CARVING MODELING CASTING ASSEMBLAGE - …hssadv.prenhall.com/take_a_look/sayre/Chapter13.pdf · MODELING CASTING ASSEMBLAGE ... Stewards (Fig. 363), projects only a little dis-tance

CHAPTER 13

272

SCULPTURECARVING

W O R K S I N P R O G R E S S

Jim Sardonis’s Reverence

MODELING

CASTING

ASSEMBLAGE

W O R K S I N P R O G R E S S

Eva Hesse’s Contingent

EARTHWORKS

T H E C R I T I C A L P R O C E S S

Thinking About Sculpture

All of the media we have considered thus far—drawing, printmaking, and paint-

ing—are generally considered two-dimensional media. In this chapter, we turn to

a discussion of the three-dimensional media and their relation to the space we our-

selves occupy. Sculpture, the chief of these, is one of the oldest and most enduring of

all the arts. All the types of sculpture we will study in this chapter—carving, modeling,

casting, construction and assemblage, and earthworks—employ two basic processes:

They are either subtractive or additive in nature. In subtractive processes, the sculptor

begins with a mass of material larger than the finished work and removes material, or

subtracts from that mass until the work achieves its finished form. Carving is a sub-

tractive process. In additive processes, the sculptor builds the work, adding material as

the work proceeds. Modeling, construction,and assemblage are additive processes.Casting, in which material in a liquid stateis poured into a mold and allowed toharden, has additive aspects, but as we shallsee, it is in many ways a process of its own.Earthworks often utilize both additive andsubtractive processes.

In addition to these processes, there arethree basic ways in which we experiencesculpture in three-dimensional space—asrelief, in the round, and as an environment.If you recall the process for making wood-block prints, which is described in Chapter11, you will quickly understand that theraised portion of a woodblock plate standsout in relief against the background. Thewoodblock plate is, in essence, a carvedrelief sculpture, a sculpture that has three-dimensional depth but is meant to be seenfrom only one side.

Among the great masters of relief sculp-ture were the Egyptians, who often deco-rated the walls of their temples and burialcomplexes with intricate raised relief sculp-ture, most of which was originally painted.One of the best preserved of these is the so-called “White Chapel,” built by Senwosret Iin about 1930 B.C.E. at Karnak, Thebes,near the modern city of Luxor in the NileRiver valley. Like many great archeologicalfinds it has survived, paradoxically, becauseit was destroyed. In this case, 550 years afterits construction, King Amenhotep III dis-mantled it and and used it as filling materialfor a monumental gateway for his own templeat Karnak. Archeologists have thus been able toreconstruct it almost whole. The scene here (Fig.362) is a traditional one, showing the SenwosretI in the company of two Egyptian dieties sur-rounded by hieroglyphs, the pictorial Egyptianwriting system. On the left is Amun, the chiefgod of Thebes, recognizable by the two plumesthat form his headdress and by his erect penis.In the middle, leading Senwosret, is Atum, thecreator god. By holding the hieroglyph ankh (asort of cross with a rounded top) to SenwosretI’s nose, he symbolically grants him life.

Like the Egytpians, the Greeks used thesculptural art of relief as a means to decorateand embellish the beauty of their great

Chapter 13 Sculpture 273

Fig. 362 Senwosret I led by Atum to Amun-Re,from the White Chapel at Karnak, Thebes. c. 1930 B.C.E.Limestone, raised relief, H. 13 ft. 6 in. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

274 Part III The Fine Arts Media

architectural achievements. Forms and figurescarved in relief are spoken of as done in eitherlow relief or high relief. (Some people prefer theFrench terms, bas-relief and haut-relief.) Thevery shallow depth of the Egyptian raisedreliefs is characteristic of low relief, thoughtechnically any sculpture that extends from theplane behind it less than 180° is considered lowrelief. High relief sculptures project forwardfrom their base by at least half their depth, andoften several elements will be fully in the round.Thus, even though it possesses much greaterdepth than the Eygyptian raised relief at Kar-nak, the fragment from the frieze, or sculpturalband, on the Parthenon called the Maidens andStewards (Fig. 363), projects only a little dis-tance from the background, and no sculpturalelement is detached entirely from it. It is thusstill considered low relief. By contrast, AtlasBringing Herakles the Golden Apples (Fig.364), from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, isan example of high relief. Here, the figures pro-ject from the background at least half their cir-cumference, and other elements, like the leftarm of Atlas, the right-hand figure, float free.

Of the two, the relief from the Temple ofZeus is the simpler and more direct in carvingstyle. It depicts the moment in the story of

Fig. 363 Maidens and Stewards, fragment of the Panathenaic Procession,from the east frieze of the Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens, 447–438 B.C.E.

Marble, H. approx. 43 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Marburg/Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 364 Atlas Bringing Herakles the Golden Apples, from the Temple of Zeus, Olympia, c. 470–456 B.C.E.

Marble, H. 63 in.Archaeological Museum, Olympia. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

Herakles when the giant Atlas returns from theHesperides with the Golden Apples of im-mortality. In Atlas’s absence, Herakles hadassumed the giant’s normal task of holding upthe heavens on his back, assisted by a pillowthat rests upon his shoulders. In the relief, hisprotectress, Athena, the goddess of wisdom,helps Herakles to support the weight of the skyso that he can exchange places with Atlas. Thefrontality of Athena’s body is countered by thepure profile of her face, a profile repeated inthe positioning of both Herakles and Atlas.Compared to the Egyptian relief sculpture atKarnak, where the head and legs are in profile,and the body squarely frontal, the frieze fromOlympia seems highly naturalistic. Still, thecomposition of this relief is dominated by rightangles, and as a result, it is stiff and rigid, as ifthe urge to naturalism, realized, for instance, inthe figure of Herakles, is as burdened by tradi-tion as Herakles is himself weighed down.

