Alexander Stoddart
I notice that in the most cutting-edge art schools today – the ones that also happen to have large holdings of plaster-casts of the works of antiquity, medieval art and renaissance masterpieces – there is usually at least one tutor or person in authority who is keen to protest an “interest” in the works of past time as represented in these copies. But the political situation instituted during the contemporist clampdown of the last century means that these people have to conceal their obvious enthusiasm for these works behind a critical mask. These plasters are, they insist, of “historical interest” – or they have an “identity”, or they represent a “casting aesthetic all their own,” and so on. In this way these responsible people make a claim for the plaster-cast’s being tolerated within the contemporary art school setting, where powerful and visceral antipathies to the grand manner of Occidental art persist. The lovers of the plaster-cast recognise the danger which daily threatens the plaster cast and so encourage the cast collections (a) to be studiously museologised under the rubric of art-conservation, and (b) to be employed within the context of contemporist artistic idioms. In this way the casts are removed from their rough life of pedagogical function (in which they once thrived) while being purloined by talentless and lazy art-students as “found objects” arranged without leave within “installations” which pretend to base their meanings upon “issues.” I was assured, once, by one such guardian, that were the casts not seen to be exploited in this contrary way then they should be “out, out, out!” He made a throat-cutting gesture as he said this to me. So it happens that students tie red neckerchiefs around the necks of these hapless idols, or arrange them in cute groupings, or knit socks for them to wear, or even publish sophisticated words about them printed in exquisite pamphlets with quotations from the most august classical authors – and yet the dismay of the plaster-cast is palpable throughout, for the cast wants to be employed for one thing alone, which thing is never done today – and that is to be drawn to within an inch of the student’s very life, in a manner nearly inconceivable today, which is to say according to Victorian standards or, as they say in France, up to the Beaux-Arts mark.
The art of sculpture, which is the noblest of the visual arts, is not taught today for two basic reasons. The first is that there are no tutors to teach the technical and aesthetic skills necessary to be grasped if even the slightest bust is to be attempted, but the second reason is interesting and obscure. This is founded upon a primordial anxiety about sculpture that resides in nearly every human breast and which gains its first, catastrophic mythological representation in the Book of Exodus. This is the episode in which Moses, descending from the Mountain of Sinai, discovers the Hebrews to have been making sculpture in his absence, in the form of a “Molten Calf”. His rage is legendary, and the reprisals he takes brutal beyond comprehension; he orders his enforcers, the Levites, to execute three thousand men, women and children for breaching the primal Commandment of the fire-god Jehovah, whose avatar, indeed, is Moses himself; “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them…” (Exodus, Chapt.XX verses 4-5). Often mistaken as a “Golden” Calf, this offending work of art is in fact an object that is not hewn, or constructed, but cast, presumably into an earthen mould, in which technique the ancient Hebrews were apparently skilled. The Calf gains its pejorative associations not primarily from its subject but from the method of its making. In recent times, when casts have been ritually defaced either virtually, in artistic acts of “minimal interventionism”, or actually, in gleeful vandalisation, pornographisation or even actual destruction, we can observe a continued exercise of the fundamental instinct to do away with the three-dimensional, reproduced image; an instinct I call the “Mosaic impulse.” It motivates Departmental Heads to this day, as it does many a scientist, and did multitudes of Christian Copts, the Hun and Vandal, hosts of Scottish Calvinists, CIA-sponsored abstract expressionists and every Talibaneer faced with a rock-cut Buddha. As Heraclitus said, in his most profound surviving fragment, simply – “Nature loves to hide…” The artist prosecutes Nature with an eye of unbounded objectivity, in a spirit of extreme dis-interest, over a length of time. From this cross-examination he produces a re-presentation of that Nature, to the intense, Mosaic fury of Nature Himself – who loves to hide. Then, if he is a sculptor, by means of the techniques of casting he proceeds to breed that re-presentation. This, as far as Father Nature is concerned, is an impudence too far. The artist must be done away with, or the art itself. This has been the project of the Twentieth Century, triumphantly achieved, it seems, if one cares to inspect any art school of renown today. Apparently paradoxically, but in reality necessarily, the invention of the camera assisted in this eradication of art. For Nature, the photograph is tantamount to a life-casting (life-casts abound in modern art-schools) and is near enough to a “found object” to cause no offence to the God of Nature, who “is that he is.” That the photograph, or the film, is not offensive to the modern fundamentalist Islamist is a weighty indication that it is not, and cannot be, a work of art. What art-photographer ever commissioned a photographer to photograph his photograph? My photography bill is considerable.
