THE ESSENTIAL DAVID SMITH, PART I
IN 1951 DAVID SMITH MADE Hudson River Landscape and The Banquet. Shallow, rectilinear, weblike, their flat facades knifing across the viewer’s line of sight—these sculptures were radically unlike the human body with its density and its upright verticality. In that sense they seemed to his critics to represent Smith’s breakthrough; it was as though his originality, his claim to modernism, could be identified with this rejection of the human figure. Cleaving to the idea of landscape, Smith was seen as entering into modernism by means of a format that was horizontal rather than vertical and referred to continuous space rather than mass or volume. Yet the great sculptures by Smith of the 1950s, the Agricolas, the Tanktotems and the Sentinels, are all upright; and something about the body—although certainly not its density or volume—forms them. Nothing that has anything to do with landscape sculpture has much relevance to these works. The relationship of linear segments to a frame, the lateral deployment of planes with reference to a horizon line, the tremendous variability of the image itself, all may be characteristic of sculpture striving for an allusion to landscape, but the great Smiths of the ’50s cannot be so characterized. Sullenly unexpansive, rigidly erect, these works almost compulsively repeat the same basic configuration: a planar, frontal torso; a laconic head; a tripod like connection with the ground. It is a configuration which, from its first entrance into his work in 1945, Smith called “totem.”
From the very first years of his career, Smith appears to have been drawn to and convinced by a formal language that was highly abstract. Therefore one might wonder why, in the masterpieces of his mature work, he succumbed to what was at base so figurative an idea. In looking closely at Smith’s entire production one finds that he resolved each of his sculptures in terms of one of about four images which he repeated through almost the whole of his artistic life.1 This also may seem curious. But for Smith these themes became the point of intersection between his personal concerns and feelings and his convictions about form. These convictions led to work bearing an implied analysis and rejection of the whole of “modern” sculpture, which Smith saw as having been given over to the gratification of the desire for possession.
The medium of sculpture is inherently involved in giving access to possession, in enabling the viewer to grasp the three dimensional object either sensuously or intellectually. This occurs in sculpture in a way that it never does in painting. For, touching or possessing a painting as a material object and experiencing that painting are somehow understood as two clearly different operations. But in the case of sculpture, where what is seen can also be touched, possession has always been a part of its conventionalized meaning; and modern sculpture has made possession its one great theme. Henry Moore expressed this when he said of the sculptor that he “gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head—he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he identifies himself with its center of gravity, its mass, its weight.” But I am not talking here only of the major direct carve sculptors, such as Brancusi or Arp or Moore, who transformed the viewer’s continuous perception of the surface of a work into a protracted caress, or at times into an angrier, more flailing kind of contact. I am speaking as well of men such as Gabo and Pevsner, for whom the task of sculpture seems to have been the simulation of complete intellectual possession of the object. Their insistence on transparency meant that perception of their late works always involved looking into the center of the sculpture, where a core shape was established as the generatrix for the surfaces which radiated out from it, like geometric emanations from an algebraic statement. The whole range of Constructivist sculpture seems to have been made in this spirit of investigation, as a kind of scientific probe toward the center of a once opaque and unknowable object. Therefore this kind of sculpture always seems to have retained the idea of the monolith, whether it was by means of the simple contour of the generating core, or through the presence of a central spine along which all major planes intersected. For, no matter what the talk was about, space or time, it was the object over which these sculptors wanted intellectual mastery.
Gonzalez and Picasso likewise had furtively endowed their welded sculpture with the a priori unity of the solid object by creating a skeletal substructure for their animals or dancers or heads. From this spine the linear members of their “transparent” or “open” forms sprang; but no matter how attenuated or apparently weightless these elements became, the old idea of the sculptural solid was retained because of the coherence conferred upon their work by a structural core. In this way the sculpture of Picasso and Gonzalez, during the 1930s, appears to have been concerned with the generation of whole entities from the inside out, while Giacometti’s Surrealist inflection of this idea made it perform with reference to the formal secrets hidden within the placidly solid object.
Thus, as one surveys the “radical” sculpture produced in the first three decades of the century, one discovers that it was surprisingly unified, for all its diversity of style. For it seems to have been uniformly made in reaction against (but still implicitly referring to) the implacable solidity of objects. This is true whether it labored to make the object transparent and thus reveal the interior of the solid to a probing x-ray vision, or it hypostatized the mysteriousness and hiddenness of the object’s core. Since both procedures seem to have been based on the idea that the meaning of the object lay at this core, it is fair to say that both pointed to normal human perception as a kind of cheat, as inadequate to deal with a complete comprehension of three dimensional objects.
