4 UNEQUIVOCALLY MODERN

4

UNEQUIVOCALLY MODERN

NERI’S SENSE OF THE NATURALISTIC FIGURE has required — along with his devotion to the speci c physical traits of his model — that he recreate her form at the scale of life, a trait that characterizes virtually all of his output. Here, too, he deviates from both Giacometti and Marini, and some comparisons may be helpful. For Giacometti, scale would be a decisive strategy. He shifted the scale rather than the pose of his standing gures from one sculpture to the next, in part to locate them within an identi able eld of transaction between the sculptural form and his own distance from the model at the time of its construction, as a document of his visual perception within that space: the scale is so exacting that we can often recreate the precise distance between artist and model by simply shifting our position relative to the gure, which appears like the xed point on a graph, with ourselves as the variables. In a critical sense, this tactic had additional consequences. Scale was no longer a reliable determinant of utility — that is, whether the work was destined for a tabletop, niche, or civic square — nor was scale a criterion of the inherent “signi cance” of the work.

114. Philip Galgiani, Photographer Sculptures in progress in the exhibition The Remaking of Mary Julia, 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, 1976

65

LEFT/RIGHT 115. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Homme qui marche [Walking Man], 1947 Kunsthaus Zürich

116. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Piazza, 1947–48; Cast 1948–49 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

OPPOSITE 117–118. Mary Julia [Standing Figure V], 1976 Private Collection

66

Collectively, then, Giacometti’s gures build towards a particular sculptural situation — one that the sculptor demonstrates in microcosm in his City Square pieces — a situation whose operational clarity refers to our encounters and perceptions of the world as we move through its innumerable spaces in real time. Neri is less programmatic. As his gures entered the spatial realm of objects and human beings, he found that the naturalistic form at correspondent human scale had little dif culty eluding forthright allegations of a deliberate or exclusively phenomenological function. Or: the gesticulating gure, however anonymous as a depiction, could prompt a startling — and startlingly human — intimacy in the viewer that Giacometti’s standing forms do not. As a result, Neri’s gures arouse a curiosity that goes beyond interest in either their critical or their perceptual intentions as sculpted objects, and should we suddenly come upon one of them in a gallery, surrounded by other works of art, its call is so uncannily human that we can hardly turn from it.

67

68

On this point, Neri leaves behind an art of ideas, which, strictly speaking, is the territory of rationalism. He longs to transcend the tics of ideation and interpretation, to test instead the accuracy with which his gure projects a recognizable communicability in a felt, self-evidently human way. It may go without saying that an experiential familiarity with the human form — his and ours — is a perennial condition, and a serious one. We meet ourselves in others all the time, and to echo the surrealist poet André Breton, we are likely to insist that everyone knows what a human being looks like. It is among the most intractable challenges faced by the contemporary gurative sculptor. How will the work perform the necessary initial task of penetrating the perceptual habits that enclose our usual encounters with the sculptural gure, all the well-conditioned re exes of “reading”?

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 119. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme assise [Seated Woman], 1948–50 Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris 120–121. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme assise [Seated Woman], 1956; Cast 1981 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

122–123. Mary Julia Seated [Seated Female Figure No. 1], 1976 Cincinnati Art Museum

69

124. Alberto Giacometti sculptures on exhibit at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

In Giacometti’s work, the forms are clearly gurative, and yet, just as clearly, they do not reproduce or duplicate us. They are not “naturalistic” in quite the same way as are Neri’s. Surface brings them to an enlivened state that piques our interest almost in spite of the effect of separateness created by their extreme formal stylization. Put another way, the intricacy of the artist’s handwork over the entirety of the gure, in conjunction with the removal of mass, emphasizes the form as a referential “body,” however ethereal, and, at the same time, the liveliness of its surface. Because we feel these two aspects as a charged relationship between the artwork and its setting, the gure is a natural metaphor for the tension of the living, conscious body for which the very conditions of existence require that it conduct its own wary passage through an intricate, potentially dangerous world of other bodies, objects, and events separate from itself.

70

125–126. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) L’Homme qui chavire [The Man Who Capsizes] [Falling Man], 1950 Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence

71

72

In his drive for visual effect, Giacometti’s handling of gure and surface, or perhaps more accurately, his handling of gure as surface, represents a production of formal rather than depictive detail, or in place of depictive detail. Consequently, surface distortion is nally inseparable from formal distortion in Giacometti’s gures: and yet the discontinuous surface also gives the gure its delicate shiver of animation, a visual effect emanating from its literal response to the speci c conditions of space and light around it — the gural “skin” as a network of facets and textures whose interaction with its setting recreates the sculpture as a device for transforming its environment from a seemingly passive, circumstantial setting into an active reality inextricable from our perceptual experience of the work.

