Page 40 - Studio International - May June 1975

What Sculpture is

William Tucker Parts seven &eight

The visibility of sculpture is made can't destroy the painting's illusion by Degas. Consider this piece: each element
possible by space. Space is not mere moving your point of vision in front of it: — limbs, trunk, head — clearly and
absence of matter. It is our means of but neither can you find out anything economically defined, and so open to
access to things and to the world. Space more about it. The spatial relations sight that every surface of the entire
allows our bodies movement and vision. within the painting are unalterable by the body, save the sole of one foot, the heel
Space allows sculpture. There is a spectator. of the other, the inside of the right hand, is
difference between 'space', used to Adrian Stokes wrote, apropos exposed to sight from one view or another.
describe the intervening space, the Donatello: 'The sculptors taught the It is hard to think of a sculpture in which
distance between objects, and 'depth', painters perspective'. Certainly the more is given, less concealed, yet the
the word by which we relate space to sculptors of the early Renaissance might physical articulation, the order in which
ourselves, by which we experience be expected to have had a more acute sense this perfect definition of volumes is
distance, the nearness and remoteness of both of the possibilities and dangers of bonded and presented renders their
things. We speak of depth easily in this new-found depth. Donatello's exact relation entirely unpredictable and
relation to a painting, or at least to the reliefs by their evident materiality defend mysterious. However long you look at
perspective painting of the Renaissance. against the vertigo induced by the most this sculpture from a single view,
This is clearly a space which is depth, daring exploration of the depth. The however frequently you change your
because the painting has only one side, painters, with light at their command to focus or viewpoint, the exact relation of
one flat surface : there is but one way, reveal or conceal what they wished, each form to each other and to your eye
one direction for our sight, into and needed to take no such risks with space. can never be determined. The sculpture
through this surface. The painting has no But how were the sculptors to capture exists in depth — it works not in a single
thickness, yet is infinitely deep. Typically, painting's transparency in the free- channel, as in a niche, but in terms of a
a central figure in the foreground is standing figure ? The pictorial frontality limitless field of perception. It is, as I
situated to obscure the vanishing point of early Renaissance sculpture, the proposed earlier as an ideal for
on the horizon: to prevent the onlooker's location of the figure in a niche for a sculpture, infinitely exposed but,
gaze from being irretrievably sucked frame, was a poor answer : the exact because visually inexhaustible,
right through the surface. This dimension of the shallow depth thus infinitely concealed.
perspective space does not threaten: it is trapped can easily be tested by the Any common object will in fact
consistently convincing and visible from onlooker moving his point of vision, technically fulfil this requirement. You
any point in front of the painting — while the natural desire to grasp visually cannot know it with your eyes, totally,
you do not have to stand exactly opposite what one knows to be fully dimensional at any moment in time. But the self-
the picture's centre. It is a contained is simply frustrated. evidence of most objects in the world
space, space-in-itself. It allows perception, Not until Degas and Rodin was the means that this kind of visual questioning
but it also resists perception. You figure thrust back into free space. This of their being is an academic procedure.
brief dismissal of the four intervening Only where a thing has been made with
centuries of European sculpture may be the deliberate end of at once extending
forgiven, if it is understood that I am and resisting our utmost visual effort, can
speaking here of the autonomous it claim such a response from us. This is
spatiality, not the autonomous volume, the realization of depth, of that medium
of 'free-standing' sculpture. In that persists exclusively between each
Rilke's marvellous description one of us and the object of perception.
`sculpture was a separate thing, as was Merleau-Ponty describes this medium
the easel picture, but it did not require between seeing subject and seen object
a wall like a picture. It did not even as an Interworld' of sheer visibility.
need a roof. It was an object that could When I and another look at a landscape
exist for itself alone, and it was well to `it is not I who sees, not he who sees, but
give it entirely the character of a an anonymous visibility inhabits us both,
complete thing about which one could a vision in general . .
walk, and which one could look at from Degas and Rodin stand at the moment
all sides . . .' Degas and Rodin discovered where visibility is detached from the
depth for sculpture by attending to human image. They in particular made it
volume alone : in Rodin's case by freeing possible for visibility to be considered
the figure from the monumental group, an end-in-itself for sculpture. From their
and from the wall; from gravity itself; time on, it has been possible to realize
the sculpture from the boundary of the a transparency in sculpture that would
single figure even: by recalling the advice disclose the world as once perspective
given by his teacher Constant: 'Rodin, disclosed the world for painting. This is
you are going about it badly. All your the perspective of sculpture.
leaves appear flat. That's why they don't Through this perspective, this goal of
look real. Make them so that they shoot transparency, we can relate the most
their points towards you . . . From now dense, superficially the most opaque
on when you model, never look at your sculpture of the past with the most open
forms in extension, but always in depth. and literally transparent sculpture of the
Never regard a surface as anything but present day. This Egyptian sculpture,
the outermost point of a volume, as the for example — what could be more
broader or narrower summit which it massive, more resistant than this block
Edgar Degas directs towards you . . with its densely impacted and
Dancer Holding her Foot What is true of the single volume in continuous surface, without a single
Bronze Rodin is true also of the aggregation of crevice for the eye to penetrate and
Coll: Tate Gallery volumes that constitutes each figure by explore. There is no separation of form,

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