The idea of sculpture as a projection from the unseen and mysterious core of objects did not originate with the sculpture of the 1930s. It was the major theme of sculpture that grew up around the central figures of Cubism in the late teens, setting itself the epistemological problem which rises from the duality of the inside versus the outside of objects. As such it was a conceptual issue that came into art garbed in the robes of an idealist philosophy. It can be felt most insistently in a sculpture like Boccioni’s Development of a Bottle in Space of 1912.
In this work, the bottle is presented as a succession of concentric cores. One can read from its silhouette its total shape as a bottle—the upright side of the cylindrical body, the inward tapering of the shoulders and the slender shaft of the neck. But at various places this exterior shell is cut away so that beneath its solid facade can be seen another more interior surface . . . similarly shaped. At the very inside of the work, presented as the goal of the viewer’s exploratory gaze, is a concavity which is also bottle shaped. Unlike the positive, convex skin at the periphery of the sculpture, this innermost bottle is a negative shape, a hollow. But as such, it is the definite core which extends upward through the entire interior. It is like a fictive spine around which the other, more exterior bottle revolves in a spiral movement. It is the “real” shape of the bottle from which emanate the merely contingent and ephemeral surfaces of the bottle as given in appearance.
Boccioni was saying, then, that there are two bottles: a real one which we don’t see ordinarily but which we know conceptually, just as we know cubes or spheres, geometric abstractions which when embodied in real objects cannot have the transparency that shines through the objects of thought; and a less real bottle—the bottle seen from the outside and therefore seen only partially. Boccioni is responding to the “Cubist” problem as it was spelled out by Gleizes and Metzinger, as they called on simultaneity to project the object in terms of its “successive appearances”;2 in other words, the Cubist problem reconstructed from the lectures of Henri Bergson rather than the quite different one to be intuited from the canvases of Braque or Picasso.
In addressing himself to the real and the less real bottle, Boccioni is talking about the viewer’s supposed capacity to “analyze” the components of his vision, to synthesize the object from both what he sees and what he knows. He is responding to the cheat that is vision from a fixed viewing point. After all, he says with Bergson, if I say I see a bottle and I am referring to what I see of the object over there as seen from my position fixed from here, I am lying. I really see only its outside surface and of that only that part of the surface which faces me directly.3 I do not see its back or its inside. But my experience is not constructed from fragments of that kind; rather, objects are for me full of possible views of their reverse sides, their centers, their “realities.” It is to this intellectual suspicion of fraud that Boccioni responded both pictorially and sculpturally with a diagrammatic rendering of Bergson’s notion of duration. The bottle rotated 360 degrees around its core is the bottle seen from all its possible views. The viewer is given the object with what Boccioni saw as a new kind of completeness.
But from an historical vantage one becomes skeptical of this fullness, for what it suggests is that the vantage point conferred upon the viewer by Boccioni is one of omniscience. Because it is the bottle seen from everywhere, it is the bottle seen from nowhere.4 Omniscience as a vantage point can now be seen as the distinctive point of view of 19th-century academic art.5 It radiates through the subject matter of 19th century sculpture and through academic classicism as a formal ideal. It is summed up, for example, in the prescriptive formulae of the writings of Hildebrand: “All detail of form must unite in a more comprehensive form. All separate judgments of depth must enter into a unitary, all inclusive judgment of depth. So that ultimately the entire richness of a figure’s form stands before us as a backward continuation of one simple plane.”6
For Hildebrand, the sculptor had to guarantee to the beholder that when he took up his stance opposite the sculpture he would know at a glance all the possibilities of shape and gesture that the figures could offer. For Boccioni too the enterprise of sculpture involved the same promise. It therefore centered on the object’s wholeness or completeness given before perception, given, that is to say, in the mind.
The striking originality of Smith’s earliest welded sculpture (1933–35) rises from the radical criticism it directs at the European constructors’ hidden but implicit adherence to the old notions of the closed sculptural volume. No matter how indebted Smith was to Picasso and Gonzalez for the idea of using welded metal as a sculptural medium, and no matter how many details he imported from the works by them which he saw reproduced in the Cahiers d’art, Smith held himself aloof from the basic preoccupations of these men. And while he clearly involved himself in the themes of Giacometti’s work from the early 1930s, he did not allow this borrowed imagery of encaged or pinioned, helpless flesh to usurp the place of his own, quite different formal content. Smith’s Suspended Figure (1935) revokes the central spine of Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut, and instead projects the figure in terms of a shifting and elusive exterior shell. His Aerial Construction (1936) is also completely vacant at its center; its linear patterns cannot therefore read as the contours of a transparent but nonetheless present monolith. They must instead relate to surfaces which are somehow disconnected, disjunctive and shifting, relative to one another because no core, not even a relief plane, will bestow on them a fixed point of unity.
