5/16/2023 0 Comments Klaus stella glow![]() ![]() The procedural clarity and the obvious interaction of paint and gravity of Pollock’s drip paintings from 1947-51 were seminal to many of the artists of the late sixties. Pollock’s conversion of painting from the confined movements of hand and wrist to broad sweeps of the arm leaving layers of linear drips in their wake internalized and objectified human scale and measure as actual visual components of the work. Materials generally noteworthy for their liquidity and/or pliability – molten lead, mineral oil, latex, chicken wire, felt, glass, flour, cloth, and others – were torn, poured, folded, or molded in configurations that revealed and congealed the behavior of the material and the marks of the maker (marks of process, not of personal touch). The nature of an astonishing variety of materials was probed and propelled into an active play with the forces of gravity. Sculpture as object was submitted to a radical revision: gestalt gave way to process, form and mass melted into gesture and even transience. Robert Morris was to join them and become their self proclaimed spokesman. In the late sixties, a re markable generation of sculptors emerged and renewed the bond with painting but now it was to be a (re)view of Pollock, not Picasso, that submerged sculpture in a solvent of painterliness – a generation that included Alan Saret, as well as Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Barry Le Va, and Lynda Benglis. Even the retreat from the painterly and a return to a greater specificity of form and objectness by sculptors like Judd and Morris, in the sixties, still owed much to Constructivism and Cubism. The dissolution of mass into transparent planes and space was to dominate much of the sculpture of succeeding generations. Sculpture’s solidity and mass began to dissolve in sfumato and chiaroscuro in the hands of Medaro Rosso and Rodin, and then flattened into a planar play of space and transparency with the advent of Cubism - drawing upon his painterly innovation, Picasso set about redefining sculpture, as did the Constructivists in Russia. The divorce of sculpture and architecture that occurred concurrently with the rise of the bourgeoisie and modernism led to a symbiotic relationship between painting and sculpture. Saret studied architecture at Cornell but came to sculpture through painting. His intent does not preclude but includes a refined and conscious formal intelligence. Since “sublime” was expelled from the art vocabulary in the mid-1950s, flatter words and deeds have been preferred nonetheless, Saret insists on “spiritual” in word and deed – he is anxious to protect and propagate the revelatory nature of art. Now, when pop stardom has become both subject and object of much art, the word “spiritual” hangs precariously on the page. Saret constructs bridges to the spiritual. All conspire to transform the material into the skeleton of the immaterial. Saret’s sculpture, drawings, and architectural projects draw strength from the forces of nature his first exhibition, in 1968, was titled “Mountains of Chance, Documents of Ruralism.” He draws organic images from industrial materials, molding and yielding to the structure of the material to “let matter present itself as spirit.”* Saret’s work resolves and dissolves itself in a finely calibrated balance of contradictions: volume drawn from line, mass becoming space, the order of number disordered (re-ordered) by the mutability of natural forces, clarity of process turning into vapors of illusion. He grew up in sight of the George Washington Bridge, more impressed by the harmony of the bridge’s glistening spans with the craggy shorelines than by the implacable and inorganic staccato of New York City, visible to the northwest. Technology and the clarity of mathematics, attuned to nature, laid claim to Alan Saret’s vision at an early age. Alan Saret: Matter into Aether, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California, 1982. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |