Night Fishing

NIGHT ‘There is no statue in our square. When I look at statues I find later that I have usually not paid close attention but I have paid close attention to the statue that is not in our square. I’ve come to think of it as a fountain really. There’s a large stone basin and a little thin bronze girl with her skirt tucked up, paddling in the water. She’s not in the centre of the basin but near the rim. In the centre there’s a little jet of water that shoots up taller than the girl. Sometimes the wind blows drops of water spattering on the girl. When it rains, the water in the basin is spangled with splashes that leap up to meet the rain. The bronze girl gleams in the rain. When the sun shines her shadow moves over the water, over the stone rim, over the paving round the fountain. The bronze girl is always at the centre of the circle of her revolving shadow that marks the time.

In Sloane Square there really is a fountain. With two basins and a proper fountain lady in the upper basin pouring water from a shell, a kneeling bronze physical-education sort of lady, naked but unapproachable. I think of her name as being Daphne. Sometimes an empty Coca-Cola tin, bright and shining, circles her basin like part of a water clock. But that bronze lady and her fountain are cold and heavy compared to the statue and the fountain that are not in our square.’

Russell Hoban, The Turtle Diaries, 1975

FISH I NG

The Lookout Never Looks Back 7 Chris Fite-Wassilak How Sculpture Speaks to Us Today 11 Mark Kremer Medardo Rosso – through the water’s thickness 22 Damian Taylor Serial Originality 31 Jan Teeuwisse Night Fishing 37 Sydney Picasso

Plates 45 Georg Baselitz Tony Cragg Richard Deacon Cristina Iglesias Wolfgang Laib Mark Manders Nam June Paik Markus Raetz

Biographies 129 List of works 134 List of illustrations 139

7

The Lookout Never Looks Back Musings on the Archaeology of Time Chris Fite-Wassilak

‘Class Trip,’ the words repeated over and over, are layered with excitement. We are herded onto the bus from school, riding slowly down the singular, winding roads into downtown. Once the teacher eventually announces that we’re there, we look out the window: a curved and broad, pristinely white building, a knoll of grass rolling down towards where we are pulling up and unloading. It’s a grey, overcast day. A large black triangle rises up from the lawn with a bar of silver steel balanced on top. Dangling from either end are broad paddles of red, yellow and white, every once in a while swaying begrudgingly in the wind. This is our first ever visit to an art museum: inside, there are more trenchant, colourful shapes, each abiding stubbornly on their own patch of wall. This was to become a lasting impression: massive, faceless wonders, set immobile as almost a counterbalance to the rest of the messy, scribbled world. Who might have known any of this was from any particular time, was birthed from any specific, incidental and passing whim?

We all might know those time-filler TV shows, an hour of D-list talking heads reminiscing about decades gone by, their eyes lighting up as they remember debuting their purple sequinned bell bottoms, their bright red glued up mohawk, the reverberating impact of a disco song that just hit the dance floor.

‘I had huge shoulder pads that stretched out 20cm beyond my actual body.’

‘My hair was a bouffant a foot above my head.’

The distance between their animated, outlandish recollection and the present is only more marked by their current, generally quite drab and conservative, demeanour. Short hair, plain clothes, straight faces: how could we have been so silly?

The word ‘retro’ itself only came into use in the 70s; what was first applied to fashion soon widened to music, interior design, technology.

8 This type of mulling over the not-too-distant past with decade-defining nostalgia shows only started being aired in the late 90s, with the BBC in the UK commissioning an ‘I love the 70s’ season that went on to spawn subsequent ‘I love the 80s’, ‘I love the 90s’, and a US version on VH-1. The recent past became a recyclable commodity. TV shows like Mad Men, widespread rockabilly and swing retro revival club nights, these dipped-into artefacts have instead a veneer of irony about them, symptomatic of what writer Mark Grief called in the London Review of Books an ‘unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better.’ The kaleidoscopic re-collaging of the past might define our post-post-modern, retromaniac societies, but the quality with which we treat the idea of the past, the way we affix it is telling. The past becomes something in a specific place: assuredly distant, there purely to mock and marvel. We’ve moved on.

A quick survey of acquaintances on their own memories of the 80s pulled up some of the typical stuff (gaudy colours, weird macho rock, more shoulder pads) and a few forgotten tokens of the time: Madonna’s mole, the bowl hair cut, or worse yet, rat tails: a fad in parts of the US and UK at least, where boys would grow a little curly extension to the back base of their hair. I had one for a few weeks at least. Part of what became apparent is that advertising, more than music, proves itself to be the most insidious and enduring of our cultural artefacts. Jingles for NyQuill, Tyson’s, Folger’s instant coffee remain programmed, surfacing unbidden every few months for years later. The wider question quickly becomes: whose 80s? And where? While it’s become normal to say something is ‘so 80s’, or ‘so 90s’, to pinpoint an atmosphere on a decade, or to brand something as ‘dated’ or ‘out of date’, what does this language disclose about us?

The attempt to define each decade according to its salient traits is perhaps a forgivable tendency – we try to find patterns, and take no small comfort in the recognition of things we grew up with. It’s a way to deal with one the imponderables: how to recognise, mark, and commemorate the passing of time. One method: put a start and end point on an arbitrary duration (seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia). The finite slices let us make some sort of sense of the stream of experience. Despite our hyper awareness of the recent past, though, we seem remarkably resilient to alternative ways of re-establishing these

9 boundaries: it’s easily overlooked that the UK were using the Julian calendar (closely related to the current Gregorian calendar – differing only in its distribution of leap years) until 1752, or that the decimal clock and calendars of the French Revolution were in use for a full twelve years until Napoleon Bonaparte reverted to the Gregorian organisation in order for the pope to recognise him as emperor of France. Time itself was only standardised in the UK with the spread of the rail and telegraph systems in the 1840s, and agreed internationally by conference in 1884.

In their 1991 study of American age groups Generations, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe separated those born in recent decades into discernable groups: the Baby Boomers (born 1943–60), 13ers (as literally the thirteenth generation since the US became a nation, though we now know them more commonly as Generation X, born 1961–81), and Millennials (inevitably, also called Generation Y, 1982–2004). In 2005, Howe and Strauss’ consultancy firm sponsored an online competition to name the following generation: the winner was the dubious title of ‘Homeland Generation’, though it has also been labelled Generation Z, or iGen. What was remarkable about their study was its attempt to categorise and identify overriding characteristics about each generation, with a tacit understanding that what they meant concerned white majorities. The book reads like an extended horoscope: ‘your generational consciousness is on the rise.

They (13ers) look upon themselves as pragmatic, quick, sharp-eyed, able to step outside themselves to understand the game of life as it is really played…The youth attitude that strikes elders as blasé is, from the 13er perspective, unflinching and realistic.’ Where Gen X is, according to them, a ‘reactive’ generation, the Millennials are ‘civic’: ‘Cute. Cheerful. Scoutlike.

Wanted.’ The future, for Strauss and Howe, becomes merely a matter of rote, where iGen will be the next generation to actually change the world.

In the middle of the floor is a circle of stones. On the wall, just below the ceiling is a small, oblong mirror. Unlike everything else in the room, the mirror is unlabelled. At some angles, it reflects the dimmed daylight coming through the slats in the roof; at others, the white walls of the rest of the room. It’s vaguely pill-shaped, less than a centimetre thick.

10 The guard, wearing a name tag and standing just beneath the pill mirror in the doorway nearby, makes a point of looking at all the labels on the wall in the vicinity, and says that he doesn’t know. He goes to get another guard; they do the same. The question leads back to the front desk of the museum, where the attendant flips through the available pamphlets, and then phones up her supervisor. No one knows what it is that is sitting on the wall; the object remains anonymous.

In his diatribe Black Mass, philosopher John Gray argues that contemporary politics takes its main drive and ideology from esoteric, millenarian Christian sects, groups that believed that instead of an on-going, shifting and changeable cycle of life, plans should be made for an idealised afterlife. Which is to say, things could never get better or be sufficiently improved in the current life, and so the current era would resolutely end and be replaced by a new, altogether different era. Apocalyptic thinking (here, the ‘apocalypse’ being closer to the original Greek meaning of an unveiling) and the promise of a complete change under a particular regime of thought became an accepted method: think of how many grandiose promises you’ve heard from any politician in an election. The realism of the claims is irrelevant – the point is more in the belief in that change, that only a shift will lead there.

The labels of the movements and moments of history and our strengthening Decade-ism carry the marks of these millenarian cults: a defined and squared away time past can guarantee the progression towards a subsequent new dawn. We still, despite any revisionist renovations and altermodern proclamations, seem to believe in a linear, segmented conception of time. As a result, what we’ve come to regard as the natural currents of history are those that gloss over irregularities, smooth over inconsistencies, and highlight already dominant narratives.

It’s no mistake that L P Hartley described the past as ‘a foreign country’. It’s not a time to reflect upon, cherished and owned, but an unknown and unruly place to visit; to then attempt to know better, differently each time. The most telling artefacts from our pasts are those that are inexplicable, that no longer make sense, and it is those lost moments for which we must be constantly on the lookout.

11

How Sculpture Speaks to Us Today From the Stationary to the Mercurial Mark Kremer

I There exists a plaster relief entitled Remorse (a deep manifestation of regret). The Icelandic artist Einar Jónsson (1874–1954) worked on it during a period of over thirty years (1911–47). The sculpture was produced in two versions, both moulded in plaster: a small early work, and a larger, late and revised one. Their origin is a 1906 sketchbook drawing, and this two-dimensional character translates into the relief, where the head of a man rises up from a flat, abstracted background. This movement comes with great effort; the man seems to be under a spell.

I have long been fascinated with this particular work by Einar Jónsson. Above all it is an imaginative portrayal of self-torment. We see the head of an elderly man in the company of two symbolic figurines that can easily be read as young versions of the man himself. They remind him of missed chances and forsaken love, and force him to confront wrongdoings and misfortunes. The figures encompass the man’s senses: on top

Einar Jónsson, Remorse, 1911–47

12 of his head is one whose stretched out arms tear both his eyes open; the other crawls into his ear and, guessing from its posture, is pouring cries and whispers into him, in one continuous flow. The whole sculpture relates the haunted state that we witness a lot in so-called Nordic Symbolist sculpture, with an over-abundant mass of inner life seeking its way out, via art, by way of over-abundant expression. This heightened expressivity, this exaggeration of the art of figuration, of representing a human being, can be related to what Aby Warburg called Pathosformel, an emotionally charged visual trope that we also see in, for instance, Gothic sculptures from the Middle Ages (e.g. the suffering Christ).

Nowadays Einar Jónsson’s work is shown in a specially built museum.1 It hosts a large collection of plaster sculptures and behind it there’s a garden with (most of these) sculptures cast in bronze or carved in stone. Following an arrangement the artist proposed in 1909 to the Althing, the national parliament of Iceland, this museum served as his house, studio, and showcase of the work during his lifetime. In fact the deal was made at a moment when he had just settled down in Copenhagen, and it lured the talented artist back to his hometown. Upon his death the house was converted into a public museum. Einar took great care that his legacy would be shown in the way he saw fit. His will stipulated the conditions, one was that his life and art were to be shown in a virtually fixed order: nothing is to be moved in the museum, no art from outside (made by other artists) is to enter. Today the museum offers a unique experience: a visit takes you straight back, just like a time-machine from some science-fiction film would do, to a historical place and time; probably this is the era around 1910, when all the artist’s concerns were present, and on the point of crystallizing.

