Jaume Plensa Sees His Work in Much the Same Way Darwin Thought About That Tangled Bank

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and so dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.… [F]rom the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is gran- deur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. – Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859

In the last paragraph of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin puts his revolutionary treatise on evolution into perspective. After several hundred pages documenting decades of his observa- tions and investigations into the origin of species – “that mystery of mysteries,” as he called it in his introduction – Darwin leaves his reader not with certitude or dogma, but with a humble sense of wonder. His sensorial description of nature (birds singing, insects flitting, worms wriggling through damp earth) imagines its “elaborately constructed forms” still intimately connected with those first few organisms from which they are descended and the divine power at their origin: “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” The physical world links to an ephemeral past and intangible spirit. The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa sees his work in much the same way Darwin thought about that tangled bank. For the past three decades, Plensa has also investigated, through the medium of sculpture, what he calls “the big questions” with similar awe and wonder.1 In one of his earliest works, Itinerari (Figure 1), a system of weights, lines, and pulleys is strung together in two open metal frames creating complex interrelated networks. Like Darwin’s tangled bank, each element depends on the others. Although the sculpture is entirely abstract, its physical presence recalls the Jaume Plensa: Genus and Species Jed Morse human body: the metal frames are over seven feet tall, large enough to contain the viewer, and are

19 placed just inches apart. This work can be seen as the origin of a particular species of Plensa’s work: elaborate forms constructed of individual elements whose materiality and physical presence evoke the intangible, yet ever-present connection between human beings and the universe around them. Since that early work, Plensa has achieved international renown for his large-scale sculptures and public installations, which frequently incorporate light, sound, and text in transparent, often interactive structures that offer a visceral experience of the nexus between art, language, biology, and metaphysics. The title of the exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Jaume Plensa: Genus and Species, underscores the notions of biological diversity and genetic development in Plensa’s work. Although the sculptures presented are primarily new or recent creations, many of them maintain physical and conceptual links to even their most distant sculptural ancestors in Plensa’s oeuvre. Moreover, in the last fifteen years, the genealogical relations among the works have become more explicit. Experimenting with various methods of sculptural reproduction, Plensa has created groups of related works derived from a few essential elements – glass blocks, letters, the human body, and light. The artist refers to these groups as “families,” preferring the biological reference over the more clinical term, series. The families generally develop as follows: elements are combined in several basic, evocative forms, or templates, such as enclosures, curtains, or figures. The elements can then be recombined in a variety of ways to create several variations on the forms, each one a unique, distinguishable entity. Of course Plensa uses these elements and ideas freely, and they frequently cross-pollinate. Recently he has said that his work “follows this rule: the development of independent cells that slowly continue to associate with one another to eventually arrive at the construction of one unique, single body.”2 Here, the idea of reproduction, either sculptural or biological, is key. Repetition and seriality are elements of art making that have been explored and exploited by artists for millennia and can even be seen as a natural con- sequence of sculpture. The techniques of molding and casting, as well as more recent industrial fabrication processes used in sculptural production, lend themselves to making multiples, either identical or fraternal. Plensa expands this process of association using installations and exhibitions as opportunities to experiment with pairing or grouping several individuals from

