sculpture, iron and the forge

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Sculpture, Iron and the Forge Author(s): Alain Kirili Source: Art Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 47-49 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776254 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 20:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:04:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Sculpture, Iron and the Forge

Sculpture, Iron and the ForgeAuthor(s): Alain KiriliSource: Art Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 47-49Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776254 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 20:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:04:14 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Sculpture, Iron and the Forge

Sculpture, Iron and the Forge* ALAIN KIRILI

The use of the forge in my work is by no means a sudden

development, but rather the result of investigations begun in 1972 with my first sculptures. The pieces shown recently in New York derive from a reaction against the academicism and repetitiveness generated by the reductivist approach in

sculpture. Among the effects of reductiveness, I would single out the

division of artistic theory and practice which produces, on the one hand, an essentially formal or irrational process and, on the other, a totally conceptual process, cancelling out all involvement of the artist in the making of the work.

One finds, as well, a climate of political and theoretical

dogmatism, characterized by a mixture of references to

phenomenology, structuralism, the work of Marx or Jacques Lacan. I am inclined instead-to put it as succinctly as

possible-to focus on processes that may in turn enrich theory.

I have written on the work of Egon Schiele, Julio Gonzalez, David Smith, Giacometti and Barnett Newman. I am inter- ested, as well, in coming to understand certain crafts, espe- cially that of the forge. The use of the iron forge is disappear- ing in France and in the U.S.; but it has stayed alive in Austria, where wrought metal is still used in housing and in

farming tools. Many art forms have, I believe, become impoverished

through their practitioners' loss of interest in craft.

Hammering metal, changing its surface and its color, requires a certain knowledge that is far from connoting an archaic attitude. It actually calls for a radical reconsideration of sculptural problems. To merely imitate the blacksmith would smack of romanticism. One has to select and extract those aspects of one's craft that are relevant to the problem of sculpture. I wanted to see if the techniques of the forge could assume a contemporary sensibility. This way of think-

ing has nothing in common with sentimentality or reaction- ary nostalgia. The idea is to enrich and diversify the work of

art: the study of what we call "decorative arts" has led me to reconsider the artist's relation to metal, fire and water.

I remain, however, very wary about the mythology of

metal, that collective and poetic heritage of Homo Faber. My sculpture articulates the history of a subject, consciously and

unconsciously, and introduces it into the history of sculptural form.

The bodies of my sculptures are made of irregular lines and squares (sheets of metal or cubes weighing more than 50

pounds each). Metal, by its threadlike quality, can draw

empty volumes in space, on a wall, or on the ground. This

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Alain Kirili, Untitled, 1977. Iron, 88"' h.

* This article is an edited excerpt from Alain Kirili: sculpture and writings 1972-1978, the catalog of an exhibition at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. in early 1978.

FALL 1978 47

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Page 3: Sculpture, Iron and the Forge

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Workshop Kunstschmiede Zelinger, Austria, 1977: two views of a late-16th-century wooden hydraulic power hammer; the furnace.

property, particular to metal, has led me to focus on the problem of weight and mass in sculpture in a special way.

Gargallo, Picasso and especially Julio Gonzalez (in his Maternities) were the first to achieve light, transparent and threadlike sculptures in iron. When considered in relation to traditional bronze or stone sculptures, their work has no

precedent. I have focused on their work in an analysis of the

problem fundamental to a dialectical sculptural practice, taking into account such relationships of opposition as those of mass/empty volumes, surface/lines, heavy/Ilight, stability/ instability ... so as to move beyond any conflict of a stylistic nature.

When I first started to make sculpture, I cut metal, either hot (with a torch) or cold (with metal scissors). This work became more complex with the addition of a forge, which implies the intimate involvement of one's whole body. Heat, sweat, energy; the pleasure of developing one's strength, from its greatest intensity to its most delicate expression, in the use of the hammer to correct a curve or alignment. Coating a piece of metal with oil, then cleaning it in order to

intensify the black color of the metal. The blackness does not cover the material, but, on the contrary, emerges from

it. Without entering into the smallest details of the different operations, it should be clear that the artist is directly involved with each step in the making of these sculptures.

