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Home , Alexander Archipenko, Baroque sculpture, Francesco Mochi, Henry Moore, Leon Underwood, Saint Longinus (Bernini)

Reviews Estelle Lingo, Mochi’s Edge and Bernini’s Florentine, which leads her to investigate how was being considered Harvey Miller Studies in Baroque Art, and in during the second half of Turnhout, Harvey Miller Publishers, 2017, 328 pp., £100. ISBN 978-1-9094-00801 the sixteenth century. She notes, as others have, that its critical fortunes were in a state of decline, which she Between the late 1980s and the early 2010s, attributes to various constraints being the annual list of PhD dissertations in put on sculptors, both political and progress in the United States included one religious, that were preventing them being written at Columbia University on from practising their art like Michel- the sculptor , born in the angelo – that is to say, with the freedom Tuscan town of Montevarchi in 1580 and to embrace the idea of monumental who was one of the outstanding talents sculpture, to revel in the heroics of of the seventeenth century. Belief that it sculpture-making and to celebrate the was well advanced kept many graduate nude body. Lingo is undoubtedly correct students – including this reviewer – that Mochi’s demonstrate from tackling the subject for their own fiorentinità in their consistently large dissertation. We can now be thankful that scale, technical daring and ways of this particular study went uncompleted revealing the human form. and that it had the discouraging effect it The title of Chapter 2, ‘Draping did, since it preserved Mochi as a wide ’, prepares the reader for open field of enquiry for Estelle Lingo, Lingo’s interpretation of how Mochi whose new book on the artist is possibly managed to pay respect to Michelan- the most important contribution to gelo’s exaltation of the nude in an age the study of Roman of extreme religious modesty, where produced this century. the new normal in sculpture was to The book is more than a monograph turn attention away from the body by on Mochi – and herein lies its signif- concealing it beneath heavy layers of icance. As the title establishes, it is distracting drapery. Mochi’s Angel of also focused on the larger situation of the Annunciation in Orvieto Cathedral early seventeenth-century sculpture in – his first major commission – is used , whose chief protagonist was the to demonstrate his innovative solution much younger . to the dilemma. It amounted to a new By restoring to Mochi’s sculpture its language of drapery, in which drapery historical specificity and intricacy, was allowed to be as expressive as Lingo helps us see Bernini’s art with possible provided that it allowed the new clarity. Before reaching Bernini, body to be seen. As the angel’s cloak the reader is led through Mochi’s career lifts up in a dramatic cyclone of cloth, from his beginnings in Rome during we are left with views of the bare the late 1590s until his return from left leg, as well as the right hip and in 1629, when he became thigh, revealed through the skin-tight involved with Bernini on the statues for undergarment. Drapery is not the the crossing piers of St Peter’s Basilica. chapter’s only concern. Lingo also Each of the major monuments Mochi investigates how Mochi, in his quest for created over those roughly thirty years fiorentinità, drew inspiration from other is interpreted according to a critical icons of Florentine sculpture, including framework that Lingo outlines in Donatello and Giovanni Pisano. With her first chapter, entitled ‘Sculpture’s Pisano, her argument centres on the Shame’. The key point of reference is a striking similarities she sees between statement by Mochi’s only seventeenth- his Sibyl on the pulpit in Sant’Andrea in century biographer, Giovanni Battista Pistoia and Mochi’s Virgin Annunciate Passeri, about Mochi’s relationship with in Orvieto Cathedral. Can it be possible, Florence. Passeri writes that Mochi, however, that as Mochi started work ‘who was born in the state of Florence on his statue, he thought a pilgrimage […] always wanted to show himself a to Pistoia was the only way forward? rigorous imitator of the Florentine This is not to deny that an element of manner’ (p. 7). Lingo asks what it means thirteenth-century archaism may have that Mochi was committed to a style of entered into his solution that was born sculpture that he saw as being distinctly out of a respect for Pisano.

375 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2018.27.3.9 Francesco Mochi, Angel of the Annunciation, 1603–05, detail. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Orvieto. (photo: courtesy of Mauro Coen)

Between 1612 and 1629 Mochi was virtue. There are other visual features, occupied with the bronze equestrian such as the horses’ rapid gaits and the statues of Ranuccio Farnese and his apparent strength needed to control father, Alessandro, in front of the the animals, that seem to be part of Palazzo Comunale in Piacenza. In the same subversive message. But it Chapter 3, ‘Power and the Grotesque’, cannot be the case that Mochi was using Lingo first looks at the statues through the grotesque to offend the Farnese, the lens of technique. As documents as it is an art form that the family had make clear, Mochi insisted that the helped popularize and with which they sculptures be cast in a single pour, which were still associated. This leads back reflects his adherence to earlier ideals to the likelihood that Mochi was most of bronze casting in Florence. Lingo interested in using the grotesque to observes that he calculated elements assert his singularity as an artist. As of the design to celebrate his feat of the Lingo concludes, Mochi appreciated how single pour. The electrified manes and the grotesque could play different ways tails of the horses, as well as the twisting depending on the audience. fringes and tassels on the saddles and Mochi received final payment for riders’ skirts, are among the details the bronzes in April 1629 and returned that allow the viewer to appreciate how to Rome, the setting of Chapter 4, the molten metal had coursed with ‘Crossings’. The principal subject is energy as it flowed through the mould Mochi’s Saint Veronica in the crossing of while being poured. In the rest of the St Peter’s. Lingo reviews this sculpture’s chapter Lingo focuses on understanding complicated history, emphasizing the implications of the fact that the the essential fact that Mochi was not statues were not commissioned by the working under the thumb of Bernini rulers they celebrate but by the people like the two other sculptors represented being ruled, the Piacentines, through in the crossing, Andrea Bolgi and their governing body. The appearance François Duquesnoy. Mochi reported of grotesque ornament on the base directly to Pope Urban VIII and the is interpreted as a kind of rebellious Congregazione della Fabbrica, which language that Mochi used to address gave him a certain licence to pursue his his patrons’ difficult situation. She also own approach, one grounded in fioren- sees it as Mochi’s way of demonstrating tinità. Lingo interprets the Veronica as the power of the artist to invent without a ‘Nympha’, an ancient figure type that constraint – a traditionally Florentine was part of the Florentine revival of

376 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] antiquity in the fifteenth century. As completion of the Veronica in 1640 and Lingo observes, the Veronica is like a his death in 1654. Traditionally, these Nympha in the way she rushes forward works have been seen in a negative with her garments swept back. Lingo light, understood as the bizarre failings reasons that Mochi’s use of the Nympha of an ageing artist. Lingo shows that was designed to allow him to project the heterogeneous character of the his fiorentinità in a more essential way. group is a reflection of Mochi’s respect The drapery, as it catches in the wind, for the unique circumstances of blows against the saint’s body, which each commission. Her most effective it reveals sensually, while also being demonstration is with his colossal a source of visual wonder in itself – marble statues of Saints Peter and Paul the same strategy he had developed a in the . When they are quarter of a century earlier in Orvieto. considered in relation to their intended The observation serves as a pivot to setting in the Basilica of San Paolo Bernini’s Saint , which Lingo fuori le Mura, where they would have sees as existing in opposition to the been seen against a backdrop of Early Veronica. Whereas the Veronica brings Christian mosaics, the stylized quality the Renaissance into the seventeenth of the faces and hair makes better century, the Longinus breaks with it, and sense. Mochi was trying to create works the reason is because of the disconnect that meshed visually with their Early between body and drapery. As Lingo Christian environment. concludes, it is the ‘rebellion’ of the Throughout the book Lingo is to be drapery that becomes the essence of commended for the superb photographs, the ‘baroque’ style that Bernini helped which help her drive her points with spread to all corners of Catholic . particular effectiveness. Lingo made Here, the reader is treated to as cogent it a condition of publishing the book an analysis of Bernini’s style as is to be that a new campaign of photography be found anywhere in the vast literature on undertaken, and she was unrelenting the artist. in her hunt for the requisite funds. Her The final chapter, ‘Unfinished approach, which had the sympathies of Endings’, addresses the major the series editor, Lorenzo Pericolo, is a commissions of Mochi’s later model for all scholars. career, which unfolded between the C. D. Dickerson III