In fact this museum is the ideal entry to Einar’s oeuvre. The knowledge that his art doesn’t travel, as opposed to most of the art produced today, that it –apart from the few public sculptures that he made in the USA – can’t be seen outside Iceland, gives the oeuvre a remarkable position in the contemporary art landscape. Today its stationary character presents us with an artistic challenge.

1 For an impression of the museum, visit: <http://www.lej.is/en/>; website last visited 21.01.2015.

13 The Einar Jónsson Museum also offers a challenging perspective on a historical phenomenon that I already mentioned. Nordic Symbolism can be understood as an art-historical formation with resonances and a timeline that differs from Symbolism in Western- and Eastern Europe, the international style/movement dominating the fine arts in the years between 1890 and 1910. In the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and in Finland and Iceland, once it was on its way, Symbolism struck a chord. 2 Today in some Nordic countries it is still an important factor in contemporary art. Historically, as has been observed, Symbolism occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to a scientific worldview determined by materialist ideas and an obsession with data, and developed in opposition to realist painting which was seen to ignore philosophical issues. Artists like Odilon Redon and his young colleagues James Ensor and Léon Spilliaert developed a new visual vocabulary for rendering dream-life, the emotional world, subjective perception. They posited that, compared to scientific approaches, the individual world – our inner life in all its movements – was as apt a tool or lens to fathom and see through exterior reality.

Nordic Symbolists took this one step further. Their work tells us: the inner world, rather than exterior reality, that’s the real thing. Einar Jónsson’s art is defined by an amalgam of tendencies that all aim towards interiority. Finnish artist Kimmo Sarje has characterised him as ‘a symbolist, theosophist and almost psychedelic artist’.3 His sculptures reveal a personal cosmology wherein supernatural forces steer the individual’s fate, but they also depict Icelandic tales and folklore. They make the experience of nature tangible, day and night, the way we humans see ourselves reflected in nature; they dwell on archetypes and configure them anew. But perhaps most of all, these works stage a repertoire of 2 Nordic Symbolism has not gone unnoticed in other parts of the world. Of course many know the Munch Museum in Oslo. Less known is that some contemporary artists are strong advocators of a Nordic legacy. Per Kirkeby has spoken up for Danish sculptor Rudolph Tegner, who had built a modern museum in two parts, shaped as a rotunda and a sarcophagus, for his work in Dronningmølle. Georg Baselitz has written about the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill whose hallucinatory drawings are in the Malmö Art Museum.

14 human expressions that connects with Duchenne de Boulogne’s meticulous research in The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy (1862), a systematic account of what a face can tell and which facial muscles are involved in that very process.

The white, a non-colour, of Einar Jónsson’s plaster sculptures adds a special element to all this: abstraction. In this context it is something of an anomaly. In 1906, Wilhelm Worringer, in Abstraction and Empathy (1906), defined the urge to abstraction as the result of inner unrest and lack of confidence inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world.

II Today, sculpture comes in manifold guises, its spectrum of formats and shapes is innumerable. Interestingly, the stationary element that typified Einar Jónsson’s work persists; for example the recent rediscovery of the earth-bound figures made by Swiss sculptor Hans Josephsohn shows that a certain type of (once dismissed) figurative sculpture can return with a vengeance. Today however this stationary element is also complemented by its very opposite: sculpture that embraces an ephemeral, transitory, mercurial element. In this context Franz West is relevant, his art meets this development half-way. In the late 1970s West began to make his Paßstücke (Adaptives), portable sculptures that look clownish, odd,

15 a bit clumsy. Made of plaster, wire and paper mâché, they’re to be used, carried around, petted by visitors. The works liberate sculpture from its pedestal. There is a theatrical aspect to them, the Paßstücke start to live via little performances of the public – more spontaneous than pre-conceived acts. In fact, Franz West’s art is a ground where different art forms come together: sculpture meets theatre and performance and vaudeville (the popular precursor of cinema from 1880–1930).

In the year 2015 inter-disciplinary or cross-media encounters in art are a matter of course. What possibly makes these present-day encounters unique, is the fact that in the meeting of two art forms, one of these forms might be present in quite a virtual way, rather as a memory than as a real physical presence. For example: on January 1st 2015, the Stedelijk Museum started a year-long retrospective of Tino Sehgal, where each month one work will be shown. Tino Sehgal’s art takes on a live form, because to him it is the most direct form of communicating with an art audience. A part of his oeuvre consists of re-enactments of artworks from the (classical-) modern canon: for instance Rodin’s The Kiss (1889), in the form of dance/ movement, with performers in a museum room who kiss for real. This is the way sculpture appears today. Another example is a group exhibition, The Event Sculpture (2014–15), held at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, with presentations of nine sculptures that are ‘events in and around the surfaces of the building.’ Anthony McCall, who makes films that he calls light sculptures, is one of its participants. Lara Favaretto creates an event with other collaborators which she calls a study of making and unmaking sculpture: ‘Standing outside the Henry Moore Institute, armed with a chisel and hammer, performers are tasked with reducing solid blocks of marble into dust.’ The Swiss artist Roman Signer, known for performances where objects are blown up, either in the landscape of Switzerland or in an art interior, is another participant who realised a work.4 How to explain this change in how sculpture manifests itself today?

The answer to this is complex, two factors clarify this development, be it only in part.

3 Kimmo Sarje, ‘Nordic Pathos’, Siksi, nr 3, 1988, p.31.

4 <http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/exhibitions/the-event-sculpture>, website last visited 22.01.2015.

Hans Josephsohn, Untitled (Angela), 2000

16 Firstly, the new art of the 1960s contested the medium-specificity of painting and sculpture: Conceptualism, Psychedelia, Fluxus, Happenings, Land Art, Performance Art, and Photo-Conceptualism were real shape-shifters, they broke through the old boundaries and contested traditional ways in which art represented/embodied space and time. These art movements broached new territory and introduced new vocabulary.

At the same time, in the 1960s, there are many initiatives by artists who start collaborations that bring different arts together. Often painting and sculpture return in these collaborations but in other forms. As if the old arts could not be cast aside so easily, as if common ground was needed to anchor the new ‘experiments’. Thus, much ‘progressive’ art of the 1960s has deeper layers where resonances of painting and sculpture can be felt.

This observation brings us to the second consideration. There is a general principle that explains the development of art through the trans-migration of visual tropes. A particular form that we find in one art at a certain time/place, may recur in another context and time, but with a completely different meaning, as if it had been re-incarnated. Possibly the agency of the individual artist is less important than we in the West tend to assume, and closer to that of a medium or even a shaman in so-called ‘primitive’ society. In other words: genre is persistent, the message of art transcends boundaries of time and space, and what we tend to acknowledge as the latest art, may take its form in fact from the very old.

At this point I want to return to the artist with whom I started this text. How do all these considerations about sculpture, about the ‘place’ where it is now, about its preferred appearance, affect our view of Einar Jónsson? Earlier I wrote about his museum and the time-travel experience it offers. Of course the museum also poses a problem: Einar Jónsson’s art sits under a bell jar, it is almost completely sealed off from the exterior world. For a fresh look at the museum I’d propose a thought experiment that involves the making of a fictitious group show, featuring samples of relevant contemporary sculpture. This museum is packed with Einar Jónsson’s sculptures, but perhaps it has a cellar where we can store some of these items. Anyway, I don’t want to add a lot of works, seven or so should do the job. Here is a list of works that I suggest, some function as referents only; in that case we’ll ask their maker for a new work.

17 A group show for the Einar Jónsson Museum: 1 Franz West, a Paßstück (if only because of his disarming way of using plaster).

2 Siobhán Hapaska, A wolf, an olive tree and circumstances, 2014.5

Franz West, Paßstück, 1975 Siobhán Hapaska, A wolf, an olive tree and circumstances, 2014

18 3 Chris Burden, Oh Dracula, 1974. For this performance at the Utah Museum of Art in Salt Lake City, the artist replaced a painting on the wall with a large white cloth which he then climbed inside. Burden hung on the wall for one day during museum hours, cloistered in darkness like a light-sensitive vampire (or chrysalis).

19 6 Suchan Kinoshita, Untitled (Hourglass), 2009.

October 7, 1974 Utah Museum of Art, Salt Lake City, Utah I was invited to do a piece in the foyer of the Utah Museum by the director E.F. Sanguinetti. The room was filled with Renaissance paintings of religious subjects. Using strips of adhesive tape, I made a large chrysalis for my body. I was mounted on the wall, replacing one of the paintings. A lighted candle was placed on the floor beneath my head, and another at my feet. An engraved plaque, similar to those identifying the paintings, giving my name, title of the piece, and the date was placed on the wall.

I remained in the chrysalis during Museum hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

7 Joseph Beuys, Stuhl mit Fett (Chair with Fat), 1963.

4 Lili Dujourie, Cabinet, 1992. In these works plaster, the material, becomes the protagonist which bears fruits: shaped as a membrane or organ, a plaster form sits in an iron case; the case is painted black and stands on four high legs.

5 Reinhardt Mucha, Das Figur-Grund Problem in der Architektur des Barock (Für Dich allein bleibt nur das Grab), (The ground-figure problem of baroque architecture ( for you alone what remains is the tomb)), 1985. Or, Harald Klingelhöller, Sorge wächst (Worry grows), 1988. Or, Emilio Moreno, Acrobat, 2014. Made in situ, this sand sculpture is in the shape of an ornament which was originally on the façade of a Spanish Romanesque church. During the Franco regime this church was dismantled, transported to, and rebuilt in New York. Today the church is in the Cloisters, the open air exhibit of historical architecture samples of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

5 <http://www.hiddevanseggelen.com/artists/siobhan_hapaska.html>, website last visited 22.01.2015.

Chris Burden, Oh Dracula, 1974

III Painting and sculpture: both have their myths in which the two art forms outdo themselves. Once an emperor commissioned a team of Greek artists and a team of Chinese artists to make a mural. There was a dividing partition in the palace so that neither could see the other team’s work before it was complete. When the Chinese were done, their picture was unveiled. It was a colorful scene of birds and fruits, that looked as vivid as nature can be. A few weeks later the Greeks had finished, and

Suchan Kinoshita, Untitled (Hourglass), 2009 Joseph Beuys, Stuhl mit Fett (Chair with Fat), 1963

20 the emperor came to see the work. Their picture superseded the Chinese one, surprisingly so, as they had only polished their wall so that it gently mirrored the Chinese painting, making the nature scene even more real.6 In a similar way, wonders of sculpture are evoked in the tale told by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, about the Greek sculptor Pygmalion who falls in love with a statue he had carved and had called Galatea. He wishes for a bride who would be the living likeness of the ivory girl. Aphrodite, the goddess, granted his wish and with a kiss he was able to bring the sculpture to life.

I refer to these ‘creation myths’, because they remind us of a simple truth: much of our inspiration, the energy we get from looking and thinking about art, comes from the fact that once, there was a maker standing before an easel or a socle, or simply sitting on a chair, in a studio or somewhere else, who attempted to give life to a thought, an emotion, an observation. Sculpture is an art form that effects and affects the spectator via an intricate and mysterious interplay of illusion and presence.

