AN ALTERNATE HISTORY

12 THE EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE OF MODERNISM / AN ALTERNATE HISTORY

CONTEMPORARY SCULPTUREHAS GONE its own way and with its extravagant formal and critical inventions, its innumerable passages and transformations, it can con dently claim parity with painting in the discourses of contemporary art. Figural naturalism has been among the bene ciaries of this development, but any account of the re-legitimization of the gure must also acknowledge Neri, and behind him, the surge of humanist gural sculpture in Europe after World War II. Neri’s career by now bears some resemblance to that of both Marini and Giacometti: his output has been so inimical that he has garnered no disciples, founded no group or school. By the same token, the evolutionary narrative of modernism, still favored by many art historians, does not provide a suitable perspective from which to view his work, or theirs. Even the af liations that have attached themselves to Neri most strenuously, whether the San Francisco art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, or postwar guration in Europe, may be little more than suggestive and contextual in the end. The very ambiguity of Neri’s relationship to other, now-institutionalized movements in contemporary sculpture requires that we come to his work more or less as it stands.

404. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 1992

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Or perhaps we should approach Neri’s career as a contemporary instance of art’s alternate history, one that attends to the cyclical reoccurrence of particular forms in different places and over great spans of time. If his gures are responsive to the conversations around modernity and indeed modernism in art, they also declare, once again, the endurance of the human form as a sculptural subject. It is a form whose necessity in art has never disappeared. From this perspective, Neri is a contemporary sculptor whose work af rms the power and durability of the gure after eons of visual making, not simply as a motif, but as (a) presence. Such a history would assist in accounting for Marini and Giacometti as well.

By the 1980s, in the climate of postmodernism, critical emphasis began to turn from the “body” as “ gure” to the “body” as “system” or “organism,” a turn in the direction of those dilemmas originating in the systemic operations of the actual, individual body and the paradoxes that can arise in the corporeal being as a consciousness-bearing organism. This represented a shift in the cultural understanding of the gure in art and our expectations for it, one that returns us to an issue as relevant to Neri as it was to Giacometti or Marini as a way of thinking about their work in its speci c historical setting: modernity’s identi cation of gural sculpture with generally conservative, retrospective values — a narrative at least partly contrived, but one that affected cultural and critical views of the sculpted gure through much of the twentieth century.

Postmodernism brought relief from this straitjacket of historical legacy, and the subsequent developments of the gure/body within the critical arena of postmodernism show Neri to be something of a transitional artist. Although he is tied to some of the key issues of late modernism, his period of emergence, at the same time he often looks in the direction of developments to come, having spent his career treating the gure as an expressible body that speaks for its altogether human maker — this tentative, uncertain, always limited creature of esh and blood.

If Neri appears to stand apart from other art movements that were pushing towards the threshold of artistic postmodernism during the 1970s and 1980s, one reason may be his acute awareness of the breadth and vitality of the gure as an extraordinary network of histories stretching back through time. As a

405–407. Carriona Figure No. 2, 1981 Harold Washington Library, Chicago

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408–410. M.J. Series II (Cast 2/4), 1989; Cast 1990; Patina 2016

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gurative artist, Neri knows that he cannot escape them entirely, but as a matter of far greater importance for him, he does not want to. History is not a resource for quotation, reference, or visual bibliography. History bears the heat of life. The makers of the past, his real and actual predecessors, were exactly like him, as he well knows, taking into their hands each day the same kinds of tools as they pursued their own interrogations of some of the most challenging problems of human existence.

Yet Neri must have had moments of doubt. During the mid-twentieth-century decades that are at once background and prelude to his work, the sculpted female nude survived only at the fringes of progressive art, having been excluded from its major cultural campaigns by the notion, a legacy of eighteenth-century critical theory, that painting is privileged by its emphases on visuality, color, and poetic or literary ideation — that painting offers a more appropriate visual forum in which to engage philosophical and social values separate from art as a production of images. Under those terms, sculpture would remain bound to its relationship with the physical body, to high craft, and to the antique.

Figurative sculpture was caught in this tangle of received doctrine, as we have seen, a view that lingered into the postwar decade as an issue that still required de nitive address. Enlightenment theorists and their inheritors linked sculpture to touch, objective autonomy, and durability, and painting to sight, imagination, the effervescence of moment-to-moment experience. In effect, this narrative positioned sculpture and painting as antagonists in a seemingly irresoluble struggle between ancient and modern, between the public and private spaces and functions of art, and between the physicality of the three-dimensional gure and the poetic interiority of painting.