Tomas Macsotay (ed.), Rome, Travel and flux that have been otherwise obscured the Sculpture Capital, c.1770–1825 by the unquestionably canonical status London, Routledge, 2017, hardback, £92. ISBN of Rome as a ‘sculpture capital’ during 978-1-4724-20350 the period. The dates that frame the volume, Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital, 1770 to 1825, encompass most of c. 1770–1825 offers a fresh approach Antonio Canova’s career and mark a to the study of patrons, artists and historical moment when the market for markets for Roman sculpture in the marble sculpture in Rome began to be late eighteenth and early nineteenth dominated by foreign visitors, many centuries. Instead of focusing on of whom understood it in terms of a the agency of the traditional cast of site of ‘cosmopolitan projections’ (p. 5). powerful tastemakers and artists, such While not discounting as a as Antonio Canova, Bertel Thorvaldsen pan-European phenomenon, the volume and Johann Winckelmann, the volume also makes a case for the uniqueness of emphasizes the shifting status of Rome as a ‘sculpture capital’, where ‘two travellers, trade routes, political systems types of “goods” were exchanged: aristo- and institutions that underpinned the cratic and tourist taste and the lustre production, consumption and reception and classical form of Carrara marble’ of marble sculpture in Rome. The book (p. 3). The conditions for the sculpture thus points to areas of contingency and market in Rome were unique insofar as

377 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] Antonio Canova, Apollo Crowning 1825. This includes a dive into questions Himself, 1781–82, marble, 84.7 of historiography and a section that cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 95.SA.71. addresses the day-to-day conditions (photo: digital image courtesy faced by sculptors and patrons of the Getty’s Open Content during the volatile revolutionary and Program) post-revolutionary period, when riots and war interrupted travel and caused the population of to decrease by one-third. The first few sections of this introduction would be useful in an introductory history of sculpture course, in courses related to the grand tour, and for any study abroad programme that is taught in Rome. The last sections of the introduction summarize the essays in the book and lay out its organizational structure in terms of three thematic sections. The first section, ‘A Space for Encounters’, addresses the ‘socio-economic image of life for sculptors’ (p. 17) in late eighteenth-century Rome; Chiara Piva’s essay, ‘Restoring and Making Sculpture in Eighteenth-Century Rome’, offers a lens into the functioning of they relied on ‘the constant assembling studios in terms of their transmission and disassembling of artistic and of technical knowledge for artists who national communities and supervisory worked collaboratively in creating institutions’ (p. 4) in dialogue with a new works and, most illuminatingly, constantly rotating cast of travellers. restoring sculptures. Susanne Adina One of the most important Meyer’s outstanding essay, ‘Promoting intervention of the essays in the Sculpture in Eighteenth-Century volume is their implicit challenge of a Rome: Exhibitions, , monolithic understanding of neoclas- Public’, examines studio exhibitions sicism in terms of its public, didactic of marble sculpture intended to attract mission (epitomized by the ‘school’ of the attention of foreign visitors; and Co.), as well as a conception Meyer’s essay addresses a plurality of of it as a ‘tightly run enactment of exhibitionary conditions, including Winckelmann’s ideas’ (p. 6). Many of the an informal, non-institutional type essays accomplish this by examining of exhibition as well as institutional the movements of sculptors and patrons exhibitions, such as the ones hosted from northern Europe to Rome as a by the French Academy to display means of providing a critical framework the works of the pensionnaires for a for understanding the mobility of specifically Roman audience. The last objects, artists and patrons; Rome is essay in this section, ‘Bringing Modern understood to be a place where ‘the Rome to Chatsworth: The Formation of traveling aristocrat met the emigrated the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s Sculpture sculptor’ (p. 5) in official as well as Collection’ by Allison Yarrington, unofficial spaces such as artists’ studios. provides an illuminating case study of The book’s introduction by Thomas the ways in which transalpine sculpture Macsotay is invaluable and is written galleries depended on a complex in a language that will be accessible to network of local Roman agents who new students and specialists alike. In facilitated the movement of Roman addition to laying out the theoretical sculpture across borders. and methodological stakes of the The second section, ‘Close to Canova’, volume, the introduction is composed of offers a reassessment of Canova’s studio several sections that provide a historical practice and seeks to complicate our overview of the development of Rome understanding of the artist’s reputation as a ‘sculpture capital’ from 1770 to for cosmopolitan openness and

378 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] magnanimity towards foreign sculptors representation of his encounters with and patrons alike. Christina Ferando’s sculpture in his notebooks in his essay, essay, ‘Truly Transnational? Sculpture ‘Sculptor and Tourist: John Flaxman and Studios in Rome after the Restoration’, His Italian Journals and Sketchbooks positions Canova’s status as a bellwether (1787–1794)’. Thomas Macsotay examines of Rome’s artistic in terms a vibrant, if normally overlooked, area of his complex relationship to the of the market for sculpture in Rome, question of transnationalism; Daniella namely classicizing sculpture in Gallo examines the hierarchies in his ‘Struggle and Memorial Relief: John studio between master and students Deare’s Caesar Invading Britain’. Roberto in her contribution, ‘In the Shadow of Ferrari’s scintillating contribution, the Star: Career Strategies of Sculptors ‘The Sculptor, the Duke, and Queer Art in Rome in the Age of Canova (c. Patronage: John Gibson’s Mars Restrained 1780–1820)’. The last essay in this section by Cupid and Winckelmannian by Johannes Myssok, ‘Canova and His Aesthetics’, focuses on a sculpture German Friends’, focuses on the artist’s commission from the 6th Duke of relationships with Swiss and German Devonshire, William Spencer Cavendish, sculptors in the 1780s and 1790s. The from one of Canova’s students, John third section of the volume, entitled Gibson, in terms of homoerotic desire, ‘Distance and Difference’, examines passion and the traditions of the beau the cultural imaginary of neoclassical idéal. sculpture and the important role Rome, Travel, and the Sculpture that Rome played in negotiating the Capital, c. 1770–1825 helps to advance expectations of viewers. The essays and complicate our understanding here approach the problem of specta- of Rome’s reputation as a centre of torship from several different points of neoclassical art and grand tourism that view. In ‘Multiple Views, Contours and has long been enshrined in studies Sculptural Narration: Aesthetic Notions related to the history of sculpture. Its of Neoclassical Sculpture in and out of focus on complex systems and networks Rome’, Roland Kanz considers the role of artists, patrons and other local that narration plays in the embodied conditions provides an exciting path for experience of neoclassical sculpture. future directions in the study of Roman Eckart Marchand focuses on the travels sculpture. of John Flaxman to Rome and the Katie Hornstein

Herbert M. Cole, Maternity: Mothers and by male artists until recent decades. Children in the Arts of Africa In Cole’s reading, the resulting images New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2017 (distributed for reflected both an idealizing masculine Mercatorfonds), 376 pp., 343 colour illustrations, £70. ISBN 978-0-3002-29158 gaze and the role of the mother in upholding patriarchy. Maternity centres on works used in religious, We are all the children of mothers. No ritual, and socio-political contexts, matter where or when, the biological emphasizing complexity and cultural fact of birth unites us all. It is the specificity rather than a unified thematic cultural elements surrounding birth and interpretation. These ‘instrumentalized’ motherhood – the rituals, celebrations, sculptures were prized by their users taboos and art – that vary. In Maternity: more for their efficacy rather than their Mothers and Children in the Arts of Africa, aesthetics, asserts Cole, though their Herbert Cole investigates the visual beauty makes it immediately evident archetype of maternity to ‘illuminate that significant thought was put into the universal character of the icon while their appearance. revealing deep wells of African thought’ Running to nearly 400 pages, (p. 13). Primarily sculptural, maternities Maternity’s eleven chapters include two in Africa were overwhelmingly made introductions, six thematic chapters and