The act of bestowing life upon a form that we, a priori, would consider lifeless, is reflected each time in a different way in all the contemporary works at the end of the last paragraph. That is what they share. Taking this idea to the world of Einar Jónsson should make us more susceptible to what he was trying to achieve. In this perspective, the Symbolism in his work is less a matter of course, less a given or art historical category that we (claim to) understand. It is rather a case of one artist who, proceeding in a tentative and precise way, was exploring the symbolic potential of the world, a potential that he also found in the smallest of gestures. This is what makes his work unique, and deserving of our renewed attention.

When contemplating Einar Jónsson’s art, certain works from Performance Art or more precisely Body Art from the 1970s may come to mind. In Body Art we also find the interplay of presence, conceived as a live form, and illusion. As an art form, Body Art pursued a reality that comes close to that if life. Yet it would be wrong to say, as has happened, that Body Art tried to get rid of the dividing-line between art and life.

6 Dutch painter/photographer Daan van Golden mentions this story as a motto for his artistic production.

21 The concepts ‘art’ and ‘life’ are not inter-changeable, they deserve precision in any context. Like with any art form, Performance Art is based on the persuasiveness of its illusion. In the Body Art pieces from the 1970s, aspects of life such as certain emotions, were compressed, or expanded.

This of course explains their impact on spectators, the suspense they had. In a metaphor borrowed from sculpture: pieces of life were chopped out, worked on, and set on a socle so they could be studied better. Artists were using artificial means so as to manipulate life. The early work of Chris Burden is exemplary.

Burden thought it important that his performances had a clear form.

He wanted people to be able to read them at a glance. He typified the form to be realised as ‘crisp’. He strove for the hardness of illusion. Through its clarity the action was, as it were, dissociated from the surrounding space and time. The here-and-now character of the performance was uplifted into a sublime moment.7 Hence, in his performance Shoot (1971), one of Burden’s friends at a pre-arranged point fired a gun at Burden’s upper left arm. The silent film on which the event was recorded shows a man looking at the camera; then, suddenly, as if he had been stung by a vicious insect, he grabs his arm at the spot where the bullet hit him. In Transfixed (1974), one of his last performances, he had himself crucified.

In the garage of a small petrol-station on the highway, Burden went to lean with his back against the rear of a Volkswagen. Assistants drove a nail through each of his hands into the roof of the car. Thereupon, the doors of the garage were opened and the car was driven half-way out.

The noise of the engine, which was being revved up to the maximum, was like a long drawn-out cry. About this last episode, the artist has said: ‘It [the car] screamed for me.’

The artist is still alive. How would Chris Burden, once an amazing performance artist, portray remorse?

7 Cf. Mark Kremer, ‘Hard Acts and Soft Gestures’, Onder Anderen/Amongst Others.

Biennale di Venezia 1995 (Ghent: MvHK, 1995), pp.68–75. Republished in: Kunst & Museumjournaal, vol. 6, nr. 3/4, 1995, pp.70–76.

22

Medardo Rosso – through the water’s thickness Damian Taylor

For Medardo Rosso the history of Western sculpture was one of ‘useless paperweights’ and photography was its natural extension.1 In his view classical sculpture betrayed perception, ripping the depicted subject from the ineffable weave of impressions and memories which it prompted and through which it should be known. Sculpture’s history was one of ‘putting fleeting clouds on a table’ and at its heart photography was a similar practice of ‘objectivising’, carried to a higher and evermore pervasive pitch.2 The notion of photography as a technology which captures the world is as old as the medium itself: ground-breaking chemist and angler Humphry Davy’s 1802 essay on photography introduced the still-standard term ‘taken’ to describe the apparatus’s relationship with the depicted object.3 Sculpture as a photographic subject was familiar from at least 1839, the year of the momentous public unveiling of Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype and William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawings.4 1 Rosso’s public statements are translated in the English edition of the catalogue for the 1996 exhibition in Santiago de Compostela, see Gloria Moure (ed.), Medardo Rosso (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1996), p.203.

2 Moure, p.179.

3 Humphry Davy, ‘An Account of a Method of copying Paintings upon Glass, and of making Profiles, by the agency of light upon Nitrate of Silver. Invented

by T. Wedgwood, Esq. With Observations by H. Davy’ in Journals of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: Savage, 1802), p.172. Amongst his many achievements Davy was a noted angler, and, late in life, wrote Salmonia; or, Days of Fly-fishing (London: John Murray, 1828), the extended dialogue format of which ranges between the natural history of salmon, the pleasures of fishing, animal memory and ethics.

4 I.e. Arman-Pierre Séguier’s Still Life with Plaster Casts (1839–42) and William Henry Fox Talbot’s Classical Statuettes on Three Shelves (c. 1841).

23 Yet, despite Hippolyte Bayard’s photographs of the 1840s, which demonstrated that the sculptural subject could be both profoundly enquiring and supremely funny – i.e. Bayard Surrounded by Statues (1845–48) – by Rosso’s era the reproduction of the sculptural form had accrued half-a-century’s ossifying convention, as one can observe in the didacticism of late-nineteenth-century essays such as Heinrich Wölfflin’s 1896 ‘How One should Photograph Sculpture’.5 The catch, for Rosso, was that despite his antipathy to the medium, for a successful artist working at the turn of the century the photographic reproduction of one’s work was both unavoidable and commercially desirable. Rosso’s movement towards photographic experimentation coincided with a radical shift in the social significance of the medium – its migration from chemical to photomechanical reproduction. It wasn’t until the 1880s that experiments into photographic half-toning made mass-produced photographs technically possible and this technology gained commercial feasibility only in the late 1890s, with the first photographically illustrated magazines appearing in 1898.6 From this moment the printed page became the standard site of a viewer’s first encounter with the work, and the subsequent engagement with the sculptural object became a necessarily complex layering of vision and recollection.

From 1900 until his death in 1928 Rosso embarked upon a remarkably sophisticated enquiry into the use of photography to deny that which he saw as the defining characteristic of the medium: its objectifying tendency. Rosso turned to photography to imbue the photographic representation of his works with the rootedness in human existence which he sought for his sculptures. This is a rootedness in which the object viewed cannot be divorced from the atmosphere which animates its appearance; in which the notion of apparition becomes the defining quality. As Merleau-Ponty put it in 1960: ‘When through the water’s thickness I see the tiled bottom of the pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it through them and because of them.

5 Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘How One Should Photograph Sculpture’ trans. Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History, 2013, Vol.36(1), pp.52–71.

6 Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Cologne: Könemann, 1998), p.362.

24

25

If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without that flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is’.7 Rosso turned to photography to present, not fleeting clouds on a table, or paperweights, or fish stuffed and mounted on the wall, but a time of tension between inanimate matter and living presence; between the fish in the water – its scales lambent in the lamplight – and its enduring depiction as something to which one can return again and again, which can play a defining role in subsequent art.

Hands on In an essay of 1907 Rosso asked: ‘Is it possible that a work of art is not the property of an idea, and that any hand but that whose owner has conceived this idea should be able to express it?’8 As with his sculpture, Rosso’s engagement with photography is typified by a playfully hands-on working with materials, which led the artist beyond any preconceivable outcome – as he wrote: ‘I am busy working with materials… I have done work not yet done by celebrities with every resource available to them’.9 Rosso’s photographs are beautiful objects and powerful images which, today, framed and hung in a museum exhibition, are easily afforded the status of works of art. Yet to view them in this light isn’t retrospectively to elevate their status above studio experiments; rather, it is to overlook their radical nature as mass-reproduced public expressions of his sculptural work. Rosso’s startlingly innovative photographic pursuits were offered with absolute confidence as the most appropriate public representation of his sculpture.

The facing image depicts Rosso’s early Impression d’Omnibus (1893– 94) as it appeared in Ardengo Soffici’s 1909 Il Caso Medardo Rosso, a book published with Rosso’s endorsement.10 The plate explicitly depicts a photographic print, not a sculpture. On the right of the image the 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p.142.

8 Moure, p.141.

9 Moure, p.290.

10 Ardengo Soffici, Il Caso Medardo Rosso: preceduto da l’impressionismo e la pittura italiana (Florence: B. Seeber, 1909).

photographed photograph’s edge falls well inside the plate’s frame, running skew to the page. On the plate’s left the photographed print asserts itself even more blatantly as an object; the print is torn and the whole left side is curled-up, as though poorly dried, reflecting the light unevenly so as to emphasise this sculptural dimension of the paper. The materiality of the photographed print is as evident as the represented sculpture. Indeed, the photograph is so evident that one hardly attends to the sculptural materiality of the more clearly depicted form on the right: it is a figure, that much is evident in an instant. Beyond that instant of recognition, one is lost in the abstraction of the left – an abstraction all the more powerful for bearing the indelible feel of a photograph, an index of a thing. Rosso’s engagement with the mass-reproduction of the photograph achieves – and beautifully illustrates – something which he argues for in his first published essay, namely his much repeated maxim: ‘What is important for me is to forget matter’.11 This somewhat paradoxical aim is not attempted by emulating the ethereal Pictorialist photography 11 Moure, p.130.

26 of his era, i.e. the Symbolist-inspired prints of Edward Steichen which gave new life to Rodin’s Balzac. Rather, it is achieved precisely by emphasising the materiality of mediation: the crazed gelatine surface, the ‘distortions’, the ‘ripples of sunlight’ through which this image of the past arises to confront the viewer.

The complexity of the generations which are layered into this image is further emphasised by presenting the entire glass plate negative, including the lines marking where it was to be cropped for previous uses. A negative exists to produce a print, yet the negative is here explicitly retrospective of the print exhibited as print: Rosso displays both the source of a photograph and, in an older instance, its life to come.

Through presenting this future – this future which is the ‘original’ element of this compound image – as already subject to the passage of time, Rosso re-affirms the transience of the work. Beyond this, he asserts that this transience is not terminal; rather, it forms part of a greater complexity of generations, of regeneration and re-thinking the past.

Experiments with photographic reproduction were Rosso’s only means of keeping Impression d’Omnibus alive, the sole sculptural instance

27 having been accidentally destroyed in the 1880s. Rosso’s engagement with the majority of his sculptures continued throughout his lifetime, both through photography and recasting. His increasingly sophisticated enquiry into reproduction had as its corollary a withdrawal from modelling ‘new’ subjects. Modelled in 1906, Ecce Puer broke a six-year hiatus in working with clay and became Rosso’s last conception – from 1906 until his death in 1928 Rosso engaged exclusively in reproductive processes.

For instance, Ecce Puer was cast by the artist in at least nine materially unique instances: in variously painted and varnished plasters, in patinated bronze and in cast wax with plaster armatures.

Although not as explicit in its engagement with the medium of photographic processing as Impression d’Omnibus, the illustration of Ecce Puer in Soffici’s 1909 book (the work photographed is the early plaster now in Milan’s Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderne) is evidently also a photograph re-photographed – something with little if any precedent in photographic history. Rather than the clean cropping one might expect of a published photograph, the image’s edges appear worn and rounded. Its fragmentariness is less that of a torn photograph than of a broken slate, wave-washed smooth. This effect is heightened by the grey mount, which follows the lines of the print on three edges, but on the right side extends beyond the photograph, making explicit the layering and physicality of the object subsequently photographed. This physicality is asserted still more forcibly by its size and its scale on the page.