The naturalism of the Parthenon frieze ismuch more fully developed. Figures overlapone another and are shown in three-quarterview, making the space seem far more naturaland even deeper than that at Olympia, thoughit is, in fact, much shallower. The figures them-selves seem almost to move in slow procession,and the garments they wear reveal real fleshand limbs beneath them. The carving of thisdrapery invites a play of light and shadow thatfurther activates the surface, increasing thesense of movement.

Perhaps because the human figure has tra-ditionally been one of the chief subjects ofsculpture, movement is one of the definingcharacteristics of the medium. Even in reliefsculptures it is as if the figures want to escapethe confines of their base. Sculpture in-the-round literally demands movement. It is meantto be seen from all sides, and the viewer mustmove around it. Giovanni da Bologna’s TheRape of the Sabine Women (Fig. 365) isimpossible to represent in a single photograph.As its figures rise in a spiral, the sculpturechanges dramatically as the viewer walksaround it and experiences it from each side. Itis in part the horror of the scene that lends thesculpture its power, for as it draws us aroundit, in order to see more of what is happening,it involves us both physically and emotionallyin the scene it depicts.


Fig. 365 Giovanni da Bologna,The Rape of the Sabine Women, completed 1583.

Marble, height 13 ft. 6 in.Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

Looked at from different points of view,David Smith’s Blackburn: Song of an IrishBlacksmith (Figs. 366 and 367) appears to betwo entirely different works of art. The frontalview is airy and open, the work seeming tofloat in space like a series of notes and chords,while the profile view reveals the sculpture asdensely compacted, a confusing jumble offorms from which two seem to want to escape,one at the top left, the other on the extremeright. The frontal view is almost symmetrical,the profile view radically asymmetrical.

The viewer is even more engaged in theother sculptural media we will discuss in thischapter—environments. An environment is asculptural space into which you can physicallyenter either indoors, where it is generallyreferred to as an installation, or out-of-doors,where its most common form is that of theearthwork. With these terms in mind—relief


sculpture, sculpture in-the-round, and environ-ments—we can now turn to the specific meth-ods of making sculpture.

CARVINGCarving is a subtractive process in which thematerial being carved is chipped, gouged, orhammered away from an inert, raw block ofmaterial. Wood and stone are the two mostcommon carving materials. Both materials pres-ent problems for the artist to solve. Sculptorswho work in wood must pay attention to thewood’s grain, since wood will only split in thedirection it grew. To work “against the grain” isto risk destroying the block. Sculptors whowork in stone must take into account the differ-ent characteristics of each type of stone. Sand-stone is gritty and coarse, marble soft and

Figs. 366 and 367 David Smith, Blackburn: Song of an Irish Blacksmith,frontal view above; profile view at right, 1949–1950.

Steel and bronze, 46¼ � 49¾ � 24 in.Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany.

© Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

crystalline, granite dense and hard. Each mustbe dealt with differently. For Michelangelo, eachstone held within it the secret of what it mightbecome as a sculpture. “The best artist,” hewrote, “has no concept which some single mar-ble does not enclose within its mass. . . . Takingaway . . . brings out a living figure in alpine andhard stone, which . . . grows the more as thestone is chipped away.” But carving is so diffi-cult that even Michelangelo often failed to real-ize his concept. In his “Atlas” Slave (Fig. 368),he has given up. The block of stone resistsMichelangelo’s desire to transform it, as if refus-ing to release the figure it holds enslaved within.Yet, arguably, the power of Michelangelo’simagination consists in his willingness to leavethe figure unrealized. Atlas, condemned to bear-ing the weight of the world on his shoulders for-ever as punishment for challenging the Greekgods, is literally held captive in the stone.

Nativity (Fig. 369), by the Taos, New Mex-ico-born Hispanic sculptor Patrocinio Barela, iscarved out of the aromatic juniper tree thatgrows across the arid landscape of the South-west. Barela’s forms are clearly dependent onthe original shape of the juniper itself. The linesof his figures, verging on abstraction, follow thenatural contours of the wood and its grain. Thegroup of animals at the far left, for instance,are supported by a natural fork in thebranch that is incorporated into the sculp-ture. The human figures in Barela’s workare closely related to santos, images of thesaints. Those who carve santos are knownas santeros. Both have been an importantpart of Southwestern Hispanic culturesince the seventeenth century, serving togive concrete identity to theabstractions of Catholic religiousdoctrine. By choosing to workin local wood, Barela ties thelocal world of the everydayto the universal realm ofreligion, uniting materialreality and thespiritual.


Fig. 368 Michelangelo, “Atlas” Slave, c. 1513–1520.Marble, 9 ft. 2 in. Accademia, Florence. Nimatallah/Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 369 Patrocinio Barela, Nativity, c. 1966.Juniper wood, H. tallest figure 33 in. Private collection.

This desire to unify the material and thespiritual worlds has been a goal of sculpturefrom the earliest times. In Egypt, for example,stone funerary figures (Fig. 370) were carvedto bear the ka, or individual spirit, of thedeceased into the eternity of the afterlife. Thepermanence of the stone was felt to guaranteethe ka’s immortality. For the ancient Greeks,only the gods were immortal. What tied theworld of the gods to the world of humanitywas beauty itself, and the most beautiful thingof all was the perfectly proportioned, usuallyathletic male form.