20 Figure 1 21 Jaume Plensa, Itinerari, 19 81 Cast iron, nylon, and mahogany 94 1/2 x 51 3/4 x 23 5/8 in. (240 x 130 x 60 cm.) Collection of the artist the same family to expand the symbolic impact of the encounter and explore aspects of duality Plensa’s entire oeuvre and connects it to a rich and heterogeneous network of poetic, scientific, and multiplicity. and historic sources. From the single element to the individual sculpture, to the series or family of The continuing association and interrelation of independent parts is not only a method related works, to the entirety of his production as a whole, to the universe beyond, each ever- of artistic investigation for Plensa, it has become the primary metaphor in his work. Plensa elabor- widening circle contains within it the imprint of the elements that precede it and the suggestion ated on this idea in a recent interview: of the larger realm of ideas. You are familiar with my fascination with texts and the importance I give to the written word, in The term “genus and species” also acknowledges the taxonomic function of the museum, its most organic sense, due to its similarity with the body, with the way the human being grows and which is charged with categorizing works of art and placing them within specific art historical con- expands. One simple letter is like a cell charged with memory. It may seem, a priori, that they texts in order to better illuminate them and their impact. After studying at the Facultat de Belles can have nothing in common with each other in view of the human personality and a notable differ- Arts, Universitat de Barcelona and at the Escola Superior de Disseny i d'Art Llotja, also in Barcelona, entiation in shape, but this tiny letter in association with others starts to form words, and these Plensa began his career as an artist just after the fall of the Franco dictatorship. Although largely in association with others give rise to texts, which in association with others proffer ideas, and isolated during the Franco years, Spanish art stayed connected to broader international develop- these in further associations give shape to the thought that nourishes cultures and religions, tradi- ments through the abstract work of artists like Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tápies. After Franco, tions and so on.… In short, the whole world! This is the idea of the Even Shetia, or foundational Spain began making up for lost time, establishing ARCO, an international art fair in Madrid, and re- stone, around which the temple was built, around the temple the city, around the city the country, engaging with the vibrant international art scene. Like many of his compatriots, Plensa left Spain in from the country to the world, the world to the universe, and so on and on.… It’s the idea of ex- the early 1980s to work and teach abroad. Over the next two decades, he lived in Berlin, Brussels, pansion from the smallest of things, from the association of diverse elements for the purpose of Paris, and Halifax, and now lives and works in both Barcelona and Paris. Plensa’s work reflects some constructing a more complex body. A complex body like ours formed of eyes, fingers, ears, hair, of the broader concerns of art after the 1960s and ’70s. Like many artists in the 1980s and ’90s, feet, arms, lungs, heart, and so on and so forth.… Elements that when compared to each other Plensa adopted the serial investigations of minimalism and also benefited from the vast expansion do not appear to have any relationship to one another, but in association do in fact perfectly articu- of artistic methods in the previous decades that reconsidered traditional media like painting, sculp- late one single organization: the body.3 ture, drawing, and photography, and pioneered nontraditional modes such as installation, earth- The idea of language as a creative force and physical, tangible presence that offers a direct link works, performance, and documentation.5 Artists like Plensa embraced the freedom to use virtually to the intangible and the spiritual has been a fixture in human thought at least since the Gospel any material or engage any space that this newly expanded field offered. They rejected, however, According to John (circa 70–90 CE): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, the strict formalism typical of the work of the 1960s and ’70s and reengaged with specific content, and the Word was God.… And the word became flesh and lived among us.”4 Many of Plensa’s returning to the human figure as a primary carrier of meaning and site for the investigation of the recent sculptures make explicit this ever-expanding link between the body and language (letters, universal themes that characterize our human experience: life, death, nature, culture, the body, and words, poetry), nature and culture, the tangible and the intangible. In the cosmos of Plensa’s the spirit. In this way, his work shares a kinship with that of artists like Jonathan Borofsky and body of work, this principle of expanding relations applies. The artist’s method of expansion by as- Antony Gormley, as well as his compatriot Juan Muñoz, who have also used the human body, often sociation is not limited to the production of individual objects or families of works. It also unites their own bodies, as generic templates for reproduction and variation to explore the transcendent

22 23 aspects of human experience. Although Plensa explores these subjects from the perspective of his personal experiences and intellectual interests, his touchstones of artistic, literary, scientific, and historic sources from prehistory to the present align his work with the grand tradition of European arts and letters, as well as with contemporary critical thought. The paragraphs that follow investigate Plensa’s recent production within the overlapping gene pools of his contemporaries and his historical predecessors.

Spillover (pages 83–85) is part of an extended family of works consisting of open form figures constructed of steel letters that had its beginning in 2003 with works such as Tel Aviv Man I (Figure 2) and also includes Twins I and II (pages 57–61) in this exhibition. These lettered figures are also more distantly related to other groups of cast works that incorporate text with the body, including The Heart of Trees (pages 87–91) and Where Are You? I, II, and III (pages 71–75), also in the current exhibition. The open form sculptures analogize most explicitly the organic development of language with the growth of the body. Letters are joined together randomly to compose and encapsulate the form of the body. As mentioned earlier, Plensa’s method is central to the meaning of the works. The letters are not assembled, free-form, into the shapes of the bodies, but weld- ed over a fiberglass template of the figure (page 84). This allows for virtually endless variations on the same greatly symbolic form. In the case of Spillover, the letters spread out from the figure into the surrounding area, mirroring the dissemination of language and culture and connecting the figure to the broader world. The sculptures are slightly over life-size, enhancing our sense of their physicality. Procedurally, Plensa’s variations on a basic structure in the open-form sculptures recall min- imalist investigations with elemental forms such as Sol LeWitt’s cube sculptures (Figure 3). Taking an open cube as his basic unit of composition, LeWitt created a diverse array of constructions exploring various spatial and visual effects of the relationships of the cubes. Whereas LeWitt used the cube specifically for its neutrality (it does not refer to anything outside of itself and has no associated biographical, historical, or narrative content), Plensa uses letters as his basic units to explore evermore evocative variations of the relationship between language and the body.

