A radical encounter with the everyday world - sculpture in the '60s

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The very varied work of five US sculptors 'undermined claims that there was a dominant approach or style throughout the decade'

Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America by Jo Applin

If we accept that some of the sensibilities associated with the 1960s, such as playfulness, inclusivity and iconoclasm, were first articulated in the 1950s, then we might well consider two key documents released toward that decade’s end.  In 1958, the US painter, assemblage and performance artist Allan Kaprow argued that Jackson Pollock’s  legacy was to help artists move beyond the confines of the canvas to a radical encounter with the everyday world.  The following year, Robert Rauschenberg   insisted that his work existed in the gap between art and life. To exceed the two-dimensional plane of traditional painting was to enter into the space of actual objects. It marked an important beginning of the postmodern assault on rigid categorization and hierarchy, while ushering in an extraordinary moment of sculptural production and theorization.

Anyone with an interest in the sculpture produced in the USA during this period will welcome an opportunity to consider more fully the heterogeneity of the objects made then. Jo Applin’s study, Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America, is a sustained engagement with a select group of artists whose works never found an easy fit within some of the dominant trends of the time. Against the simple, geometric, and often industrial forms and materials associated with Minimalism, nearly any deviation seemed eccentric. Some of the artists, such as Claes Oldenburg  and Bruce Nauman, are very well known.  The others, Lee Bontecou, Lucas Samaras, and H.C. Westermann, less so. With the exception of Nauman, each was identified by the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd   as the author of compelling, challenging, and important work. Significantly, it was work that undermined claims that there was a dominant approach or style throughout the decade.  Each of the five is the subject of a chapter in the book. But Applin is careful to note that her selection of artists cannot stand as a summary of the sculpture of that decade as a whole.  Indeed, she continuously asserts that such totalizing projects are out of sync with the history and ideas of the period, as well as the art under consideration.

Perhaps H.C. Westermann best summarized the challenges and possibilities for sculpture in a series of carved and constructed punctuation marks dating to 1962. As an exclamation point, his object asserted its dramatic presence – with attitude – in the here and now; as a question mark, it self-consciously inquired of its own phenomenological status. It seems to ask: ‘Who or what am I?’. That the New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg had situated question marks on pedestals or in public spaces in a series of drawings a year before Westermann gave the mark three-dimensional form indicates that the very nature of modern sculpture was a topical issue in the early 1960s.

Though Applin cautions against a too easy assimilation of the five sculptors’ practices into the tradition of assemblage, it may remain the most useful means of categorization, at least as a starting point. Common threads linking the five are: a search for expanded means of making, a refusal to take sides in the abstraction versus figuration debate, a willingness to work with what was at hand, and a deep knowledge of modern art history combined with an openness to other influences. In other words, their approach did not so much cross borders as simply refuse to acknowledge their existence.

Applin rightly argues that although these artists flirted with autobiographical disclosure – in a way, furthering the modern sensibilities of romanticism and expressionism – they did so in an oblique, sometimes disjointed fashion. So perhaps the question posed by this art is not so much the maker’s subjectivity, but that of those viewers, critics, and collectors who dared engage with these challenging works. A central theme in Westermann’s entire oeuvre is that of the gift, the concept based on the idea of reciprocity. Once on view, these works elicited from audiences their creative investment. This included the realization that such projections back onto, and into, each object guaranteed that whatever level of eccentricity might be found in the work itself also registered viewers’ own idiosyncrasies and investments. In this regard, Applin’s consideration of the work of these five artists is a model of the historian/critic not only as arbiter and interpreter, but also as collaborator.  It is an honest and worthy model.

Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America by Jo Applin  is published by New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012. 176 pp.  40 colour and 38 mono illus, $50.00. ISBN: 978-0-300-18198-2