5 THE SPIRITUAL TERRAIN OF MODERNITY

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THE SPIRITUAL TERRAIN OF MODERNITY

THE SCULPTURAL FIGURES OF THE PAST are cloaked in a distinctly human reality, the mark of their human origins. Neri studies them with care, whatever their epoch, and he has turned to them on occasion, taking up forms and poses that feel present to him, vivid, pertinent, useful. The untitled, headless/ armless gures of 1974 look at history in one way, as Neri examines with increasing discernment the phenomenon by which complete formal communicability resides in broken, incomplete forms: Neri uses only what is necessary, nothing more, and indeed, a full body might articulate itself with less concision. Their brokenness may for him suggest the spiritual terrain of modernity, its losses and absences, which he wants to express and overcome. Other gures investigate the functionality of prior forms. These would include three sculptures done in the 1980s titled, Bull Jumper I, II, and III, that were based on a small, Minoan ivory gure with moveable head, arms, and legs, The Bull-leaper, c.1600 B.C.; the Sancas partial gures of the early 1990s, and many of the serene, nely harmonized standing gures in marble from the same period and later, many heads and partial gures, often derived from sources in Classical antiquity.

139. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1979

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140–141. Colonata No. 1, 1982 Private Collection

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In each of these series, the sources remain relatively undisguised, and Neri seems to look not only at the sculptural form, but at his own relationship to the past, what it is, its features and contours, what it means for him. He has an enthusiasm for the gure, of course: it continually arouses his curiosity. Sometimes he wants to study a pose through the form itself, at human scale, with his own model and his own constructive gestures: he is a gurative sculptor contemplating his tradition with his own hands. Elsewhere, he considers what he has gained from this past, literally so, what he can use, what must be discarded, what any historical form says about its own time and about the circumstances of the present in which he now puts it to use. And always there is the artist’s love of the motif as a personal, intrinsic form.

142. Pisano Marble Torso, 1985 Private Collection

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ABOVE, BELOW 143–144. Bull Jumper III, 1987 Yale University Art Gallery 145. Bull Jumper II, 1987 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa

OPPOSITE, LEFT 146. Sancas I, 1991

OPPOSITE, RIGHT 147–148. Sancas Plaster Maquette, 1983 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

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149–150. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Popolo (La couple)[People (Couple)], 1929 Museo del Novecento, Collection Marino Marini, Milan

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Certainly Neri was aware of how Marini had made use of historical sculptural idioms at a time when much contemporary art wished only to leave history behind. Although Marini was acutely conscious of the sculptural past, that past was his own, and speci cally Tuscan. His native landscape had been inhabited more than two millennia earlier by the Etruscan civilization, and he grew up there at a time when comprehensive excavations of some of the great cities of Etruria were newly underway. Marini came to feel an unusually intimate bond to his own place and its remarkable history, a sense of ineffable connection at once genetic, cultural, and imaginative: he possessed that past, and was, in turn, possessed by it — its glorious, ruined artifacts, the old walls and ironwork and votive niches in the old hill towns, the houses and piazzas piled one against the other along winding laneways, the enduring stone and tile buildings, many of them still in use, almost monuments themselves, their surfaces like geological textures, richly detailed — a tangible environment in which past and present seemed to merge. For the artist, it was an experience of site and situation inseparable from consciousness itself, and yet, as a modern, Marini knew that he had been cast adrift from the kinds of cultural certainties that once shaped and nourished the old sculptural forms. Still he loved them, with a depth of feeling undisguised in his work — loved them as one who knows them thoroughly, has always known them, cannot forget them and does not want to do so. Thus he engages the shadow life of a history that has left its lovely bones upon the land.

In this respect, Marini is more of a modern than a modernist. He feels no need to submit his work to any strictly programmatic format, and as he takes up the modes of the past, those gural motifs that once eased the passage of societal values and ideals from one generation to the next, his visual language remains personal, self-possessed, and modern because he is himself modern, an artist of his own time. If the Pomonas evoke something of the idealism and integrity that Marini has recognized in archaic sculpture, at the same time the gures are, in a modern context, determinedly anti-idealist in form as well as theme. And yet it is not quite enough to say simply that they constitute the artist’s critique of a corrupted present: for him, those forms are not exhausted.

Marini would achieve a unity of the aesthetic and the ethical as he contemplated the cultural loss of con dence in the forms of art — the nature of that loss as well as its consequences — the ethical as inextricable from his motif and imparted aesthetically to the viewer. To accomplish this, he con ned himself to a narrow range of serial forms, forms attuned to a cultural history of immeasurably greater length and breadth than Marini’s own moment, a sense of scope that allowed him to absorb and utilize the archaic forms in a thorough, authentic way. Elements of critique will be inevitable in such work, and they can hardly help becoming thematic for us. Marini, however, had found a way to fuse a visual present and a visual past in the gure itself, not just as idea but as a perceivable sculptural form, and for Neri, that was an invaluable precedent.

LEFT/RIGHT 151. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Giovinetta [Young Girl], 1938 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia 152. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Nudo femminile [Female Nude], 1932 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia 153. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Giovinetta [Young Girl], 1938 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

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LEFT/RIGHT 154. Figurine of a Concubine, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, XIIth Dynasty (1991–1786 BCE) Musée du Louvre, Paris 155. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme au chariot [Woman with Chariot], 1943–45 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

BELOW 156. Fertility Figure, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, XIth–XIIth Dynasty Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

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Giacometti knew the gural past as well, and while his formal debts to Egyptian, Cycladic, and Romanesque sculpture are by now well documented, the studio research to which he submitted these antecedents would be perceptual rather than historical. How is the gure, ancient or modern, seen by the viewing eye? How do the senses gather information from the physical world, that endlessly contingent experience of the relationships between space, distance, and scale, and then resolve our encounters with it? Is the eye a reliable source? Giacometti represents this, our situation in the world, as sculpture, building gures that ask us to set aside acculturated assumptions about the procedures of sight and how we know and understand the appearance of objects in space. Giacometti longs to return viewers to the marvelous strangeness of bodily experience as he knows it for himself, the truly remarkable experience of inhabiting a human body in the realm of objects.