379 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] three culturally focused case studies. The following chapter returns to the Presenting a selection of the continent’s pan-continental approach, discussing maternity imagery, the content is sculpted ‘children’ owned and used by weighted towards nineteenth- and women to fulfil their desire for offspring, twentieth-century art from central, such as the flat-headed akua’ma figures western and southern Africa, due to that Akan women tuck into their the wide availability of objects and wrappers. Moving beyond biological documentation from this period. In reproduction, Chapter 5 considers many ways aimed at readers familiar sculptures that honour the generative with African art history, Maternity power of women as goddesses, remains accessible to non-specialists. foundresses, culture heroes and even the Glosses of local language terms, field- earth herself. Breaking down scholarly specific concepts and organizing themes divisions between ‘traditional’ objects unite its often whirlwind continental (i.e. those used in ritual functions) and dash. A map, bibliography and index entertainment-based objects (such as round out the text, which is comple- puppets), Chapter 6 takes a wide-ranging mented by excellently printed colour view of the object types and materials field photographs and studio images used to depict maternity. Of special of objects from private and public interest to scholars of sculpture is its collections in Africa, North America and section on materials and techniques, Europe. Many are reproduced at full- or which offers an introduction to the nearly full-page scale. formal and technical aspects of African Chapters 1 and 2 outline the book’s creative processes, covering everything theoretical core and survey of 7,000 from wood and ivory to metal and years of maternity images, starting terracotta, as well as composite objects with prehistoric rock art in the Sahara and other media such as painting and and southern Africa, moving through photography. the paintings of Christian Ethiopia and The first of three case studies, Egypt, and ending with West and Central Chapter 7 considers Cole’s area of African practices from ancient times greatest expertise, Akan arts from through the twentieth century. Chapter Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. There, visual 3 considers terracottas from Djenné- and verbal forms (primarily proverbs) Djeno, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s mix to inform and reinforce cultural oldest urban centres (c. 250 BCE to c. 900 messages. In Ghana, matrilineal descent CE). Clasping twins or triplets, Djenné inspires royal, religious and secular maternities are often entwined by Akan sculpture alike to depict Queen enigmatic snakes or markers of disease. Mothers and maternities. Reflecting this iconographic fluidity, renowned carvers such as Osei Bonsu (1900–77) often carved works for all three purposes. Chapter 8 considers the iconography and origins of sculpted Kongo mother-and- child figures, arguing for the influence of European Christian sculpture (the Kongo king Nzinga a Nkuwu voluntarily converted to Catholicism in 1491). Equally, when filled with special substances according to local religious practices, certain figures became Kongo artist (Yombe subgroup), nkisi, empowered sculptures linked to Figure of Mother and Child (Phemba), nineteenth century, powerful spirits. The final case study, wood, beads, glass mirror, Chapter 9, appraises Yoruba artists’ metal, resin, 27.9 × 12.7 × 11.4 cm prolific creation of mother-and-child (11 × 5 × 4½ in.). Possibly Kongo Central Province, Democratic images for shrine, divination or royal Republic of the Congo. Brooklyn architectural contexts. These sculpted Museum, Museum Expedition representations reflect the revered status 1922, Robert B. Woodward and perceived spiritual power of Yoruba Memorial Fund, 22.1138 (photo: by permission of Brooklyn women, referred to honorifically as Museum) ‘mother’.

380 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] The penultimate chapter considers these works, where women are often arts linked with masquerade. In the much more than biological mothers. African context, masquerade is a sacred Finally, cultural anthropologist Victor or secular event that integrates sculpted Turner’s work on liminality informs face masks, costumes and ritual or interpretations of maternity artworks entertaining performance. Frequently used during periods of transition, such used in rituals tied to liminality – such as initiations or funerals. as the transition out of childhood/the Professor Emeritus of African art maternal sphere into adulthood – masks history at the University of California depicting women are nearly always worn Santa , Cole has curated and by men, and thus represent the majority written extensively on the arts of Ghana of Cole’s examples. Uniquely in both and Nigeria, as well as big-picture topics Maternity and in general, Sierra Leonean like the art of power and masking. and Liberian women in the Sande society Cole’s interest in sculpture is not purely commission and perform ndoli jowei academic: as ‘Kofi Cole’, he has carved (wooden helmet-style masks depicting miniatures of African masterworks for idealized women) for their own nearly two decades. The present volume initiations. They represent an exception is the culmination of over five decades within the otherwise male-dominated of writing and curating on the subject genre of masquerading. of the mother and child in African Finally, Chapter 11 considers sculpture, an interest first started with post-colonial maternities, centring his 1968 dissertation on Igbo mbari on artists practising in a ‘modern’ or houses dedicated to the earth goddess ‘contemporary’ mode in South Africa. Ala. Cole argues that after independence, Cole’s Maternity is strengthened female artists created new, empathetic by the number and variety of field images of maternity. He contrasts photographs depicting works in situ, these with the idealized versions whether placed in shrines, as part of historically made by male artists, some architectural complexes, or in use by of which are still made and used. While their owners. It is through contextu- sculpture dominated the so-called alizing images that these sculptures ‘traditional’ works considered in earlier are clearly understood as ‘ritual chapters, contemporary sculptors such instruments’, thus reorienting the as Claudette Schreuders and Sokari sometimes myopic Western focus on Douglas Camp are in the minority aesthetics in African art. Similarly, among contemporary artists. Expanding Cole’s emphasis on cultural and object- material possibilities through the use of centred specificity goes a long way photography, collage and paint, artists to defy stereotypes about African such as Kwame Akoto (‘Almighty God’), sculptures, such as the simplistic Penny Siopis and Mmakgabo Mapula ‘fertility doll’ or ‘fertility goddess’. Both Helen Sebidi employ naturalism, while terms are too often used elsewhere to reinterpreting sculpted archetypes of downplay both the complexity of local women. knowledge systems and the technical While focusing extensively on formal skill of artists. In his geographically and stylistic analyses, Maternity also inclusive approach to the maternal engages with anthropological theory and archetype, Cole reflects scholarly trends art historical debates about maternities to unite the arts of Pharaonic Egypt and in African arts. Drawing from anthro- northern Africa with those from the pologist Alma Gottlieb’s work on sub-Sahara. Previously, the artificial cultural practices surrounding infancy separation of the continent on racist in western Africa, Cole uses comparisons grounds derived by Western scholars left with Euro-American parenting to make a persistent gap in our understanding of African cultural practices and their continental creativity. It must be noted, attendant art objects understandable however, that with the exception of a to a Western audience (his self-declared brief treatment of Algerian rock art, primary readership). The structuralist northern Africa is not treated in this theory of anthropologist and ethnologist text. Though probably due to the relative Claude Lévi-Strauss informs his analysis lack of representational art in the region, of the binaries inherent in many of references to male and female sexuality

381 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] and fertility certainly exist there, as With its broad scope, Maternity is Cynthia Becker has demonstrated for the a strong introduction to mother-and- arts of the Amazigh (Berber) in Morocco. child imagery made by African artists, The main limitation of this work is featuring not only Cole’s decades of in its details. Curiously, many captions field work on the subject, but also lack dates and artists’ biographical synthesizing studies by many leading information, and are otherwise scant scholars. The figure of the mother when compared to their home collection and her progeny has been a recurrent records. Local language names for objects topic in African art history, forming (such as dege for the Dogon mother and the subject of numerous books and child, figure 10) and detailed geography exhibitions since at least the 1960s, are often omitted. More troubling are such as the former Musée Dapper’s 2008 captions with incorrect information. Two Femmes dans les arts d’Afrique. Yet few such examples are Figure 13, a mid-to-late recent titles have appeared in English fifteenth-century Ethiopian Christian or have sought to cover such ambitious Marian triptych listed with an incorrect pan-continental ground. Coming soon accession number, measurements and a after the publication of studies on seventeenth-century date, and Figure 37, mother-and-child images in medieval a Nok terracotta impossibly dated as c. France (Marian Bleeke, Motherhood and 1912 (Cole dates Nok culture as 300 BCE to Meaning in Medieval Sculpture: Represen- 200 CE). The lack of dates in the captions tations from France, c.1100–1500, 2017) and in many parts of the text lends the and the Bronze Age (Stephanie Lynne works considered an unintentional Budin, Images of Woman and Child from sense of atemporality. This counters the Bronze Age: Reconsidering Fertility, Cole’s otherwise careful attention to Maternity, and Gender in the Ancient cultural specificity in his interpre- World, 2014) Cole’s Maternity represents tations. For a work that will probably a major work in sculpture studies that become a reference for both specialists will broaden our global understanding and non-specialists, the accuracy and of this universally human, yet completeness of this information should culturally distinct, relationship and its have been given far greater editorial representations. attention. Kristen Windmuller-Luna

