Changing face of sculpture
Goes to see and finds intriguing highlights at the first incarnation of an ambitious idea
Ayoung, blonde girl stands beside a swathe of glorious English parkland, looking disconsolately downwards, her leg in a splint, clutching a collection box with the words “Please Give Generously”. She’s not a real girl, of course. Charity, a 21ft-high replica of the once-commonplace Spastics Society collection box is one of Damien Hirst’s best-known works and it has a typically cruel twist in that the door at the back is hanging open, the crowbar with which we suppose the contents were looted, standing nearby.
Hirst, the one-time enfant terrible of British art, raised in Leeds and a Yorkshireman to the core, has finally made it to the holy of holies of British sculpture – Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP): the spiritual home of great Yorkshire sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
And far from outraging the park’s mainstream regular audience, his arrival, as part of the first Yorkshire Sculpture International, has been met with enthusiasm. Visitor numbers, already buoyant, have gone up.
So has the king of the YBAs, notorious for his stuffed sharks and flayed cows’ heads, become safe “heritage” art? Not entirely. His works’ synthetic surfaces and virulent colours still look stridently out of place, but in a way Middle England can now very much cope with. That’s one of many intriguing revelations provided by the first incarnation of this ambitious festival, which is spread over four venues: Leeds Art Gallery, the Henry Moore Institute, Hepworth Wakefield and YSP.
Another vital insight is that sculpture today is about much more than the sort of robust, organic forms exemplified by the likes of Moore and Hepworth. Indeed, much of the work by the festival’s 18 artists from 13 countries – with many works commissioned specially – is so fragile
and fugitive, it barely takes tangible form. Take Japanese artist Nobuko Tsuchiya’s poetic assemblages at Leeds Art Gallery. Their temporary-seeming arrangements of apparently valueless materials – wire, glass, fluff, rusting metal – have been put together with a teasing, laconic elegance.
Where marble and bronze were long ago replaced as the favoured materials for sculpture by steel, plastic and even polystyrene, it seems that now there’s virtually no substance that can’t be turned into sculpture. Israeli artist Tamar Harpaz wires up random objects – electric fires, sheets of glass – to produce clanking, whirring noises that are intended to draw you through her loose, floor-based 3D collages.
Rashid Johnson creates mounds of yellow shea butter (used in cosmetics) with a truly monumental impact, while fellow American Cauleen Smith draws out the political implications of Seventies’ revolving disco balls.
You can smell German artist Wolfgang Laib’s installation at Hepworth Wakefield from two rooms away. The nutty aroma of rice will never hit you as powerfully as in this room-filling work, in which minute piles of rice have been arranged with truly devotional patience over the floor. Its loose grid-like formation taps into the spiritual resonances of a substance on which billions rely for sustenance.
American artist Jimmie Durham has challenged the gallery’s magnificent collection of pieces by Hepworth and Moore, by dumping a massive olive tree root beside iconic wood works by these great sculptors. If it seems to mock their doctrine of “truth to materials” – the idea that wooden sculpture, for example, should exploit its grain and texture – Durham’s is less cruel critique than affectionate homage.
These are all highlights of a festival that consistently intrigues, but doesn’t quite cohere into the single exhibition spread over four venues its organisers intend. And while it gives a fair view of cutting-edge sculpture today, it essentially presents a set of refinements and variations on existing forms and ideas – perhaps the state of art today.
Paradoxically, it is with the oldest works in the festival – YSP’s major exhibition on the great American sculptor David Smith (1906-1965) – that we get a genuine sense of originality. Smith’s early works still bear the strong influence of Picasso. But the final pieces: gravity-defying and completely abstract juxtapositions of cuboid steel forms that seem to hang weightless over YSP’s lawns, still project a dazzling sense of immediacy and sheer newness.