John De Andrea sculptures that breathe
While John De Andrea’s polyester and glass fibre human figures, with their
cold realism, are known and easily identifiable, the same cannot be said of the artist who creates them. Indeed the man is very reserved and prone to introspection rather than commenting on his work. Erik Verhagen met him at his home in Colorado and analyses his work in the context of 1960s and 70s American art, and brings us the segments of an intimate conversation. The Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Gallery in Paris is exhibiting his work from 8 June to 21 July.
John De Andrea lives with his wife Lorraine an hour’s drive out of Denver in Colorado, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and on the edge of a small town called Loveland - a name that only Americans could invent.The man is reticent and wary of words – let’s say, as we shall see later, that he learnt to do without them long ago – but he does show generosity in dialogue, and does not hesitate to confide, even confess, on the subject of episodes of his artistic trajectory, as well as his conflicted relationship to (non) verbalisation. These episodes and relationships cannot be separated from childhood events, some of which are extremely painful and which he decided it was useful - if not crucial - to unearth during the April weekend spent in his company. Yet the man does not like to pose as a victim; it is enough to have witnessed the force and the resistance (especially to the limits imposed by his disability) that inhabit his body and mind, to be able to gauge to what extent his hyperrealist sculptures of the last fifty years, with their propensity for pleasing forms, are woven through with auto-biographical considerations. They emanate inertia and a seeming lack of effort; bodies are usually lying, sitting or standing, but seldom in movement.
AN IDEAL OF BEAUTY
De Andrea’s work is a mystery. It is a mystery in the eyes of a history of Western contemporary art that imagined, even before the 1950s, that it had finished with the representation of the human body, in the most realistic sense of the term. And yet neither American Abstract, Minimalism, nor Conceptual Art, signalling its end, were able to eradicate it, notwithstanding some of the keepers of the shrine. The human body was very much in evidence in the art of the 1960s, at the very moment when De Andrea was laying the foundations for his sculptural work. It was present in the different variants of body art and other performance types, and it
was absent as a result of practices like Minimalism that were merely suggestive (e.g. doubles, imprints, projections), or metaphorical. But the representation of the body as a “faithful” three-dimensional one remained very marginal. The way Jean-Claude Lebensztejn expresses it, “hyperrealist artefacts were from their beginnings of another age; they are of our time by not being time-bound” (1). Still, it is worth noting that some artists had been faithful to it and had laid the groundwork. To stay in the American sculptural context, we can mention Edward Kienholz and George Segal. Likewise Marcel Duchamp, whose posthumous Étant donnés were brought out to the public in the late 1960s – just the period when De Andrea embarked on the hyperrealist path. What De Andrea says is simple. Some will say simplistic. He has, however, the advantage of being coherent, pragmatic and respectful of technical challenges. He has absolute honesty and unswerving humility. No grandstanding, no justifications, no getting bogged down in theory. His quest is at once a basic and impossible one: the attempt by means of sculpture and painting – the realism effect owes a lot to the use of the right colours on the figures’ skins – to achieve an ideal of beauty. Nothing more. And that a realistic perfection should accompany this quest. His ambition, simultaneously humble and immoderate, as he himself said many times, is to give the impression and the illusion that his sculptures breathe.
A DISTURBING EXPERIENCE
The fascinating thing about art of the 1960s and 70s is that, as its history gets rewritten, some of the differences fade and the parameters and goalposts shift. If for example one rereads Michael Fried’s famous essay Art and Objecthood in the light of a rediscovery of De Andrea’s work (the latter participated in Documenta 5 in 1972 and caused a furore together with Arden Anderson and Norma Murphy), it can actually be enlightening in that regard, given that the American art historian’s indictment of Minimalist art could easily be turned on the work of our hyperrealist sculptor. In fact, one of the argu- ments advanced by Fried is that Minimalist, or Literalist art, relies on an anthropomorphic and theatrical impetus. Here is an extract: “The answer I want to propose is this: the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art. Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. […] The experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder. […] The object, not the beholder, must remain the center of focus of the situation; but the situation itself belongs to the beholder – it is his situation. The presence of literalist art […] is basically a theatrical effect or quality – a kind of stage presence. It is a function, not just of the obtrusiveness and, often, even aggressiveness of literalist work, but of the special complicity that that work extorts from the beholder. Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder take it into account, that he take it seriously - and when the fulfilment of that demand consists simply in being aware of it and, so to speak, in acting accordingly. […] Here again the experience of being distanced by the work in question seems crucial: the beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended - and unexacting - relation as subject to the impassive object on the wall or floor. In fact, being distanced by such objects is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly - for example, in somewhat darkened rooms - can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in just this way (2)”. Coming across one of De Andrea’s pieces will always be a disturbing experience, whether in a museum or gallery in any case, and even more so in a domestic setting, for example in the subdued light of a sunrise in Loveland. These are the conditions, virtually ideal, in which the unheimlich nature of the work momentarily asserts itself most powerfully.
BETWEEN HUMAN AND OBJECT
De Andrea’s sculptures and our perception of them should be experienced over time – a time for absorption and transformation. This is the expanded time fostered by literalist objects and condemned by Fried. It can be broken down into different stages. During the first stage, the surprise effect can involve a sensation of fright, followed in the second by a steady detachment from the initial illusion, leading to a gradual realisation of the artificial component. The feeling of fright is probably due to the “theatrical” quality of the artist’s approach and its illusionist if not cinematographic aspects. A good many cinematic impressions came to mind as I encountered his sculptures alone after a night of insomnia in the semi-darkness: Georges Franju