Edward Juler, Grown But Not Made: British scientific factions at play – something Modernist Sculpture and the New Biology of a rarity in art historical accounts Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015, £75. ISBN of bio-centricity – he weaves a 978-0-7190-90324 comprehensive picture of the biological foundations that underpin the The sinuous organic forms in the conceptual frameworks of artists and sculpture of , Henry critics in the interwar period. Moore and others are often tied to While the author employs the vague conceptions of Biology; however, term ‘bio-centricity’ as an overarching few have embarked on the subject with description, he immediately begins the level of scientific specificity that teasing out different strands of inquiry Edward Juler does in his book Grown that came under this broad term, But Not Made. Juler’s intervention constructing a web of interlinked and into the study of organic overlapping ideas in science that, he – a subject previously discussed by argues, played a fundamental role in art scholars including Oliver Botar, Isabel and art criticism in the and 1930s. Wünsche and David Thistlewood – is to He conveys the wider social and political historicize the trend in ‘bio-centricity’ implications brought about by what as both a British phenomenon and he calls the ‘New Biology’, a school of a wider European endeavour, and thought that consciously challenged the to situate modern British sculpture predominant mechanistic and positivist within this context.1 Through the ideas that continued to linger from author’s confident explanations of the the nineteenth century and included

382 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] Edward Juler, Grown But Not towards ‘organismal composition’, Made: British Modernist Sculpture forging a connection between the process and the New Biology, cover (photo: reproduced by permission of creating multi-part sculptures and of Manchester University Press) prevalent studies of organic arrangement. A discussion about morphology and the discourses surrounding inorganic and organic form follows on from this. Crystal structures are particularly significant for Juler’s argument since technically they are inorganic but have the capacity to grow. Ernst Haeckel’s resultant hypothesis that all things, organic and inorganic, possessed life, is presented as a key theoretical source for ’s writing and for discussions about the life of artistic form. The author ends by examining the impact of micro- and macro-biology on , especially the role it played in ideas about visual perception, establishing a relationship between new photographic technologies and modern sculpture. theories such as ‘neo-lamarckism’ and Perhaps Juler’s most illuminating ‘neo-vitalism’. contribution is his discussion of Juler first traces the relationship embryology and modern sculpture. Here between science and art in the interwar Juler examines ’s gendered period, challenging Charles Percy descriptions of direct carving and the Snow’s summation in 1959 that the surrealist fetishization of a ‘feminine two disciplines had developed separate creative force’, through this growing languages. He considers the widespread field of scientific research, identifying interest in the biological sciences that the prevalent forms of the egg and the came about thanks to publications such as foetus in works by Barbara Hepworth, Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature (1928) Hans Arp, Dora Maar and Paul Nash. The and D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On author makes an original intervention Growth and Form (1942), and emphasizes by stressing that while these embryo- the profound importance of BBC radio logical forms became potent symbols broadcasting which disseminated of creativity, they also carried sinister scientific knowledge to much broader connotations, due to the proliferation audiences than would have accessed it of eugenic research in the interwar otherwise. The artists and critics who period. On the one hand, this gave rise to circulated around the journals Axis and pioneering figures such as Marie Stopes Circle are among those to have responded but, on the other, it led to dangerous most fervently to the expansion of ideas about controlling childbirth popular science, and these go on to form among certain ethnic groups and Juler’s principal case studies. classes. Stopes, who was among the first Juler follows this overview with a scientists to propose using eugenics to thematic analysis of the relationship offer women greater freedom over their between the New Biology and modern reproductive capabilities, was as contro- sculpture, examining the biological versial a figure as those who applied sciences and the art of the interwar eugenics for more sinister ends, and period through the concepts of ‘metamor- Juler brings these contentious political phosis’, ‘organicism’ and ‘morphology’. and social anxieties to bear on interwar His discussion of metamorphosis sculpture, rooting it in a socio-historical focuses on the revival of neo-Darwinist context that is often negated in analyses evolution in the New Biology, which of organic modernism. became a paradigm for the creative What is more, this bio-centric lens process among artists and critics. Next, has illuminating art historical value in he investigates the stylistic manifes- inviting comparisons between artists tations of bio-centricity in the tendency who are rarely discussed together.

383 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] Juler achieves this most effectively In interdisciplinary studies, it is in the parallel he makes between the often the case that the author has British painter Paul Nash and the a greater appreciation for one area French dissident Surrealist Georges over another. Juler, in his rigorous Bataille, who shared an interest in Karl reading of modern British sculpture Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (Art through the New Biology, represents Forms in Nature) (1928). Comparing an emerging generation of scholars Nash and Bataille’s writing on Art Forms who bring to the subject an in-depth in Nature, Juler reveals a surprising knowledge of the scientific as well as alignment of their perspectives on the art historical landscape of their the perverse function of Blossfeldt’s period. His emphasis seems to be photographs. While one might placed on balancing an art historical expect this position from Bataille, appreciation with a real understanding the comparison presents Nash in an of biological science in the interwar entirely new light that strays from period which enables an effective

1. Oliver Botar and Isabel the romanticism of Herbert Read, analysis of the specific trends in Wunsche (eds), Biocentrism and with which he is often associated. The scientific research that informed Modernism, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011; implication that Nash was informed different, and sometimes conflicting, David Thistlewood, ‘Organic art and by the dissident Surrealist journal artistic and critical approaches. the popularization of a scientific philosophy’, Journal of Aesthetics, Document has the potential to open up Rachel Stratton XXII, 4, 1982, pp. 311–21. new avenues for research on the artist.

Sebastiano Barassi, Tania Moore and Jon The exaggeratedly sculptural nature Wood, Becoming of the forms in Moore’s sketch (rendered Perry Green, , 2017, 128 pp., 110 with far greater clarity and weight colour illustrations, 790 b/w illustrations, £14.99. ISBN 978-0-906909-33-1 than by Turner in his hazy original), the balance between three differently shaped elements of the composition and At the age of 17 Henry Moore painted a the angles at which they are set on the rather heavy watercolour copy of J. M. sea (for which substitute base) already W. Turner’s Deriding Polyphemus portend an interest in volume, mass and (1829), allegedly after a postcard, since counterpoint composition that was to he had yet to visit the Gallery in be fundamental to Moore’s work. There London, to which it had been transferred was nothing modernistic about Moore’s from the around 1910.1 copy of the Turner and it certainly did With three distinct forms apparently not herald the arrival of a great talent. floating in the water, one of which is Rather it presented the work of a young an arched rocky outcrop, the painting survivor of the Victorian era, the son resembles what would become one of of a worker at the local colliery who, Moore’s signature motifs, the multi-part like his wife, was photographed seated composition. The outcrop itself clearly at a table in front of a fake, luxuriantly anticipates Moore’s interest in arched curtained backdrop, in a manner forms, seen most clearly in the Lincoln similar to the subjects of a Victorian or Center Reclining Figure (1963–65), but Georgian ‘swagger’ portrait. To paint whether he was thinking of Turner at a copy of a Turner in 1916 was to be this time, or even Monet’s depictions behind the curve. and the art of the Manneport, is moot, for Moore of Bloomsbury were still the dominant would have maintained that his avant-garde movements in , interest came principally from his own even though many of the Vorticists had observation of nature. However, he enlisted. Moore, isolated in , retained a lifelong interest in Turner, had not yet encountered them. owned one of his watercolours, acquired Becoming Henry Moore, the when his wealth permitted, and became catalogue to accompany an interesting the first president of the Turner Society exhibition recently held at the Henry in 1975. Moore Foundation in Perry Green,