Such ideas were part and parcel of the intellectual life of the Enlightenment epoch, and as they continued to develop, they elevated the viewer to the role of perceiving subject who would henceforth determine the meanings of the artwork, rather than being determined by them. The shift was congenial to an increasingly secularized, humanistic cultural environment and, needless to say, it had immeasurable consequences for art. In the viewer-centered relationship, a painting stimulated the imagination and was then “completed” by observers who kept their distance, an operation that attered the autonomous viewing

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411–412 . Cipolina No. 1, 1983 Private Collection consciousness. Painting, of course, was not only very good at accomplishing this, the canvas at any scale knew its place — the wall — where it did not compete with the space of the viewer, who could now take (imaginative) control of the image through the eyes. Sculpture’s solidity and its identity as an implacable spatial object, especially at human scale, presented a literal obstruction to the Enlightenment’s visual fetishes. The standing female nude, whether carved, modeled, or cast, bearing the implications of its allegiance to unrecoverable traditions, seemed escapist by comparison, a wistful distraction from the discomforting realities of the modern (urban, industrial) world.

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Sculptors working in Europe in the mid-twentieth century were fully aware of these historical circumstances as a signi cant and nally unavoidable background to their work. But by the time Giacometti committed himself to his postwar style, he also knew that neither cubism nor surrealism could provide him with the resources he needed to reinvigorate the gure. However expansive or in uential the movements themselves, the sculptural formations that emerged from them had grown directly out of advances charted by painters, and such work tended to be unpersuasive as sculpture. The three-dimensional gure had to be reinvigorated from within, by means not yet established.

LEFT/RIGHT 413. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer View of Alberto Giacometti’s working desk, detail, c. 1952 414. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer View of Alberto Giacometti’s studio with sculptures, Paris, c. 1955

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415–416. Carrara Figure No. 3, 1979–80 Honolulu Museum of Art

OPPOSITE 417. Carriona Figure No. 3, 1981 Private Collection

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Thus Giacometti formulated an ef cacious sculptural claim to the (painting’s) modern realm of sight, one that sought no rivalry with painting, rst by remaking the gure in a form compatible with viewer-based physical correspondence, and then, with that gure, by transforming its traditional duties in the realm of cultural objects into a phenomenological situation. Marini, with his frank embrace of native forms, further proposed that the legacies of a historical and/or sculptural past could not be argued away or objecti ed, not, at least, by theory or critical exposition. Rather than battle critical restraints on their own ground, Marini and Giacometti went about altering guration in ways that answered the crisis of the present without denying or betraying the sculptural past.

Neri, on the other hand, negotiates a modernism terrain that, by the late 1950s, was itself codi ed as doctrine. His solution — only loosely following his predecessors — would include a syncretizing (rather than an appropriation) of gural history. Although he looks at the carvings of the past for the ways in which they communicate complex information about the human form, they are not tokens of a lost world: the sculptural past, whether recent or ancient, provides him with real information, still vital and available to use. Thus he gazes across the entire eld of gural sculpture with the purpose of strengthening his own language. For him, the various gurative traditions, taken together, establish an atmosphere, a kind of habitation, one that has continued to nourish his faith in the human form as a speaking object.

When Neri turned to non-naturalistic, ostensibly abstract sculptural construction during the late 1960s, even those twisting, torso-like blocks have an evident gural bias. He soon left them behind, in any case, and went about ridding himself of modernism’s formal distillations. He had studied early twentieth-century predecessors like Jacques Lipchitz and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and found that they offered little assistance. Their lessons had limited value for a sculptor uninterested in modes of building whose relation to the human form focuses on some purely artistic business or on a self-conscious deviance from “traditional” guration. When the sculpted gure re ected advances in painting, imposed on it as a formal ideology, it surrendered its vivid connections to lived experience.

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418–419. Aurelia No. 3, 1995 Private Collection

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Human beings are drawn to forms and objects that resemble themselves — that is axiomatic — and the immediacy of a felt, bodily empathy can be crucial to an encounter with the work of art. Attempts to reduce gural sculpture to networks of signs or art-historical codes must be secondary, partial, or contingent, insofar as they discount its most penetrating level of reception, that of physical af nity. For Neri, who begins from this assumption, the sculpted gure is not life, but certainly it is more than an image of life. With this in mind, we can see that all of the artists under discussion here have asked similar kinds of questions of the motif, and about its relationship to the art-historical past. What are the deepest, most unequivocal sources of empathy? What, exactly, is the nature of its power over the viewer? Where is this power actually located in the work of art? How does it reveal itself physically? What sustains it from past to present? What endures, and on what terms?

And how, nally, can such information be transmitted to the contemporary gure as the sculptor strives for the expression of human continuity that only the gure can provide?

