NOT VITAL’S RELICS OF THE PRESENT
WHEN NOT VITAL first began exhibiting, his figural sculptures were said to be archaeological in character. They resembled nothing so much as dank, charred bodies, excavated from some bog and still reeking of fresh death. They had a Beuysian aura, a Beuysian sense of dismal process; they existed under the sign of the Earth Spirit evoked by Goethe’s Faust. Over time, the dead bodies have been transfigured, released from the misery of their material. They now have the thinness of Giacometti’s figures without their pain. They have lost their animality to become almost angelic, holy survivors that have passed through the alembic of abstraction and lived to tell the tale. What they have lost in weight and substance they have gained in grace and wit. They have become minimal without entirely losing their primitive character, that is, they remain instinctive, rather than programmatic, in import. Their geometry, at once elementary and elemental in its abstractness, is, in other words, a reborn geometry, still wet from the womb, and peculiarly driven and secretive, as though hiding some odd awareness of being that is fraught with the possibilities of even further renewal.
Here, for example, are roughly made circles and firm oblongs, some bearing vaguely vestigial animalistic appendages. (The animals themselves have totemic cult significance: in one untitled work from 1987, the crudely modeled bronze horse forms that jut out at the intersections of a frame-like rectangle are Indian in origin.) In Wing and Orientation, both 1988, a circle exists within a square, as though an old intellectual problem had been made into a new obsession. And when Vital gives us verticality, it is the enduring form evoking the wish for transcendence, but it is also the unstable, anxious, precarious verticality that reminds us of our binding to the earth. It is the “difficult,” uncanny verticality that abstract art has ruminated on from Constantin Brancusi’s birds marking distance to Barnett Newman’s sculptures marking hereness. This verticality is the abstract trace that remained when overt figuration was abandoned; it is the leap of elation as well as the upright posture of pride. In Romulus and Remus, 1988, two upright stick figures lean against the wall for support, as the yoked figures of some untitled works do. But in another untitled work, one stick figure, rooted in a crude base, stands completely straight. All the works seem to share these qualities of the quietly assertive and primitively tentative, are urgent with a restrained inner necessity. They are poised, then, between the epic and the lyric—insidiously monumental, or suggesting an unrequited passion to be monumental.
In a sense, the problem Vital addresses is an old Modernist one: how to charge form with its mythopoetic momentum—how to make it glow with the “unconscious,” how to make it immediate, but with the energy of the depths. The task, then, is to make us superstitious, so to speak, about nonobjective form, to raise doubts about its self-evidence; in short, to wed the artificial and the animistic. For as Jean Piaget has said, the animist regards inert objects “as living and conscious,” while the artificialist regards them as the products of “a transcendent act of ‘creation.’ “1 But both animism and artificialism are the means by which the child attempts to understand and explain to him- or herself the origin of things. In a sense, the Modernist project parallels that fundamental struggle, attempts to invest the timeless object with the child’s sense of timeliness.
In Vital’s sculptural figures, the two great “cleansing” streams of animism and artificialism in 20th-century art—primitivism and geometrical nonobjectivity—converge, as though their union could inspire a fresh art, be a new Urquelle (original source). And indeed, there is the sense of returning to the fundamentals of both figuration and abstraction in Vital’s figures, each as an omen of the inevitable, inseparable from that notion of the fundamental. If figuration and abstraction coexist in attenuated, neo-istic form, and with more subtlety than vigor, nonetheless their original sense of purpose remains intact. Each was once, in its own way, a method to renew art’s myth-making potential, its power to convey the ultimate—what exists beyond style—in tangible, intimate form. A good part of Vital’s importance lies in the way his sculptures both restore the fundamental immediacy of both nonobjectivity and primitivism, and remind us that they can still make whatever they touch seem mythical. Though these once-“Protestant” movements of Modernism were to become the established sacraments of 20th-century artmaking, their iconoclasm is still trenchant in Vital’s sculptures, even though this iconoclasm manifests itself in covert images.
One untitled Vital work, abstractly ithyphallic, however, is more overt. In twin constructions facing one another across the room, a crude piece of what is in effect magma is perched on a high rectangular pedestal—a minimalist structure. All in Modernist white, each structure has the predestined look that the best abstract art achieves. The whiteness, with its aura of clarity and detachment, with its power to distinguish whatever thing it touches from reality—to irrealize it—serves as a kind of anesthetic, numbing us to the sensation that these masses of sculptural magma are alive, that energy is stirring in their expressive rawness, that they are more organic than inorganic, that the forms themselves are completely conscious, the emanations of divine impulse, of a transcendent act of origination, and thus are themselves transcendent. The whiteness purifies the crude materiality of the ithyphallic tips, imposing a peculiar kind of stasis on the actual creative process implicit in them, while seemingly making the latent consciousness manifest. Vital has invested amorphous, Dionysian form—formlessness itself—with the ultimate Apollonian grace that only whiteness can give, and then elevated and sanctified it by giving it the support that only “solid geometry” can provide. Structurelessness raised on a structure can now be worshiped like sacred stones, not unlike the Kaaba stone worshiped in Mecca. There is often this strong sense of religiosity in Vital’s works, although without any allegiance to a specific religion. Yet here is the wish to believe, without dogma, in, a multitude of things, and above all in art.
But for all his Modernist resonance, there is a streak of anti-Modernism in Vital, as in many post-Modern artists. If it is regressive, it regresses us to that spot of solitude inhabited by his figures, that place in which we can discover how old we are, indeed, how old our humanness is. Jose Ortega y Gasset once wrote that Modern art is a young person’s art—an art that seems to know the secret of eternal youth. To be avant-garde once meant to have an eternally young attitude toward art, and to feel that art could be kept eternally young. Today, as Vital suggests, to be avant-garde—avant-garde in a post-Modern sense—means to accept the fact that art, along with everything else, grows old, and that growing old is not the worst thing. It can mean the start of a fresh sensibility, a new sense of the sibylline character of life, and, in art, of material and form. Vital’s sibylline sculpture suggests that today’s artist is eager to grow old fast rather than to remain young forever, that art today might be about innovating the “eternal past,” not the “eternal present.” His is an art that wants to be old enough to have a past to look back on, and to make memory a touchstone of possibility—a permanent source of possibility. The post-Modern avant-garde is struggling to make a wise art, and Vital is among its practitioners. Perhaps this wisdom—subliminal and premature—will last long enough to seem permanent, to seem as fated as tradition, to serve as powerfully as a source of future inspiration as the memory of ancient Rome and still more ancient amorphousness serve us now.
Donald Kuspit is a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the editor of Art Criticism. He contributes regularly to Artforum.
—————————
NOTE
1. Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, Totawa, N.J.: Roman & Allanheld (Helix Book), 1983, pp. 207, 253.