384 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] which travelled on to the Henry Moore have known, with Ernst Kirchner and the Institute in , aims to chart the Brücke artists less well known and, at awakening of Moore’s modernist the time, probably unfamiliar to Moore. conscience from his teenage years It is disappointing that Barassi failed to his early thirties (which coincided to take the opportunity to revise our with the early thirties of the century), understanding of Moore’s growth. principally through a narrative of his Similarly, Tania Moore’s essay, absorption of objects from what he ‘The Nation’s Collections’, reviews old called the ‘world tradition’ seen at the territory. Only Jon Wood’s detailed and , but also in and well-researched article on the impact of the private collections of, among others, Sumerian sculpture on Moore, and in and Michael Sadler, the particular Gudea, adds to our knowledge. vice-chancellor of Leeds University. Starting out from Moore’s 1935 article Sebastiano Barassi’s introductory essay on Mesopotamian art published in goes over familiar ground in outlining the Listener on 5 June (and presumably Moore’s formal development, indicating previously the subject of a radio similarities with the work of Ivan broadcast), Wood describes the history Meštrović, Michelangelo Buonarroti, El and restoration of the Gudea sculpture Greco, and later , Henri acquired by the British Museum not long Gaudier-Brzeska, , before the appearance of Moore’s article, Alexander Archipenko, Ossip Zadkine and asks whether Moore may have seen and others, as well as pointing to the it either in Leon Underwood’s Brook Oceanic, Mexican, African and other Green School, where Underwood had sources Moore saw and sketched. Some worked on it in 1931, or even at the home of this material was exhibited alongside of the collector Sydney Burney, where Moore’s work in the exhibition to telling it had been much admired by artists in effect, but the catalogue essay itself is Underwood’s circle, of which Moore was no more than a standard introduction a ‘member’. The importance of Mesopo- that declines to engage with some of the tamian art in relation to Moore was more recent commentaries on Moore. threefold: its compact, compressed form, In particular Barassi glosses over the its lack of emotional expression and, on impact of Moore’s war service and the a more detailed level, the clasped hands extent to which it may, or may not, have that Moore adopted and adapted in a had a profound effect on his work or small number of sculptures, notably Girl even his choice of interests. He deals with Clasped Hands (1930) and Girl (1931). only superficially with the impact of If Moore had seen Gudea in Burney’s artists who engaged even earlier than collection then Girl with Clasped Hands Moore with ethnographic art. André would have been an uncharacteristically Derain, and Henri Matisse rapid response to it, although, as Wood are the obvious ones that Moore would states, he may have seen an article by Georges Conteneau about Sumerian art in 1929 in the first issue of Documents, which included reproductions of sculptures of Gudea. Even more likely he may have looked at Sumerian sculpture in the Louvre, and perhaps even saw Conteneau’s earlier article on Sumerian sculpture in L’ Amour de l’art in 1925.2 There is no doubting that Moore was devouring many different forms of ethnographic art and the art of ancient cultures as his many sketchbooks testify. Like the Vorticists before him and many artists of his own generation, at this point Moore rejected the Sebastiano Barassi, Tania Moore apparently sophisticated art of the and Jon Wood, Becoming Henry high Renaissance, preferring instead Moore, cover (photo: reproduced by permission manifestations of what was considered of the Henry Moore Foundation) primitive, whether it was trecento and

385 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] quattrocento painting, Aztec and Mayan and Design (Chatto & Windus, 1920). sculpture, Nigerian wood carvings, Why would a young man be attracted Congolese masks or Cycladic heads. It is to the art of ancient cultures, especially a curious anomaly of the period that the since it had already been explored by word ‘primitive’ could describe the work an earlier generation of artists working of Piero della Francesca as well as what before the First World War? We might say Fry referred to as the art of the bushmen. there was something rather derivative Barassi’s exhibition documents the and retardataire about this choice, a wish shift in Moore from a taste for El Greco, to turn back the clock to pre-war days, and perhaps Aubrey Beardsley and and an equivalent to the continental Albrecht Dürer on the one hand, and return to order that Barassi, for some Michelangelo and Rodin on the other, reason, suggests Moore ignored. Unless to an idiom that abjured verisimilitude we interpret the return to order as in favour of the real. While Moore did simply relating to the writings and not altogether dispense with illusion work of the artists grouped around he found a greater reality in acknowl- Amédée Ozenfant and Pierre Jeanneret edging the power of the block of stone or and their magazine L’Esprit nouveau, wood, in coaxing from it a recognizable Moore’s emphasis on the solidity of form that would nonetheless remain the figure, which he saw in the work of conjoined to or inseparable from the Picasso, is undoubtedly a manifestation matrix. Power was derived from its of this tendency. Like many people block-like nature and compression of his generation Moore probably felt rather than movement, naturalism or that the relentless progress towards a expressive emotion. sophisticated, ‘civilized’ society had led Masaccio, whom Moore was later to the barbarism of war with its techno- to regard as the first artist to ‘make logically up-to-the-minute machinery sculpture in painting’, as Barassi notes, and chemical weapons. Many artists felt is not mentioned at an early stage in that the suave nature of Edwardian art the latter’s account, but his Expulsion was no longer relevant in the post-war from the Garden of Eden was surely the era. The elemental emotions and source for Moore’s Two Nudes Among behaviour revealed during the war made Trees (c. 1921), not El Greco. Indeed this the conventions of art seem no more fresco must also have been the source than veneers. There was a need to return of the face for Woman with Upraised to something primal. It seems unlikely Arms (1924–25) which bears a strong that Moore’s devotion to the art of resemblance to Eve in Masaccio’s world cultures stemmed purely from his painting, while the pose itself recalls, interest in Fry. if a little obliquely, the left-hand figure Moore was typical of many war in Edgar Degas’s Repasseuses (Women veterans in rarely speaking about his Ironing) (1884–86), which was on view at horrific time in the trenches and the the Louvre from 1914 onwards.3 Moore gas attack he suffered. Photographs of continued to look at Florentine painting him after the war show him in a state and modern painting and sculpture even of shock and blankness. The sculptures when he was engaged with the ‘world he made in the late twenties and early tradition’. As Barassi remarks, Moore thirties repeat such blank expressions, spent the next decades trying to elide and while they mimic, as Wood suggests, his interest in what he later called the the expression of Gudea, they also ‘cruel hardness’ of the ‘world tradition’ reflect the desire in the post-war era for with ‘its opposite’ in European art. serenity, repose and restraint, for an art The reference to the ‘world tradition’ that shunned emotion.4 Such critics as is interesting in itself, for it indicates Stanley Casson echoed Fry’s interest in that Moore made no distinction between disinterested emotion. During the war what was regarded as the art of the there had been a surfeit of emotion and

1. In his catalogue essay, ‘A ‘civilized’ first world and what we call there was now a need not only to forget master in the making’, Sebastiano ethnographic art of the second and third but also to close down the inhuman Barassi erroneously states that worlds. The question is never discussed experiences that gave rise to strong the painting was in the National in this book as to why Moore might have emotional outpouring. So in adopting Gallery, but in an email to the author dated 1 November 2017 Ian Warrell been interested in such sources other models from ‘primitive’ cultures, Moore confirmed that the painting moved than by reference to Roger Fry’s Vision drained them of emotional appearance,