Neri never ritualized the procedures of building as an avenue for interrogating those kinds of concerns, not as Giacometti did, certainly. For Neri the building process can be more accurately characterized as a path of continuing re-evaluation of the formal and its communicable possibilities. If his form remains more or less consistent, based on the actual body of the model before him, the details of his making process remain non-repetitive from work to work, as his mode of discourse with the motif. The surface never undermines our sense of the gestural accuracy of the overall form. It records, rather, the sculptor’s passage across the gural body, a detailed, inquisitive conversation conducted throughout the course of its construction.

420–421. Aurelia No. 2, 1992; Re-worked 1998 Private Collection

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422–423. Re-making Mary Julia No. 8, 1976 Private Collection

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True, Neri is interested in particular sculptural effects, effects that, he knows, would not be enhanced by formal ritualization. His gure stands with us, cloaked in the irrevocable humanness of our own size. For Neri, human scale, as an irrefutable assertion of the correspondent nature of the (his) gure, insists upon the (shared) condition of inhabiting a fragile, or mortal, body, the physical body that exists in a (spatial) world of things in which it, like us, must make its way. Thus the kneeling gures, the Penance and Annunciation works of 1982–83, for example, need no gallery riser to assert themselves. Every twist of musculature feels visceral, alive. On the oor, at our feet, the pose, at once submissive and resistant, achieves a condition of shocking vulnerability, an effect of emotional and spiritual tension that is especially pronounced in the bent arms and clenched hands of Annunciation No. 2.

At the same time, such gures also advance Neri’s interest in a phenomenon that echoes another idea articulated in modern terms by Merleau-Ponty, that perception begins as, or takes place as, the experience of a gure in a ground. Perception goes about organizing itself from that point, although the inherent subjectivity of any single view means that our experience of the form will be always variable, contingent, and above all individual. When the gure shares our scale and our gestures, the absence of a conventional base reduces our sense of its identity as an “artwork.” It seems to join our own spatial arena — our world — much like any other human presence. Any further interaction of Neri’s visual and referential elements only expands the liveliness of its presence.

Great historical transitions always entail some loss or abandonment of prior cultural traditions, and in our own time, general awareness of such losses has been debilitated, or trivialized, by a postmodern sensibility in which historical motifs are more likely to survive in a realm of style, quotation, add-on, or pastiche — and so contemporary Western life drifts a little further from its sturdiest, most nourishing taproots. Such is the triumph of a consumerist culture indifferent to all but the most ephemeral of desires, values, and memories. We may know some of the older visual histories that guided sculptors less than a century past, or know of them, and yet lack a clear sense of their relevance in their own time, or their potential relevance for us. Still, even

424. Annunciation No. 2 [Penance No 3], 1982; Re-worked 1984 Private Collection

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LEFT/RIGHT 425. Escalieta, 1989 Private Collection

426. Odalisque I, 1989

OPPOSITE 427. Escalieta, 1989 Private Collection

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as contemporary life continues to erase our ability to grasp the poignancy with which twentieth-century sculptors yearned for the lost security of an authentic connection with the past and its availability to art, we can certainly recognize the lingering, underlying uneasiness in their work, the statement of an existential loss from which few escape.

Neri does know the history of his form, and he is sympathetic to the issues that surround its loss without quite submitting his work to them. As a builder, he is also involved in the question of how things take form. That these “things” are sculptural and gural leads him back in the direction of how human expression comes into being, how communication formulates itself, con gured in or by the body, whether art-historically or in the present: this begins to explain why he has never made a project of working with strict canonical forms that may only “speak” from somewhere beyond the immediacy of the sculpted gure itself — indeed, Neri has used his surfaces to loosen the referential correspondences that might otherwise draw attention to themselves in a particular pose or gesture, thus reestablishing any such gure as the means by which he formulates and shares a (his) visual language. His gures evoke rather

than mimic humanness. In doing so, they also enact Neri’s own reconciliation of their dualistic nature as invention and representation, recreating them as a synthetic, continuously evolving embodiment of a struggle to communicate clearly and accurately. In this sense, his gure is a model of the expressible, of order created out of the material disorder of raw plaster.

Because Neri is involved in sculptural formation, in the emergence of the material gure before him in the studio, his sources, whatever they might be, must be in his hands, with real depth of re ex, or they will enter his work as interruption rather than presence. They are fully assimilated into the sculptor’s vocabulary by the time this seepage occurs, and can be spoken without self-consciousness. Thus Neri takes up the challenges entailed in guiding the naturalistic gure over an uncertain territory between the history of the form as an inescapable background to the work, on the one hand, a history whose meaning in the present is by now inexact, and on the other, the array of contemporary demands upon it, particularly that of abstraction, whose position in art culture rebuts the relevance of formally referential sculptural building. Neri’s borrowings, when they occur, have an effect on us whether we are able to locate them art-historically or not. He has made them anew.