As a photograph of an object it doesn’t feel photographically reduced or enlarged to fit a space, but simply the size it is; a size which has a strong relationship to being held, recalling a depiction of an ancient artefact transformed by use. The smooth contours of the right edge await the cleft of thumb and fore-finger, the print’s left edge the final joints of the fingers. The image evokes a desire to touch. Rosso’s hatred of touch went hand in hand with his desire to ‘forget matter’. As he said in 1923: ‘I do not touch. People have always believed in seeing through touching. I do not touch, I do not touch’.12 Through invoking touch (Rosso’s anathema), the photographic image of Ecce Puer acts in a manner akin 12 Moure, p.180.

28 to the above print of Impression d’Omnibus: it imbues the layer of mediation with those properties from which Rosso sought to deliver sculpture, allowing the sculptural image to appear as though emerging from a veil. Rather than obscuring the image, mediation is used to enhance its strikingness.

Rosso repeatedly emphasised a desire that his works present an ‘impression’ drawn from life – ‘we ourselves are the real saints. More women and fewer Madonnas in art!’.13 Yet, as Rosso employed material mediation to lend the sculptural apparition greater strikingness, he also used historical mediation as a creative tool.

13 Moure, p.193.

14 Moure, p.150.

29 Publically aligning his project with artists such as Velasquez, Goya and Turner, Rosso believed his works marked a decisive break from the Western sculptural tradition.14 His method for asserting his own position was comparison, conducted in public and in private. For instance, of a visit to Rosso’s studio the distinguished critic and art historian Julius Meier-Graefe recalled: ‘…he built up a little bit of art-history in the form of a singular still-life. He placed on a table a very fine bronze copy, made by himself, of the large head of Vitellius in the Vatican, beside it a wax after Michelangelo’s small group of the Madonna and Child at Berlin, then a torso of Rodin’s John the Baptist and finally a work of his own, the Head of a Child’.15 Within the highly public arena of 1904’s Salon d’Automne in Paris Rosso turned to photography to construct a similar constellation of images, which contrasted his works with Rodin’s. This composition found renewed life in Soffici’s 1909 book.16 Despite the overwhelming probability that Rosso orchestrated the ‘confrontation’ of his works with those of others in order to assert his radical departure from them, the assembled images achieve something else. Rosso could have illustrated his argument through Jacques-Ernest Bulloz’s photographs of Balzac (reproductions of which were the norm in contemporaneous books on Rodin17); in choosing Eugene Druet’s prints he offers Rodin’s work at its most elliptical and incomparable. Likewise, with Michelangelo’s sculpture it would have been perfectly possible to use a photograph of the original, rather than an image of Rosso’s own tiny sculptural copy. The prints of Rosso’s works which flank the 15 Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art trans. Florence Simmonds (London: Heinemann, 1908), vol. 2, p.21.

16 The assembled photographs are, from left to right on the top row: Eugene Druet’s print of Balzac; a lesser-known Druet photograph of Despair; Rosso’s La Portinaia; on the bottom row a detail of Impression d’Omnibus; to the right of which a copy of Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna and, lastly, Rosso’s Bimbo al Sole. The sculptural montage above displays Rosso’s Bambino Ebreo, Rodin’s Torso, and Rosso’s copy after Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna.

17 I.e. Camille Mauclair, Auguste Rodin: the Man, His Ideas, His Works (London: Duckworth, 1905); Frederick Lawton, The Life and Works of Auguste Rodin (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906).

30 Madonna are derived from wholly different sculptures (the left, a detail from a group of five life-size figures, the right a compact, isolated head and shoulders), yet are presented, through photography, as possibly the same object. The attention to the amorphous lumps of shoulders in all three depictions of Rosso’s sculptures find correspondence in the stone base of Rodin’s Despair, making the foetal profile a surrogate head. Due to Rosso’s choices the assemblage admits of no direct connections, no easy arguments. Developed from a simple premiss, the work becomes a rich tapestry of allusions.

Rosso’s montage reminds one that, whatever the conceptual impulse behind a work – its trigger or ostensive subject – through the process of making, through the hands-on quality of artistic practice, the work is carried beyond didacticism. Rosso used the sculptural and photographic reproduction of his own work, and that of others, to open new spaces for the works within art’s history. History became something greater and richer than the narrative progression his own theorising promulgated. It became a site of playful interactions of scale and form, of meanings become newly-meaningful, of linear connections ever folded through making.

In each of the plates discussed one finds rich and tellingly different layerings of generations and associations, in which heightened mediation – both of physical matter and of history – is employed to conjure a strikingly fresh encounter with the artwork, which speaks to one as both vitally of its time and wholly alive today.

31

Serial Originality The Sculptural Marriage of Convenience Jan Teeuwisse

The marketing of the recent exhibition of Rembrandt’s later works at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam exploited two key positions. Firstly the financing of this, the most expensive exhibition ever held in the Netherlands, was highlighted in order to awaken the public’s interest. One could argue that this glamourising of financial outlay is consistent with a wider art-world trend: if the question arises as to the significance of leading contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, it is their spectacular prices at auction that is put forward as evidence.

In addition to the economic aspect, the other unique selling point in the promotion of Rembrandt was la vie bohème, the stereotypical image of the artist as evoked in biopics. The artistic genius should behave as a promiscuous swine (J M W Turner), tormented madman (Vincent van Gogh, Camille Claudel) or in some other sense eccentric in order that the public can indulge themselves in all that artistic misery. The beauty of Rembrandt’s late work is linked directly with his – thickly applied – personal tragedy and bombards him en passant into being the progenitor of modernism. The widowed and penniless Rembrandt suddenly painted with guts, and concepts such as ‘authentic’, ‘original’ and ‘innovative’ turned him into a modernist avant la lettre. Rembrandt appears not only to be the ‘father’ of Claude Monet and Van Gogh, but also Pablo Picasso, Karel Appel, Georg Baselitz and many other modernists are, according to the art history marketers.

The sculptor as prophet Authenticity, originality and innovation have been parameters in the evaluation of contemporary art since the emergence of modernism on the eve of the First World War. These concepts have been linked inextricably with a development in which the genius behind the work of art, the

32 person of the artist himself and his divine inspiration, has come increasingly to the forefront. The craftsman-like process, the organisation of the studio, the patronage of collectors and other down to earth matters shifted gradually into the background. Since the coming of romanticism the spotlight has been increasingly focused on the artist and on the manner in which he has put himself at the service of art.

If one limits oneself to sculpture, the pragmatic biographies of masters such as Donatello and Michelangelo become pale by comparison with the saints’s vitae that have been written about Auguste Rodin and Constantin Brancusi. Of the old masters it is at the very most only Benvenuto Cellini that can be accused of any stardom. Whilst accounts of the Renaissance artists generally tell of their artistic successes and commissions, we come to know about the fathers of modern sculpture through the records of their profound utterances and the idiosyncratic behaviour that they displayed in their secretive ateliers. The more the secularising society became organised, the artist was increasingly given the role of court jester or prophet. Sculptors such as the Rodin and Brancusi understood the desires of their admirers. Brancusi was the champion self-mythologist, capturing his personal phenomenon meticulously with the self-timer. Inspired by a mystical treatise by an eleventh-century Tibetan monk, he opted for a lonely and sober existence in the service of sculpture. In the silence of his atelier he worked doggedly at the further fine-tuning and refinement of his sculpture, with a snow-white Alsatian as his only companion. Between 1928 and his death in 1957 his atelier in the Impasse Ronsin was a ‘must see’ for – in particular – American admirers. Visitors were allowed only under certain conditions: there was to be no laughter, and the taking of photographs was forbidden. The sculptures were covered by white cloths and were revealed one by one by the equally spotless Brancusi who, while tugging the cord to lift the cloth, solemnly pronounced the titles: ‘mon Phogue’, ‘mon Oiseau’, etc.

In 1997, forty years after Brancusi’s death, his atelier was reconstructed adjacent to the Centre Pompidou by distinguished architect Renzo Piano and was opened to the public. This high altar for the shepherd’s son from the Carpathians, who, after Rodin, fundamentally changed the art of sculpture, has since become a place of pilgrimage for sculpture lovers.

33 Serial Originality A principal role in the canonisation of our artists should be reserved for the sculptor. After all, of all artists it is the sculptor that comes closest to creating the ideal balance of body and soul. The sculptor is an artisan and artiste, and with their monumental work they serve the community, continuing a tradition which stretches back thousands of years. The sculptor’s atelier is as old as the hills, a characteristic and photogenic phenomenon.

In a field that is by definition robust and tactile as that of sculpture, great importance is attached to concepts such as ‘authenticity’, ‘originality’ and ‘uniqueness’. It is true that our knowledge of the classical Greek sculpture is mainly founded on Roman copies, and until circa 1900 the reproduction of works of art was barely perceived as conflicting with these concepts. It was all about The Idea, the concept, and if there were more clients, the demand could be met. The fame of a work of art could even be measured in terms of its dissemination. This was for centuries the practice of the sculptor’s atelier, with that of the sixteenth-century sculptor Giambologna in Florence as a prime example. But with the advancing industrialisation and urbanisation of society in the late nineteenth century and – not to forget – the development of photography, the artistic concept changed drastically.

With Van Gogh, the adoration of the autodidact and the repugnance to academism started to grow, however much Van Gogh himself tried to paint as an academician. The modern proclivity for authenticity, originality and uniqueness is translated in sculpture into the glorification of the brilliant artisan and his honest craft. The sculptors of the Arts & Crafts movement and Expressionism respectively did not seek their inspiration in Greece and Rome, Michelangelo and Jean-Antoine Houdon, but in ethnographic images and folk art. Instead of modelling a late-archaic Charioteer in plaster and increasing or reducing its size with the pantograph, they cut their figure directly in stone or wood; en taille directe and thus unique. But at the same time these modern sculptors also continued to model, and the popularity of bronze has remained undiminished. In the nineteenth century the age-old technique of casting in bronze had been refined to such an extent that the new social stand of the bourgeoisie could be served with an abundance of romantic, erotic

34 and exotic scenes. A glossy sculptural feast developed, not only behind the curtains but also in urban parks, theatres and other buildings for the benefit of all. After Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Jules Dalou, Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle, Aristide Maillol and Charles Despiau, early modernists too, such as Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti and Ossip Zadkine have modelled statues in wax or clay and had them cast in series. These artists have even had unique pieces that were originally created in stone or wood cast in bronze, however much the serial nature of such techniques may go against the modernist principles of material authenticity. As regards this, it can be said that as it comes out of the mould every cast is different, has to undergo lengthy post-processing and thus has a certain unique value. Jeff Koons’ giant baroque eggs were also made in a (limited) production series, but each one came out of its own egg differently.

From left to right: Studio Germaine Richier, 36, avenue de Châtillon, Paris, 1954.

Studio Ossip Zadkine, 100, rue d’Assas, Paris, 1954. Gypsothèque Aristide Maillol, Rudier Foundry, Paris, 1954. Studio Charles Despiau, 49, rue Brillat-Savarin, Paris, 1954. All photographs: V P S Esser.

35 The sculptor chooses their favourite foundry, decides on a limited edition, supervises the finishing and patina and dates and numbers the casts. If after the artist’s death the series has not been completed, their heirs can still have that done. In this case there is a difference between the casts that have or have not been seen and approved by the artist; between the so-called lifetime and posthumous casts. In the art trade this distinction leads to considerable price differences. But what is of course more interesting is what the artists themselves would have thought about this posthumous exploitation of their oeuvre.