The greatness of that short-lived little societal and ethical phenomenon called the West, consisted in its capacity to confound, over a period of about 1500 years in total, the natural law proscribing the artistic representation of the forms and effects of the phenomenal realm. Before its delicate reign, there had always been some scratchings of more or less inarticulate forms and figures, always made in so abstracted a way as to affright Nature to no significant degree – that is, with a “fig-leaf” of crudity maintained over the possibility of any artistic virtuosity. It is called, usually in qualified terms, “primitive” art – and it gets this title because it safely proceeds no further than a “first principle” state. It is a sign for a natural form, but it is never likely to be taken for one. No birds will fly into that wall to attempt to peck at those grapes, no man of rude and strong will can ever mistake yonder figures on the braes of Easter Island for an army ranked behind a rival male. That art was sufficiently weak in re-presentation to have been tolerable all along, although it must be wondered why so many of the early artists in humanity’s dawn had to hide in caves when they wished to paint. When it came to Greece, however, in the inaugural gesture of the sculptor Kritios in first re-presenting that relaxed stance where one leg supports and the other “plays” (the contrapposto) – in that single gesture the instinct to push the heresy of re-presentation further than Nature might happily permit, commenced. A simple dropping of the pelvis and a bending of one leg, forming an asymmetry in deep repose, and an action in perfect stillness, was what made the Occident begin; for all the poetry and all the philosophy already going strong, yet there had to be achieved the visual art equivalent of those leaps towards Enlightenment, without which no self-knowledge could possibly be concluded. Kritios took that leap, in about 480 BC – terribly late in time. With it he inaugurated the idea of the transgressional artist, which has had a certain hardihood much declined in recent years, as art schools have become bastions of smoke-free obedience, political correctness, and Health, and a fully dreadful Safety. The clampdown upon what Winckelmann called the “imitation of antiquity” is the presiding piety of these institutions, which guarantees all the other, dismal proscriptions that they impose and see are observed.
In such a world of denial, the status of the plaster-cast is naturally questionable. If one is very honest and observant, one will recognise that there is something in the plaster copy, especially if it be of a work from a specifically classical original – or a neo-classical – that excites tremendous anger in certain hearts. Those who find themselves nevertheless drawn towards those objects have, beyond a museological or installational excuse to approach them, a third option with which to cover their erring steps. They can always claim they have a “great love of plaster.” To the real sculptor, who has nothing but a hearty contempt for this atrocious substance, his ten-thousandth bucket of which he has just mixed that very morning, this infatuation is both laughable and mendacious. If the plaster-lover is struck on the head by some of the revolting stuff falling on her from her rotten ceiling, she will likely alter her opinion in some haste, and were she to die, after a long career of inhaling its dust, of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, she might take a somewhat jaded view of the charms of powdered gypsum, hanging in the studio air, shafts of fairy sunshine glancing through its enchanted veil. She claws at her dermatitic forearms? She ain’t so enamoured. In her claim – to “love plaster” – the connoisseuse is really hiding behind a political shield of dialectical materialism. She knows her status as a paid-up member of the Marxian establishment will be seriously compromised if she professes a categorical love of the shapes, forms, handlings and pure aesthetics of the plaster-cast’s artistic substance; we all know that to adore these things is as politically suspect as it is to be seen drawing them. But if one invokes the material with which they are made, again one can move to cuddle up to these unholy totems without fear of censure. Never mention their beauty, nor their uninscribed eyes beaming “keen with honour”, nor that diabolical drop of the knee towards the centre of the earth, nor dare to proclaim their authority beyond time and place, and all will be well. Make no aesthetic comment, cast no glance of approval, above all make no recommendation on their example for generations past and to come – and you can “love” all you like. For the material, the stupid plaster, is nearly nothing about these things; to “love plaster” in the plaster-cast is similar to those modern architects who love “space”. Why does she feel so strongly about some matter, if it were not the shape that the matter is in?
The true sculptor, who has no illusions about plaster, is strongly drawn to a metaphysical view of the world – the world as a material illusion. This is because he knows all about the action of casting - the process of making a multiple material conversion through a sequence of geometric exchanges between positive and negative forms. First the sculptor makes a clay model (he makes it – not some underpaid fabricator, grateful for the pittance and accustomed to the exploitation) upon which he puts a plaster negative – the mould. He then opens the mould destroying the clay original (at this point certain contemporist pants become moist as the promise of destruction arises). From this negative another positive is made, in plaster, swilled into the mould interior. Once the cast is set within the mould, the mould is then chipped away (that is, destroyed; more joy in the underwear). What is released (Marxian emblem of Fidelio-style deliverance) is the plaster cast. It stands as the surviving print of the lost form of the original clay. It concludes the first phase of the material dialectic and because it is a little terminus of action, so it tends to disappoint the vitalist sensibility. Thus it becomes vulnerable to attack, especially by its furious author, if he be young. I know this from within, for I was young once, sort of.
