William Tucker the Art Museum at Florida International University Frost Art Museum the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum
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Florida International University FIU Digital Commons Frost Art Museum Catalogs Frost Art Museum 10-21-1988 William Tucker The Art Museum at Florida International University Frost Art Museum The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/frostcatalogs Recommended Citation Frost Art Museum, The Art Museum at Florida International University, "William Tucker" (1988). Frost Art Museum Catalogs. 59. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/frostcatalogs/59 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Frost Art Museum at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Frost Art Museum Catalogs by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Gaia, 1985 bronze 87" x 55" x 50" Edition of 3 Courtesy David McKee Gallery, New York William Tucker October 21 - November 16, 1988 Essay by Dore Ashton Organized by Dahlia Morgan for 1J[Ju® &[[� D¥U0Il®®0Il 0UiJ AT FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY University Park Miami, Florida 33199 (305) 554-2890 Ackrwwledgements The Art Museum at Florida International University is pro exhibition. ud to have this William Tucker exhibition. Mr. organized First and foremost I would like to thank the Lannan Foun Tucker's twenty-five year contribution to art on both sides dation for their most generous grant. Their enlightened ofthe Atlantic is distinguished by a vigorous evolution that leadership and support made an exhibition and publica is both of his times and a beacon to other artists working tion of this scope possible. In addition, the National En in the plastic arts. His work has both a unique physical dowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Florida presence and very strong conceptual underpinnings that Arts Council in Tallahassee have recognized the will engage our audience on multiple levels. This exhibi significance ofthis exhibition by much needed grants. Their tion was conceived as part of our ongoing mission to in support has been essential to organizing the exhibition and troduce prominent individual artists to our growing South to publishing this extensive catalogue. I would also like to Florida community. acknowledge the contribution ofour Student Government Our small staff has been forthcoming with a tremendous Association, and the Office of Academic Affairs who of amount of effort. Particularly I would like to thank Mr. fered crucial support to The Museum. William Humphreys, Museum Coordinator, who par This exhibition, however; would not have happened without ticipated in every aspect ofthe organization, planning, and the cooperation of the David McKee Gallery in New York publication ofthe catalogue and notices for this exhibition; and other museums and private individuals who are listed as well as Ms. Linda Cole, who handled the details involv as Lenders to the Exhibition. ed with correspondence, shipping, and publications sur rounding the show; and Ms. Karen Goodson, who dealt efficiently with the financial aspects and records of this Dahlia Morgan, Director Special Ackrwwledgements Florida International University Modesto A. Maidique Adam Herbert President Vice President, North Miami Campus Judith Stiehm Doris Sadoff Provost and Vice President, Assistant Vice President for Ad Academic Affairs ministrative Affairs Richard]. Correnti Walter Strong Vice President, Student Affairs Vice President, University Relations and Development Paul Gallagher Vice President, Business and William Maguire Finance Chairman, Visual Arts Department Art Museum Staff Dahlia Morgan Karen Goodson Director Administrative Assistant William B. Humphreys Curator/Coordinator of University Collections Lendors to the Exhibition Arkansas Art Center, Liule Rock, AK Edward R. Broida Trost, Los Angeles, CA Dorothy Ellron, New York, NY Anne and Martin Z. Margulies, Miami, FL David McKee Gallery, New York, NY Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York, NY William Tucker, New York, NY and various otherprivate collections, anonymously Untitled, 1984, charcoal on paper, 45" x 30", Private collection, New York Portrait ofK, 1975, wood 6'9" x 10'12" x 10", Collection: Edward R. Broida Trust, Los Angeles William Tucker and The Mind's Desire by Dore Ashton A few years ago, in a preface to a William Tucker exhibi case, they launched themselves with immense energy in tion in Rome, a fellow artist, Carlo Battaglia, used as an a host ofdirections, discovering moment by moment how epigraph a resounding quotation from Lucretius: many alternatives there could be to the old master's vision. Because, the all matter meant to do throughout body Tucker's own discoveries at first took the direction, as An so must rise, and courses each limb, pushed, through drew Forge wrote in 1972 of"an unbroken meditation on so that with the mind's desire follow. it, may the nature of modern sculpture." That meditation had the Nature of II, V. (On Things 266-268) taken him