Of Brancusi and Matisse it is known that they spent a great deal of time giving their bronzes a final finish. However, the majority of the Matisse’s renowned series of four reliefs – Nu de dos – were cast posthumously and this did not prevent them from achieving record sums at auction. In the case of Degas it is a matter of speculation as to whether he would have wanted the dozens of modelled studies that were found in his atelier after his death to have flooded the world as posthumous casts. That during his life Degas exhibited only one statue gives food for thought. Nonetheless, we must be grateful to his heirs for their zest for action, perhaps in this case disregarding their motives.

It is not infrequent that after the death of a sculptor the casting of their work is continued: by their heirs, by other entitled parties, by fortune hunters and by scoundrels. In the last case one can speak of ‘pirated bronzes’. The work of Rodin and Maillol is still being cast, under the supervision of a committee or other controlling body. Henry Moore put on record that no further casts of his work should be made after his death, and Anthony Caro only created unique pieces. Modernistic ideas are difficult to reconcile with anything that meddles with the original and unique nature of an autonomous work of art, but artists and their descendants do have to make a living, and the bronze provides them and collectors with an acceptable no-man’s-land. As has been said: the modernist artistic concept has put the age-old practice of the sculptor in a difficult position, and it does not seem as if we are about to think differently about this.

36 Torso Belvedere as self-portrait A contemporary artist who has chosen the essentials of sculpture as his starting point is the Dutchman Caspar Berger (1965). In his self-portraits he examines the relationship between skin and interior, reality and imagination, unica and replica, fragment and whole. Berger casts his skin in silicone and from the moulds he casts sculptures in bronze, silver and gold. He is fascinated by the Western sculptural tradition and examines world-famous works of art for their reception and universal significance. Berger has stretched his peeled-off skin over the Vatican’s iconic sculpture Torso Belvedere. The two-thousand-year-old sculptural fragment in marble has thus become a self-portrait of Berger. He has, as it were, made himself master of the great tradition of sculpture in art history and followed in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Rodin, each of who were influenced by the Torso Belvedere. Berger’s torso-cum-self-portrait has – of course – been cast in an (limited) edition.

37

Night Fishing Sydney Picasso

Hereafter when they come to model Heaven And calculate the stars, How they will wield The mighty Frame!

How build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances, how Gird the Sphere With centric and eccentric Scribbled o’er Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb John Milton1

I GRASP/GESTURE Artistic creation often, perhaps naturally, mimics origin myths.

Sculpture pervades mythology and founding legends as one of the primal gestures of humanity. Not only present in visible form, from clay figures to ritual axes, it overwhelms traditional narratives from the Indo-European zone, through Judeo-Christianity, to Central America and the South Seas; the earth, the cave, Adam’s rib – origin myths abound in this metaphor, from matter through hand to form.

The Latin term Sculpere or scalpere contains the additional notion of ‘cutting and carving’.

Richard Deacon’s text ‘In Praise of Television’ devotes several pages to the theme of prehistoric imagery.2 Mentioning a stone object (which 1 John Milton in Thomas Wright, Letter the Second: Hypothesis of the Universe (London 1750), p.14.

Caspar Berger, Torso ZZM/Self-portrait 6, 2008

38 could be as much as 330,000 years old) found in Israel, which may be interpreted as a ‘Venus figure’, he highlights the ‘ambiguous’ status of this object and questions whether or not its antiquity creates a lineage. ‘the discovery of this thumb-sized sculpture raises questions as to when man first became capable of artistic creation and what kind of art he made during this long period of time?’

Although one can question the precise motivation of the object’s production, it is clear that one is in the presence of ‘proof’. The existence of sculpture is historically rooted in the manifestation of power, which persists today, variously expressed, in portraiture, process and design.

II MASS/MATTER In societies where landscape primarily dwarfs craft, the practice of sculpture could be regarded as imitation. Where man feels out-dimensioned by nature he can alter or repeat it: stone monuments in Easter Island; Mayan temple monuments which aspire to the heavens; statuary reproducing human and animal figures; and not least, the Buddha. This is sculpture’s legacy to its future. Monuments embody power: ‘the graven image’ constitutes a danger aptly abolished by those societies which understood its power. Later marble and bronze sculptures emit an irresistible force: the sheer power of their execution dares the spectator to touch.

André Leroi-Gourhan, in his studies Gesture and Speech and Man and Matter, has cast a long shadow on the examination of the relationship between primal gesture and material. He argues that ‘The living world is characterised by the physico-chemical exploitation of matter’,3 yet ‘it is matter which conditions all technique and not means and forces’.4 Georg Baselitz has commented: ‘While I have always moved around a lot, I’ve always taken materials from that place with me. That’s been important’.5 2 Richard Deacon, Richard Deacon: So, And, If, But, Writings 1970–2012 (Düsseldorf: Richter Fey, 2014), p.170.

3 André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et La Parole (Paris: Albin Michel 1964), p.86.

4 André Leroi-Gourhan, L’Homme et la Matière (Paris: Albin Michel 1943), p.19.

5 In Nicolas Wroe, The Guardian, 14 December 2014.

39 Cristina Iglesias has delved into process. Her work in bronze integrates not only surface, but depth. Her ‘Pozo’ allows negative space to integrate the overpowering presence of its sheer size.

In Iglesias’s works prime elements such as air and water reformulate space. Her San Jeronimo claustra doors become almost vegetal. The ‘sky shields’ chime the heavens, but cast gay shadows on the earth. Earth, air and sky reclaim her work: any perambulation through the Alhambra in Granada reprises the experience. The viewer becomes performer, whilst the works reiterate the Spanish sculptural Baroque revisited by Moorish motifs.

In 2013 Tony Cragg gave a series of seminars at the Collège de France in Paris. He described sculpture’s history of patronage and the monument in relationship to its material. One image he used was of standing on an eroding riverbank, the ground failing under one’s feet: the river, flowing from its source, is both the cause of the instability and that which can drive one into the future.6 Cragg’s work is anchored in three- and four-dimensional representation. He states that ‘material empowers us, not just as a tool that tills the earth, but disseminates values through time.’7 The encounter between traditional materials such as stone, clay and bronze, with newer technologies, is part of his own encounter with materials and working processes, such as the casings of electrical infrastructure which he used when he was working in Bristol. The industrial revolution and the use of chemistry and physics accompanied artists into the twentieth century. Cragg states: ‘all materials have signification: they are carriers of content.’8 Viewing his works’s roots in those of Duchamp, Brancusi and modernist sculpture, Cragg replaces Maillol, Moore and Medardo Rosso in a re-examination of the ‘sheath’ of form.

6 Tony Cragg, Collège de France, Lecture, 29 October 2013.

7 Cragg.

8 Cragg.

40 III SURFACE/SHELL Into this context enters the cut, the splice. Introduced not only by cinema, collage is also a product of this rupture. From Freud’s studies of the unconscious, to Jung, to jazz. The invisible reveals the visible; or to render visible the visible.9 It was not only the surrealist movement which fostered juxtaposition and revelation: it ferried the works of scuplture

by Picasso, Archipenko and Laurens in their cubist phases.

The viewer was called into service to translate; his eyes to interpret.

And as easy as it seems now to understand the editing process of Sergei Eisenstein, his films did alter our ways of seeing. The spectator becomes the accomplice, and art, and mainly sculpture, becomes the ‘other’.

The evocation of night fishing serves as a predictive metaphor for the artist’s process: most fishing, apart from fly fishing, takes place in darkened harbours or, by and large, at night. Most artists seek the solace and the still of their studios in which to work. I have previously described the unforgettable instance of seeing the stars reflected on the surface of the black sea and the reversal which suddenly pivots earth to sky, and inverts one’s point of view.10 Apart the magical aspects of scrutinising the waters at night, one becomes a lone spectator to a galactic spectacle: essentially looking forward into time passed. The sculptor, in exercising his metier of either adding or removing matter, inserts himself into the space/time continuum in spite of himself. Markus Raetz has followed this path.

Mark Manders glides easily between the orders of surrealism and traditional representation in three-dimensional collage. His plaster casts and pedestals create contemporary meaning from established assemblage. De Chirico’s three-dimensional paintings, or Magritte’s multi-signifiers are redressed here: the atmosphere is changed, but form abides.

Richard Deacon, commenting on Poussin, has said: ‘the containment of a three dimensional object within its surface (the outward form) is more complex than the limits of that form as presented to sight from any one viewpoint… Degrees of constancy are variable, particularly in 9 Sydney Picasso, ‘The Fact of Fiction’ in Sydney Picasso, Daniel Blau (ed.), The Invention of Paradise (Munich: Galerie Daniel Blau, 2010).

10 Sydney Picasso ‘Feu de tout Bois’ in Sydney Picasso, Picasso: Comme Si J’Étais une Signature (Paris: Hachette, 1996).

41 sophisticated subjects, with the nature of the experimental task… The point is that the presentation of a complex experiential as opposed to strictly perspectival space (albeit sustained and qualified by the latter) is a means of carrying and conveying a thematic structure of the sort previously adumbrated’.11 Markus Raetz has skewed perspective, tomfooled us, made us question our eyesight. The viewer is ‘present’ as an integral part of his work, for if in fact we do not question Oui, Non or Todo, Nada the work cannot exist. Beyond sheer anamorphosis, he brings the viewer into the scene.

Georg Baselitz has practiced the technique of sculpture for many years. As Nicolas Wroe remarked recently, ‘He began to use his hands instead of brushes and when he moved to sculpture in wood he opted for the crude attack of the chainsaw over the precision chisel’.12 Revisiting Loie Fuller in his recent ‘Louise Fuller’ bronzes evidences a clear fascination with virtual and created space, within and around.

IV AIR/ETHER Wolfgang Laib has maintained the age-old practice of the gardener, or the prehistoric settler. His is a work in process and in progress. He cultivates pollen producing plants, harvests, and sifts them into light charged ‘carpets’. He has also taken a step back, gathering honeycomb and beeswax from which he forms primordial shapes. As in his earlier works where milk is poured onto a white marble slab, where actor and act merge seamlessly, we are projected into our own past. Form comes out of form. Chemical reactions create new forms. The coupling of the two white materials, milk and marble, is so perfect that if the act is performed properly the milk sits in a ‘bubble’ on the marble. Ritual and reality merge in Laib’s vocabulary, matter and time proceed as in the Buddhist notion of two rivers (souls) coming together.

11 Deacon, opus cit., pp.72–74.

12 Wroe.

42 V LIGHT/SPACE Many of the artists present have commented on the practice of photography as having inverted certain notions: the cast shadow, the release of surface, the depth of ‘light’. All these were explored by Brancusi and

by Picasso (with Brassai, but also alone): where point of view and space intersect, where invisible and visible collide, where empty space becomes as important as occupied space.

‘By the time they opened the studio, a former stable, the light was fading. The studio had not been electrified, so when night fell Picasso took down the hanging hurricane lamp, hid it behind a watering can on the food, and used it as a spotlight. It was typical of Picasso to improvise a lighting system, and typical of Brassai to use the improvisation to heighten the chiaroscuro. Brassai had brought along the twenty-four cliche-verres, which permitted forty-eight exposures. The imaginative use of the kerosene lamp resulted in one of the most memorable modern art photographs.

