Page 44 - Studio International - January 1969

tricks for a party of Friends—debase the
vocation of the artist and blunt the power of
his art to assert the dignity of one man standing
in his own ground. Art is much harder for the
artist who honours his medium—and a sense of
responsibility toward the medium of sculpture
has been the greatest gift of St Martin's to those
who have worked there. Activities such as
McLean's are often the means by which the
sculptor maintains and tests his involvement
with his medium while he cannot afford to
work in the permanent materials of his choice.
They are none the less valid for that. These less
physically durable works are at least contribu-
tory and true to the hard situation. If he can
keep the urge to make sculpture alive in him-
self by these means and in these works he will
have provided for his activities the only justifi-
cation which it is relevant to demand.
At times when the artist is obliged to impro-
vise to maintain his commitment to his art he
is often more closely involved with his immedi-
ate environment than he is likely to be again.
It is his source of materials, his gallery and his
audience. (Rauschenberg's combine pictures
made with junk from the streets of New York
were far more alive than his recent expensive
technological extravaganzas.) McLean ima-
gines making sculpture specifically for his own
present locality; a wholly unaggressive means
of making himself felt within it. The wide
divergence of apparent intent between the
two generations of younger sculptors (with the
exception of Louw, roughly divided between
those over and those under 30) is partly a
matter of different economic situations and
different environments. The successful sculp-
tor will not feel the need to use his environ-
ment when he can use more expensive and
more permanent materials. McLean has made
sculpture in and for the streets and empty lots
of his own locality, and has shown that the
particular identity of sculpture need not there-
by be lost. Claiming an area of concrete as a
'plinth', he makes a sculpture for it; having
identified his idea with the area in question, he
has every right to claim the whole as sculpture.
float away but not from a desire to dispose of If an object or an area can be identified with
them—is really expanding the limits of what his idea with no addition or modification
sculpture can be. whatsoever, it is still claimable as having
Of course evanescent art is no novelty in the identification with the sculptor, and thus
field of intermedia activities, but what looks identity as sculpture.
like the same gesture can, in a different, more Richard Long, of all British sculptors, has per-
exacting context have quite a different signi- haps claimed the largest area as an aspect of his
ficance. Manifestations like the floataway work. In one sculpture made between Decem-
sculpture deserve attention because they de- ber 1 and 3, 1967, he employed a large sector
velop, like the works of all the younger sculp- of eastern England. In his own description : '16
tors I have been discussing here, out of a deep similar parts placed irregularly surrounding an
10
Richard Long with map showing sites of concern for a specific medium and for its area of 2401 square miles. Near each part was
sculpture in sixteen parts, December 1-3, 1967 chances of uncompromised survival. These a notice giving the information. Thus a spec-
11 things are of quite a different order from those tator could only see one part (no information
Richard Long
sculpture Summer 1967 celebrations which derive their audience from being given to locate the others), but have a
12 the outrageousness of their premature and mental realization of the whole.' In other
Bruce McLean
sculpture September 1967 public claims to be art, and which to serve works a path trodden in a field or a circle sunk
concrete and wood titillate those who, if they were not already in thick grass are records of the sculptor's parti-
13 deceived, would not have come. Events like cular idea embodied in the rhythms peculiar
Richard Long
sculpture March 1967 Cesar's 'Expansions' at the Tate—conjuring to our behaviour in landscape and in the forms
32