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I wrote this some time ago, at least on 26 November 2017, long before the current situation with COVID-19, and certainly before even contemplating embarking on this MA adventure. It seems apt to bring it out in the light of the cessation of physical exhibitions for the time being.

A Response to William Tucker 1977

Wood, J. Hulks, D. and Potts, A. (2012).
Modern sculpture reader. Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, pp. 325-332.

In this address, William Tucker describes the field of sculpture in 1977 as in crisis. This sense of crises arising out of the inability to describe what sculpture is exactly. The lack of identity to the term sculpture, intrinsic and comprehensive, creates ambiguity or even lack of purpose in society. Sculpture eludes a general description, unlike painting, music or architecture. This state of affairs probably came about due to the proliferation of techniques, materials and ways of making which diffused the essence of what a sculpture is. In addition, historically sculpture represented the human condition, mainly through the figure, it no longer does so to the same extent and is therefore somewhat irrelevant. The term statue once described the object aside from the way of its making. The word sculpture now encompasses both the object and the means by which it comes about. By extension, a sculptural object has no longer an existence in itself, at least semantically. The sculptural object is therefore denied its own existence without which it cannot have a clear purpose outside the patron, commission or gallery. Tucker says that sculpture has lost its human dimension (in 1977) and in order for it to regain its relevance and purpose, it needs to once again become mythical. That is to say, denote narratives and descriptions that are rooted in, and transcend the real world, but are in themselves a reflection on the world, the artist being part of the world. In short, expose nature and its essence as it once did.

Online showing further degrades the sense of physical myth, of the living presence. What I am presented with is a facsimile of experience. Online, the sensation comes from visual and auditory responses, but the human scale, the presence of the object is erased. For this reason, I have decided to show work as an unfolding of ideas more than a sensual experience. In the context of showing work online, I find that sensuality is highly restricted, sound being the predominant sense engendering feeling: the eye is relegated to the level of passivity in which responses come primarily from the head. Sound becomes the principle vehicle for feeling. Watch a film without sound, and in the vast majority of cases the experience becomes a sequence of images that I respond to intellectually, analytically. That is the state that sculpture is reduced to in contemporary online offerings. This, in turn, has given rise to a plethora of images that belie the actual presence of the work, its affecting power or, more often than not, the lack of it.

My imperfect solution for this state of affairs is to extract the myth from sculpture and make the sculpture the origin of the poetry it embodies, not its expression. The myth is translated from a transmutative process to a translational-illustrational one in which it (it being the work itself) becomes an altered reality from what it was originally.

Having said all this, I continue to create the physical presences: transmuting dreams that do not need intellectual intervention in the first instance on a palpable human scale.

I have just created this font. It needs a few adjustments but it serves for now. I will not write all of my blogs in the font. That would be just too cryptic… but it is tempting.

Used: High Logic Scanahand. A basic but useful programme from converting handwriting into a useable font in various formats which can be embedded into graphic and writing programmes.

I have only just returned from our evening walk. We were passing by Chris Kitchen’s farm when he ran out and offered us a glass of wine. We got to talking about things, the virus and art while we kept our distance, physical but not social.

In turn, Janet and I described our current work and as I explained in as few words as I could muster what I am doing, Chris said, ‘is it like an allegory?’. That was like a blast from the past: a word I have not used for some time which, if truth be told, says what my work is. It is a metaphor that encompasses the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular. The text I wrote for Logos is infused with creation myth and scientific theory, Genesis and Evolution, in which the idea becomes physical, the text becomes texture, fact becomes myth and myth takes on the fact of physical reality, or should I say allegory? It is an allegory of origins, in which the animal self is embraced as part of the natural state of things, as a necessary, no, inescapable truth about our existence. No more can we reject the human-animal than can we are humanity. The two are entwined, coeval, parts of a whole.

This is why the lack of physicality in an online presence falls short of what I had intended. Yet, the virus, as much part of nature as anything, has made me think in terms of translating this into a screen based experience in some way, and why the balance of sensuality shifts towards sound.

I do not pretend that I could convey anything like the presence of the actual work in such a way, but I may be able to unfold some of its inner workings and thereby weave another form of narrative… or at least begin to do so.