“For a sculpture to attain maximum rotundity,” Picasso said, “the bright parts must be much brighter than the rest of the surface, the dark parts much darker, it’s that simple.” In the theatrically lit studio, these sculptures looked dramatically different than they did in sunlight.’13 Of Picasso’s paintings Brassai wrote: ‘Sculpture was lurking like a virtuality, deep within his paintings themselves, betraying a nostalgia for art in the round.’14 Emulating cyborgs, video installation, electronic and sound sculpture, Nam June Paik compiled a whole playbook of material at hand.

Heidegger struggled to place culture and technics into a satisfactory conjugation.15 Paik was a natural. He just did it. So just when we think we have surpassed traditional ‘hands on’ assemblage and modelling, we observe that Paik has cast another die.

13 John Richardson, Picasso and the Camera (New York: Gagosian/Rizzoli, 2014), p.177.

14 Brassai cited by Richardson, p.177.

15 ‘Enframing, as a challenging-forth into ordering, sends into a way of revealing. Enframing is an ordaining of destining, as every way of revealing.

Bringing-forth, poiesis, is also a destining in this sense’. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), pp.24–25.

43 This ‘in media res’, walking into the film in the middle, into sculpture as the past and the present, is pretty much an echo of Tony Cragg’s description of walking on the eroding riverbank in an obvious direction.

However, we are not in quicksand: our feet take us forwards, with the flow, towards the sea, which is, in this case, the sky. To ‘Gird the Sphere…

Orb in Orb’: sculpture in the hands of an artist, cyborg or a robot, hurls itself onwards.

45

Georg Baselitz, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Cristina Iglesias, Wolfgang Laib, Mark Manders, Nam June Paik, Markus Raetz

‘it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles’ Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke with You, 1966

Georg Baselitz

1 Die große Nacht im Eimer, 1962–63

2 B.J.M.C. – Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1965 3 Gruß aus Oslo, 1986

00 Title of the work, 2015

4 Dreieck zwischen Arm und Rumpf, 1977

5 Modell für eine Skulptur, 1979–80

6 Meine neue Mütze, 2003

7 Torso Rosa, 1993

8 Marokkaner, 2012 9 Yellow Song, 2013

Tony Cragg

1â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Bodicea, 1989

00 Title of the work, 2015

2 Minster, 1992 3 Complete Omnivore, 1993 4 Congregation, 1999

00 Title of the work, 2015

00 Title of the work, 2015

5 Early Form, 1993

6 Caught Dreaming, 2006

7 Frame, 2012 8 Wild Relatives, 2012

00 Title of the work, 2015

Richard Deacon

1 The Heart’s In The Right Place, 1983

2 Double Talk, 1987

3 What Could Make Me Feel This Way (A), 1993

4 Nothing Is Allowed, 1994 5 From Tomorrow, 1996 6 Kind Of Blue (A), 2001

00 Title of the work, 2015

7 Infinity #33, 2008 8 Restless, 2005

9â&#x20AC;&#x201A; From left to right: I Remember I, 2012; I Remember III, 2013; I Remember II, 2012

Cristina Iglesias

1 Deep Fountain, 1997–2006

00 Title of the work, 2015

2 Habitación vegetal III, 2005

3 Corredor suspendido I, II, III, 2006 4 Vegetation Room Inhotim, 2010–12

00â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Title of the work, 2015

5 Towards the ground, 2008

6 Pozo II, 2011 7 Pozo I (Variación 2), 2011

00 Title of the work, 2015

8 Tres Aguas (A Project for Toledo), 2014 9 Puerta-Umbral, 2006–07

Wolfgang Laib

1 Without Place – Without Time – Without Body (detail), 2007

2â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Pollen from Hazelnut, 2013

00â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Title of the work, 2015

3â&#x20AC;&#x192; Installation view of a beeswax zikkurat and fleet of brass ships at Basilica of St. Apollinare, Ravenna, 2014

4 From the Known to the Unknown – To Where Is Your Oracle Leading You, 2014

5â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Wolfgang Laib collecting pollen in Southern Germany

6â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Rice Mountains, India, 2007

Mark Manders

1 Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a building), 1986–96–2002

00 Title of the work, 2015

2â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Fox/Mouse/Belt, 1992 3â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Fragment from self-portrait as a building, 1994

4 Several drawings on top of each other, 1998–2002 5 Room with Chair and Factory, 2003–08

00 Title of the work, 2015

6 Ramble-room Chair, 2010 7 Mind Study, 2010–11

8 Landscape with Fake Dictionary, 2012–14 9 Working Table, 2012–13

00 Title of the work, 2015

Nam June Paik

1â&#x20AC;&#x201A; TV Buddha, 1974

2 Hommage aan Stanley Brouwn, 1984

3 Sun, Moon, Earth, 1990

4 Alt Heidelberg, 1991

5 Cro-Magnum Man, 1991

6â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Internet Dweller: mpbd.three.cgsspv, 1994

7 Early Bird with Hierographics, 1996

8 Diamond Sat, 1998

Markus Raetz

1 1 B N° VII, 1989

2 Nichtrauch, 1990–92

3 Kopf, 199

4 Ring, 2009–10

00 Title of the work, 2015

5 Si-No, 1996 6 Paquet III, 2011–12

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Sculpture in monuments and exhibitions in all European cities offers such a pathetic sight of barbarism, ridiculousness and monotonous imitation, that my futurist eye withdraws in deep disgust.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Umberto Boccioni, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, 1912

Artists Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz near Dresden (Saxony) in 1938, now lives and works between the Ammersee in Bavaria and Imperia of Liguria. He has been an influence on international art since 1960, his works developing in the arena of the reception of German expressionism on the one hand, and the lightness of American painting on the other.

From the late 1960s, Baselitz demonstrated how his visual insight is taking priority over the subject by deliberately showing his works upside down.

The result is a unique simultaneity of figuration and abstraction. This urge towards permanent variation and change is also evident in his late work. Since 2006 he has produced so-called remix paintings in which, with an unprecedented lightness of touch, he re-examines the iconography of his own historical works.

Baselitz’s first sculpture was shown in the German Pavilion in 1980 at the Venice biennale. Since then he has made only a few. In an interview on the question of ‘What is Germany, really, in regard to traditional sculpture?’ Baselitz looked back to questions he asked himself in the 1970s: ‘The last thing I could think of in the way of pleasing or characteristic German sculpture after the Gothic period was the group Die Brücke, including Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner and Lehmbruck. When I finally arrived at this idea, I took a piece of wood and started work’ (Georg Baselitz, 2011).

For the past ten years, Baselitz has cast limited editions of his wood sculptures in bronze at the long-established Hermann Noack fine art foundry in Berlin. Here the finest details of the sculpted wood are reproduced and burnished in black by the artist. On Baselitz’s black, unreflective surfaces, John-Paul Stonard remarks in (2013): ‘They betray the light absorbing wood from which they were originally carved; memory falls into them, rather than drama out of them.’

For Night Fishing Georg Baselitz is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac.

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. He studied at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design in Cheltenham, the Wimbledon School of Art from 1968 to 1973 and until 1977 at the Royal College of Art. Tony Cragg moved to Wuppertal in 1977. From 1978 he started teaching at the

Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was director of the Kunstakademie from 2009 to 2013.

In 1988 Tony Cragg represented Great Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennale and won the Turner Prize in the same year. He was appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002. In 2007 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture and in 2009 received a Honorary Doctor of the Royal College of Art, London. In 2013 he was awarded the Chaire de Création Artistique of the Collège de France.

Recent solo exhibitions by Tony Cragg include the Musée du Louvre Paris, the Scottish National Gallery Edinburgh, the Nasher Sculpture Center Dallas, the CAFA Museum Beijing, the Heydar Aliyev Center Baku or the Musée d’Art Moderne St.Étienne.

Tony Cragg lives and works in Wuppertal, where he founded the sculpture park Waldfrieden to show works by international renowned sculptors.

Buchmann Galerie is one of his main representative galleries in Germany and Switzerland and represents the artist since 1983.

For Night Fishing Tony Cragg is represented by André Buchmann.

Richard Deacon was born in Bangor, Wales, in 1949, has emerged as one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors. He lives and works in London.

From an early stage in his career, Deacon experimented with different media and forms of expression. In his sculptural work, he has employed materials ranging from laminated plywood and concrete to stainless steel, cloth and clay. These structures noticeably emerge from an interest in the nature of these materials themselves, as well as the way their form may relate to human association or sensory experience.

Aside from numerous solo shows in museums in Europe, America and Asia, he has participated in many of the most significant survey exhibitions including the Carnegie International, documenta and Sculpture Projects, Münster. His works may be found in leading collections all over the world, including the Tate Gallery, London, the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 2014, his work was presented in a major retrospective at Tate Britain.

Richard Deacon won the Turner Prize in 1987.

129

In 1997 he was awarded Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France, elected a Royal Academician in 1998 and made CBE in 1999. He was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2010.

For Night Fishing Richard Deacon is represented

by Thomas Schulte.

Cristina Iglesias was born in San Sebastián in November 1956. She studied Chemical Sciences (1976–78) and sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art in London (1980–82).

In 1995 she was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (Germany). Iglesias was awarded Spain’s National Visual Arts Prize in 1999 and the Grosse Kunstpreis Berlin, in 2012.

She has represented Spain twice at the Venice Biennale (1986 and 1993); the Biennale of Sydney in 1990; at the Taipei Biennial in 2003.

She works with major international galleries and is represented in Spain by Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid.

Iglesias’s major public commisions include the Laurel Leaves in Moskenes sculpture in the Lofoten Island; the Centre Convencions Internacional in Barcelona; Deep Fountain, the Leopold de Waelplaats, Antwerp, 2006; the threshold-entrance for the Prado Museum extension, 2007; and the Estancias Sumergidas underwater sculpture in the Cortes Sea near Isla Espiritu Santo, in the Mexican state of Baja California, 2010.

Selected solo exhibitions include CAPC Musée d´Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, 1987; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, 1991; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1994; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 1997; Palacio Velázquez, MNCARS, Madrid, 1998; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 1998; Carré d´Art, Musée d´Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 2000; Fundaçao Serralves, Porto, 2002; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2003; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2006; Pinacoteca del Estado de São Paulo, Brazil, 2008, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, 2009; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2011; Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris 2011.

Works in Selected Museums and Collections: ARTIUM, Vitoria; CAPC, Bordeaux; Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes; Centre Georges

Pompidou, Paris; Fundaçao Serralves, Porto; Fundació ‘La Caixa’, Barcelona; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; IMMA, Dublin; Kunsthalle Bern; MACBA, Barcelona; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (Slovenia); MoMA, New York; Musée de Grenoble; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; MNCARS, Madrid; Tate Gallery, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Inhotim, Belo Horizonte (Brasil).

For Night Fishing Cristina Iglesias is represented

by Elba Benitez.

Wolfgang Laib (b. 1950) was born and grew up in Metzingen, southern Germany, where a strong awareness of nature and a focus on a modest, simple existence permeated his life from an early age onwards. Travels to the Near and Far East left a deep impression and they helped crystallise his decision to become an artist. Laib’s oeuvre strongly resonates with non-Western cultures, religious rituals and sacred places. These ancient motifs and forms find their way into the artist’s sculptures in a multitude of different materials such as beeswax and pollen, milk, rice, marble, brass and sealing wax. In 1975, Laib created his first milk-stones and works made of pollen, which he collected in the vicinity of his home in southern Germany. Rice-works were to follow in 1983, with beeswax sculptures appearing four years later. In 1984, Laib’s sculptural work started to include stairs, rice houses and ships made of beeswax, gilded brass, lacquered wood, granite and marble. Elementary and simple in their forms, these sculptures refer to traditional archetypes, altar pieces, memorial shrines and ritual places encountered by Laib during his many travels and sojourns.