24 Figure 2 (left) Figure 3 (right) 25 Jaume Plensa,Tel Aviv Man I, 2003 Sol Lewitt, Modular Cube/Base, 1968 Iron Painted steel 72 1/2 x 37 x 38 in. (184 x 94 x 96 cm.) 20 1/8 x 58 1/2 x 58 1/2 in. Roberto Bachman Collection, Lisbon (51.1 x 148.6 x 148.6 cm.) Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso is also an instructive touchstone for considering Plensa’s methods. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rosso performed radical experiments with the casting process. At the time, most artists used the casting process to recreate a hand-modeled clay sculpture in a more durable material such as bronze. Rather than cast an identical copy of a composition, Rosso essentially used his compositions as templates, casting them over and over again, changing the composition slightly each time so that each cast was unique.6 Because of his sculptural treatment of text and prolonged investigation of language and communication, several scholars have likened Plensa’s enterprise with that of Bruce Nauman. This has always struck me as not quite right. Yes, like Nauman, Plensa uses texts to explore the concept of communication, and his work evinces a similar freedom with materials and variety of forms, but Plensa’s position seems to me to be completely opposite to Nauman’s. Whereas Nauman’s work investigates the limits of communication and the displacement of experience, Plensa’s work highlights the power of the written word and its direct, physical impact, even at its most abstract. Although procedurally both artists take an analytic approach to language, Nauman’s work suggests the deconstructivist paradigm of Jacques Derrida, while Plensa’s reaches for the sensorial cosmos of William Blake. When Nauman posits a poetic statement, like The True Artist Is an Amazing Luminous Fountain (Figure 4), he does so to test its veracity. When Plensa presents the words of Blake, like in One Thought Fills Immensity (Figure 5), he does not doubt them.

Twins I and II represent a new variant of the open work form of Spillover and stem directly from the monumental Nomade (Figure 12). The figures sit squarely on the ground, and the letters do not spread from the base of the figure. Also, the front portions of the sculptures have been left open and the scale is slightly enlarged so that viewers may walk into their interiors, experiencing the works more directly as architectural enclosure. The figures are composed of letters from seven distinct alphabets: Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, and Latin. Randomly juxta- posed, the letters simply become lyrical gestures and dynamic structural elements, highlighting the abstract origins of language. For those unfamiliar with many of the alphabets, the letters do not even suggest the specific sounds they represent. Plensa’s use of seven languages is also signifi-

