Page 42 - Studio International - January 1969

sculpture's physical, tactile quality and to arches under which the spectator may walk are Like Roelof Louw, Flanagan avoids imposing
emphasize its dynamic. What is important is kept bowed only by concrete blocks which hold his will upon the materials he uses in order to
the state that exists within the sculpture while them down at either end. The whole physical transform them to his own ends, seeking rather
we are enclosed by it; it is only from outside environment in which he works, and the pro- to establish a situation in which his identifi-
that we can perceive how its dynamic is con- cesses of manufacture and installation, become cation with materials and processes is assured
fined and resolved. One great advantage of emotive and enactive for Brener as for few and unassertive from the start. This implies a
this most exciting sculpture seems to me that it other sculptors using comparable materials. different order of priorities from those sculp-
would maintain its effectiveness in virtually The process by which the sculpture is formed tors who strive with intractable and unassocia-
any context; a confused setting might even is still alive in the work and is potentially tive materials to create an object whose real
emphasize the particular intensity and identity reversible. That the reversal might be sudden, effect is poetic (Caro) or philosophic (Tucker).
of the experience enshrined by the structure. dramatic and even dangerous testifies to a Many of the younger sculptors have shown
The physical realities of Louw's sculpture be- strong element of contained tension in the great reluctance to risk losing touch with an
come secondary in the extreme without there sculpture — a direct emotionally expressive idea by developing it sculpturally; the idea has
being any evidence that he has laboured self- quality of a kind which the majority of the to be sculptural in the first place. By implica-
consciously to transcend them. An unwilling- New Generation sculptors have so far striven tion, once the artist has identified himself as a
ness to impose upon the nature of materials is to avoid, perhaps because it reflects too sculptor, whatever else he can identify with in
characteristic of certain younger sculptors. closely what they themselves had to reject in honesty and without compromise becomes an
Louw emphasizes the particular element in order to make good sculpture. Their pre- aspect of sculpture. Five years ago Barry Flan-
sculpture—the sense of embodiment within it occupation with a certain morality in sculp- agan wrote, `... Is it that the only thing a
of some dynamic identity—by exposing the ture has outlived the ascendancy of the indis- sculptor can do, being a three-dimensional
arbitrariness of its other ingredients. In an- criminately emotive styles which threatened it. thinker, and therefore one hopes a responsible
other recent work the steel elements have been Those bogey words 'gestural', 'architectural' thinker, is to assert himself twice as hard in a
left in their intractable state, unbent, unwelded and 'environmental' are beginning to lose their negative way. I might claim to be a sculptor
and unpainted, and the means of assembly— sting; perhaps it's time to admit that the atti- and do everything else but sculpture. This is
scaffolding clasps—has been left almost aggres- tudes they represent are not necessarily adul- my dilemma'.13
sively explicit ... 'conforming to the require- terating. It is a dilemma which is likely to be most
ments of the material'12. Yet precisely the same In the work of the best younger sculptors of acute for the young artist, who is often in no
elements could have been articulated differ- the last two to three years increasing attention position to substantiate his claims to be a
ently using precisely the same means of assem- has been paid to states and processes rather sculptor in any other terms than in his desire
bly. It is as if Louw were ensuring that what he than to things and phenomena. Flanagan in and willingness to identify himself with pro-
is making is specific as sculpture by ensuring particular has been concerned with the .forms. cesses of formation and with• the • states so
that it is specific in no other way. Sculpture things take and the processes which condition formed. Bruce McLean, a student at St Martin's
takes form as the selection and arrangement of shape. Of those I have seen, the most simple, from 1963-6, has set up a series of sculptural
elements—by implication here any selection the most extreme and the most poetic sculpture situations of determined originality, abandon-
and any arrangement of any elements. All that in which he has expressed these concerns is ing any arrangement or process once it begins
is left particular is the sculptor's will and the ringX, a sculpture made by pouring dry sand, to lose its particular identity and becomes
identity it serves. exhibited in his first exhibition at the Rowan identifiable as 'art'. A floataway sculpture
Some of Brener's recent sculptures imply the Gallery in August 1966. (The fact that Flana- made earlier this year survives as a positive
same possibility of change of state, though in gan acknowledges in this context his excite- affirmation of the mental reality of sculpture
his case the change would be more sudden and ment at Phillip King's cone sculptures of and as a forceful negative as regards its ma-
more dramatic. In two works of 1968 the steel 1962-5 is a testimony to the fruitful and un- terial reality. There is a sense in which sculpture
shapes take their particular form only under a predictable nature of the interchange between is identifiable as such when it is recognizable
sustained tension: in one, three bow-like the various groups of sculptors who have parti- as nothing else. McLean, in adding another
shapes are bent by tensile wires; in another the cipated in the advanced course at St Martin's). negative—by allowing particular things to

5
Roland Brener
sculpture 1968
steel and tensile wire, painted
height 66 ft, length 35 ft
6
Roelof Louw
sculpture September 1968
sand-blasted and zinc-sprayed steel
17 ft sq
7
Roelof Louw
sculpture June 1968
sand-blasted and zinc-sprayed steel
approx. length 40 ft (poles 17 ft)
8
Barry Flanagan
tinef '66 August 1966 (Rowan Gallery
dry sand
9
Bruce McLean
floataway sculpture March 1967
chipboard, linoleum and water