Page 52 - Studio International - March April 1975

through which we generally live today.
Sculpture, to achieve existence in the
world as thing, must be present in itself.
It must not, primarily, re-present anyone
or anything outside itself. This is not to
dismiss representation as having been of
no importance to sculpture. But I would
argue that the central function of the
recognizable image, wherever it has
appeared in sculpture, has been as a
vehicle between the sculpture and the
onlooker. It has carried the experience of
the sculpture-as-thing into the onlooker's
habitual expectation of reality. The
newness, the unexpectedness, of each
separately created thing could only be
tolerated when mediated through the
expectedness of human or animal forms.
Secondly, the figure makes the thing
visible. It gives it a front and a back, a
defined boundary, a specific spatial
orientation. It focuses and directs the
onlooker's attention. It is in this sense
alone that the residual role of the figure
is of importance to sculpture now, and I
want to develop this theme in our next
discussion.
I think we have now focused and
isolated two notable characteristics of
sculpture as thing-in-itself. I mean its
stability and its visibility. The first of
these characteristics sculpture shares with
all created things : the second is peculiar
to sculpture among things and, I will
argue, its one central quality.
As we found last time, things stand
differently in the world from humans.
The permanence of things, among which
sculpture is counted, is not the historic
permanence — the "immortality" — of
sculpture. It is simply this, that things,
standing-in-themselves, retain visible
constancy denied to humans, whose
"mortality" consists not only in the
inevitability of death, but in the
inevitable departure of each moment,
enforcing a continual change on each
living subject and of his view of the
world. Things need survive long enough
only to assure humans of the constancy
of their own presence in the world. 'It
is this durability,' Hannah Arendt writes,
"which gives the things of the world their
relative independence from men who
produced and used them, their
"objectivity" which makes them
withstand, "stand against", and endure, at
least for a time, the voracious needs and
wants of their living makers and users.
From this standpoint the things of the
world have the function of stabilizing
human life, and their objectivity lies in
the fact that — in contradiction to the
Heraclitean saying that the same man can
never enter the same stream ( ? twice) —
men, their ever-changing nature
notwithstanding, can retrieve their
sameness, that is, their identity, by being
related to the same chair and the same
table.'
It is the stability and sufficient
permanence of things that leads Rilke to
speak of them as belonging to an order
above that of the human and animal
world, in the quotation from the Rodin
lecture I used earlier; and later, in the
Ninth Duino Elegy: 'These things that
live only in passing, understand that you
praise them; fugitive, they look to us the
most fugitive for rescue.' Men and things Rodin jean d'Aire, nude c. 1889. Bronze, 83 x 27 x 24½ in. Rodin Museum

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