For Night Fishing Wolfgang Laib is represented by Konrad Fischer.

Mark Manders was born in 1968 in the Netherlands and currently works and lives in Belgium. At a young age the artist initiated his presently on-going project called ‘Self-Portrait as a Building’ which characterises his oeuvre.

In his artistic practice Manders translates individual existence into sculptural spaces. Thinking of the individual as an architectural space, Manders conceives sculpture as a materialisation of personal emotions and ideas. Nonetheless it is important to

realise that the portrayed person cannot be identified with the artist himself. Certain objects reoccur often throughout his oeuvre, like brick wall, tables, chairs and other everyday objects, as well as the number five.

Manders has collaborated with Zeno X Gallery since 1992. In 2013 he was selected to represent the Netherlands at the Venice Biennial.

He had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute Chicago, and the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, and IMMA in Dublin, Ireland.

In 2008 the solo exhibition ‘The Absence of Mark Manders’ travelled to Kunstverein Hannover, Kunsthall Bergen, S.M.A.K. Ghent (BE) and Kunsthaus Zürich (CH).

Mark Manders was the subject of a major US retrospective organised by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (US) and the Aspen Museum of Art, which was also on view at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2014 he had solo exhibitions at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela, and Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia.

Among others his work is included in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Kunsthaus Zürich; MoMA, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Guggenheim, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

For Night Fishing Mark Manders is represented by Zeno X. Nam June Paik considered the father of video art, pioneered the use of televisual electronic media in art. An integral member of the Fluxus movement alongside John Cage and George Macunias, Paik sought new modes of artistic expression and cultural exchange in his music, performances, and media works. Paik recognised the TV as more than a content delivery mechanism in works such as Zen for TV, a broken television broadcasting only a horizontal line across the screen. He created numerous robots composed of television sets, produced a synthesiser that allowed him and others to manipulate electronic imagery in real-time, and made the first video collages with found imagery. Coining the term ‘the electronic superhighway’, he imagined a world in which human beings near and far would

be connected through radio waves and television broadcast channels – in many ways predicting the internet. Paik explored the widening reach of media in his large-scale video installations that display an assault of flickering of images and masterpieces like Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a groundbreaking live performance broadcast on television in five countries on January 1, 1989, which offered a utopian answer to Orwell’s bleak predictions for the future in his classic novel 1984.

The artist was born in 1932, in Seoul, Korea. He moved to Germany in 1956 to pursue his study of music, and then to New York City in 1964. From the late 1970s Paik had divided his time between the United States and Germany, where he taught at the Düsseldorf State Academy of Art. For Night Fishing Nam June Paik is represented by Galerie Hans Mayer.

Markus Raetz was born in 1941 in Büren an der Aare (Switzerland), Markus Raetz is a painter, sculptor, photographer and poet. His work is characterised by a metaphysical approach in which the perception of form and language play a pivotal role.

Farideh Cadot has represented Raetz since 1981 and has exhibited his work at her galleries in Paris and New York. His work was included in ‘Markus Raetz et photographie’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Museum of Contemporary Art of Nîmes, New Museum of New York or more recently Bibliothèque Nationale de France, curated by Farideh Cadot.

In 1969, Harald Szeeman included Markus Raetz in the renowned exhibition ‘When attitude become form’ at Kunsthalle in Bern.

Raetz has participated in Biennials in Paris (1964 and 1971), Sao Paulo (1977 and 1998), Sidney (1990); and Dokumenta Kassel (1968, 1972 and 1982). He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1988.

For Night Fishing Markus Raetz is represented by Farideh Cadot.

131

Authors Chris Fite-Wassilak (1981) is a writer, critic, and curator based in London. He studied English Literature and Psychology at Trinity College and Visual Arts Practices at IADT in Dublin. Fite-Wassilak is a regular contributor to Art Monthly, Art Review, Art Papers, and frieze. Recent publications include Out of Time, Out of Place: Public Art (Now) (ed. Claire Doherty, Art/Books and Situations, 2015) and Curating Research (eds. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, Open Editions, 2014)

Head Curator of Modern Art at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD). Teeuwisse publishes in the field of modern and contemporary sculpture.

He obtained his PhD in 2004 with a thesis on the development of early modern Dutch sculpture under the influence of French neoclassicism. In 2012 Teeuwisse was appointed to the endowed chair in the History, Theory and Practice of Modern Sculpture at Leiden University. He has been a member of TEFAF’s Vetting Committee since 2003.

Mark Kremer (1963) works as a curator, art writer and art academy tutor (freelance) and is based in Amsterdam. He studied art history, literature and film studies, at the Universities of Groningen and Amsterdam (1982–88).

In 1990–91 he attended the 3rd session of the École du Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, one of the earliest curatorial training programmes in Europe.

Recently he developed/organised the group exhibition When Elephants Come Marching In: Sixties’ Echoes in Today’s Art at De Appel arts centre in Amsterdam, which was an exploration of the historical proximity, and contemporary manifestations of Psychedelia and Conceptualism.

Sydney Picasso has been writing about modern and contemporary art, archaeology and style for many years. She is the co-author, notably, with Claude-François Baudez, of Lost Cities of the Maya, Gallimard (1986). She also wrote Picasso, as if I were a Signature, Hachette (1996) and The Invention of Paradise: The Photographs of Paul-Émile Miot, Editions Daniel Blau (2008). For many years she wrote in French Vogue on contemporary art, as well as in Contemporaine, Art Press, and has contributed many essays such as in The Muse: Francesco Clemente, and Picasso, A Contemporary Dialogue, Andy Warhol: Polo Players, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Ombres Portées, Porteurs d’Ombres: Three Mexican Artists, Centre Culturel du Mexique, Paris. She co-translated John Russell’s ‘Francis Bacon’, and recently, ‘Bite’ by Fabrice Hergott, in Cained and Abled: The Chapman Brothers.

Recently a text on Oceanic fish hooks, ‘A Small Philosophy of Ones’ in Fish Hooks of the South Pacific, Editions Hirmer (2012), ‘From Silverpoint to Silver Screen’ in Andy Warhol Drawings 1950s, Hirmer (2013).

She was Adjunct Director of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Meudon, and a member of URA 5 CNRS, and RCP 394 Recherches sur les Sociétés Amérindiennes, et sur l’Art Rupestre.

She was President of la Société du Jeu de Paume (1997–2004) and is presently a board member of the Amis du Festival d’Automne de Paris, the Prix de Dessin Daniel et Florence Guerlain, and was awarded Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1999.

She is also a member of the International Councils of the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a Trustee of the China Art Foundation, UK.

Damian Taylor (1984) is an artist living and working in London.

His work ranges between sculptural processes, painting, alternative-darkroom and digital photography, writing and video. Recent solo exhibitions include Developed, Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2013); Untitled (nephews), Hobbs Mclaughlin, London (2012); and One More Thing, Hidde van Seggelen Gallery, London (2011). Damian studied fine art at Chelsea College of Art, followed by an MA at the Slade School of Art, and is currently concluding a doctorate at the University of Oxford focused on Medardo Rosso. He has recently completed a research fellowship at Yale University developing his interest in John Constable, landscape and photography.

Jan Teeuwisse (1955) is director of museum Beelden aan Zee (Sculpture by the Sea) and the research centre Sculptuur Instituut, both in The Hague, Netherlands. He studied Art History at the University of Amsterdam and from 1991 to 2002 was

List of works georg baselitz 1 Die große Nacht im Eimer, 1962–63 Oil on canvas 250 × 180 cm Photograph: Jochen Littkemann Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015 2 B.J.M.C. – Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1965 Oil on canvas 162 × 130 cm Photograph: courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015 3 Gruß aus Oslo, 1986 Basswood, coal and oil paint 227 × 54.5 × 27 cm Photograph: Jochen Littkemann Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015 4 Dreieck zwischen Arm und Rumpf, 1977 Oil on canvas 250 × 200 cm Photograph: Frank Oleski Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015 5 Modell für eine Skulptur, 1979–80 Basswood on tempera 178 × 147 × 244 cm Photograph: Frank Oleski Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015

6 Meine neue Mütze, 2003 Cedarwood and oilpaint 310.5 × 83.5 × 107 cm Photograph: Jochen Littkemann Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015 7 Torso Rosa, 1993 Painted limewood 118 × 64 × 53 cm Photograph: Philippe Servent Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015 8 Marokkaner, 2012 Fir and oil paint 172.5 × 108.5 × 84 cm Photograph: Jochen Littkemann Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015 9 Yellow Song, 2013 Bronze 310.2 × 149 × 108.5 cm Photograph: Jochen Littkemann Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg © Georg Baselitz 2015

tony cragg

richard deacon

1 Bodicea, 1989 Bronze, wood 87 × 195 × 190 cm Photograph: Michael Richter Courtesy Studio Tony Cragg

1 The Heart‘s in The Right Place, 1983 Galvanised steel 205 × 310 × 250 cm Photograph: courtesy Richard Deacon Private collection

2 Minster, 1992 Steel 285 × 250 × 250 cm Photograph: Michael Richter Courtesy Studio Tony Cragg 3 Complete Omnivore, 1993 Plaster, wood, steel 160 × 200 × 200 cm Photograph: Michael Richter Courtesy Studio Tony Cragg 4 Congregation, 1999 Wood, metal hook 280 × 290 × 240 cm Photograph: Niels Schabrod Courtesy Studio Tony Cragg 5 Early Form, 1993 Bronze 75 × 110 × 225 cm Photograph: Charles Duprat Courtesy Studio Tony Cragg 6 Caught Dreaming, 2006 Bronze 159 × 285 × 153 cm Photograph: Michael Richter Courtesy Studio Tony Cragg 7 Frame, 2012 Wood 167 × 140 × 176 cm Photograph: Michael Richter Courtesy Studio Tony Cragg 8 Wild Relatives, 2012 Bronze 104 × 78 × 79 cm Courtesy Studio Tony Cragg

2 Double Talk, 1987 Laminated wood, vinyl 244 × 844 × 520 cm Photograph: courtesy Richard Deacon Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, NYC 3 What Could Make Me Feel This Way (A), 1993 Laminated and bent wood 280 × 560 × 485 cm Photograph: Helge Mundt Collection Sprengel Museum, Hannover 4 Nothing Is Allowed, 1994 Stainless steel 120 × 28.5 × 140 cm Photograph: courtesy Richard Deacon Collection L.A. Louver, Venice/CA 5 From Tomorrow, 1996 Welded polycarbonate 102 × 156 × 134 cm Photograph: Dave Morgan Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo 6 Kind Of Blue (A), 2001 Glazed ceramic 149 × 102 × 80 cm Photograph: Dave Morgan Collection Arts Council, Southbank Centre, London