386 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] from the National Gallery to the Tate preferring an impassivity that concealed continue to believe, as Barassi asserts, Gallery after 1910 to join the enlarged visible emotion. The emotion, however, that Moore focused on ‘pure formal Turner display in the new galleries paid for by Joseph Duveen. was contained within the mass of the invention without the preoccupation of 2. Documents: Doctrines, block of stone, the compression of the narrative content’ (p. 8)? Surely the fact Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, object and gestures of his subjects. that he produced variants on a theme Ethnographie, April 1929, pp. 1–8; L’Amour de l’art, June 1925, pp. 167–73. There is another aspect to Moore’s was not simply because he wanted to 3. The link between Woman with art, only hinted at in Wood’s essay, explore the forms more thoroughly Upraised Arms and the Masaccio namely that there is an unmistakable but perhaps also because one iteration painting was first announced by Norbert Lynton in David Mitchinson resemblance to Moore’s facial features did not capture the intention in all its (ed.), Celebrating Moore, London, in a number of his works, shown most complexity or completeness. If ever Lund Humphries, 2006, p. 91. In the clearly in a photograph of Moore there was a narrative sculptor it was West Wind Sketchbook Moore notes: working on West Wind in 1928. In his Moore. Why might a male artist be ‘Remember Masaccio in the Nat Art Co Fund’, proving that as late as 1928 1926 Notebook no. 6 Moore wrote: ‘What so interested in the maternity theme he was still thinking of Masaccio as I am attempting to express connection in the decade after the cessation of a source, in this case, presumably with my own life & vision.’5 The autobio- hostilities? Why would he go on to make The Virgin and Child acquired by the National Gallery in 1916 with graphical element of Moore’s sculpture sculptures with fragmented forms? a contribution from the National needs more serious investigation. Why Again the wartime experience seems Art Collections Fund. Barassi notes was Moore so interested in funerary pertinent. These are questions that need correctly that Moore’s visit to monuments, in Etruscan funerary consideration. in 1925 was particularly important for his visit to the Brancacci Chapel caskets decorated with reclining figures, Wood certainly addresses some of in Florence. in the artefacts of such brutal cultures as the narrative aspects of Moore’s work, for 4. Girl with Clasped Hands (1930) the Aztec? Might this interest be related example the role of hands in his sculpture. is something of an exception in suggesting a state of anxiety. to his war experience? Although often He refers to photographs of Moore 5. In Notebook no. 6 1926 (Henry seen as Earth Mother figures, were the touching his sculptures, inserting himself Moore Foundation, , reclining and recumbent, sometimes into a close bodily relationship with them, HMF 427), Moore notes on the second page: ‘Sculpture is the relation androgynous women monuments and the symbolic but unrevealed value of [?] of masses etc etc| Modelling to the fallen or memories of sights the clasped hand in the Gudea sculpture. is undulation of surfaces.| Write seen on the battlefield?6 Their outline Moore’s sculpture differs consid- out thesis of fact present beliefs.| resemblance to the war-torn landscape erably here from Barbara Hepworth’s. What I am attempting to express -;| Connection with my own life - & is somewhat uncanny while their pacific Hepworth’s sculpture is haptic, almost vision| make a sketch each night qualities parallel Moore’s post-war designed to hold in the hand, as indeed of something absurd during |day; | pacifist expressions.7 While Moore liked she was sometimes photographed doing. Keep ever prominent | the big view of sculpture, The World Tradition’. This to maintain that he sculpted these Her mother-and-child sculptures can page, displayed in the exhibition, is monumental figures because they were be held in places where they narrow, reproduced in Ann Garrould (ed.), a given subject that became a vehicle for and you can hook a thumb or a finger Henry Moore. Volume 1. Complete experimentation, this reasoning looks through her pierced forms. Moore’s Drawings 1916–29, London, Lund Humphries, 1996, p. 129, AG 26.2. increasingly misleading. sculptures from the same period are far The inscription is transcribed by As for the masks that Moore made, heavier, more inclined to emphasize the Garrould. In the first line she gives there is no mention of the possible block, and cannot be grasped in this way. the word ‘relative’ where I have given the word ‘relation’. The manuscript is influence of Derwent Wood, Moore’s Where Hepworth could easily pick up her unclear here but the word ‘relation’ teacher at the , who sculptures in one hand, Moore could only seems more likely and echoes made prosthetic masks for war victims, touch his. To counteract their remoteness Gaudier’s article, ‘Vortex’, in Blast Moore had himself photographed laying (1914) which began: ‘Sculptural or, if not his influence, then the impact energy is the mountain | Sculptural of seeing veterans walking around hands on them not simply to suggest their feeling is the appreciation of masses in these strange accessories. Moore’s handmade quality but to link them to his in relation | Sculptural ability is the haunting masks with gashed mouths own persona and body. Once again the defining of these masses by planes’ (p. 155). and hollow eyes must have reverberated autobiographical nature of the work is not 6. Moore’s use of this motif with an audience for which the sight of a far away. to commemorate the death of mask was common. This well-illustrated book presents Christopher Martin in a sculpture of 1946 for Dartington Hall surely The problem for Moore scholars is an interesting selection of Moore’s points to a funereal association. that although the sculptor commented sculptures and some of the sources 7. For a discussion of the extensively on his work, he never he studied. It has a chronology but no relationship of Moore’s art to his discussed its meaning beyond an bibliography and is elegantly designed. wartime experience, see Jeremy Lewison, Henry Moore, Cologne, association with nature or in formal It is a pity that for the most part it leaves Taschen, 2007, pp. 17–27, and, more terms. But can we continue to take his so many questions unanswered and, briefly, Chris Stephens, ‘Anything comments at face value? Are there not with the exception of Wood’s essay, but gentle – Henry Moore – modern sculptor’, in Chris Stephens sociological aspects of the work that presents little new information. (ed.), Henry Moore, London, Tate Moore did not allude to? Can we really Jeremy Lewison Publishing, 2007, p. 15.

387 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] Elise Archias, The Concrete Body: Yvonne widely of late (originating at Museum Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci der Moderne Salzburg, 21 November New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2016, £55. ISBN 2015–28 February 2016, and travelling to 9-780-3002-17971 MMK Frankfurt, 31 May–17 September 2017, and MoMA PS1, , 22 Elise Archias’s tightly structured study October 2017–11 March 2018), with an offers a fresh perspective on three accompanying, monumentally scaled artists whose practices are inextricably monograph, edited by Breitwieser associated with the material, (Prestel, 2015). Schneemann was also performative and conceptual upheavals recently the recipient of the Golden Lion of the 1960s. The position of Yvonne for Lifetime Achievement at the 57th Rainer (born 1934), Carolee Schneemann edition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2017; (born 1939), and Vito Acconci (1940–2017) the ultimate seal of recognition on her within graduate syllabuses and art establishment acceptance, decades undergraduate art history curricula of after she was routinely shunned and the post-war era is now unassailable. overlooked by many critics, museum Archias succeeds in counterbalancing curators and art historians for her this state of over-familiarity with the sexually explicit practice. provision of distinctive theoretical Rainer’s return to insights, close re-readings and new choreography and performing in 2000 analyses of the artists’ most iconic after a twenty-five-year film-making works (notably Rainer’s Trio A (1966) career was at the invitation of Mikhail and Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964)). Baryshnikov. The visibility of her Providing the publication’s through-line resultant work for Baryshnikov’s White is what Archias identifies as the Oak Dance Project marked the beginning three subjects’ focus on the ‘everyday of a groundswell of critical reappraisal materiality of bodies’ (p. 77). Her chapter of her Judson Dance Theater-era practice structure prioritizes the individual (c. 1962–68). Rainer published her treatment of each artist, while retaining autobiography, Feelings are Facts, in a capacity for elegant and unexpected 2006. A documentary film of the same lines of thought to be drawn between name was released in 2015. In 2014 the them. Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles The timeliness of this volume is mounted a major retrospective, Yvonne important to note. The first compre- Rainer: Dances and Films, while a major hensive museum retrospective of monographic study that covers similar Schneemann, Carolee Schneemann: territory to that mined by Archias was Kinetic Painting, curated by Sabine published in 2008: Carrie Lambert- Breitwieser, Director of Museum Beatty’s Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer der Moderne Salzburg, has travelled and the 1960s (MIT Press). The death of Vito Acconci on 27 April 2017, some months after the publication of Archias’s book, prompted wide-ranging tributes that routinely emphasized his seismic impact on the New York art scene of the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as his later practice in radical architecture. Shortly before his death, MoMA PS1 organized an important survey of his early works, VITO ACCONCI: WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976, from June to September 2016, which included many of the works featured in Archias’s chapter on Acconci. The past five years has therefore Elise Archias, The Concrete provided perhaps the best opportunity Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee to experience, read about or view Schneemann, Vito Acconci, cover (photo: reproduced by permission documentation of the 1960s work of of Yale University Press) Rainer, Schneemann and Acconci that

