Page 29 - Studio International - June 1972

Cat's Cradle 3 1971. 1.65 x 2.90 m Beulah I 1971. 1.53 X 2.69 m
Photo courtesy Kasmin Gallery Photo courtesy Kasmin Gallery

although they rest on the floor, and are more or passages and so on. main determinant of the structure (rather than
less man-sized, confront or correspond These last considerations lead on to the a pre-figured plan or image). The work is
with the spectator : they are not to be work I am now doing, illustrated here. more direct and real than my earlier
touched—their exclusively visual quality keeps The pieces are clearly distinctive from sculpture : although the material is familiar,
the spectator at a distance. However, they the earlier work: in fact the size and the even banal, I feel the sculpture is a good deal
do have, on this visual level, certain fact that they start on the floor are the only more abstract—having 'come through'
architectural features that would not have made common factors. The crucial difference seems the world as it were, instead of remaining
sense, indeed would not have been possible, to me to lie in the attitude toward material. distant, isolated, untouchable: a statement,
unless the sculptures had been conceived and The earlier sculptures were made of rather than a diagram.
made in the way they were, of that size, 'no-material', or even perhaps 'thought- I don't want to over-emphasize an
resting directly on the floor. In an expository, material', as though they had been willed into `architectural' reading of my recent sculpture.
diagrammatic way, these sculptures stress, in existence out of abstract matter, without There are, I hope, many different ways of
some instances, architectural construction— interference of hand or tools. Physical looking at it, and certainly my own first
simple modes of joining, butting, bonding and qualities, such as they were, were 'assigned', consideration when making it was, and remains,
piling elements. They point to factors in the subsequent to the making of the work. This a desire to stay free from any bonding
articulation of architectural space—distance, whole process was a possibly over-emphatic concepts or principles that might be
interval, level. Finally they call attention to the rejection of the association of particular extrapolated from a view of the preceding
symbolic aspects of architecture that have been forms with particular materials in previous work . However, at a time when progressive
largely neglected in modern buildings : that is, sculpture . It was, in effect, a kind of purging, architecture seems largely to have abandoned
the relation of the construction to the after which I felt I could look at materials aesthetics in favour of planning, housing,
experience and ritual of its use—its relation to quite freshly again, without prejudice. Any engineering or futurology, it may be that
the points of the compass, the symbolism of material, whether used in sculpture before or sculpture has gained both the freedom and the
height and level, placing of windows and not, now seems possible; the tool or technique— capacity to articulate what has been thought
doors, the experience of mounting and sawing and joining wood, cutting and brazing of up till now as exclusively architecture's
descending stairs, passing through doors and steel bar, bending and fixing tube—is the province. q

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