Egyptian sculpture was known to theGreeks as early as the seventh century B.C.E.,and Greek sculpture is indebted to it, but theGreeks quickly evolved a much more realis-tic, or naturalistic style. In other words, com-pared with the rigidity of the Egyptianfigures, this Kouros, or youth (Fig. 371), isboth more at ease and more lifelike. Despitethe fact that his feet have been lost, we cansee that the weight of his body is on his left


leg, allowing his right leg to relax completely.This youth, then, begins to move—we seehim shift his weight to his left foot to take astep in one of the earliest examples of theprinciple of ponderation, or weight shift. Thesculpture begins to be animated, to portraynot just the figure but its movement. It is asif the stone has begun to come to life. Fur-thermore, the Kouros is much more anatom-ically correct than his Egyptian forebear. Infact, by the fifth century B.C.E., the practice ofmedicine had established itself as a respectedfield of study in Greece, and anatomicalinvestigations were commonplace. At thetime that the Kouros was sculpted, the bodywas an object of empirical study, and its partswere understood to be unified in a single,flowing harmony.

This flowing harmony was further devel-oped by Praxiteles, without doubt the mostfamous sculptor of his day. In works such as

Fig. 370 Pair Statue of Menkaure and His Queen, Khamerernebty II,Egypt, Dynasty IV, c. 2548–2530 B.C.E.

Giza, Valley Temple of Menkaure. Graywackle, height 54½ in.Harvard-Museum Expedition. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Fig. 371 Kouros (also known as the Kritios Boy), c. 480 B.C.E.Marble statue, height 36 in. Acropolis Museum, Athens. (Inv. no. 698).

Hermes with the Infant Dionysos (Fig. 372),he shifted the weight of the body even moredynamically, so that Hermes’s weight falls onhis right foot, raising his right hip. This shift inweight is countered by a turn of the shoulders,so that the figure stands in a sort of S-curve.Known as contrapposto, or counter-balance,this pose became a favorite in the Renaissance,as artists strove to achieve greater and greaternaturalistic effects.

Such naturalism is perhaps nowhere morefully realized in Greek sculpture than in thegrouping Three Goddesses (Fig. 373) on theeast pediment, or triangular roof gable, of theParthenon. Though actually freestandingwhen seen from the ground, as it is displayedtoday in the British Museum, with the wall ofthe pediment behind them, the goddesses—commonly believed to be Aphrodite, the god-dess of beauty, her mother Dione, and Hestia,the goddess of the hearth—would have lookedas if they had been carved in high relief. Asdaylight shifted across the surface of theirbodies, it is easy to imagine the goddessesseeming to move beneath the swirling, cling-ing, almost transparent folds of cloth, as ifbrought to life by light itself.


Fig. 372 Praxiteles, Hermes and Dionysos, c. 330 B.C.E.Marble, height 7 ft. 1 in. National Archeological Museum, Athens, Greece.

Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 373 Three Goddesses, from the east pediment of the Parthenon,Acropolis, Athens, c. 438–432 B.C.E.

Marble, over-lifesize. British Museum, London. London/Bridgeman Art Library.

Jim Sardonis’s Reverence

Stone is a symbol of permanence, and of all stones, black granite

is one of the hardest and most durable. Thus, in 1988, when

sculptor Jim Sardonis chose the stone out of which to carve his


tribute to the whale, Reverence (Fig. 375), black granite seemed the most suitable medium.Not only was its color close to that of the whales themselves, but the permanence of thestone stood in stark contrast to the species’ threatened survival. Sardonis wanted the workto have a positive impact. He wanted it to help raise the national consciousness about the

plight of the whale, and he wanted to use thepiece as a means to raise funds for both theEnvironmental Law Foundation and theNational Wildlife Federation, organizationsthat both actively engaged in wildlife conser-vation efforts.

The idea for the sculpture first came toSardonis in a dream—two whale tales risingout of the sea. When he woke he saw thesculpture as rising out of the land, as if theland was an imaginary ocean surface. And,surprisingly, whales were not unknown to thearea. In 1849, while constructing the firstrailroad between Rutland and Burlington,Vermont, workers unearthed a mysterious setof bones near the town of Charlotte. Buriednearly ten feet below the surface in a thickblue clay, they were ultimately determined tobe the bones of a “beluga” or “white” whale,an animal that inhabits arctic and subarcticmarine waters. Because Charlotte is farinland (over 150 miles from the nearestocean), early naturalists were at a loss toexplain the bones of a marine whale buriedbeneath the fields of rural Vermont. But theCharlotte whale was preserved in the sedi-ments of the Champlain Sea, an arm of theocean that extended into the ChamplainValley for 2,500 years following the retreat ofthe glaciers 12,500 years ago.

Sculptures of the size that Sardonis envisioned are not easily realized without financialbacking. A local developer, who envisioned the piece installed at the entrance of a plannedmotel and conference center supported the idea, and Sardonis was able to begin. The piecewould require more space, and more complicated equipment, than Sardonis had available in

Fig. 374 Jim Sardonis’s Reverence in progress, 1988–1989.Photos Courtesy of the artist.

Video DemoSculpture: Carving


WORKS IN PROGRESShis own studio, so he arranged towork at Granite Importers, an opera-tion in Barre, Vermont, that couldmove stones weighing twenty-twoand fourteen tons respectively andthat possessed diamond saws as largeas eleven feet for cutting the stones.

Sardonis recognized that itwould be easier to carve each tail intwo pieces, a tall vertical piece andthe horizontal flukes, so he beganby having each of the two stones cutin half by the eleven-foot saw. Largesaws roughed out the shapes, andthen Sardonis began to work on thefour individual pieces by hand (seeFig. 374). As a mass, such granite isextremely hard, but in thin slabs, itis relatively easy to break away. Thesculptor’s technique is to saw thestone, in a series of parallel cuts,down to within two to six inches ofthe final form, then break each pieceout with a hammer. This “cut-and-break” method results in anextremely rough approximation ofthe final piece that is subsequentlyrealized by means of smaller sawsand grinders.

When the pieces were finallyassembled, they seemed even largerto Sardonis than he had imagined.But as forms, they were just whathe wanted: As a pair, they suggest arelationship that extends beyondthemselves to the rest of us. Thename of the piece, Reverence, sug-gests not only a respect for nature, but a respect tinged with awe, not only for the largest mam-mals on the planet, but for the responsibility we all share in protecting all of nature. The whale,as the largest creature, becomes a symbol for all species and for the fragility and interconnectionof all life on earth.

