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PARTISAN REVIEW
Roman art, testing the expressive limits of Picasso and Gonzalez's
new language. For a time, sculptors who worked in this way
seemed to be asking how much could be left out before a sculp–
ture stopped being a sculpture. They exaggerated the differences
between construction in metal and the traditional monolith,
avoiding massive volumes and (especially after Caro) verticality.
The practitioners of what was called "the new sculpture" avoided,
too, materials associated with more traditional art.
It
wasn't sim–
ply that welded iron or steel permitted forms to be dissected in
ways impossible to carved marble or cast bronze. Using the
materials and methods of industry was a declaration of
independence from the past, a declaration of modernism.
Exciting sculpture was provoked by this set of assumptions,
but in the past two decades or so, young sculptors raised on the
"new tradition" of constructing in metal began to regard the
legacy of Picasso and Gonzalez as a convention as powerful as
carving neoclassical figures in marble. As a result, we have seen
(often very successful) investigations of the capabilities of plastics,
glass, light circuitry and the like, newfangled materials, but still
within the industrial tradition and, frequently, already explored
by like-minded artists when they had first become available.
More startling, substances previously unassociated with anything
that could remotely be called sculpture-dry pigment, leather,
branches, draped felt, rope, hay, fat, ostrich eggs, children's
toys-have turned up with increasing frequency. Paradoxically,
so have wholly traditional bronze and stone. In part, I suspect, this
is a reaction or, at least, a counterpoint to the reductive austerity of
Minimalism, arguably the most extreme permutation of Picasso
and Gonzalez's original conception. But more important, this ex–
panded lexicon of materials permits the construction of forms
impossible to achieve with more usual materials (as was true,
once, of working in welded steel). The result is, while not neces–
sarily a proliferation of better sculpture, an expansion of sculp–
ture's territory as dramatic as that occasioned by the adoption of
industrial technology more than half a century ago. Curiously,
though, while Picasso and Gonzalez derived much of their en–
ergy and stimulation from rejecting the past, present-day sculp–
tors are reexamining tradition in an effort to revitalize their work.
It's not limited to the younger generation, although it seems to be
getting most of the credit for the phenomenon.