7 Infinity #33, 2008 Stainless steel 288 × 254 × 2.5 cm Photograph: ‘Nuage’ at Musée Réattu, Arles, 2013 Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg 8 Restless, 2005 Wood, stainless steel 158 × 374 × 257 cm Photograph: courtesy Richard Deacon Collection Tate, London Installation Tate St Ives

by Markus Leith & Andrew Dunkley 9 Installation at Böhm Chapel, Cologne, 2014, from left to right: I Remember I (2012) Wood, stainless steel 400 × 136 × 71 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thomas Schulte I Remember III (2013) Wood, stainless steel 172 × 400 × 122 cm Private collection I Remember II (2012) Wood, stainless steel 121 × 400 × 137 cm Photograph: Werner Hannappel Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thomas Schulte

cristina iglesias 1 Deep Fountain, 1997–2006 Polichromed cement, resin, water 137 × 328 cm Photograph: Kristien Daem Location: Leopold de Wael Platz, Antwerp 2 Habitación vegetal III, 2005 Bronze powder, polyester resin, glass fiber Variable dimensions Photograph: Attilio Maranzano Installation view MNCARS, Madrid 3 Corredor suspendido I, II, III, 2006 Braided iron wire and steel cables Corredor suspendido I: 925 × 795 cm Corredor suspendido II: 233 × 600 × 730 cm Corredor suspendido III: 740 × 425 cm Photograph: Attilio Maranzano Installation view at MNCARS, Madrid 4 Vegetation Room Inhotim, 2010–12 Stainless steel, bronze, polyester resin, fiberglass, water 900 × 900 × 300 cm Photograph: Pedro Motta Location: Centro de Arte Contemporánea, Inhotim

135

5 Towards the ground, 2008 Bronce powder, resin and water 243 × 243 cm Photograph: Cortesía Castello di Ama Site specific installation at Castello di Ama, Italy 6 Pozo II, 2011 Resin with bronze powder, motor, water, metallic structure, stainless steel container, system 114 × 120 × 120 cm Photograph: Cristina Iglesias and Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid 7 Pozo I (Variación 2), 2011 Bronze poder, resin, motor, water metallic structure, stainless steel, container, electrical system 120 × 123 × 123 cm Photograph: Taka Studio Installation view at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris 8 Tres Aguas (A Project for Toledo), 2014 Stainless steel, water Photograph: Attilio Maranzano Site specific installation at the Torre del Agua, Toledo (this project is installed in three different locations in the city) 9 Puerta-Umbral, 2006–07 Bronze, automatic hydraulic mechanism 600 × 880 × 350 cm Photograph: Attilio Maranzano Location: Prado Museum, Madrid

wolfgang laib 1 Without Place – Without Time – Without Body (detail), 2007 Complete installation appr.

3600 mountains of rice, 5 mountains of pollen from hazelnut Installation view 2007 at Konrad Fischer Galerie Düsseldorf Photograph: Konrad Fischer Galerie Courtesy: Wolfgang Laib 2 Pollen from Hazelnut, 2013 Installation view at Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013/Installation view with Wolfgang Laib at Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013 Photograph:Jason Mandella Courtesy: Wolfgang Laib 3 Installation view of a beeswax zikkurat and fleet of brass ships at Basilica of St. Apollinare, Ravenna, 2014 Photograph: Carolyn Laib Courtesy: Wolfgang Laib 4 From the Known to the Unknown – To Where Is Your Oracle Leading You, 2014 (Left: the artist sitting down) Beeswax tunnel, appr. 40m Installation at La Ribaute, the studio of the German artist Anselm Kiefer Photograph: Carolyn Laib Courtesy: Wolfgang Laib

5 Wolfgang Laib collecting pollen in Southern Germany Photograph: Carolyn Laib Courtesy: Wolfgang Laib 6 Rice Mountains, India, 2007 Photograph: Wolfgang Laib Courtesy: Wolfgang Laib mark manders 1 Inhabited for a Survey ( first floor plan from self-portrait as a building), 1986–96–2002 Writing materials, erasers, painting tools, scissors 8 × 267 × 90 cm Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift by Howard and Donna Stone 2 Fox/Mouse/Belt, 1992 Ceramics, mixed media 110 × 40 × 16 cm Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent 3 Fragment from self-portrait as a building, 1994 Ceramics 180 × 100 × 40 cm Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp Fondation Louis Vuitton

4 Several drawings on top of each other, 1998–2002 Bronze, pencil on paper 40 × 480 × 60 cm Photograph: Peter MacCallum Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (purchased with funds provided by The Buddy Taub Foundation, Jill and Dennis A. Roach, Directors) 5 Room with Chair and Factory, 2003–08 Wood, iron, rubber, painted polyester, painted ceramic, painted canvas, unpainted canvas, painted wig, chair, offset print on paper 318 × 240 × 405 cm Photograph: Brian Forrest Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp & Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York 6 Ramble-room Chair, 2010 Wood, painted epoxy, offsetprint on paper, chair 85 × 180 × 67 cm Photograph: Peter Cox Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp 7 Mind Study, 2010–11 Wood, painted epoxy, painted ceramic, painted canvas, iron 170 × 240 × 500 cm Photograph: David Huguenin Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp & Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht

8 Landscape with Fake Dictionary, 2012–14 Painted wood 64.5 × 58 × 78 cm Photograph: Peter Cox Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp Kravis Collection 9 Working Table, 2012–13 Painted epoxy, painted wood, painted canvas, iron, offset print on paper 368 × 142 × 225 cm Photograph: Jan Kempenaers Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp & Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York nam june paik 1 TV Buddha, 1974 Video installation, wood Exhibition: 160 × 215 × 80 cm Pedestal: 60 × 200 × 80 cm Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2 Hommage aan Stanley Brouwn, 1984 Video installation 32'26" Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 3 Sun, Moon, Earth, 1990 Video installation, aluminum, monitors, plastic flowers, marble, electric 215 × 38 / 215 × 175 × 53 / 230 × 185 cm Photograph: Galerie Hans Mayer Courtesy Galerie Hans Mayer

4 Alt Heidelberg, 1991 Video installation 274 × 246 × 81 cm Photograph: Galerie Hans Mayer Courtesy Galerie Hans Mayer 5 Cro-Magnum Man, 1991 Mixed media, monitors 167.6 × 149.9 × 81.3 cm Photograph: Galerie Hans Mayer Courtesy Galerie Hans Mayer 6 Internet Dweller: mpbd.three. cgsspv, 1994 Wood, monitors, 1 DVD projection 125 × 130 cm Photograph: Bob Goedewaagen Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, purchase Fonds W. van Rede 2007 7 Early Bird with Hierographics, 1996 Neonsculpture Photograph: Galerie Hans Mayer Courtesy Galerie Hans Mayer 8 Diamond Sat, 1998 3 monitors, 1 channel, neon bulbs, 8 ft fluorescent light fixtures 610 × 610 × 610 cm Photograph: Galerie Hans Mayer Courtesy Galerie Hans Mayer

137

List of illustrations markus raetz 1 1 B N° VII, 1989 Magnolia leaf (mouth), charcoal on cardboard, wooden frame, glass 95.5 × 85 × 6.5 cm Collection FC Courtesy Farideh Cadot & the Artist 2 Nichtrauch, 1990–92 Cast iron from a plaster model Base: cardboard tube, plywood 34.3 × 45.7 × 24.3 cm Base: 162 × 22 cm Private collection Courtesy Farideh Cadot & the Artist 3 Kopf, 1992 Cast iron 28 × 20.3 × 20.3 cm/pedestal H 142.5 cm Photograph: Farideh Cadot and Markus Raetz Courtesy Farideh Cadot 4 Ring, 2009–10 Cast brass patinated 45 × 46 × 8.3 cm Ed. 4/6 Collection Galerie FC Paris Courtesy Farideh Cadot & Artist 5 Si-No, 1996 Cast brass patinated in black, waxed 78 × 150 × 118 mm Ed. 3/6 Private Collection, Paris Courtesy Farideh Cadot & Artist

mark kremer p. 11 Einar Jónsson, Remorse, 1911 Plaster 118 × 111 × 48 cm Image courtesy The Einar Jónsson Museum p. 14 Hans Josephsohn, Untitled (Angela), 2000 Small half-figure (Reg. nr. 3105) 63 × 34 × 25 cm Brass Ed. 2/6 + 2ap

Small half-figure (Reg. nr. 3122) 61.5 × 35 × 23 cm Brass Ed. 3/6 + 2ap Image: Kesselhaus Josephsohn/ Galerie Felix Lehner Courtesy: Josephsohn estate, Hauser & Wirth, Kesselhaus Josephsohn/ Galerie Felix Lehner p. 17 Franz West, Passstück, 1975 Model Otto Kobalek at Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna Image: Friedl Kubelka Copyright: legal successor of the artist

p. 17 Siobhán Hapaska, A wolf, an olive tree and circumstances, 2014 Aluminium scaffold tubes, synthetic wolf fur, olive tree, vibratory motor, aluminium section, military ratchet straps 250 × 450 × 260 cm Image: Will Thom Courtesy: AndréhnSchiptjenko, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Kerlin Gallery, Hidde van Seggelen p. 18 Chris Burden, Oh, Dracula, 1974 Utah Museum of Art, Salt Lake City, Utah Image: Chris Burden Courtesy Gagosian Gallery p. 19 Suchan Kinoshita, Untitled (Hourglass), 2009 Handblown glass, laundry conditioner 50 × 21.5 cm Image: Sylvain Deleu Courtesy Hidde van Seggelen

damian taylor All Images are photographs taken by Damian Taylor from the book Il Caso Medardo Rosso

by Ardengo Soffici, 1909 jan teeuwisse p. 34 Studio Germaine Richier 36, avenue de Châtillon Paris, 1954 Photograph: V P S Esser

Studio Ossip Zadkine 100, rue d’Assas Paris, 1954 Photograph: V P S Esser

Gypsothèque Aristide Maillol Rudier Foundry Paris, 1954 Photograph: V P S Esser

Studio Charles Despiau 49, rue Brillat-Savarin Paris, 1954 Photograph: V P S Esser

Joseph Beuys, Stuhl mit Fett, p. 36 Caspar Berger, Torso ZZM/ 1963 Self-portrait 6, 2008 Block Beuys Bronze and concrete Hessisches Landesmuseum 222 × 90 × 80 cm Darmstadt Image: Wolfgang Fuhrmannek Collection Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague, © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn/ The Netherlands Pictorights NL Photograph: Erik & Petra Hesmerg

6 Paquet III, 2011–12 Mixed media 172.6 × 31.7 × 19 cm Photograph: Farideh Cadot and Markus Raetz Courtesy Farideh Cadot

139

This publication has been realised with dedication of the artists, the writers, the galleries, the curator and in particular: Frederique van Oorschot, Damian Taylor, and Adrien Vasquez. Night Fishing is published by tefaf, Broekwal 64, Helvoirt, The Netherlands, on the occasion of the exhibition Night Fishing at TEFAF 2015 in Maastricht. Night Fishing is curated by writer and collector Sydney Picasso who spends her time between Europe, the Americas and the rest of the world. The concept for Night Fishing was developed by Hidde van Seggelen, who lives and works in Fulham, London. The book is designed by John Morgan studio, who are departing from their office on platform 1, Paddington Station in West London. The typeface in this book is Lexicon, designed

by Amsterdam born graphic- and type designer Bram de Does who gained great international acclaim with his publication Typefoundries in the Netherlands. Publisher and printer Lecturis in Eindhoven has printed Night Fishing, including the cover, which will glow in the dark after the sun has set or lights have been switched off.

ISBN 978-90-75375-21-3. ©2015 tefaf (publication). ©2015 the Authors (text). All rights reserved.