the spectator through purely visual and mental
spectator, passive in his freedom to move (be moved). participation with the object. This, by the use of physical­
Barry Flanagan, a sculptor with a very different sort of spatial improbabilities and by an anonymous material and
imagery, shares this concern with the autonomous surface.
presence of the work. He writes:
The real stuff of sculpture goes on from inside. Sculpture Image as process-the story of what is happening­
reaches this state having been made in such a way to allow might have seemed central to a consideration of Tucker's
this independence of its 'manufacture', and of the laws, rules, work-to the Merus ( 1964-5), for instance; Tucker sees
and ideas, even articulation of its fabrication. them 'as the object standing to the spectator as subject,
The physical involvement of the sculptor can find a in a sense as his reflection in the world of things.' This
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