Although Neri, too, uses the surface to bring a felt sentience to the mass of inert sculptural material, his conception of the building process — his search for the gestures with which to speak through the gure — is far more variable than Giacometti’s, and certainly less committed to the requirements of stylization. As naturalistic forms of our own scale, Neri’s gures are spatial beings, resolutely so, as they must be, and we, the viewers, meet them in space, where they stand. Or: they do not tell us about space, as Giacometti’s gures tend to do, they tell us about our space. Thus Neri employs scale and surface to invoke the familiarity of experience that characterizes our encounters with other human beings, but the liveliness of his sculptural surface — the textures and colors that mobilize the eye — is not dedicated to drawing attention to experiences of uncertainty speci cally spatial in nature. We absorb the gural presence in a bodily way, true, yet Neri’s gures never insist that our encounters with them ought to proceed from their real settings, or from the ways in which the contingencies of distance can and often do in ect our reading of the gure before us. Neri, we might say, accepts the presence of space and gure alike as readily apprehensible, and so he problematizes the communicative resources of the gure as a representative of human expression rather than the physical, sense-based experience of distance and form.

Whatever Neri’s treatment of surface may derive from the Giacomettian gure, the comparison refuses to continue into the realm of thematic function. The uni ed drama of formal organization and surface invention is instead a

OPPOSITE 127. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Grande femme [Tall Woman], 1958 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

128–129. La Niña de la Piedra, 1978 Private Collection

73

74

means by which Neri claims authentic engagement with his form: the form is him, or speaks for him, in an idiom of his own devising. The orchestration of the sculptural surface, the ow of detail that constitutes the gural “skin,” is another active mode of speech. While the surfaces may strike us as pictorial in the same sense that a nonobjective canvas is pictorial, and descriptive in the sense that the artist makes self-descriptive gestures on them, for Neri their pictorial, descriptive activities are integrated with his goal that the gures be recognizably “naturalistic” as gures, more “like” us than not.

OPPOSITE 130–131. Standing Male Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Private Collection

132. Acha de Noche II, 1975

75

76

As another comparison, let us turn to Marini’s Pomona gures, the standing or seated females constructed of plaster or stone, their scored surfaces rubbed with soft-hued pigments. Here, similar means lean toward more decidedly narrative, thematic effects. The Pomonas emerge from the Tuscan landscape where the artist spent most of his life: history lies everywhere around them, remnant, fragmented, obscured but never quite eradicated, like a fragrance that has settled on the present — and the gures, conscious of this past, evoke the timeworn, yet incompletely effaced ideals that long ago gave such vitality to Western sculpture. In this sense, their surfaces can also be described as autobiographical, at least to the extent that they manifest in sculptural form a tension, lodged within the artist himself, between his love of the old parlance of guration, on the one hand, and on the other, the modern loss of faith in art’s ef cacy.

Marini’s surfaces rarely bear the unmistakable signature of the sculptor’s hand. He is creating marks, but they are not the marks of a “writing” hand, as are Neri’s. Put another way, Marini’s material facility is committed to a thematic necessity, and he does not need to claim the surface with the same declarative energy. Still, if Neri is a more individualistic mark-maker, he and Marini do share a feeling for the sculptural surface as a referent of time, not time as a concept but as a substance, carrying with it all of life as it goes by. It is among Marini’s intentions for his archaized gures that they demonstrate the loss of a supportive, uninterrupted cultural tradition.

The modern condition, Marini infers, becomes quite clear when we contemplate it visually, through the social and cultural values that once found unitary form as art, the values we have freely chosen to abandon in our pursuit of self-congratulatory fantasies of progress. No nostalgia is intended. In encounter with the artwork, the viewer’s intuitive recognition of loss — a palpable loss, beyond recovery — might lead further still, toward deeper insight into the circumstances and implications of a culturally diminished present. Neri’s surfaces are never as explicit. For him, surface is another vehicle of ambiguity, one that succeeds by balancing gural scale and exacting formal accuracy with visual textures that refuse the old sculptural illusion of skin, thus redirecting our approach to the form as a whole.

OPPOSITE LEFT/RIGHT 133. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1941 Uf zi, Florence 134. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1941 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

135. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Nudo femminile [Female Nude], 1932–34 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

77

LEFT/RIGHT 136–137. Rosa Negra No. 1 (Cast AP), 1982; Cast 1998 Private Collection

OPPOSITE 138. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Torso di donna [Female Torso], 1929 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

78

79