Giacometti had ruminated at length about the ancients. What did those vanished civilizations seek in the rigorous stylization of their sculpture? What were the intimate, interior connections of such forms to the peoples who created them, their functions, their meanings? This became the process by which Giacometti discovered how modern perception might be instructed by similar kinds of forms, human, yes, but unmistakably sculptural, and capable of speaking to the moment by moment conditions of existence in a real world of spaces and objects.

To maintain the comparison with Marini’s work just a little further, Marini was not concerned with the cognitive hazards entailed in occupying a eshly body. He believed that the Etruscans and Archaic Greeks had been striving for an embodied, ideated form that would invoke a higher mode of realism — a realism of aspirations, desires, dreams — and so he looked upon their forms as inventions that in turn gave him permission to invent in his own way. Unlike Giacometti, or Neri, for that matter, Marini did not typically work from the model. He composed differently. His gures, whether the Pomonas or the Dancers, are unabashedly thematic, addressing us in a manner that can be as literary as it is visual.

Neither Marini nor Giacometti expects us to confuse their gures with “real” beings, of course, nor should we see them as surrogates of the human. Both artists want their work to act upon us as art, setting us on our own paths of inquiry, whatever they may be.

157. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio

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158–159. M.J. Series V, 1989 Private Collection

Neri has expended little effort on the problem of “how” we see. He proceeds from the belief that visual encounter is neither elusive nor illusionary in essence, nor inherently deceptive. Put another way, Neri does not question physical reality as such, its existence or its appearance, and so — crucially — he reverses Giacometti’s question. Rather than interrogate how we see, Neri strives to understand how a gure expresses itself across, or within, a site composed of continuously variable spaces, distances, scales, and perspectives.

Or: Giacometti involved himself in the physical processes of cognition — and hence, how we arrive at knowledge through the senses, that is, the extent

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to which the sculptor’s formal “expression” can be said to reside in us, as the agents of perception — while Neri investigates the ways in which form makes itself known to other (human) objects in the spatial eld around it, how it communicates information and/or knowledge about itself. Thus Giacometti embraces as inherently problematic the precariousness and variability of the senses lodged in esh as they pass through their surroundings — not just the optical, but our entire experience of ourselves, our sense organs, and our scale, as the inhabitants of bodies in space moving in relation to other bodies. Neri, on the other hand, tests the projection of visual data rather than its reception, how a gure makes itself apprehensible in a spatial world.

160. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) La forêt [The Forest], 1950 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

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LEFT/RIGHT 161. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Alberto Giacometti working with plaster, c. 1960 162. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio

OPPOSITE, ABOVE/BELOW 163. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 2003

164. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2004

Giacometti’s constructive process was of great value to Neri, while Marini offered the example of an unusually cordial relationship with the past. The utilization of historical forms, Marini suggested — their assimilation and internalization by the contemporary artist — should never be con ned by the artist’s own, perhaps rather specialized interests, and he himself demonstrated some of the bene ts entailed in opening the present to a dynamic, imaginative conversation with the past. Neri seems to share something, too, of Marini’s tender regard for the old traditions now closed off to him by the passage of time — he is cut off, in other words, from the kinds of widely accepted values and meanings that once enabled the forms of sculpture to converse with viewers in a eld of mutual understanding — but Neri realizes, too, that he can do nothing to reverse the terms of historical change in the wildly fragmented, media-saturated culture of late twentieth-century America, a condition he considers indirectly, or metaphorically, through the material fragility of plaster. Change will come.

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In a sculptural sense, the female nude has provided Neri with a versatile basis for his organizing instincts. At the same time, to return to an earlier point, it is the point of departure in a drive to circumvent his abiding mistrust of (verbal) language, giving him both a form and a constructive means with which to establish his own alternative to the vagaries of the linguistic. It is language, after all, whose own repetitions are put to the task of con rming and conditioning our sense of experience as stable, containable, safe, accessible to the tools of cognition. Neri wants desperately to avoid the impositions of language and its dubious claims to mastery of experience, and he strives to elude its urge to organize and tame the unruliness and joy and pain of existence. If Neri cannot quite trust the word, he does trust the act, and here the past is important as a source of continuity in an inherent communicability of form: statements made through the gure a millennium, even millennia, ago, are perfectly comprehensible to the present viewer, a phenomenon that guides Neri’s study of the past. Is the human past really this close, as near to our own experience as the sculpted form before us? While Neri is uninterested in simply imitating or replicating the formal means of the past, he knows that he ignores them at some peril. They are too rich.

In a straightforward way, the gure offers him the security of its gestures, the body that cannot hide its intentions, which is the source of his faith in the processes of sculptural building as a route of escape from the confusions instigated by language and by the potential for misinterpretation that lurks within the enclosures of verbal exchange. He wants his form to speak clearly, directly, apart from language and its proclamations of authority, and to be understood in just this way. His encounters with the gural past assure him that such “speaking” is potential in the present, that the development of an authentic gural language remains available to him.

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