26 Figure 4 (left) Figure 5 (right) 27 Bruce Nauman, Untitled Jaume Plensa,One Thought Fills (The True Artist Is an Amazing Immensity, 1997 Luminous Fountain), 1968 Bronze, copper, rope, and water Cast aluminum, letters Dimensions variable 8 in. (20.3 cm.) in height, variable widths Gori Collection, Santomato di Pistoia, Italy Collection of the artist cant. The artist often associates the number with the seven major musical notes. For him, letters and notes are the abstract building blocks of languages that, like sculpture, are able to convey transcendent experiences: Musicians are working with seven notes, and it seems so few elements to create the cosmos, which is amazing. A writer is using twenty-six letters, which seems like nothing, but with this you can create the universe. And sculpture has this kind of capacity to talk about the main questions, things that affect human beings. In the deepest part of our memory, it’s a language that connects everybody. Sculpture has this amazing capacity.7 The intimate association of words and music derives in part from Plensa’s formative experiences. He is fond of telling the story of growing up “surrounded by letters, texts, books and music.” At the center of these childhood memories was the piano that his father “was always playing.” “And I remember the piano was a vertical piano in front of a wall, and I was so small, or the piano so big, that I had the capacity to hide myself inside the piano.… I remember the smell of the piano, the flavor of the dust on the wood, the felt.”8 For Plensa, the associations of books and music are bound together with the visceral experience of an object – the piano – that could enclose and contain his body. Twins I and II also points to another recurring concern in Plensa’s work: duality. His exploration of the theme can be seen as early as the paired cages of Itinerari in 1981. Plensa has used the title “Twins” in various languages, throughout his career, perhaps beginning with Mémoires Jumelles (Figure 6) in 1991, an installation that featured pairs of bronze containers pinned overhead to opposite walls of the gallery by tension bars. The fascination for Plensa is the idea that an entity can embody itself and its opposite: light produces shadow, the body contains the soul. For him, duality is inherent to sculpture: “the use of the physical to touch on the world of the intangible.”9 The notion of a sculpture being a container also pervades Plensa’s work. From the open cages of Itinerari in 1981 to the Boîtes d’Ombre of 1991–92 (Figure 7) to all of the works in the current exhibition, Plensa’s sculptures have functioned as containers of space, or of the body, but also of ideas. A 1995 installation, Islands I (Figure 8), arranged on the walls of the gallery seventy-three nar- row polyester resin cases each containing a glass bottle varying in size and shape. Each of these

28 Figure 6 (top) Figure 7 (center) 29 Jaume Plensa, Mémoires Jumelles, 1992 View of the artist’s studio in Barcelona Bronze and iron with Boîtes d’Ombre, 1992 Variable height x 275 1/2 x 433 in. Figure 8 (bottom) (700 x 1,100 cm.) Jaume Plensa, Islands I, 1995 View of the installation at Palacio Polyester resin, iron, fabric, and glass de Velázquez, Museo Nacional Centro de Seventy-three elements, each 41 3/8 x Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2000 7 x 14 1/8 in. (105 x 18 x 36 cm.) Jordi Soley Collection, Barcelona View of the installation in the Städtische Galerie, Göppingen, Germany, 1995 vessels contained the remnants of a yellowish liquid and was sealed with a wax-soaked cloth and iron the artist by authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Blake, León Felipe, Allen Ginsburg, Goethe, ring stopper. The cases were inscribed with a number, 1–73, and the name of an artist, from Giotto William Shakespeare, César Vallejo, Oscar Wilde, and William Carlos Williams. The structure to Broodthaers, who was important for Plensa. As the art historian Carsten Ahrens noted, “each echoes the formation of language itself: groups of letters form words; groups of words form ideas; individual sculptural vessel becomes a molded form of memory,” embodying “the spirit of an artistic etc. The arrangement and position of the installation further underscore the abstract nature of attitude, the island of an individual conceptual world whose importance for the present is frozen language. Hanging vertically, the letters float in the air, individuated, removed from the familiar hori- by Plensa in a rigid form of resin.”10 Islands I constitutes a kind of self-portrait by proxy, as well as zontal, left-to-right format of the written word in the Western tradition. Because the letters twist an acknowledgment that the unit of the self is made of a multitude of independent elements or parts and turn, it is difficult to read the lines of text. Moreover, there is no clear theme that unites the of other selves. Many artists have made works as a kind of homage to figures of great influence, texts, other than their profound effect on the artist. In fact, it is this visceral and lasting effect that in particular Pablo Picasso, who quoted from Old Master paintings in his work throughout his career, Plensa means to evoke. The texts are meant to be experienced physically, more than read. The but particularly in the last decades of his life. strands of letters create a transparent curtain through which the viewer is obliged to pass. As one Although the names in Islands I mean very specific things to Plensa, they may evoke other moves through the curtain, the letters collide, making tinkling sounds like chimes. Poetry is trans- ideas and emotions in other viewers. Plensa explains: formed into music, the letters expressed as musical notes. The result is analogous to speech: the If I speak of Proust, Berlioz, or Velázquez, each of us will have a different memory from the written word is activated by the sound of the voice. Here, the notion of speech, of communica- same information. If we speak of colours (blue, red, or black) of trees, of countries, or of words of tion through sound, becomes palpable through one’s physical interaction with the letters. Plensa any kind, they are all like containers of a collective memory thanks to the personal experience associates these, and works like Islands I where words are frozen in resin, with a passage in each of us actually has. I prefer to simply offer the word as a container and, from your own tradition the book Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, in which words spoken in the frozen night and experience with it, you can continue to enrich its contents.11 air crystallize and fall on the deck of Gargantua’s ship, forming a mound of frozen symbols that Typically, Plensa thinks of words and their formation in sculptural terms. For him, a mold for making a only become audible with warmth. sculpture, “the empty space that guards the memory of its form and volume,” is like the mouth. The transparency of the curtain format and the act of passage through the text are They are containers that give life to the forms they produce: “the mouth seems to me to be a wonder- crucial signifiers of the transformational effect of reading. As Plensa expressed it recently, “Why ful image of the mold. It is in the humid darkness of the mouth where words are born. It seems that should the page of a book be opaque if when I pass to the other page my life is completely different saliva helps us to unmold these words and issue them from the mouth like living springs.”12 thanks to the experience of reading it?”13 The title, Twenty-nine Palms, equates the poems with trees, an ancient symbol Plensa frequently employs to suggest the germination and organic devel- Twenty-nine Palms (pages 51–55) belongs to a family of works including Silent Rain (2003) opment of ideas, rooted in the earth and growing toward the sky. There is no prescribed order for and Song of Songs (2005) that present texts as strands of steel letters hung like curtains. The installing the work. The strands have been installed single file in a long line, as well as in shorter works follow the primary methodology Plensa has adopted recently. They are assemblages of in- overlapping planes, or used to create a mazelike environment. Because the meaning of the work is dividual elements combined to create a larger, more complex body. In this case, steel letters contingent upon the viewer’s own reading of and experience with the texts, possible interpreta- are strung together to make up texts, twenty-nine selections of poetry and prose meaningful to tions expand exponentially.