The project had taken almost a year, and by mid-summer 1989, the site at the prospectiveconference center was being prepared. Though the pair of forms were installed, when fundingfor the conference center fell through, they were moved to a new site, just south of Burlington,Vermont, on Interstate 89, where they overlook the Champlain Valley.

Fig. 375 3Reverence2 by James L Sardonis, ©1989.Beside Interstate 89, south of Burlington, Vt. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

MODELINGWhen you pick up a handful of clay, youalmost instinctively know what to do with it.You smack it with your hand, pull it, squeezeit, bend it, pinch it between your fingers, roll it,slice it with a knife, and shape it. Then yougrab another handful, repeat the process, andadd it to the first, building a form piece bypiece. These are the basic gestures of the addi-


tive process of modeling, in which a pliant sub-stance, usually clay, is molded.

Clay, a natural material found worldwide,has been used by artists to make everythingfrom pots to sculptures since the earliest times.Its appeal is largely due to its capacity to bemolded into forms that retain their shape.Once formed, the durability of the material canbe ensured by firing it—that is, baking it—at

Fig. 376 Robert Arneson, Case of Bottles, 1964.Glazed ceramic (stoneware) and glass, 10½ � 22 � 15 in. Collection: Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Sheinbaum. © Estate of Robert Arneson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, NY.

Video DemoSculpture: Modeling

temperatures normally ranging between 1200and 2700 degrees Fahrenheit in a kiln, or oven,designed especially for the process. This causesit to become hard and waterproof. We call allworks made of clay ceramics.

Robert Arneson’s Case of Bottles (Fig. 376)is a ceramic sculpture. The rough handmadequality of Arneson’s work, a quality that claylends itself to especially well, contrasts dramat-ically with his subject matter, mass-producedconsumer products. He underscores this con-trast by including in the case of Pepsi a singlereal 7-Up bottle. He has even allowed the workto crack by firing it too quickly. The piecestands in stark defiance to the assembly line.

Throughout history, the Chinese havemade extraordinary ceramic works, includingthe finest porcelains of fine, pure white clay.We tacitly acknowledge their expertise whenwe refer to our own “best” dinner plates as“china.” But the most massive display of theChinese mastery of ceramic art was discovered


in 1974 by well diggers who accidentallydrilled into the tomb of Shih Huang Ti, thefirst emperor of China (Fig. 377). In 221B.C.E., Shih Huang Ti united the country underone rule and imposed order, establishing a sin-gle code of law and requiring the use of a sin-gle language. Under his rule, the Great Wallwas built, and construction of his tombrequired a force of over 700,000 men. Shihwas buried near the central Chinese city ofXian, or Ch-in (the origin of the name China),and his tomb contained more than 6,000lifesize, and extraordinarily life-like, ceramicfigures of soldiers and horses, immortal body-guards for the emperor. More recently, clerks,scribes, and other court figures have been dis-covered, as well as a set of magnificent bronzehorses and chariots. Compared to Arneson’srough work, the figures created by the ancientChinese masters are incredibly refined, butbetween the two of them we can see how ver-satile clay is as a material.

Fig. 377 Tomb of Emperor Shih Huang Ti, 221–206 B.C.E.Painted ceramic figures, lifesize. Photo: An Keren/PPS. Photo Researchers, Inc.

CASTINGWhen the sculptor Henry Moore visitedGreece in 1951, he was immediately enthralledby the use of drapery in classical sculpture.“Drapery can emphasize the tension in a fig-ure,” he wrote, “For where the form pushesoutwards such as on the shoulders, the thighs,the breasts, etc., it can be pulled tight acrossthe form (almost like a bandage).” Moore’sDraped Reclining Figure (Fig. 378) wasinspired by what he saw in Greece. “Althoughstatic,” he said, “this figure is not meant to bein slack repose, but, as it were, alerted.”

Moore’s work is cast in bronze, a metalmade by mixing copper and tin. Casting is aninvention of the Bronze Age (beginning approx-imately 2500 B.C.E.), when it was first utilized tomake various utensils by simply pouring liquidbronze into open-faced molds. The technologyis not much more complicated than that of agelatin mold. You pour gelatin into the mold


Fig. 378 Henry Moore, Draped Reclining Figure, 1952–1953.Bronze, 40⅞ � 66⅝ � 34⅛ in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution;

Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

Fig. 379 Girl Running, Greece, probably Sparta, c. 500 B.C.E.Height 4½ in. British Museum, London. Marburg/Art Resource, New York.

and let it harden. When you remove the gelatin,it is shaped like the inside of the mold. Small fig-ures made of bronze are similarly produced bymaking a simple mold of an original modeledform, filling the mold with bronze, and thenbreaking the mold away. The early Greek GirlRunning (Fig. 379) is a small, solid, cast-bronzefigure almost certainly made by this moststraightforward of bronze-casting methods.

As the example of gelatin demonstrates,bronze is not the only material that can be cast.In the kingdom of Benin, located in southernNigeria, on the coastal plain west of the NigerRiver, brass casting reached a level of extraordi-nary accomplishment as early as the late four-teenth century. Brass, which is a compoundcomposed of copper and zinc, is similar tobronze but contains less copper and is yellowerin color. When, after 1475, the people of Beninbegan to trade with the Portuguese for copperand brass, an explosion of brass casting


occurred. Shown below is a brass head of anOba dating from the eighteenth century (Fig.380). The Oba is the king of a dynasty. When anOba dies, one of the first duties of the new Obais to establish an altar commemorating hisfather and to decorate it with newly cast brassheads. The heads are not portraits. Rather, theyare generalized images that emphasize the king’scoral-bead crown and high bead collar, the sym-bols of his authority. The head has a special sig-nificance in Benin ritual. According to Britishanthropologist R. E. Bradbury, the head “sym-bolizes life and behavior in this world, thecapacity to organize one’s actions in such a wayas to survive and prosper. It is one’s Head that‘leads one through life.’ . . . On a man’s Headdepends not only his own wellbeing but that ofhis wives and children. . . . At the state level, thewelfare of the people as a whole depends on theOba’s Head which is the object of worship atthe main event of the state ritual year.”