388 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] there has been at any point during the approach resonates with the overall previous four decades. Given such a conceptual argument of the book. bountiful context, Archias’s publication In the introduction, ‘When the Body achieves the impressive feat of offering Is the Material’, Archias sets out her up something new for art historians, theoretical priorities by positioning her curators and students of the period reading of Henri Lefebvre’s The Critique alike. of Everyday Life (1947 and 1961) as a The contents of the three framework preferable to Guy Debord’s monographic chapters are arranged The Society of the Spectacle (1967), near-chronologically, starting with often used in interpretations of these the eldest of the three artists, Yvonne artists’ works, notably Lambert-Beatty’s Rainer, whose mature work dates from reading of Rainer’s choreography. very early in the 1960s, and concluding Lefebvre is subsequently called on to with the late 1960s/early 1970s practice bolster Archias’s framing of the three of Acconci, and his intersections with artists, although this is infrequent, and and divergences from conceptual art. The Critique of Everyday Life is never The three chapters are clearly separated returned to in as much detail. The out: there are few points of explicit following chapters subsequently convey overlap, with the artists treated as three very different versions of case studies. In the case notion of ‘embodiment as abstraction’, of all three artists, the book concen- which is, Archias notes, ‘a general trates on the work produced after they condition rather than localized identity established their professional base in – an abstraction, like the everyday for New York, relocating from San Francisco Lefebvre … that is inextricably rooted in (Rainer), Urbana-Champaign, Illinois particular experience’ (p. 19). (Schneemann) and Iowa City (Acconci), The three artists, Archias argues, the latter two after the completion ‘brought together abstract form and the of their MFA degrees in painting and lived immediacy of everyday life rather poetry respectively. than choosing one over the other’ (p. 2). Archias’s book is profoundly This crucial dialectic of the abstract ambitious in its specificity. The careful and the everyday is convincingly close readings of the three artists, articulated in the introduction, then as their practices were configured at returned to and developed over the specific moments in their respective course of the three chapters and coda. careers, is a strategy that corresponds Further dialectical structures are to the author’s wider thesis of concrete seen in Archias’s positioning of the abstraction. It is in the particular that artists as representing the turning Archias locates the notion of univer- inside out of three key movements or sality so crucial to modernism at this concerns of 1960s practice: point in time: its moment of collapse. (Rainer), happenings (Schneemann) and By underscoring the particularity of conceptual art (Acconci) (p. 11). Archias these bodily expressions of desire, underscores the importance of their touch and repetitive actions, the work antagonistic roles, built upon the artists’ is understood to be simultaneously dual identities – both insiders and universal in its address, and particular outsiders relative to these terms. This is, in its articulation. This connects in part, what enabled them to probe the with Archias’s theorization, in the limits and vulnerabilities of the 1960s introduction, of the everyday as ‘an body. abstraction grounded in the particular, a Archias is upfront about the notion of “sensuous human activity”, as difficulties attached to speaking of ‘the Marx understood it…’ (p. 25). body’ in such generalizing terms: she The author treats the three artists acknowledges the very real problems like historical objects. Despite the associated with universal address in the fact that all three were alive during era of civil rights. Rather than disavow the research and writing of this book, the intrinsic bodily privilege of the almost all quoted speech from her works and artists under discussion, subjects is taken from or close to the she uses it to make the more nuanced period under consideration, rather contention that ‘there is something to than later reflections. This object-based be relearned from these moments of

389 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] simplification, something about how a with implacable stillness registering more broadly embracing, collectivizing even in moments of movement. In notion of the human was imagined Archias’s own chapter on Rainer, ‘Hurray during the transition to what we now for People’ (the title being a quote from call ’ (p. 27). This is a dance critic Jill Johnston’s review of We crucial pivot for her entire study, and Shall Run (1962)), there is a corresponding Archias returns to this theme at the emphasis on this idea of stillness within very end of Chapter 3 (on Vito Acconci), movement, which Archias traces back to via a comparative discussion of Adrian the artist’s ‘complete control’ over her Piper’s street-based performances, and a body (p. 44). ‘Control’ and ‘concreteness’ reference to Rosa Parks’s historic act of gradually appear as twinned terms public bodily resistance. throughout the chapter on Rainer, In the work of Rainer, Schneemann with ‘control’ often used as a leitmotif and Acconci, Archias’s argument implies, implying the purposeful displacement of ‘the concrete body’ of these artist- skill. This articulation of bodily control performers (and/or their surrogate as favoured over a classical dancer’s performers) materializes a sculpture comportment underpins the author’s that is of the body. The body becomes a analysis of Trio A’s ‘abstracted version of new container for sculpture. Sculpture labour’. The movements’ ‘factual’ quality is certainly not visible as the artistic and the overall impression of ‘tasklike’ medium of any of these artists, who activity in Trio A combine to suggest variously utilize dance, film, painting, Archias’s interest in pinpointing Rainer’s performance, photography and unique version of the body’s abstraction poetry. However, it is the stillness and under late capitalist conditions (p. 34). tangibility of sculpture that is of note This terrain relates to what Steve relative to Archias’s proposal of ‘concrete Paxton, one of Rainer’s closest Judson abstraction’. As the author writes of Meat collaborators, speaking in 1970 called Joy (1964) in Chapter 2, one section of ‘the crisis in dance: whether to become the performance involved the female a technical dancer or not is a real cast forming themselves into what choice now’. Paxton acknowledges the Schneemann termed a unit of ‘sculptural impossibility of simply erasing his own shapes’, which always ‘fail and fall apart’ classical dance training, saying that (p. 107), destined to underscore the he instead found ways to circumvent impermanence of body/object compat- it.1 Paxton’s comments underscore the ibility. It is this purposeful failure of fact that this radical, post-John Cage/ Meat Joy’s bodies to operate as legible Merce Cunningham choreography shapes (more than momentarily) that found at Judson was not predicated foregrounds the temporal dimension upon a straightforward opposition of that characterizes any consideration of the trained versus untrained body, or the body as sculpture. indeed any kind of preference for the Archias establishes her opposition untrained. Rather, the works subverted to Lambert-Beatty’s framing of Judson’s expectations for balletic movement and ‘spectacular visuality’ (p. 23), by directly rhythmic timing, with the collective addressing Lambert-Beatty’s Debordian participants’ many years of various negation of Sally Banes’s socially forms of training (as dancers and as affirmative account of the democratic artists) acting as a sort of residual well of alignment of the Judson Dance Theater physical potential and invention. Archias (proposed by Democracy’s Body (1983), utilizes Paxton as a foil to illustrate the among her other publications). Archias’s differences between his approach and thesis further argues against the Rainer’s. While both dancer-choreog- ‘resigned and melancholy’ tone that raphers replaced ‘impressive’ skill with Lambert-Beatty assigns to Rainer’s work, ‘the ordinary’ (p. 59), in her comparison via her extrapolation of the relationship of Rainer and Paxton, Archias teases between Rainer’s choreography out their alternative versions of the (particularly its mediation by film and everyday in relation to questions of photography) and 1960s consumerist control, rigour and the accidental. In and spectacle culture. For Lambert- Paxton’s work, Archias claims, the Beatty, dances such as Rainer’s The Bells everyday was ‘emptied out emotionally’, (1961) should be read as a photo-image, in contrast to Rainer’s practice, which

390 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] she frames as being ‘as much about Schneemann’s early training as a everyday feeling [my emphasis] as the painter in the late 1950s and early 1960s. look of the ordinary…’ (p. 63). It is in the Schneemann’s version of modernism is elaboration of this point that Archias articulated through a form of expressive most profoundly distances herself from painting as ‘passionately sensitive Lambert-Beatty’s analysis. living’ (p. 87). Archias goes on to provide The insistence on emotional context an intelligent material examination of where many critics have seen only an her collage painting Quarry Transposed expressive vacuum fortifies Archias’s (Central Park in the Dark) (1960). There take on Rainer’s choreography. Later in is the sense of a deeply felt continuum the chapter she describes the ‘tasklike between the paintings and perfor- body’ visible in Rainer’s work as mances, which Schneemann called damaged and alienating, but also tender ‘concretions’ (p. 88), again eschewing (p. 75). Archias’s claim that post-war the language of ephemerality in favour spectacle culture made these performing of a materialist-led encounter with bodies outwardly inexpressive, performance as an ongoing concern. manifesting a necessarily negative In Meat Joy, Schneemann’s audience is defensive posture, is something that confronted with the body as a concrete partly explains her decision to contex- and immediate thing, its involuntary tualize Rainer’s dance development movements central to the performance using an earlier moment in American art (p. 81). history. With the body as merely one possible One link between the ostensibly material among many, both organic and divergent work of Rainer and inorganic, the concrete as a category Schneemann is seen in Archias’s becomes ‘about what materials can perhaps unexpected focus on painting do’, in Schneemann’s words. Asking throughout Chapters 1 and 2, as she if Schneemann understood the body locates the roots of both Rainer and as a ‘non-art material’ taken from Schneemann’s performance practices the real world, Archias’s provocative in Abstract . It is Rainer’s question sets the course for much relationship with the AbEx painter Al of what follows, specifically the art/ Held that helps Archias address her life intersection of the chapter on performative equivalency to Clement Acconci. One wonders why Archias did Greenberg’s writings, in particular his not make more of Schneemann’s own theoretical approach to painting that terminology, to reflect on her transition is grounded in the ‘positivist, concrete’ from a painterly output towards (p. 39). Rainer’s commitment to working performance. ‘Kinetic painting’ was through a Greenbergian lexicon of the term that shaped Schneemann’s expression, expressiveness and ‘feeling’ recent museum retrospective; its curator as painterly affect is lent weight by Sabine Breitwieser explained that Archias’s clear-eyed recognition of the ‘the conception of kinetic painting [is dancer’s links to modernist abstraction one] which Schneemann, a landscape in her attitude towards material, painter by training, devised to describe structure and frame (p. 65). This chapter her mature practice: an embodied and ultimately contends that Rainer shares time-bound art and, more generally, more with Jackson Pollock than Robert one that transcends the boundaries Morris. This striking claim distin- of media’.2 This state of non-medium guishes Archias’s volume from more specificity is in truth quite relevant familiar accounts of Rainer in the 1960s, for much of what Archias unpacks which always hinge on her ‘minimalist around her theme of embodied concrete turn’ circa 1966, when in the orbit of materiality. Morris. In her choreographic embrace Initially, the second chapter on of involuntary bodily effects, Rainer’s Schneemann is formulated so as work embodies an expressive ‘texture’ to specifically address the bodily that is particular to the concretely materiality of sex, but gradually its performative. contents reveal how profoundly the While Rainer absorbed the painterly central work under consideration, lessons of modernism indirectly, the Meat Joy, goes beyond sexual expres- start of Chapter 2 concerns itself with siveness as its main concern. While