30 31 Plensa has treated the ancient Song of Songs, a book of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament that is also known as Song of Solomon or Canticles, in several works, including the curtains mentioned above as well as Song of Songs III and IV (pages 77–81). The text consists of a cycle of poems about erotic love, largely in the form of a dialogue between a bridegroom and his bride, which is often interpreted allegorically as a testament of God’s love. In this treatment of the Song of Songs, Plensa combines the structural template of glass block enclosures, which date to the mid-1990s in works such as Bedroom (Figure 9), with text and colored light, as he had in works like The Traitor, The Porter, and Lady Macbeth (Figure 10). These installations provide an environment for retreat and contemplation. Visitors are welcome to step inside the glass cubi- cles to experience isolation in a sensuous environment of modulating colored light. On the metal doors to each cubicle are inscribed verses from the Song of Songs, so that one literally must pass through the language of the text in order to enter the interior space, providing just one experience or reference for contemplation when within. The quietude of the interiors, the soft, hazy, colored lights, and the aura of the ancient language provide a rich experience conducive to self- examination and thoughts on the beauty of love in its many expressions.

Plensa’s process of elaboration by association is not limited solely to fabrication of individual works of art or related series. The artist extends this experimentation to the installation and exhibition of his work. Plensa is frequently involved in the organization and installation of his exhibitions and relishes them as opportunities to “verify [his] intuitions.”14 Several of the installations in the current exhibition (Twins I and II, La Llarga Nit, Song of Songs III and IV ) are made up of independent, self-sufficient sculptures that are shown together as coherent entities. These installations extend Plensa’s investigation of language and communication, expanding the singular sculptural statement into more complex dialogues. Such flexibility in presentation calls into question what precisely constitutes the work of art and makes the meaning contingent on varying circumstances, but also invigorates Plensa’s body of work by establishing new relations and suggesting new ave- nues of investigation. La Llarga Nit (de Ausias March a Vicent Andrés Estellés) [The Long Night (From Ausias March to Vicent Andrés Estellés)] (pages 47–49) belongs to a family of works featuring translucent