Fig. 380 African, Nigeria, Edo; Court of Benin, Head of an Oba, 18th century.Brass, iron, Height 13⅛ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, 1991.

(1991.17.2) Photograph © 1991 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


The Oba head is an example of one of themost enduring, and one of the most compli-cated processes for casting metal. The lost-waxmethod, also known as cire-perdue, was per-fected by the Greeks if not actually invented bythem. Because metal is both expensive andheavy, a technique had to be developed to cre-ate hollow images rather than solid ones. Thediagram to the left (Fig. 381) schematizes theprocess in simplified terms, while the illustra-tions of the method on these two pages and thefollowing (Figs. 382–384) give some indicationof its actual complexity. From the Encyclopediaof Science, the Liberal Arts, and the Mechani-cal Arts, compiled in the eighteenth century bythe French encyclopedist, art critic, dramatist,and writer Denis Diderot, these latter imagesdepict the casting process of a mounted figureof the French king, Louis XIV, which was actu-ally erected in Paris in 1699.

In the lost-wax method, the sculpture isfirst modeled in some soft, pliable material,such as clay, wax, or plaster in a putty state.This model looks just like the finished sculp-ture, but, of course, the material of which it is

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

Fig. 381 The Lost-Wax Casting ProcessA positive model (1), often created with clay, is used to make a negative mold(2). The mold is coated with wax, the wax shell is filled with a cool fireclay, andthe mold is removed (3). Metal rods, to hold the shell in place, and wax rods, tovent the mold, are then added (4). The whole is placed in sand, and the wax isburned out (5). Molten bronze is poured in where the wax used to be. When thebronze has hardened, the whole is removed from the sand and the rods andvents are removed (6).

Fig. 382 Casting a Large Equestrian Statue, I.Denis Diderot, Recuil de Planches, sur le Sciences, les Arts liberaux, et

les arts mechaniques, Paris, 1767–1772 , Vol 8, Plate 4.(Arents Coll. S0713) Arents Collections, The New York Public Library, Astor,

Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Video DemoSculpture: Casting

composed is nowhere near as durable as metal.As the process proceeds, this core is at leasttheoretically disposable, though many sculp-tors, including Auguste Rodin (see Fig. 259),retained them for possible re-casting.

A mold is then made of the model (today,synthetic rubber is most commonly used tomake this mold), and when it is removed, weare left with a negative impression of the orig-inal—in other words, something like a gelatinmold of the object. Molten wax is then pouredor brushed into this impression to the thick-ness desired for the final sculpture—about aneighth of an inch. The space inside this waxlining is filled with an investment—a mixtureof water, plaster, and powder made fromground-up pottery. The mold is then removed,and we are left with a wax casting, identical tothe original model, that is filled with theinvestment material. Rods of wax are thenapplied to the wax casting. They stick outfrom it like giant hairs. They will carry offmelted wax during baking and will eventuallyprovide channels through which the moltenbronze will be poured. Figure 382 depicts the


wax model of the statue of Louis XIV sur-rounded by a latticework of wax channels.Note how the channels descend from the top,where the bronze will eventually be poured.The statue’s surface is a thin layer of wax sup-ported by the investment. Bronze pins havebeen driven through the wax into the invest-ment in order to hold investment, casting, andchannels in place.

This wax cast, with its wax channels, isnow ready to be covered with an outer mold ofinvestment. In the left panel of Figure 383, wesee a cutaway of the wax cast surrounded bythe investment. When this outer mold cures, itis then baked in a kiln at a temperature of1500° F, with the wax replica inside it. The waxrods melt, providing channels for the rest of thewax to run out as well—hence the term lost-wax. A thin space where the wax once was nowlies empty between the inner core and the outermold, the separation maintained by the bronzepins. The right hand side of Figure 383 showsthe burned-out mold ready to be lowered intothe casting pit, its exterior reinforced by ironbands.

Fig. 383 Casting a Large Equestrian Statue, II.Denis Diderot’s Recuil de Planches, sur le Sciences, les Arts liberaux, et les arts mechaniques, Paris, 1767–1772 , Vol 8, Plate 5.

(Arents Coll. S0713) Arents Collections, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.


In Figure 384, the bronze pour is about totake place. The casting pit is located beneaththe foundry floor, where the mold is encased insand. The large box in the background is thefurnace, where the bronze is melted. Moltenbronze is poured into the casting gate, the largeopening in the top of the mold directly in frontof the furnace, filling the cavity where the waxonce was. Hence, many people refer to castingas a replacement method—bronze replaceswax. When the bronze has cooled, the moldand the investment are removed, and we areleft with a bronze replica of the wax form com-plete with the latticework of rods. The rods arecut from the bronze cast and the surfacesmoothed and finished.

Large pieces such as Moore’s DrapedReclining Figure (Fig. 378) must be cast in sev-eral pieces and then welded together. Bronze isso soft and malleable that the individual piecescan easily be joined in either of two ways:pounded together with a hammer, the proce-dure used in Greek times, or welded, the moreusual procedure today. Finally, the shell isreassembled to form a perfect hollow replica ofthe original model. In fact, when Moore sawthe torso part of his Draped Reclining Figure,cast separately from the rest, he was struck bywhat he called “its completeness and impres-siveness just as a thing in its own right.” Thus,after the Draped Reclining Figure was com-pleted, he had a wax version of the figure’storso made, and he reworked it, alternatelymodeling and carving it until it looked appro-priately poised in an upright position. Theresulting work, Draped Torso (Fig. 385), lookslike a piece of medieval body armor, and it is,in fact, possible that the process of makingbody armor might have suggested to theGreeks that the living human body could beused to create molds for cast bronze sculptures,such as the magnificent Zeus we described inChapter 5 (Fig. 118).