391 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] it is undeniably important that the away from what it purported to critique. work aimed, in the words of the artist, At this chapter’s conclusion, Archias ‘to eroticise my guilt-ridden culture meticulously unpacks their collective and further to confound this culture’s error. By measuring the work against sexual rigidities’ (p. 85), Schneemann the ‘shock’ value of sex/death dramatics was equally alive to the contemporary (and finding it wanting), these male co-opting of the sexual revolution by critics failed to understand that Meat advertisers (pp. 79–80). She desired to Joy’s true subject was the ‘everyday reflect that process in Meat Joy’s overtly coding of mass-cultural life’ (p. 118). In politicized eroticism. We are once again this way, Archias’s middle chapter circles situated in the modernist project of back to the body’s concretions under the embodiment: a recurring critical motif conditions of late capitalism. throughout the three chapters, here At the beginning of Chapter 3, seeking to rescue our understanding of ‘Reasons to Move: Vito Acconci’, Schneemann’s mid-1960s project from Archias efficiently reiterates a primary a one-dimensional focus on its erotics associative link between the three (p. 83). artists: their shared concern with Archias’s text illuminates many ‘presenting […] the body’s unintended small details of Meat Joy for her readers, movements’ (p. 122). Compared to which are often overlooked in critical Schneemann and Rainer, the author reflections on the performance. At one emphasizes, Acconci’s movements are point, the ‘paper belly’ constructions located within far more ‘repellent’ worn by the women operate as a barrier territory. Crucially, in this territory between their bodies and the male he makes use of more rigid structures performers. This intrusion of Schnee- than those found in Trio A or Meat Joy. mann’s earlier collage sensibility The structural underpinning of the into her live work manifests as both concrete body is a concern that Archias absurdity and abjectness (p. 78). These explores with more explicit reference are two key terms that for Archias come to conceptual art in this final chapter. to replace or re-complicate the erotic One crucial device used by Acconci is as Meat Joy’s conceptual focal point. the notion of a bodily ‘test’. In his early Central to the successful invocation of performances he assigns himself a ‘task’, absurdity and abjection was Schnee- to use Rainer’s terminology. Inevitably mann’s belief that the dancer’s body is this task morphs into a test: not of his aligned with art, not life. As a result, she skill, but rather an endurance test and endeavoured to make dancers’ bodies indeed defence against self-inflicted, more ‘unfinished’ as a material (p. 95) senseless abuse, such as rubbing soapy and, like Rainer, used a combination of water into his own eyes. Yet again, the dancers and non-dancers in her casts skilled body is relinquished in favour to promote imperfection and wild of involuntary articulations, as seen variation in bodily movements. Further in Acconci’s video performances Three aligning the body with physical matter, Adaptation Studies (Blindfolded Catching, Schneemann ‘overwhelm[ed] the body Soap and Eyes, Hand and Mouth) (1970). with sensation’, provoked by materials Positioning Acconci as ‘a modernist including raw chicken and fish, paint in the tradition of Lefebvre’ (p. 132), and plastic. Ultimately, ‘body and Archias emphasizes his use of a nonbody were intertwined as categories modernist and often serial model, which and materials, with the difference succeeded in arriving at the real through between them made less distinct’ (p. 114). abstraction (p. 136). This is to say that Archias also reminds us that Meat what we witness in these early perfor- Joy’s version of modernist practice mances by Acconci is the body in its embraced existing cultural forms, ‘schematic condition’, beyond language for example in its soundtrack’s use of and conditioned only by its needs, pop music. With various references to impulses and desires. Acconci manifests consumer and pop cultures, as well as desire as something fundamental to gender stereotyping and commodified the body and beyond its conscious forms of sexuality (such as bikini-clad control, like gagging. Discussing this pin-ups), some contemporary reviewers white male body almost solely in terms felt the work didn’t move far enough of its physiology and reflexes, the

392 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] chapter tends to skirt around the sexual The coda of The Concrete Body politics of the artist’s ‘beyond control’ utilizes a more contemporary work motivations. Archias does at one point by Rainer, Spiraling Down (2008), to address the feminist critique of Acconci’s perform a ‘reaching back through time’ work, but only really in a footnote. to Trio A and numerous other moments She uses it to bring her ‘concrete body’ from Rainer’s choreographic history argument back into focus, as inevitably (p. 178). It is the importance of Rainer’s entwined with constraining social recursive, self-reflexive structures (still structures. She then returns to the topic adhering to a modernist sensibility of bodily vulnerability (as signalled in in 2008, Archias argues) that explains the introduction), yet as a white hetero- why her new work is chosen for the sexual man, one could argue, Acconci coda, rather than Acconci’s or Schnee- never truly experienced this state of mann’s post-1960s developments. being in 1960s America. What does Spiraling Down reveal to While discreetly acknowledging us about the very specific period of Acconci’s entitled position as a white 1962–70 that The Concrete Body focuses male body, Archias argues that this very on? It is, once again, in the service condition is what enables embodiment of ‘embodied understanding’, and in to equal generalized abstraction. At art’s opposition to spectacle, as voiced this chapter’s end, the three artists are through collective attempts at signifi- brought together to suggest again their cation. In an earlier moment, Archias shared modernist worldview. Adrian conveys the three artists’ shared search Piper’s early performance practice is ‘for alternative abstractions to the introduced as a new alternative: an abstractions of capitalism’ (p. 134). This artist who by the end of the 1960s wholly is what ties them together, and equally questions the status quo of universally it is what makes the coda so satisfying accommodating embodiment. Although as a means to bind the project’s it feels slightly reductive to use Piper as contents into a whole, despite stark

1. Steve Paxton in Don McDonagh, a tool of differentiation, as a stand-in divergences, through the ‘making sense ‘Audio interview with Steve Paxton’, for the ensuing moment of identity of concrete struggles’. Archias strikes 1970, call number: *MGZTL 4-2514, politics, her practice does signal a crucial an optimistic tone in her concluding discs 1 and 2, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: ambivalence towards embodiment, argument: that the presence of abstract Jerome Robbins Dance Division. which is an effective counterweight to governing structures can enable the 2. Sabine Breitwieser, ‘Preface’, much of what proves difficult to digest unfolding of many sensuous particulars in Sabine Breitwieser (ed.), Carolee (from our contemporary perspective), (p. 182); a contradictory but ultimately Schneemann: Kinetic Painting (exh. cat., Museum der Moderne Salzburg), particularly in the concluding Acconci energizing state. , Prestel, 2015, p. 7. chapter. Stephanie Straine

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