32 Figure 9 (top) Figure 10 (bottom) 33 Jaume Plensa, Bedroom, 1995 Jaume Plensa, The Traitor, The Porter Polyester resin, iron, and Lady Macbeth, 2000 synthetic leather, and light Three sculptures, each molten tempered 78 x 34 1/4 x 84 3/8 in. (198 x 87 x 217 cm.) glass, stainless steel, and light Fonds National d’Art Contemporain 91 x 35 x 35 3/8 in. (231 x 89 x 90 cm.) Collection, Paris Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York figures with changing colored lights atop tall, stainless steel poles, and more remotely to a whole range of internally illuminated kneeling or seated figures adorned with text, such as the works in the Tattoo and Sitting Tattoo series. All of these present the body and sculpture as a source of energy and vehicle for communication. Perched high above the street, the figure acts as a beacon, emitting energy and calling people with its cryptic message of changing lights. The title refers to two great Valencian poets, Ausias March and Vicent Andrés Estellés, and quotes a line from an Estellés poem that talks of the poet as a sentinel standing guard:

And you will hunger and you will thirst, You will not be able to write poems And you will stay silent throughout the night While your people still sleep, And you alone will be awake, And you will be awake for all of them. You were not born to sleep: You were born to stay awake In the long night of your people. You will be their living word, Their living word so bitter.15

Although La Llarga Nit is an autonomous sculpture consisting of a single figure atop one pole, the artist requested that two copies of it be shown in the exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center. The two versions will differ only in the rate at which the lights change colors, creating a dialogue between the two and further underlining the themes of communication and duality that run through Plensa’s work. The artist has grouped several of the figures on poles before: seven in Conversation à Nice (Figure 11), a 2007 installation in Nice, and six in Talking Continents, a permanent installation in Jacksonville, Florida, created in 2003. Another group of internally illuminated figures in the exhibition,Where Are You? I, II, and III (pages 71–75), has only been exhibited as a group, but consists of three sculptures that could

34 Figure 11 35 Jaume Plensa, Conversation à Nice, 2007 Stainless steel, polyester resin, and light Place Masséna, Nice, France be autonomous artistic statements on their own. The works continue Plensa’s exploration of the idea of the body as an intimate geography whose skin carries the memory of past experiences. Each translucent, polyester resin figure is marked with words indicating geographic locations: one details the poles and critical longitudes and latitudes; another carries the names of the major land masses; and the last is marked with the names of the major bodies of water. Affixed high on the wall and glowing with white light, any of the works would make a powerful and entirely self- sufficient statement on its own. The question asked in the title is meant metaphysically, prompting the viewer to think about his or her own transient experience and sense of place in the world. As Plensa scholar William Jeffett has noted about these works, “Transparency suggests fragility, the ephemeral, and an inev- itable entropy or mortality.” He then goes on to quote Plensa stating “I have always found the transitory nature of matter to be quite beautiful and fascinating.”16 The form and content of Where Are You? I, II, and III suggests interesting parallels with the work of Plensa’s contemporary, British sculptor Antony Gormley. His sculpture Three Places (1983) features three cast lead figures in different positions: lying, sitting, and standing. Although the casts were taken from molds of Gormley’s own body, the figures are anonymous, like Plensa’s. They are also hollow, acting as containers of the space of the body. Here, Gormley also highlights the ephemeral condition of the body and our experience of it in the world, identifying the body as a place, a site of transformation.

The Heart of Trees (pages 87–91) is related to an extensive series of self-portraits – some with trees, some without – that pay homage to musicians and writers important to Plensa. Like Islands I, these self-portraits recognize the impact all of these figures have had on the artist and ack- nowledge the multiple nature of the self. Their names are emblazoned in raised letters on his skin. In The Heart of Trees, the seven figures carry the names of some of the greatest composers and musicians. Of the other works that incorporate trees, this one is the only multiple-figure installation. The number of figures is significant here. As withTwins I and II, the number seven again refers to the major notes. The arrangement of the figures is flexible, altered for each location in which it is displayed. In this way, the seven figures function like musical notes or beats that