It was in this insistence on surface that Smith’s initial insight lay. For in it he could locate his and the viewer’s anxiety over the fluctuating, illusive quality of appearances. In his early sculpture Smith drew this illusionism from an essentially negative source: the absence of an organizing spine which implied the absence of a graspable object as well. By the time, late in his career, when Zig IV was made, Smith could offer his illusionism in terms of a present object, although of a very special kind.
Zig IV projects eight feet into the air, out, toward, and over the viewer. It can be described as a collection of huge cylindrical fragments—tubes split into shallow arcs—rising off a colossally enlarged relief-plane which balances delicately on one point near the viewer’s feet, and then abruptly slants away. The presence of the relief-plane suggests that the work will be legible within the normal conventions of sculptural relief. The surface, operating like the plane of a picture, will be the matrix of an illusionistic field upon which the viewer can imagine a series of whole objects intelligibly related to one another. But, in fact, in Zig IV the relief-plane contradicts its function by appearing to truncate the sculpture, so that the spectator feels half of the work is shielded from view. The plane implies that he can experience parts of Zig IV only as fragments of an entity which develops beyond his sight, on the other side of a boundary which delimits his vision.7
Why would Smith do this? Why would he build into a sculpture the idea of a relief space and then deny it by simultaneously suggesting that the sculpture is composed of two intersecting elements, one of which obscures half of the other?
One can move closer to explaining the apparent paradox embodied by Zig IV if one realizes that Smith is dealing in this work with two alternate ways of organizing or making sense of the visual data which surround everyone. On the one hand he calls to mind the whole: graspable objects which function as the substance of physical experience. On the other, he points to conventions of organizing matter—and in so doing he alludes to those patterns of intelligibility which are at the heart of pictorial thought in, for example, perspective systems or narrative relief. But as we have seen, both the literal and pictorial modes of perceiving are aborted in Zig IV. For Zig IV is a new kind of object, one whose preeminent characteristic is that it cannot be grasped either literally or figuratively.
The physical presence of Zig IV eludes us. Unlike a body or machine or natural object, the sculpture does not appear whole and complete. It has no encompassing boundaries around which we can run our fingers to trace its contours and define its shape. The startling fact is that although Zig IV is all boundary, made completely of curving walls and angled ridges, these contours bound nothing, not even a comprehensible volume of air. They are only a sensuous display of surfaces slipping past one another, making each other visible even as they slide past the sight of the spectator moving in front of the aloof construction. Given the character of Zig IV we cannot possess it physically, even in our imagination.
But neither can we hold onto the work intellectually; in the figurative sense, too, it eludes our grasp. The plane against which we see the curving walls of Zig IV, the plane which opens out to us and guarantees their visibility in the first place, does not organize the elements into a comprehensive pattern. In fact, our sense that the piece is somehow truncated and that half of it is hidden derives most strongly from this palpable absence of a mode of relating the elements in the work to some previously known pattern. The continuous flat plane of Zig IV becomes for us only the sensuous fact which registers the presence of the other planes, but does not organize them, which makes them present to and graspable by vision alone.8
Insofar as Zig IV is all boundary and all skin, it appears to us as surfaceness itself, abstracted from the object which would normally function as its support. It is surfaceness spread out before the beholder, surfaceness exposed to view.
In this sense Zig IV climaxes Smith’s experience of the 1950s when he had discovered the fruitfulness of directing all the elements in his work toward forcing an analogy between the surface of a sculpture and the planar surface of a painting.9 Smith had early been initiated into Cubism’s subversion of drawing and shading, which converted the normal agents of illusionism into the means of achieving a direct experience of the picture surface itself—in all its flatness, wholeness and openness to view. The painting’s actual surface, unlike that of a three-dimensional object, is one that can be seen completely. It does not have aspects which lie out of the range of vision. To see a painting means quite literally to be able to see all of it. By the late ’50s and early ’60s Smith understood the imperatives for grafting onto sculpture the kind of surface which derived in modern art from Cubism’s acknowledgement of the picture plane. By making sculpture which would register in terms of extended and interconnected surfaces, Smith could force the viewer to recognize that the sculpture spread before him was unlike other objects in the world. To see the work as entirely open and visible from a fixed point of view is to provoke the illusion that a sculptural object, like a picture, can be known all at once. When ’surface becomes that thing beyond which there is nothing to see, then the sculpture is wholly unlike objects in the world. Thus the presence of Zig IV involves the illusion of a total presentness of sight advanced by a set of surfaces which simultaneously register the absence of a possessable object.
