2 SECOND SELVES

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SECOND SELVES

NERI MET MARY JULIA KLIMENKO IN 1972, and she would be his primary model for decades to come. Klimenko was ideally suited to Neri’s working methods. She had an unusually vivid awareness of her body as a communicative vehicle, and at the same time showed little physical self-consciousness in the studio. No pose or gestural nuance went untested, and their work together yielded the expansive production of the gural form that has become a hallmark of Neri’s output, the lithe, delicate-looking females, androgynous, wai ike, feet planted resolutely on their plywood bases.

These gures refer explicitly to the physical traits and gestures of the model, and they reveal the tremendous care with which Neri attended to replicating her narrow, delicate shoulders and the curve of her abdomen, the owing movement of back and buttocks, the serpentine spine, the neck and ponytail, the athletic thighs and calves, her innate poise: such fastidiousness led to a particular kind of verity, one that allowed the sculptor to develop a lucid, compelling depictive reality apart from the deterministic appearances of conventional realism. What Neri does accept from sculptural tradition is the submission of the entire gure to formal integration, the insistence that each part be congruous with and contributive to the uni ed whole of the gural body — a harmony of gesture that prohibits the visual dispersal of the form into its constituent parts.

76. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Manuel Neri working with Mary Julia Klimenko, Benicia Studio, 1985

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LEFT/RIGHT 77. Steve Moore, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1979

78. Seated Female Figure I, 1979 Private Collection

This devotion to the structural unity of the gure has the effect of linking Neri to the sculpture of antiquity, the Renaissance, and, if surreptitiously, to Rodin and Bourdelle, a sense of the body as a proportionate, interconnected system of levers and fulcrums in which even the slightest shift or alteration produces unavoidable formal consequences throughout its entirety. While the historical connections may only be inferred, Neri appreciates their presence and the particular kind of support that comes from them: a nonspeci c historical context that places no pressure of its own upon his constructive process.

Still, because Neri’s gures tend to hide the kind of psychological information that normally invests the form with literary narrative — facial expression, or specialized physical gestures — his sculptures withdraw from the thematic

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intentionality of those predecessors, which in the past has variously appeared as idealization, commemoration, the orid tonality of Rodin and the symbolists, and so on. If Neri returns periodically to formal ideas drawn from the sculpture of antiquity, it is because those gures embody a paradox that he admires: though they may be quite anonymous as depictions, an expressive capacity endures, undiminished after millennia. How, he wants to know, does the gure express itself as a body rather than as a personality? Or: how is character embodied physically? Thus Neri’s study of the gure has been experiential and empirical, not traditionally anatomical, and he has often worked with the model and sculpture in immediate proximity, thereby insuring the precise accuracy of the gural form as he builds.

79–80. Seated Female Figure I, 1979 Private Collection

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81–83. Standing Figure No. 1, 1976; Re-worked 1979 Private Collection

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This kind of building is not simply technique, for the purpose of recreating the form of the model. It re ects, rather, the artist’s un inching skepticism regarding a priori knowledge of how gures reveal themselves, his conviction that sculpture contrived solely from a memory or an idea might be little more than the presentation of a predetermined concept, and therefore corrupted as a form. It further con rms Neri’s reliance on touch, as well, his fear that the eye alone might force his gures back into acculturated hierarchies of formal or narrative signi cance. To get a little closer to the nature of this quality in the artist, let us say that Neri sees with his hands. Or that what he knows with his hands is more trustworthy to him than what he only sees, and so provides him with a more dependable testimony regarding the truth of the subject.

Does this suggest a phenomenological motive for Neri’s gures? One thinks of an observation by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind.” Here, Merleau-Ponty refers to Cézanne, though the passage is toned by the author’s abiding interest in the Giacomettian gure, which, he believed, was closer in spirit to phenomenology than to existentialism or to the existentialists’ claims for it. But we cannot read these words without thinking about Neri: “The painter ‘takes his body with him,’ says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by leading his body into the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body — not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.”

Merleau-Ponty’s subject is the eye, and how a distinctly modern problematizing of visual perception affected the tasks of painting, typi ed by Cézanne’s realization, as art, that visibility is as much an extension of the body/self as it is a quality in things, that art and the world do not in fact meet within the eld of representation. Just as the point holds as an approach to Giacometti’s work, it can also be applied to Neri, whose work continually reveals his conviction that the whole body participates in our encounters with the physical world — in, that is, the endless and abundant accumulation of sensory information — and that an awareness of the operations of the active, sensate body will always be necessary to our understanding of reality.

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84–85. Posturing Series No. 2, 1978 Private Collection

OPPOSITE 86–87. Julia, 1976; Re-worked 2010 Yale University Art Gallery

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The overall integrity of Neri’s form suggests, therefore, that a comprehensive integration of our physicality — body and mind — is not simply our best means for knowing our surroundings. It is also the means by which we arrive at knowledge of others like ourselves. What exists solely in the realm of sight exists “outside” the body, in space, and thus “apart” from the body, forever marked by an absolute separateness, as the eye forages the visual eld before it, looking without physical contact across a spatial divide it can never hope to master. The eye may lead the body, but that is all.

Because the sculpted gure must express itself in a (visual) eld comprised of other objects, a eld in which it takes part, as do we, its viewers, the work always risks a return to the realm of sight alone — a situation that Neri strives to circumvent with his dynamic surfaces and the addition of color. Or: a vivid, dimensional instatement of the gure into the physical world, as the demonstration of its desire to be seen as something more than an “object,” is among the duties that texture and color are called upon to perform on behalf of the work.

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LEFT/RIGHT 88. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1992

89. Steve Moore, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1980

In L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti (1958), Jean Genet wrote of visiting Giacometti’s studio and there conversing with the standing gures by running his hands over their pitted surfaces, and we want to do the same with Neri’s sculpture, too, not as voyeurs, but as fellow travelers who yearn for the kind of experience that only the body can provide. The gural surfaces, scored and abraded, marked everywhere by the hand of the artist, sometimes urgently, sometimes gently, sometimes ruminatively, seize the haptic eye and, further, seek the actual hand of the viewer — as though Neri reaches for our hands with his own, through the gure, or with the gure as intermediary — that our hands might also see as he sees, that we might travel his path to knowledge of the form. In just this way, the gures argue for Neri’s belief that authentic contact is possible, and here he plunges decisively into a territory of his own, for he is now

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far from the Giacometti who described the unsettling nale of a studio session by saying that after many hours of close observation his model had become a stranger to him — even when the model was his wife — and that he no longer recognized her as someone he knew, loved, observed daily.

Still, Giacometti’s experience provides a useful background to Neri’s undertaking. For Giacometti, the sensation of acute visual de-familiarization, which occurred during the seemingly prosaic act of looking, provoked an anxiety that became another aspect of a phenomenon that he wanted to embed in his sculpture — the demonstrable instability of sight and the frightening jolt of physical separation it produced in him. To go another step, if the labor of the eye is unstable, then knowledge — even consciousness itself — must be perilous as well.

90. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1995

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91–94. Mary and Julia, 1979 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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Neri is sensitive to these concerns as aspects of sculptural presence and the questions it can raise for us. He feels a related, perhaps quite similar anxiety in the face of language and its ambition to contain — to represent — de nitive modes of knowledge. When rationalism calls upon language, words are susceptible to rationalism’s (self-) deceptions, its inevitable human shortcomings, limitations, and misunderstandings, and in this sense, the vagaries of language resemble, or are analogous to, the deceptions of the eye, similarly conditioned by familiarity and habit to see what it wants, or expects, to see. Neri, however, has no interest in posting further lessons on the subject of visual instability. The physically expressible is his concern — what is expressed by the gure, whether human or sculptural, authentically, beyond the reach of language — and so he commits himself — the point can hardly be made often enough — to an indivisibility of perception as the most reliable basis of experience and therefore of understanding. Here, indivisibility describes the fullest kind of physical encounter, one that engages the whole physical body in its contact with the world, represented in Neri’s work by our moment-to-moment apprehension of other human beings, endlessly variable, endlessly communicative, complex, and utterly like ourselves.

For Neri, all the pictorial conventions related to the biases of sight — perspective, scale, the illusionism of modeling, descriptive color — are inventions that have originated in art, that is, in the human mind and its desire to manage experience. As such, they are techniques, submitted to the organization of things seen, true to the human imagination and its irresistible ordering impulse, but unfaithful to the actuality of the world. Thus art may become yet another rationalizing system, like language itself, and we will nd ourselves on treacherous ground if we accept without question the explanations and claims to truth of either. We tell ourselves that language and visual art are simply revealing an order that already exists in and around us, but how can we be so sure? Neri asserts his questions through sculptural gestures that derive from his own body and are subsequently rediscovered in the body of the model. It was a stroke of fortune that he found a model through whom he could perform these constructive processes so consistently as a mirror of the (his) self.

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