Page 32 - Studio International - February 1973

THE OBJECT WilliamTucker

If one word captures the aspirations of position gained was incapable of steady
modernism from about 1870 until the Second development, but demanded either unconditional
World War it is surely object. Firstly in poetry surrender of the conventions with which they
and painting, then in sculpture, music and had been warring, but on whose existence their
architecture, the word came to denote an ideal art had depended; or counter-revolution.
condition of self-contained, self-generating It might be well to examine first the
apartness for the work of art, with its own rules, components of the drive towards the object,
its own order, its own materials, independent because these must be seen now often to have
both of its maker, its audience and the world in been in conflict. Out of, and in opposition to, the
general. It is essentially a classic and optimistic subjectivity of early nineteenth-century
ideal, depending on a strong belief in the power romanticism, came the objectivity of
and centrality of art in human experience, and naturalism — the affirmation of the objective
manifesting itself with the clarity and economy world, and its precise and 'scientific' rendering.
of scientific law or engineering structure. In the At its purest this tendency was represented by
last few years, as we approach the high tide of Impressionism, where landscape and light
the post-war reaction into romanticism and provided a neutral subject-matter : but in
irrationality, the word 'object' has become a Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rodin, Rilke, exactness of
term of abuse among the avant garde for rendering acted as the vehicle for the depiction
whatever is considered passé in the plastic arts, of extreme states of feeling. Objectivity of
those elements of the traditional vocabulary of perception allied to unusual, bizarre or
sculpture and painting, their common fixity, `degrading' subject thus gave new life to
boundedness and permanence, that are currently romanticism. We have already discussed
held superfluous or obstructive in the interest of Rodin's objectivity of method, his workmanlike
finally breaking down the distinction between physical approach to his art, which he shared
art and 'life'. The total merging of art and life is with Flaubert and the impressionists. But
as impossible a proposition as their total unlike the impressionists, he himself could not
separation: but the power of an ideal in art achieve the indifferent, 'objective', approach to
depends not on the actual feasibility of its his subject that he recommended to Rilke.
realization, but on the range and density of Out of objective perception, objective
effect created by its admission into the thinking method, objective `subject-matter', developed
of the most gifted and adventurous artists. From the objective consideration of the work itself—
this view the ideal of the object was enormously its own demands issuing from its own objective
fruitful in sculpture, and most notably in the existence — the flatness, bounded rectangularity,
period 1907-1915. colour and tactility of the painting, the
Subsequently the accessibility of the ideal for appearance of the printed poem on the page,
sculpture created particular problems which I with the simultaneous objective consideration
intend to discuss. Sculpture of its nature is of the conventions needed to support the
object, in the world, in a way in which painting, illusion of space and volume in painting and
music, poetry are not : thus the ambition of the `meaning' in poetry; thus Cezanne and
poem-object, the object-tableau, continued to be Mallarmé during the two final decades of the
active over a far longer period because of the nineteenth century emerged as the leaders of the
persistence of factors of meaning and heroic struggle for the independence of painting
representation in poetry and painting: in fact the and poetry as self-contained disciplines which
object-status of the poem or painting tended to paradoxically involved the re-structuring of
release and enlarge the evocations and objectively verifiable conventions — for example
associations in the component words or of perspective and syntax — relative to our
depicted subject, whereas the effect in sculpture perception of the external world and verbal
was the reverse: as the sculpture-object usage, in the conflicting interests of the painting
approached the reality-object in form and or poem as itself physically verifiable.
intention, the gap between them seemed Sculpture had to wait for the emergence of
progressively to decelerate to the point to which Brancusi, for a talent and ambition ready for the
all previous reasons for making 'sculpture' and task. It was not simply a question of
indeed art in general seemed to disappear. This appropriating objective tendencies in painting,
was the nature of the crisis that was experienced as Degas and Rosso had done, and which shortly
by advanced art in the 192os, when most artists afterwards were to be exploited to such
including those who had been chiefly spectacular effect in Picasso's cubist
responsible for achieving the success of 'the constructions. What was required in addition to
Rodin object' in sculpture and painting, Brancusi and Rodin's objectivity of observation, was an
Great Head of Iris 1891 objectivity of handling and of subject-matter,
Bronze 23 1/2 x 13 x 13 in. Picasso, seemed to have felt an impulse to move
Tate Gallery, London backwards or forwards violently, as though the such as occurs only rarely in Rodin's oeuvre —
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