36 Figure 12 37 Jaume Plensa, Nomade, 2007 Quai Saint-Jaume, Musée Picasso, Antibes can be rearranged to change the tenor of the piece. Clustered tightly together or spread out more disparately, the artist can alter the rhythm and tone of the experience. Sprouting from the loins of the figures, the tree serves to reinforce the theme of reproduction and variation. Again, Plensa’s theme mirrors his method. The figure becomes the template on which he can change the letters to alter the references and evoke a variety of associations. The tree also symbolizes the growth of ideas. Plensa associates it with the alchemist emblem, the Philosophers’ Tree, “sinking its roots into the earth (the physical) and reaching with its branches into the cosmos (the spiritual).”17 Reborn from dead matter, the Philosophers’ Tree represents the endurance of the spiritual beyond the physical. Plensa’s reliance on the figure, repetition of forms, incorporation of nature, and evocation of the transcendent through the physical find an analogue again in the work of Gormley. For his installation Another Place from 1997, Gormley created a hundred solid iron figures from seventeen body cast templates, virtually identical but with slight variations in posture, and arranged them along the shoreline looking to the horizon. The figures stretched for 2.5 kilometers down the beach and 1 kilometer out to sea. They were all positioned at the same level so that the changing tide would alternately conceal and reveal more of the figures. Clustered together in some areas and widely dispersed in others, the rhythm of the arrangement of the figures was reinforced by the rhythm and movement of the tide. The slow decay of the iron figures in the salt water provides a powerful metaphor for the transience of life and human experience, as well as the eternal persistence of nature. Plensa’s multi-figure installations provide an instructive counterpoint to the work of Juan Muñoz. Using the same face and general body shape as templates, Muñoz created several installations in the 1990s of groups of generic figures distinguished only by differences in pose and posture and engaged in social interactions. In the first of these,Conversation Piece I–V (1991), Muñoz brought together several figures made as distinct, independent works of art and arranged them in the gallery to suggest a complex range of social relations. Despite the similarities in their methods and their common investigation of the limits of communication, Muñoz’s work is intention- ally theatrical and emphasizes the psychological tensions in our personal interactions.

38 Figures 13 and 14 39 Jaume Plensa, Crown Fountain, 2004 Millenium Park, Chicago The exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center also includes an installation of eleven monumental stone heads. The group of heads is based on three-dimensional scans of the heads of five models: Alegría, Anna, Awilda, Irma, and Núria (pages 63–69). Each scan is digitally altered and then the volume is rough-hewn mechanically in alabaster, with finishing details carved by hand. Like Plensa’s crouching figures gripping their knees and the glass block enclosures, the heads also evince a pronounced interiority. The figures have their eyes closed, suggesting, like the symbolists of the late nineteenth century, the interior world of dreams and the subconscious. This is the newest species of the Plensa kingdom, related to the large-scale, open-work head, Sho, the monumental installation, Dream, and descended from the artist’s work on the incredible Crown Fountain in Chicago (Figures 13–16). This twenty-first century interpretation of the public fountain includes two, fifty-foot-tall glass block towers facing each other over a broad, shallow pool. Water cascades down the towers as enormous screens inside project the faces of average Chicagoans. At certain moments, the gargantuan heads on the screens pucker their lips and, like modern-day gargoyles, spew a stream of water onto the plaza below. The fountain has become a gathering point and place of respite for the entire city. Residents and tourists come to splash or relax by the edge of the pool, refreshed by the life-renewing force of the water. Like the heads of the people who appear in the screens of Crown Fountain, the heads in the installation at the Nasher Sculpture Center are elongated and monumental. Although each stone head is an independent work of art, they are shown here as a single, unified installation. This type of experimentation with grouping several independent yet related objects together for exhibition recalls Alberto Giacometti’s presentation of the Women of Venice at the 1956 Venice Biennale. In preparation for concurrent exhibitions in Venice, Italy and Bern, Switzerland, Giacometti modeled ten figures out of clay, using the same armature for each. When he would finish a figure, his brother Diego would take a mold of it to be cast in plaster. Then, Giacometti would completely remodel the figure using the same clay and armature. Although each figure represented a unique and independent work, Giacometti exhibited the six figures he selected for Venice on the same large platform (Figure 17). In the late 1940s and early ’50s, the artist had created small-scale compositions of multiple figures on a sculpted ground plane, likeThe Glade (1950). The exhibition of the

40 Figure 15 (top) Figure 16 (bottom) 41 Jaume Plensa, Sho, 2007 Jaume Plensa, Dream, 2009 Painted stainless steel St. Helens, Liverpool 157 1/2 x 157 1/2 x 118 1/8 in. (400 x 400 x 300 cm.) Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas. Museum Purchase with funds from The Pollock Foundation, the family of Mr. and Mrs. Richard R. Pollock, and the family of Mr. Lawrence S. Pollock, III, in honor of Mrs. Shirley Pollock, MM.2009.01 Women of Venice offered Giacometti an opportunity to see what effect a multiple figure composition would have at a larger scale. One can suppose that the artist drew from this experience two years later when he was commissioned to create sculptures for the plaza of the new headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank. In the case of Plensa’s installation of the eleven alabaster heads, the effect is one of creating a ritualistic space. Taken individually, the sculptures evoke the colossal stone heads found at Olmec archeological sites like San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán (Figure 18). Collectively, the group recalls ancient installations like the large stone figures at Easter Island, or, as Plensa has mentioned, the avenue of the sphinxes at the Great Temple of Amun complex at Karnak in Egypt (Figure 19). Like Karnak, Plensa’s installation plan calls for the heads to be aligned in two rows, facing each other, with one head placed in the center at the beginning of the rows. One can imagine the serial repetition of the forms having a similarly numinous effect. As Plensa has said, “It’s like music when you repeat, repeat, repeat the same note.”18 Also like music, one’s experience of the sculptures is intuitive and evocative of a broad range of references in our collective consciousness: My dream is if [viewers] could feel these primary emotions that sculpture has the capacity to convey. It’s like a container of memory. I’m excited to see if this group of pieces can evoke all these ideas, but in a very direct way. I would love if the people feel emotions immediately, not with the kind of intellectual reflection. My intention is the same I felt in Egypt. You are a part of that. You are one more head walking through. You are the twelfth element.19

The exceptionally broad appeal of Plensa’s work stems in part from the richness of its references, as well as the clarity of its symbolism. Language is by nature hermetic: it includes those who speak it and excludes those who don’t. But Plensa’s handling of language – any language, every language – makes it symbolic of the universal effort to communicate. Sculpture, like poetry, is a succinct and evocative expression that enriches and ennobles our common experience. The impact of each can be both immediate and long-felt. For Plensa, sculpture provides the physical and visceral link to a shared, persistent, and ineffable sensation of our humanity.

42 Figure 17 (top) Figure 19 (bottom) 43 Alberto Giacometti Avenue of Sphinxes at Karnak, Temple of installation of six Women of Venice Amun, Karnak, September 1, 1947 at the Venice Biennale, 1956

Figure 18 (center) Olmec, San Lorenzo Monument I c. 1200–900 BCE 112 1/4 in. (285 cm.) in height 1 “If art can have some value, of course, 9 Perlein and Plensa, “Conversation,” it’s that of permanently asking the big Jaume Plensa, 58. questions.” Jaume Plensa in Montse 10 Carsten Ahrens, ed., Jaume Plensa Badia, “Conversation with Jaume (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2003), Plensa,” Jaume Plensa (Málaga: Centro 118. de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, 11 Perlein and Plensa, “Conversation,” 2005), 112. Jaume Plensa, 72. 2 Gilbert Perlein and Jaume Plensa, 12 Ibid., 60–64. “Conversation,” Jaume Plensa 13 Interview with the author, October 14, (Valencia: IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art 2009. Modern, 2007), 60. 14 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 15 Vicent Andrés Estellés, “Proprietats de 4 The Gospel According to John, 1:1 and la pena,” Llibre de les meravelles 14, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, (Eliseu Climent, ed Valencia: 1976) as Augmented Third Edition, New Revised translated by William Jeffett, “Jaume Standard Version, Michael D. Coogan, Plensa: The Question of Sculpture,” ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford Jaume Plensa (Valencia: IVAM Institut University Press, Inc., 2007), 147–48 Valencià d’Art Modern, 2007), 34. New Testament. 16 William Jeffett, “Jaume Plensa: The 5 See, for example, Rosalind Krauss, Question of Sculpture,” Jaume Plensa “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” (Valencia: IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art October, vol. 8 (Spring 1979), 30–44. Modern, 2007), 36–38. 6 See, in particular, Harry Cooper et. al., 17 Perlein and Plensa, “Conversation,” Medardo Rosso, Second Impressions Jaume Plensa, 72. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 18 Interview with the author, October 14, 2003). 2009. 7 Interview with the author, October 14, 19 Ibid. 2009. 8 Ibid.

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