back to the early modern experiments with This wise recourse to a tradition is still apposite. Lucretius disembodiment-the first vanguard in Russia and France understood a sequence that is not only in the nature of that eschewed palpable mass-as well as to the unique things, but even more, is a fairly constant description of modern master, Brancusi, who had never abandoned it. certain artistic temperaments. William Tucker's for in Tucker experimented with reduction in the modern tradi stance. During his more than twenty-five years ofintense tion, working at times with clearlinearprinciples that moved work, Tucker has again and again probed the wellsprings toward geometry. Even in his early, seemingly geometric of his drive to make things, allowing for that surge of ris works-steel structures ofrectilinear or triangular sections, ing matter that is the bodily source ofinspiration, and ex or sometimes curvilinear derivatives ofthe circle-Tucker amining that mysterious function called by Lucretius "the demonstrated a strong tendency to dispute the very nature " mind's desire. In the course of his inquiry (for all good ofgeometry as a group ofexternally fixed relations in space. sculpture is always an inquiry into the nature of things) In those earlier pieces in steel or fiberglass, Tucker had Tucker has often discovered aspects ofsculpture that have already begun to inquire more deeply into the perplexities fallen into desuetude. He has had the temerity to resur ofperception. He had begun to suspect that the sprawling rect them. floor pieces that so preoccupied the new generation were little better than reliefs, and reliefs more In the beginning Tucker was almost scientific in his ex belonged perhaps to the domain of than 1970 Tucker periments. He made and challenged hypotheses. He re painting sculpture. By was a richer of his art which he jected received ideas. He pushed his insights to extremes. formulating philosophy would state in 1975 with he realize He always knew, though, that sculpture, unlike painting, prophetic clarity. (Did how the words he wrote would his own as had some strangely homologous relation to the human bodi shape destiny a sculptor?) In that singular statement Tucker took the ly presence. Both the sculptural object and the one who He defined in a tradition creates it, or contemplates it, in some measure share a plunge: sculpture long-hallowed the free-standing object in space, subject to gravity and space; stand within it physically, although never quite men revealed by light. tally. (The fact is that Tucker has been everywhere in space: he has circled it, looked down into it, from within pressed up IT Tucker had the courage to revive a traditional view of it, defined it as in some and as unac sternly geometric ways, the nature ofsculpture, he was never to be a dupe oftradi in others. In the broadest countably, formlessly shifting tionalism. Like the masters he studied closely-Brancusi, sense he has been an of investigator perception.) Matisse, Picasso, and their forebear, Rodin-Tucker held Tucker's earliest exhibited works reflect a special moment in delicate balance an active intelligence and prescient in in British art history-a moment when the air was riven with tuition. They would never permit him to rest comfortably impatient exclamations. Something happened in Britian in a given form. Tradition was not the rigid concept that ofthe 1960s that has still not found satisfying explanation. incited rebellion in so many modernists, but rather Tucker and his fellow artists emerging from the art schools represented that part of human memory that transcend in the early 1960s were fired with an implacable desire ed time and place. Tradition provided the thread ofcom to blaze new trails. Their obstreporous rejections were wide munication that held the promise of meaning. Yielding, ly noted and they were promptly labeled "the new genera Tucker could draw upon the wealth ofsculptural tradition tion." I suppose they were definable as "new" whenjux without fear ofcontamination. In this I think he distinguish taposed with the "old" which was, of course, the single ed himself from so many others of his generation who mighty figure ofthe one 20th century British sculptor who became victims of their own rebellion; traditionalists, in had attained international acclaim: Henry Moore. In any fact, ofit. Tucker's mind's desire was not only to draw upon the im and circumference nowhere, and Borges to compose one agery residing in centuries of sculptural practice, but to of his wittiest essays, "Pascal's Fearful Sphere," on that draw upon his entire personal culture. This included the baffling notion. works of literature and he had known, as moving poetry Not long after he completed The Rim, Tucker felt a crav we see in the earliest in this exhibition, Portrait sculpture ing for that other experience endemic to the history ofhis "K". The piece is of weathered timbers; of composed art: the experience ofmass; offorms amassed through the members ofsome other lost structure blackened by time, building up ofpalpable volumes.