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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 Good Afternoon, Ladies An

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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 Good Afternoon, Ladies An Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 MALE 1 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the third in a series of lectures on contemporary sculpture, presented by the museum on the occasion of the Fifth Guggenheim International Exhibition. Today’s lecture is by Mr. Jack Wesley Burnham. Mr. Burnham is an individual who combines the extraordinary qualities of being both artist and scientist, as well as writer. He was born in 1931 in New York City. He studied at the Boston Museum School, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds an engineering degree. He holds the degrees of Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, at which institution he was on the faculty. [00:01:00] And he’s at present a professor at Northwestern University. He is the author of a major new study of modern sculpture, to be published next year by Braziller in New York, entitled Beyond Modern Sculpture. His lecture today is entitled, “Post-Object Sculpture.” After the lecture, there will be a short question-and-answer period. Mr. Burnham. JACK BURNHAM Mr. [Fry?], I’d like to thank you for inviting me. And I’d like to [00:02:00] thank all of you for being here today. I’m going to read part of this lecture, and part of it will be fairly extemporaneous. But I’d like to begin by saying that I find the task of speaking on post- object sculpture difficult for two reasons. First, because the rationale behind object sculpture and the art form itself have developed to such a sophisticated degree in the past two years. Most of the top critical energies of this decade have devoted themselves to this area of sculpture because it has taken up the challenge of propelling the [wanting?] forces of formalism one or two steps forward, hopefully. The literature in this area is presently formidable and convincing. Secondly, I’m not quite sure, but I have a suspicion that the term “post-object sculpture,” as applied to any form of art of the future, is a misnomer. The [00:03:00] reason for this is that the term “sculpture” implies certain pre-requisites or pre-conditions, which I don’t think the new form will or can follow. It’s been the near-heroic task of object sculpture to retain the last few invariant qualities of sculpture. But to the more sensitively-aware object sculptures, I suspect they understand the cost of holding on to these qualities. The new aesthetic of object sculpture, as it is called by some, owes a good deal to the insightful text of Ad Reinhardt, who, even by the late 1950s, had grasped the need for post- compositional art, which resisted all the traditional forms of anthropomorphism. What you are seeing are three almost black canvases by Rhinehart. These he called abstract paintings. For him, they were the last word. And in part, he described them [00:04:00] thus: a square, neutral, shapeless canvas, trisected, no composition, formless, no top, no bottom, directionless, brushwork brushed out, a mat flat, free-hand painted surface, glossless, textureless, nonlinear, non-hard edge, no soft edge. A pure, abstract, unobjective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting. In a sense, this work by Tony Smith, called Die of 1965, is only the most obvious manifestation of everything that Ad Reinhardt was trying to get across. The word “die,” which, among other things, connotes the death of something, expresses readily a kind of romantic nihilism, which is shared by some of the more alert object sculptures. And for which Ad Reinhardt was not a little responsible. But also, the square-sided Die [00:05:00] Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 16 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 implies the incredible precisionism found within the tool patterns of the machinist’s workbench. The roots of this nihilism is to be found somewhat in an obvious cause. This is the technological imperative, the urge never to mark time by standing still. It can be derived from this painting, which is very nearly a non-painting by Frank Stella. That’s the object in back of the shape, which you see, the [dura vera?] sculpture. It is the nature of categories of objects, when they are subjected to the focus of modern inventive techniques, to pass into the realm of other categories. The psychological root cause for this in a sense of anxiety within the artist himself. In an interview a year or so ago, Frank Stella made these revealing remarks. Stella: [00:06:00] “I don’t want to make variations. I don’t want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and on the canvas. I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.” And Bruce [Glazer?] asked him, “Are you implying that you’re trying to destroy painting?” And Stella said, “It’s just that you can’t go back. It’s not a question of destroying anything. If something is used up, something’s done, something’s over with, what’s the point in getting involved in it?” On your right, you see a piece by Henry Moore called Locking Piece of a few years ago. It stands against the background of the Bank Lambert in Brussels, as a kind of homage to a now-almost defunct [00:07:00] sensibility. This was the intimation that a piece of sculpture could, at least metaphorically, embody life. Certainly the near bone-like projections, the polished and pitted surfaces of this work, are meant to express just that. The vitalistic tenor of this work expresses an intimate, if not introspective, rapport between the artist and his materials. While this remains for Moore the personification of truth to material, the very practical hollowness of the pieces is hardly apparent. That’s why the many modern techniques of fabrication and advertising, which finally move this work in front of the Bank Lambert. On the other side, you see a work by Gabo, this construction in space. And it would be good if it got a little bit sharper than it is. But maybe it’s just a little imprecise. In a sense, the name of Gabo, the [00:08:00] creator of this construction, and Henry Moore, these two names have been linked by Herbert Read in a particular way as representing a very distinct polarity in sculptural sensibilities. These are, in the case of Moore, organic, life-embodying, semi- closed forms, at times quite monolithic. And Gabo, whose ethereal, open, semi-geometric constructions embody pure intellectual conceptualization. The differences between these two types of work have long been noted. But I suspect, in the years to come, perhaps even less than 25, the approaches of these two men will have more in common and seem more the result of a single cultural attitude than they do at the present time. I know that in the middle ’50s, I had some chances to visit Gabo. And on one of these visits, I was struck by a certain contradiction, which [00:09:00] has only been noted by critics in the last few years. I saw Gabo making patterns for his constructions, cutting these parts out on a band saw, then meticulously filing and sanding the results. Gabo undoubtedly is a craftsman, and this is precisely the situation which seemed contradictory to me. Here is a man, anywhere from five to 50 years ago. For practically anybody in the arts, he embodied a sculptor who was dedicated to the age of technology, of industrialism, of scientific research, of scientific idealization. But at the same time, he was using techniques that would have not seemed out of place in the shop of a metalsmith or a fine watchmaker in the eighteenth century. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 16 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 This is certainly not meant as a slight to Gabo, certainly not that. But it does point out, in the first half of this [00:10:00] century of modern sculpture, the division between the techniques of industrial fabrication and the techniques used by those artists caught up in the ethos of [techniks?]. What seems amazing today is that a few years ago, constructivism represented the epitome of industrialization and technology, as it is applied to the scientific ideal. What we have on the right here is a pile-on sign. This is what you call a [double-faced?] plastic, internally illuminated sign, illuminated by a bank of fluorescent tubes. And of course, it’s mounted on this single Lally column. Over this is posed an arrow of programmed incandescent lights, which you can see silhouetted against [00:11:00] the sky. The programmer for this little arrow here is what is known in the sign trade as a flasher. From this basic double-faced Coca-Cola sign, any number of auxiliary signs or [encrustations?] or what you’d like to call them can be hung and are hung. This technique of hanging sign from sign is about 30 years old and has been used with great originality in the past 10 years. In the 1950s, when I first worked on neon signs, it was with a profound sense of spatial shock that I opened one of them for the first time and found the hollow inside.
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