Like Zig IV, Tanktotem IX is self-evidently without a core or center. In this work the flat plane of the torso establishes itself as body-become-surface. The surface seems legible as the whole object—since everything that there is to know about the work is known, or given to the eye, in this reading. In Tanktotem IX there are no possibilities left for the distinction between interior and exterior—a distinction which one was still able to make in an earlier version of this image, The Hero. For no matter how weightless and open Smith made The Hero, the line which was bent and pinched to form schematic parts of the body still has a hand-drawn quality. And this graphic aura which surrounds the work seems to shroud the figure with a sense of separation between interior and exterior, to invest it once again with a distinction between inside and outside. As long as the line is felt as descriptive, as “drawn,” it seems to endow the field it bounds with the same kind of weight and density that adheres to the unmarked areas in an Ingres drawing, where the most laconic outline has the power to invest totally undifferentiated stretches of paper with the sensed density of heavy fabrics or the warm tension of the sitter’s flesh. It was because of its persistent allusiveness that Smith seems to have given up drawing with steel rod shortly after making The Hero, turning first to drawing with found objects and then to a newly conceived idea of surface as the convention within which to work. For, as long as the plane that establishes the interior of The Hero’s body carries with it a sense of traditional illusionism it seems as though the work is asking to be read in terms of the old inside outside question—in terms of the Boccioni or the Gonzalez core—in the terms of what was to Smith the trivial question of an investigation of objects. For Smith the task of sculpture had nothing to do with knowledge of the object, but with self-knowledge. Sculpture had therefore to uncover one’s desire to possess the object and simultaneously to establish the work within a set of formal restrictions against possession. In Smith’s hands the idea of the totem became the thematic bridge between these two conditions. For the totem image combines in a single body the desired object and the prohibition against grasping it.
If the last ten years of Smith’s production are filled with continual reincarnations of the totem, it was not because Smith had found a formula out of which to make sculpture. It seems instead that there was something almost obsessional in the way in which Smith reworked this image, pushing it toward a succession of formal solutions. And each of these solutions was, in its turn, directed against possession. One of these involved the creation of extreme arbitrariness in the relationship between all the possible views of the same sculpture. Thus in Voltri XVII we find a work whose front and side views, if seen only in photographs, we would probably not identify as belonging to one and the same sculpture. Head-on, Voltri XVII appears to be an open frame raised on two legs. Four intersecting planes, visible only as edges, score the space inside the frame into a schematic grid. Above the frame one of the vertical lines of the grid has been turned 90 degrees to face the observer as a plume-like plane of metal. Taken as a whole, the work confronts the viewer with the flat head, the broad square body and the finely drawn legs of the totem image he has come to expect from Smith. What is more, the schematic geometry of the “torso” invites him to grasp this body by means of its apparent structural logic: there is something magnificently Doric about the work from this angle as the heavy steel verticals rise to support the more massive lintel of the top of the frame, capped by the flange-like pediment above it. But this kind of comprehension is made utterly gratuitous by any other view of the sculpture. From the side, the interior vertical planes swell into two gently curving but unrelated shapes, neither one of which seems to support or be supported by the rest of the structure. Given the expectations which the front view of the work raises, one sees the profile as an almost blowsy biomorphism, a swollen sensuousness which seems to come from nowhere. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that nothing else in the work would have seemed to guarantee its presence.
The strategy which Smith uses in such a work is to confront the fact that in sculpture, which is intended to convey to the viewer the title to its own possession, each of its successive faces acts as a variation on the object’s underlying geometrical theme or shape. Whether one is talking about the carve direct reference to the original block, or about skeletal constructions, or about archetypally simplified geometric shapes, one sees everywhere the sculptor’s effort to make each aspect of the work transparent to every other. Shining through each surface or facade of the object is the idea of the primal solid or volume to which the surface at hand is only a particular or partial referent. Thus whether the prime figure is presented physically in its solid, block like objecthood, or conceptually by laying bare its underlying structure, the key to making it seem possessable by the viewer is to permit him to sense it as a reality which lies behind any one particular view. For Smith it became clear that he could subvert the coherence of the freestanding object by making each facet of the sculpture radically different from the next.