As one example, Neri’s periodic references to the formations of Classicism imply a desire for a quasi-archetypal modality that will draw upon our deep cultural memories. As he has learned from his experience as a builder, however, the lingering dif culty of Classicism is embodiment, the (cultural) assumption that whatever constitutes our sense or understanding of the human, at any given moment in history, can in fact be expressed in sculptural form. Perhaps it cannot, or it no longer can, not as it once could. Neri never attempts to evade this problem. Giacometti, too, regarded sculptural embodiment with skepticism, and he turned to the forms of an even more remote past, forms that had become suf ciently generalized to provide ways of demonstrating the power of the gure without insisting that we know or acknowledge the speci c historical af liations of his formal references. Giacometti rejects correspondent scale on related grounds. Isolated, smaller than life, profoundly silent, his gures might be vibrations in space. The artist means for us to feel their human origins, but once again, the gures are not “like” us.

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LEFT/RIGHT 428. Escalieta No. 2, 1988 Private Collection

429. Odalisque IV, 1994 Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 430. Seated Marble Figure [Mujer Pegada No. 5], 1985 Private Collection

431. Escalieta No. 2, 1988 Private Collection

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Here, with this issue in mind, Neri invests tremendous faith in activity, in the ongoing activity of building in the studio, in a struggle to clarify the gure as (his) voice. He makes no effort to invoke familiar, perhaps threadbare notions of (Classical) timelessness, which in any case might be misconstrued as an artistic conceit. Although his gures are inseparable from time — it is the air they breathe — they have a quality that might instead be called “timeness,” and their immersion in it is also their freedom.

Even when the forms and gestures of his gures recall a sculptural past, color and surface texture, once again, personalize those formal details and generate further personal ambiguities around their ancestries. Thus Neri separates them from easy interpretive af liations as well. For this reason, his addition of non-descriptive color is never an effort to make the sculpture act “like” painting, in imitation of painting, or even in competition with painting: rather, that

sculpture, as Neri understands it, lives in the same realm and enters the same elds of sight and visual imagination claimed by modern painting. Color, after all, does not “belong” to painting in some innate or inviolable way. Or: sculpture does not belong solely to the realm of touch any more than painting belongs to sight alone.

If the gures dwell in the eld of the expressible, what, then, do they express? Neri’s many commentators have considered this question at length, and their answers mark him as an artist of the twentieth century: fragility, contingency, temporality, a capacity for endurance and survival, and the physical wear and tear that is the toll of survival in the contemporary world — traits that Neri’s gures do indeed seem to share with Giacometti’s standing women, standing as if squeezed nearly to the point of disappearance, their shoulders taut, arms close at their sides, legs rigid, eyes xed on vistas that only they can see.

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432–433. Bardilia No. 3, 1983 Private Collection

OPPOSITE 434. Escalieta No. 4, 1987 Private Collection

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But Neri goes further still. He has devoted a lifetime to the innumerable dif culties of communication — the human need to be known to and to know another, and to discover how and even if a comprehensive exchange of experience and knowledge is nally achievable — and so the spread of work constitutes his response to the inquiries bequeathed to gural sculpture by the Enlightenment. Over and over again, he labors to build the forms that capture the simultaneously heroic and anti-heroic condition of the gure/artist striving to make itself/himself known in a world where space and time will always intervene to one extent or another in our reception of the sculptural object. Can we reveal ourselves through our traditions of expression? Can we? The gure merges with the artist’s gestures on it, urgently pressing towards revelation. Does he achieve it? Those are among the most urgent questions we can bring to the work, Neri’s, and that of his predecessors.

WORKS CITED IN THE TEXT:

Butter eld, Jan, “Ancient Auras — Expressionist Angst: Sculpture by Manuel Neri,” in Images & Issues 1:4 (Spring, 1981), 38–43. Genet, Jean, “The Studio of Alberto Giacometti,” in Edmund White (ed.), The Selected Writings of Jean Genet (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1993.) Richard Howard, trans. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind,” in John O’Neill (ed.), Phenomenology, Language and Society: Selected Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974.) Carleton Dallery, trans. Neri, Manuel, interview with the author, Benicia, CA, November 6, 2000. Raverty, Dennis, “Critical Perspectives on New Images of Man,” in Art Journal 53:4 (Winter, 1994), 62–64. Selz, Peter. New Images of Man. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959. Exhibition catalog.) Sylvester, David. Looking at Giacometti. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996.)

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