Contemporary sculptor Tom Morandi does,in fact, use living humans to cast his aluminumsculptures (Fig. 386). At the Oregon StateDepartment of Human Resources in Salem,Oregon, he asked for volunteers from amongthe department’s employees to submit them-selves to the somewhat claustrophobic processof having their entire bodies, including clothing,serve as the original cores for the casts. Molds

Fig. 384 Casting a Large Equestrian Statue, III.Denis Diderot’s Recuil de Planches, sur le Sciences, les Arts liberaux, et les

arts mechaniques, Paris, 1767–1772, Vol 8, Plates 4 and 5.(Arents Coll. S0713) Arents Collections, The New York Public Library, Astor,

Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Fig. 385 Henry Moore, Draped Torso, 1953.Bronze, height 35 in. Ferens Art Gallery: Hull City Museums and Art Galleries,

Hull, England.

were literally fitted to the sub-jects’ faces, hands, and clothedbodies. Because they are castfrom aluminum and are thusvery light-weight, Morandi wasable to hang the sculptures frompillars at the second-story levelof the building’s lobby. Theyserve to elevate everyday workand everyday people to the con-dition of art. Morandi’s sculp-tures both dignify the work ofthe Department of HumanResources, and honor it.

ASSEMBLAGEMany of the same thematicconcerns that we saw inMichelangelo’s “Atlas” Slave(Fig. 368) are at work in DavidHammons’s Spade with Chains(Fig. 387). Both specificallyaddress the issue of enslave-ment. By means of assemblage—creating asculpture by compiling objects taken fromthe environment—Hammons has combined“found” materials, a common spade and a setof chains, into a face that recalls an Africanmask. The piece represents a wealth of trans-formations. Just as Michelangelo could see inthe raw block of stone the figure within, Ham-mons can see, in the most common materials ofeveryday life, the figures of his world. Thistransformation of common materials into art isa defining characteristic of assemblage. As aprocess, assemblage evokes the myth of thephoenix, the bird that, consumed by fire, isreborn out of its own ashes. That rebirth, orrejuvenation, is also expressed at a culturallevel in Hammons’s work. The transformationof the materials of slave labor—the spade andthe chain—into a mask is an affirmation of theAmerican slave’s African heritage. The richnessof this transformation is embodied in the dou-ble meaning of the word “spade”—at once aracist epithet and the appropriate name of theobject in question. But faced with this image, itis no longer possible, in the words of a com-mon cliché, to “call a spade a spade.” Thepiece literally liberates us from that simple andreductive possibility.


Fig. 386 Tom Morandi, Work, 1995.Three of eleven figures, cast aluminum, lifesize.

Human Resources Building, Salem, Oregon. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 387 David Hammons, Spade with Chains, 1973.Spade, chains, 24 � 10 � 5 in.

Courtesy Jack Tilton Gallery, New York. Photo: Dawoud Bey.

To the degree that they are composed ofseparately cast pieces later welded together,works like Moore’s Draped Reclining Figure(Fig. 378) and Morandi’s Work (Fig. 386),might themselves seem to be assemblages. Butit is better to think of them as constructions—works in which the artist forms all of the partsthat are put together rather than finding theparts in the world. On the other hand, H. C.Westermann’s Memorial to the Idea of Man IfHe Was an Idea (Fig. 388) is assembled from anumber of found parts, including bottle capsand cast-tin toys, in addition to its carefullycrafted wooden construction. Westermann isan artist whose work comments constantly onWestern “values,” especially those that haveled to such conflicts as the Korean and Viet-nam Wars, the first of which he fought in. Thefigure’s war-like nature is emphasized by thefortress that forms the top of its head, and its


“resemblance” to the United States is under-scored by its red, white, and blue color scheme.Westermann’s “Idea of Man” is also a recog-nizable image of the one-eyed cyclops Polyphe-mus of Homeric myth, the giant who capturesOdysseus and his men on their way home fromthe notoriously futile Trojan War. In order toescape Polyphemus, who feasts on humans(note the figure gesturing helplessly in thecyclops’s mouth), Odysseus and his men blindhim, then escape by hanging from the under-bellies of sheep as Polyphemus rages afterthem. The two toys inside Westermann’s “warchest” re-enact this, a cast-tin headless baseballplayer swinging his bat at a wooden trapezeartist hanging from the top of the interiorspace. In the bottom half of the “war chest,” ablack Death Ship sinks into a sea of bottlecaps, symbolizing the economic forces thatlead to war. Even Westermann’s own initials,

Fig. 388 H. C. Westermann, Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea, 1958. Two views, door opened and closed.Pine, bottle caps, cast-tin toys, glass, metal, brass, ebony, and enamel, 56½ � 38 � 14¼ in. collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,

Gift of Susan and Lewis Manilow (1993.34). photo © MCA, Chicago 1993.34. Estate of H. C. Westermann/Licensed by VAGA, New York.

inscribed in bottlecaps on the inside of thedoor, serve less as a signature than an ironiccommentary on the destructive role of the egoin realizing any “idea of man.”

Another assemblage, Clyde Connell’sSwamp Ritual (Fig. 389), is fabricated of partsfrom rusted-out tractors and machines, dis-carded building materials and logs, and papier-mâché made from the classified sections of theShreveport Journal and Times. The use ofpapier-mâché developed out of Connell’s desireto find a material capable of binding thewooden and iron elements of her work. Bysoaking the newsprint in hot water until its inkbegan to turn it a uniform gray, and then mix-ing it with Elmer’s Glue, she was able to createa claylike material possessing, when dry, thetexture of wasps’ nests or rough gray stone.