Voltri VIII shares with Voltri XVII both the conjunction of a rigidly hieratic front face with a voluptuously curvilinear profile and the lack of transparency between these two aspects of the sculpture—an opaqueness which has nothing to do with the actual openness or closedness of the object. Rather, with Voltri VIII there is once more no conceptual core which guarantees a sense of coherence between the various views of the same work. And it is this lack of guarantee which Smith continually forces the spectator to confront, much the way a Cubist painting constantly brings him up against the naked fact of the picture plane. In Cubism it is our very effort to coordinate the various segments of the depicted object, to adjudicate between the conflicting levels of implied space, that (in Greenberg’s words) “undeceives the eye” and causes us to acknowledge the conflict between our expectations with regard to the painting and its utter material aloofness. In Voltri XVII the arbitrariness, the lack of guarantee, likewise confronts us with our efforts to rationalize the objects we see before us, to turn them into our intellectual playthings. In making us acknowledge the arrogance of our expectations, Smith analyzes for us our greatest illusion with regard to the sculptural object: the illusion that possession is the automatic correlative of desire.
Part II of The Essential David Smith will appear in the April, 1969 issue of Artforum.
—Rosalind Krauss
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NOTES
1. The role of this set of images in developing Smith’s formal prerogatives will be examined in an essay that is now in preparation for the Museum of Modern Art’s forthcoming monograph on David Smith. Most of the material in this article, and another to be published in April, has been drawn from that manuscript.
2. “. . . the fact of moving around an object to seize from it several successive appearances, which fused into a single image, reconstitute it in time, will no longer make reasoning people indignant.” Gleizes, Metzinger, “Cubism,” (1912), reprinted in Robert Herbert, Modern Artists on Art, New Jersey, 1965.
3. See, Thompson Clarke, “Seeing Surfaces and Physical Objects,” Philosophy in America, Max Black, ed., Ithaca, 1965. My attention was called to this article by Michael Fried in his article, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” Artforum, November 1966.
4. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Experience and Objective Thought. The Problem of the Body,” Phenomenology of Perception, London, 1962, p. 67 ff.
5. The assumption that the viewer can be at the inside, can know (see) everything, deserts the idea of a fixed point of view, and returns to one which is at base academic. The idea that with the defeat of rational or traditional perspective in Cubism, Modernism itself embraced the omniscient point of view is, of course, false. The Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque never invited the viewer to move around or penetrate through objects, or to experience reality in a durational manner. Rather, objects in their paintings were given to the viewer in a point-by-point perception which at every point involved him in an overwhelmingly complete apprehension of part of the object’s materiality, bound to a simultaneously given apprehension of the painting’s surface (and by extension the whole of that surface). This simultaneous vision of the object and the surface and the viewer’s act of looking, does not loosen the viewer from his fixed point of view, allowing him to escape his own materiality and move in spirit around the object. Rather, it reinforces the fixity of the viewer’s stance and therefore his point-of-view, giving him with increased palpability the sense of illusionism itself. See, Greenberg, “Collage,” Art and Culture, Boston, 1962, pp. 76–7.
6. Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, New York, 1907, p. 95. Shortly after the passage quoted above, Hildebrand says, “Whenever this is not the case, the unitary pictorial effect of the figure is lost. A tendency is then felt to clarify what we cannot perceive from our present point of view, by a change of position. Thus we are driven all around the figure without ever being able to grasp it once in its entirety.”
7. There are many clues in the sculpture which promote the illusion that one’s view of it is incomplete, partial, fragmented For one, small steel ridges fastened to the underside of the plane are made visible because they extend slightly beyond its edges These assert themselves as the visual counterpart to the ridges of metal which delineate areas at the front of the sculpture. Or, the base of the work—a small length of structural steel shaped like an inverted T in section—lies mostly behind the diamond-shaped plane. But at the very front of the work a corner of this base actually pokes through to the surface, acting out at one point the situation which the entire sculpture so potently suggests.
8. Clement Greenberg was the first to see modern sculpture in terms of “visibility,” “opticality” and an experience in three dimensions addressed to “eyesight alone.” His seminal discussions of these ideas are in “The New Sculpture,” “Collage,” and “Modernist Sculpture, Its Pictorial Past,” collected in Art and Culture. Michael Fried’s writings on the English sculptor Anthony Caro have extended the ground Mr. Greenberg’s discussion originally covered to examine the way in which composition has been reconceived by modernist sculptors, and the use of color. See, “Anthony Caro,” Art International, VII (September 1963), 63–72, and “New Work by Anthony Caro,” Artforum, V (February 1967), 46–7.
9. This notion of surface as a medium for sculpture was first discussed by Michael Fried in “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, Summer, 1967, 21. For this idea, which is in my view essential for understanding the late Smith, I am in his debt. Other of his articles have also helped to shape my understanding of sculpture, of which I would like particularly to acknowledge the essay on Stella, cited above.