The workshop is a black room-black, in order to be able to see the exact light intensity of the hot metal -where fire is controlled and where water, fire and physical risk are con- joined. (The role of fire could be analyzed in relation to the subconscious, as discussed in "Psychoanalysis of Fire" by Gaston Bachelard, and not only in relation to a particular material [iron]. That will explain my recent interest in firing terra-cotta, for instance.) When the artist holds the hammer in one hand and the red-hot rod or sheet of metal in the other, he understands the relationship between the energy he expends and his work on the metal. He also understands the idea of time in relation to the various stages of the work-from incandescent metal which can be changed to metal that has cooled off and turns inflexible.

I want to force the metal, to produce distortions that are

rationally inexplicable, to create a conflict with the rationality of the drawing of the sculpture. For me, welding is only a way of insuring and reinforcing the union of two metals that

normally hold together. Welding is a technique too often

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Installation view, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, May, 1978.

48 ART JOURNAL, XXXV/l/1i

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Page 4: Sculpture, Iron and the Forge

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Workshop Kunstschmiede Zelinger, Austria: the red-hot metal and a detail of a metal power hammer; three people hold and hammer the metal. Forge Infeld, Austria, 1976: a foot-operated power hammer.

used to create illusionistic and academic effects: sculptures developing concave/convex spaces as in cubist painting, or sculptures using heterogeneous elements as in collages, or sculptures made up of squares, cubes, circles or triangles as in Constructivist painting, etc.

.... All these illusionistic ef-

fects have plunged sculpture into its worst nightmare: for

sculpture, the imitation of painting is suicide. Quite opposed to the concept of the "readymade," my

sculptures are based on a play between the knowledge of how to distribute space and how to transform materials.

We court trouble if we do no more than demonstrate what a material becomes after one or the other operation, for it will produce an art that is didactic and/or concerned with materials only. The artist would then be merely establishing a repertoire of effects. My sculptures offer a complexity which pitches itself against any reductivist system. They embody multiple transformations, generated by their maker's affective (sexual and unconscious) powers as well as

by his awareness of the history of sculpture. Some of my sculptures rise up; others lean against the

wall, thus becoming oblique. I have a particular interest in the argument between Van Doesburg and Mondrian about the horizontal versus the perpendicular. Criticizing the static effects of Neoplasticism, Van Doesburg introduced oblique distributions into the space of his paintings. The pictorial conflict between these two artists has contributed to my own use of oblique elements in creating movement in my sculp- tures. Otherwise, arranged in parallels and perpendicular to the wall or floor, they would have created a static space. The interaction of a full square (a metal plaque) with the empty square of a frame creates a sculpture that, by its transpar- ency, takes the wall and the floor into account. Thus the wall and the floor no longer serve merely as supports, or as a

concealed base for the work. David Smith brought about a break from the classical

conception of sculpture. Reacting against the unitary, mon- olithic conception held by Gargallo, Gonzalez and Picasso, he developed relationships of opposition (and not comple- mentary relationships) between lateral/frontal, surface/line, etc. In this way he no longer produced works of a naturalistic or anthropomorphic order.

In my work the surfaces and the lines, regular and irregu- lar, set up a dialectic tension between the welded elements and those that are simply joined.

Few sculptors have produced hammered surfaces other than those of the repousse variety. Hammering metal poses problems of drawing and coloration. It is important not to imitate the modelling of sculpture in bronze. In my work the surfaces are matte and have no reflective property at all. Blackness turns in on itself and facilitates the reading of the hammer-marks.

That is the quality of metal; it presents the sculpture directly, in the state in which the artist left it, without forcing it to pass through the interpretative process of casting. Some of my work consists of small masses of distorted metal and curved lines placed against the wall. These lines, metal rods

already formed in the factory, are propped up by clumps of forged metal. The industrial aspect of the lines accentuates and amplifies the worked-over quality of the forged metal bars on the ground. The contrast between the industrially made and the forged by hand establishes a relationship of opposites which emphasizes the dialectical quality of my sculpture. i

Alain Kirili is a sculptor who has contributed articles to Artforum and ARTSmagazine.

FALL 1978 49

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