6 STRANGENESS THAT COEXISTS WITH THE FAMILIAR

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STRANGENESS THAT COEXISTS WITH THE FAMILIAR

AS NERI WAS BEGINNING HIS CAREER in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he could hardly have ignored the elements of uncertainty and paradox simmering around him. There was a widespread feeling during those years that secure social structures, combined with technological progress and material comfort, would bring us happiness at last — a loosely assembled, eminently saleable social theory that plenitude is the rst step on the road to contentment. But was it really true?

Anyone who cared to look closely could see that it was not, that burgeoning American af uence was a solution stitched with dissatisfaction. Such was the substance of the Beat/hipster critique, as well, though it would be articulated more as attitude and lifestyle than as a manifest ideology. Further, there was the lingering legacy of war, still active in global events: ongoing revelations of the Nazi genocide; a continuation of nuclear testing by the American government; the triumph of the Western technocracy and the accelerated industrialization of capitalist society; Soviet totalitarianism; and the re-entrenchment of a self-absorbed, materialistic middle class, and with it, the aggressive spread of secular mass culture, technology’s most devout acolyte. Could the sculpted gure truly engage this world, this setting, these issues, and the anxieties that followed from them?

165. Makiko Nakamura, Photographer Carrara Studio, 1983

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LEFT/RIGHT 166. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Detail in Alberto Giacometti’s studio: wall with sculptures, c. 1954 167. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Detail in Alberto Giacometti’s studio: sideboard with sculptures, c. 1954

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In Europe twenty years earlier, Giacometti was witness to an unstable economy, widespread political unrest, the rise of fascism, and all the cultural tensions of modernity, and in the midst of it, he struggled to reintroduce a naturalistic gure, as art, based on his conviction that it could be appropriate in, and in response to, this setting. Surrealism had been the ground of his rst major sculptural campaign, but by 1935 he was heading towards an irreconcilable con ict with progressive artists and critics disdainful of overt naturalistic content. Yet he remained resolute, and before the end of the decade, Giacometti’s decision to build from the model would prompt the public ire of André Breton and the surrealist inner circle in Paris — it was of this work that Breton famously pronounced that everyone knows what a head looks like, as if to say that Giacometti had not only betrayed the surrealist revolution, he

had betrayed himself as an artist, that his return to the gure was an act of cowardice.

At that point, however, Giacometti grasped something that Breton perhaps did not, that visuality in a world of intricate spaces and objects is itself miraculous and enigmatic, and the artist who attends to it with persistence need not forage through the surrealist unconscious for imagery. As continuous motif, the human gure could draw attention to the strangeness that coexists with the familiar, a subject that might keep a sculptor busy more or less inde nitely. The surrealist work of art may be a terrible and wonderful thing, but it is the gure that brings the artist deep into the most fundamental conditions of existence. Such was the basis of his sculptural response to the world as he found it at mid-century.

168. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Alberto Giacometti modelling, c. 1965

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Neri never underwent an ordeal comparable to Giacometti’s disaf liation from the Surrealist program. In a way, the shape of his career is closer to that of Marini, a gurative artist from the start, who, after spending the war years in Switzerland, would resituate himself on his home ground as a matter of choice and temperament. Neri, too, remained where he was, in the Bay Area, working amid cultural conditions that bore little resemblance to those of postwar Italy or France. Although he saw no reason to abide the more sinister preoccupations of a social system so keen to promote its gospel of material satisfaction and complacency, his decision to pursue a path of sculptural naturalism almost guaranteed that he would have to go forward without critical or commercial support, an outsider forced to struggle against the central currents of the art world. Artists like Giacometti and Marini were now models of courage and persistence.

The situation posed an obvious but necessary question. In the self-conscious, self-certain artistic environment of the period, did the gure, with its intricate connections to the long trudge ofWestern history, have more to contribute to the inner life of contemporary culture? Neri shared with his predecessors an unswerving commitment to the sculpted gure, and in the end, he felt himself at liberty to go his own way, making a virtue of his detachment from the pressures that shadowed the New York scene. Still, if he wished to pursue the gure as his sculptural form in a serious way, Neri saw that he would need to demonstrate, through the work itself, that the business of being human was no simple, ordinary matter.

As he began his career in the mid-1950s, the heavily worked plaster gures were his initial means of negotiating this eld, de ant, rebellious gures that asserted themselves on a cultural landscape where, strictly speaking, no one knew quite what to make of them and where they were not entirely welcomed as a result. Coarse in form and posture, almost crude, made of mostly scavenged materials, they were anything but precious or artful, traits that did indeed accord with the Beat aesthetic: Beat art-making, like art brut in Paris, was carrying on a romance with low materials, the discarded and abandoned, often materials without prior art associations, but for Beat artists, these were vehicles of cultural critique, while practitioners of art brut tended to view such materials as resistant

to artistic will, which invested them with a rather more philosophical ambiance, at once uniting the artist with, and differentiating him from, the world of objects.

Although plaster had accommodated Giacometti’s constructive strategies, as a sculptor steeped in European traditions of presentation, he expected to recreate the gures in bronze editions. Plaster was Neri’s chosen medium, and in this sense, his plaster gures are nished works. Plaster had an extensive, honorable history in art, of course, but for Neri at that time, its accessibility and low cost were also great bene ts. It was another modest material, available at any hardware store for next to nothing. At that point, his material options were dictated by economic necessity, but the choice proved fortuitous. As we have seen already, plaster had assets beyond price alone, and the vivid physicality of Neri’s building processes eventually earned him a reputation — echoing the discourse around painting in New York — as an “action” sculptor. When he added color to the distressed and textured surfaces, the gures took on an aura of improvisation that seemed to infer a kinship with the programmatic demands of both abstract expressionist painting and Beat assemblage.

If, for Neri, the idiomatic surface is inseparable from his constructive processes, those processes never quite enclose the gure thematically. While his uni cation of form and surface seems to want to attract meanings of its own, meaning will fail to nd a sure footing there. As a result, the proliferation of readings, stimulated by different aspects of the total sculptural form, keep the work from sitting for long in one interpretive environment or another, as Neri intends. Thus, too, the myriad elements of touch, including color, would become as crucial as the gure itself to the development of Neri’s sculptural vocabulary, and from the vantage of the present, we can see the care with which he avoided submitting his form to (localized) thematic statement.

Neri’s combination of naturalistic form and non-naturalistic surface — the surfaces whose own “naturalism,” if naturalism it is, derives from their documentary revelation of the artist’s very human hand — arouses our curiosity, and because the gures share our scale as well as our form, they seem to beckon from somewhere within their stillness and silence. Like Giacometti’s gures, they invite commentary almost as a mode of communion, and they are similarly

OPPOSITE 169. Chula [Carla I], 1958–60 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

170. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1988

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distinctive for the ease with which they offer themselves to viewers — the ease with which they accept interpretation from any number of interests, personal concerns, and agendas, without endorsing any of them as nal or de nitive. Such is their ambiguity, their mystery and allure. Indeed, these various readings, taken together, comprise another history of sorts, one that veri es the unusual openness of Neri’s formal language.

But of course meaning is itself highly voluble, and when Neri took up the gure as his motif — a form that could not reasonably expect to escape its vast array of historical and cultural referents — he had to accept that all such meanings, whether intended or not, would be impressed upon his work from the outside. As he was pleased to discover, however, their accumulation only added to the density of the work, often in interesting, unpredictable ways.

OPPOSITE 171–172. Standing Female Figure No. 4, 1978 Private Collection

173–175. Posturing Series No. 5, 1978 Private Collection

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