Connell developed her method of workingvery slowly, over the course of about a decade,beginning in 1959 when, at age fifty-eight, shemoved to a small cabin on Lake Bistineau,seventeen miles southeast of Shreveport,Louisiana. She was totally isolated. “Nobodyis going to look at these sculptures,” shethought. “Nobody was coming here. It wasjust for me because I wanted to do it. . . . I saidto myself, ‘I’m just going to start to makesculpture because I think it would be great ifthere were sculptures here under the trees.’ ”

In the late 1960s, Connell, by then in herlate sixties, discovered the work of anotherassembler of nontraditional materials, themuch younger artist Eva Hesse, who died atage thirty-four in 1970 (see the Works in Prog-ress spread on the following two pages).Hesse’s work is marked by its use of the mostoutlandish materials—rope, latex, rubberizedcheesecloth, fiberglass, and cheap syntheticfabrics—which she used in strangely appealing,even elegant, assemblages. Connell particularlyadmired Hesse’s desire to make art in the faceof all odds. She sensed in Hesse’s work analmost obstinate insistence on being: “No mat-ter what it was,” she said about Hesse’s work,“it looked like it had life in it.” Connell wantedto capture this sense of life in her own sculp-ture—what she calls Hesse’s “deep quality.” InSwamp Ritual, the middle of Connell’s figure ishollowed out, creating a cavity filled withstones. Rather than thinking of this space insexual terms—as a womb, for instance—it is,


in Connell’s words, a “ritual space” in whichshe might deposit small objects from nature. “Ibegan to think about putting things in there, ofhaving a gathering place, not for mementos butfor things you wanted to save. The ritual placeis an inner sanctuary. . . . Everybody has thisinterior space.”

Fig. 389 Clyde Connell, Swamp Ritual, 1972.Mixed media, 81 � 24 � 22 in.

Collection: Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, Texas.A gift from Atlantic Richfield Company.

Eva Hesse’s Contingent


of her life she was ill, suffering from theeffects of a brain tumor that was not diag-nosed until April 1969. Clyde Connell’s admi-ration for her work is partly a response toHesse’s heroic insistence on making art in theface of her illness and, to use Connell’s word,infusing it with “life.” But it is also a result ofHesse’s feminist sensibilities, for Hesse was afeminist long before the Women’s Movementof the early 1970s. “A woman is side-trackedby all her feminine roles,” she wrote in 1965.

“She’s at a disadvantage from the beginning.. . . She also lacks the conviction that she hasthe ‘right’ to achievement. . . . [But] we wantto achieve something meaningful and to feelour involvements make of us valuable think-ing persons.” Contingent embodies Hesse’spersonal strength.

Hesse’s first ideas for the piece took theform of drawing (Fig. 390). “I always diddrawings,” Hesse said, “but they were alwaysseparate from the sculpture. . . . They were

Between September 1965 and her death in May 1970, Eva Hesse

completed over 70 sculptural works. Contingent (Fig. 392) is one

of the last four pieces she made. For most of the last two years

Fig. 390 Eva Hesse, Study for Contingent, 1969.Pencil on paper, 8¼ � 11 in. ©Estate of Eva Hesse.

Courtesy The Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Private Collection.Photo: Afira Hagihara.

Fig. 391 Eva Hesse, Test Piece for Contingent, 1969.Latex over cheesecloth, 144 � 44 in.

Collection: Naomi Spector and Stephen Antonakos Private Collection.©Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy The Robert Miller Gallery, New York.


WORKS IN PROGRESS

Began somewhere in November-December, 1968.Worked.Collapsed April 6, 1969. I have been very ill.Statement.Resuming work on piece,have one complete from back then. . . .Piece is in many parts.Each in itself is a complete statement. . . .textures, coarse, rough, changing.

see through, not see through, consistent, inconsistent.they are tight and formal but very ethereal. sensitive. fragile. . . .not painting, not sculpture. it’s there though. . . .non, nothing,everything, but of another kind, vision, sort. . . .I have learned anything is possible. I know that.that vision or concept will come through total risk,freedom, discipline.I will do it.

just sketches. . . . [A drawing] is just a quickie to develop it in the process ratherthan working out a whole model in small and following it—that doesn’t interestme.” In the drawing, it appears as if Hesse initially conceived of the piece as hang-ing against the wall, but by the time she was fabricating it, she had turned it side-ways, as her “test piece” (Fig. 391) shows.

The final work consists of eight cheesecloth and fiberglass sheets that catch lightin different ways, producing different colors, an effect almost impossible to capturein a photograph. The sheets seem at once to hang ponderously and to float effort-lessly away. Hesse’s catalogue statement for the first exhibition of the piece at FinchCollege in the fall of 1969 speaks eloquently of her thinking about the work:

Fig. 392 Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1969.Reinforced fiberglass and latex over cheesecloth, height each of 8 units, 114–118 in.; width each of 8 units, 36–48 in.

Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. ©Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy The Robert Miller Gallery, New York.


EARTHWORKSThe larger a work, the more our visual experi-ence of it depends on multiple points ofview. Since the late 1960s, one of the focuses ofmodern sculpture has been the creation oflarge-scale out-of-doors environments, gen-erally referred to as earthworks. We havealready seen several examples. Both Christo’sUmbrellas (Figs. 1 and 2) and Robert Smith-son’s Spiral Jetty (Fig. 6) are classic examplesof the medium, as is Walter de Maria’s LasVegas Piece (Fig. 293). As the lines drawn onthe landscape in Nazca, Peru, indicate, (Fig.294) humans have set out to sculpt the land-scape, and to impose sculpture into the land-scape, since the earliest times.

Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (Figs. 393 and394) consists of four twenty-two-ton concretetunnels aligned with the rising and setting ofthe sun during the summer and winter sol-

Fig. 393 Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, Great Basin Desert, Utah, 1973–1976. (four showing)Four tunnels, each 18 ft. long � 9 ft. 4 in. diameter; each axis 86 ft. long.

Nancy Holt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/Courtesy John Weber Gallery, New York.

Fig. 394 Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, Great Basin Desert, Utah, 1973–1976.(one front view)

Four tunnels, each 18 ft. long � 9 ft. 4 in. diameter; each axis 86 ft. long.Nancy Holt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/

Courtesy John Weber Gallery, New York.

stices. The holes cut into the walls of the tun-nels duplicate the arrangement of the stars infour constellations—Draco, Perseus, Columba,and Capricorn—and the size of each hole is rel-ative to the magnitude of each star. The workis designed to be experienced on site, impartingto viewers a sense of their own relation to thecosmos. “Only 10 miles south of Sun Tun-nels,” Holt writes, “are the Bonneville SaltFlats, one of the few areas in the world whereyou can actually see the curvature of the earth.Being part of that kind of landscape . . . evokesa sense of being on this planet, rotating inspace, in universal time.”

In an isolated region near the remote townof Quemado, New Mexico, Walter de Mariahas created an environment entitled LightningField (Fig. 395). Consisting of 400 steel poleslaid out in a grid over nearly one square mile of


desert, the work is activated between three andthirty times a year by thunderstorms that crossthe region. At these times, lightning jumpsfrom pole to pole across the grid in a stunningdisplay of pyrotechnics, but the site is equallycompelling even in the clearest weather.

Visitors to the Lightning Field are met inQuemado and driven to the site, where theyare left alone for one or two nights in a com-fortable cabin at its edge. De Maria wants vis-itors to his environment to experience thespace in relative isolation and silence, to viewit over a number of hours, to see the stainless-steel poles change as the light and weatherchange, to move in and out of the grid at theirleisure. He wants them to experience the infi-nite, to have some sense, posed in the vastnessaround them, of limitless freedom and timewithout end.

Fig. 395 Walter de Maria, Lightning Field, near Quemado, New Mexico, 1977.Stainless-steel poles, average H. 20 ft. 7½ in.; overall dimensions 5,280 � 3,300 ft.

All reproduction rights reserved: ©Dia Center for the Arts. Photo: John Cliett.


When artists manipulate the landscape atthe scale of De Maria, it becomes clear that theirwork has much in common with landscapedesign in general, from golf courses to parks tolandfills. Indeed, part of the power of their workconsists in the relationship they establish andthe tension they embody between the naturalworld and civilization. A series of interventionsconceived by sculptor Karen McCoy for StoneQuarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, New York,including the grid made of arrowhead leafplants in a small pond, illustrated here (Figs.396 and 397), underscores this. The work wasguided by a concern for land use and wasdesigned to respond to the concerns of local cit-izens who felt their rural habitat was fastbecoming victim to the development and expan-sion of nearby Syracuse, New York. ThusMcCoy’s grid purposefully evokes the orderlyand regimented forces of civilization, from thefence rows of early white settlers to the streetplans of modern suburban developers, but itrepresents these forces benignly. The softnessand fragility of the grid’s flowers, rising deli-cately from the quiet pond, seem to argue thatthe acts of man can work at one with nature,rather than in opposition to it.

THE CRITICAL PROCESSThinking About Sculpture

Anthony Caro’s Early One Morning(Figs. 398 and 399) is made of sheet

metal, I-beams, pipe, and bolts. Throughthe materials of which it is made, thematerials of contemporary industrial con-struction, it boldly declares itself separatefrom the natural world, the exact oppo-site of a work like Karen McCoy’s. Whatother elements contribute to this feeling?Consider, for one thing, that Caro did notthink of this work in any context otherthan an interior room. “I prefer to thinkof my sculptures indoors,” he says. Whywould Early One Morning lose much ofits force outside, in a sculpture garden, forinstance? Granted how different it is fromMcCoy’s piece, what does it have in com-mon with her work? What do you makeof the title? Think particularly about theexperience of viewing it. You might find it

Figs. 396 and 397 Karen McCoy, Considering Mother’s Mantle, Projectfor Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Cazenovia, NY, 1992.

View of gridded pond made by transplanting arrowhead leaf plants, 40 � 50 ft., anddetail (bottom). Photos Courtesy of the artist.

useful as well to compare it to David Smith’sBlackburn: Song of the Irish Blacksmith (Figs.366 and 367). (In the early sixties, when thispiece was made, Caro was deeply influenced bySmith.) How would you describe each of the twoviews of the piece as depicted here? Not only isthe work an assemblage of disparate elements,but our visual experience of it is itself an assem-blage, a construction of multiple points of view.Still, it is not choatic. What unifies it?

For all that it shares with Smith’s Black-burn, Caro’s Early One Morning is fundamen-tally different. Smith’s work is figurative, or atleast anthropomorhic—that is, it is human-like. How would you describe Caro’s? Whatis the relation of each piece to the ground?Caro’s work does not rest on a base, whileSmith’s does. What difference does this make?Think of the base as a kind of altar, uponwhich the sculpture rests. By losing it, whatdoes Caro gain?


Figs. 398 and 399 Anthony Caro, Early One Morning, 1962 (two views).Painted metal, 114 � 244 � 132 in. Tate Gallery, London.

Art Resource, New York. © Anthony Caro/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

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CARVING MODELING CASTING ASSEMBLAGE - …hssadv.prenhall.com/take_a_look/sayre/Chapter13.pdf · MODELING CASTING ASSEMBLAGE ... Stewards (Fig. 363), projects only a little dis-tance