After the plaster cast is dry it is sent to the foundry. A further mould, made of rubber, is constructed around this master form. The mould, when taken off the original plaster, does not destroy the latter. This is a great disappointment to the aesthetic Trotskyite, who loves, like Moses, to see a statue destroyed. Yet there is promise of more fun in the future, for the wax cast that is taken from the rubber mould will be invested in a third mould, fireproof this time. This mould, with the wax copy encased within it, is put in a kiln to be melted out. This ought to satisfy the violence-craving contemporary artist philistine, yet the process is concealed and the wax disappears as a vapour, so it is altogether too ethereal an iconoclasm to count in the aggregate. Next there is fire again, which is Nature’s fundamental element, so Nature is once more appeased. In goes the molten bronze, down the ducts in the negative. There is a rumble of mixed anger and pleasure on Sinai at this point; God himself is in a certain turmoil about the whole thing. Then the mould for the bronze is chipped away, and what a dull ending – for a work of art has been secured in a hardish material or no great distinction (since it is all material rubbish in the end.) But the process has stopped, and no promise of further destruction stands in the future. The sculpture has won – for the moment. But shortly the art schools will train their students to embrace an aesthetic of destruction, Jehovah will be thrilled and the desperate old Dialectic will start up all over again, in which words will trump objects, talented people will be ousted and a great many people will be terribly, terribly hurt. And the bust might be toppled, and if done so in an “interesting” or “thoughtful” way, then the toppler might gain a Degree from Edinburgh University, First Class.
Words will trump objects… Yes, the art schools are full of students writing about plaster-casts. Where are the students who, in silence, are sculpting about plaster-casts – and making plaster-casts of their own in the process? They are nowhere to be found. Always keep the profound truth of the Molten Calf story close to hand when you go among contemporary artists. Always remember what it was that Moses opposed to the Calf before he had it smashed to pieces and ground to a paste and forced down the throats of the innocents dancing round it. He opposed a text, the second clause of which read “Thou shalt not sculpt.”
And never forget what that old sculptor Kritios did. He affronted Nature, by showing Him so clearly, with that relaxed stance and “playing” leg. Don’t think my view of the enormity of what he did in Athens in the 5th century BC is fanciful, nor suppose my idea exaggerated - that some great transgression was committed when he went first to cut that little Boy of his, under four feet tall in its surviving fragment. For if you look carefully at the work you will find that the head is made from a different piece of stone than the body. Some grown-up specialists in work of this period believe that the piece, which is entirely intact on a stylistic level, its parts conclusively carved at the same time, might well have been damaged in the studio. Who knows? Perhaps Kritios himself, or his Department Head, “freaked out” at the sight of such closely re-produced Nature and “lost it.” You have to forgive my use of modern terminology at this point. I only use it to indicate that Dialectical Modernism, which loves to ding down a statue, is perennial, persistent, nothing new and terribly, terribly vulgar. The story also supposes some man of taste and sensibility in the scene who recognised the moral significance of what Kritios had done, and stood as protector while the most important sculpture in the history of the world was repaired.
Alexander Stoddart, Paisley 2012
The art of sculpture, which is the noblest of the visual arts, is not taught today for two basic reasons. The first is that there are no tutors to teach the technical and aesthetic skills necessary to be grasped if even the slightest bust is to be attempted, but the second reason is interesting and obscure. This is founded upon a primordial anxiety about sculpture that resides in nearly every human breast and which gains its first, catastrophic mythological representation in the Book of Exodus. This is the episode in which Moses, descending from the Mountain of Sinai, discovers the Hebrews to have been making sculpture in his absence, in the form of a “Molten Calf”. His rage is legendary, and the reprisals he takes brutal beyond comprehension; he orders his enforcers, the Levites, to execute three thousand men, women and children for breaching the primal Commandment of the fire-god Jehovah, whose avatar, indeed, is Moses himself; “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them…” (Exodus, Chapt.XX verses 4-5). Often mistaken as a “Golden” Calf, this offending work of art is in fact an object that is not hewn, or constructed, but cast, presumably into an earthen mould, in which technique the ancient Hebrews were apparently skilled. The Calf gains its pejorative associations not primarily from its subject but from the method of its making. In recent times, when casts have been ritually defaced either virtually, in artistic acts of “minimal interventionism”, or actually, in gleeful vandalisation, pornographisation or even actual destruction, we can observe a continued exercise of the fundamental instinct to do away with the three-dimensional, reproduced image; an instinct I call the “Mosaic impulse.” It motivates Departmental Heads to this day, as it does many a scientist, and did multitudes of Christian Copts, the Hun and Vandal, hosts of Scottish Calvinists, CIA-sponsored abstract expressionists and every Talibaneer faced with a rock-cut Buddha. As Heraclitus said, in his most profound surviving fragment, simply – “Nature loves to hide…” The artist prosecutes Nature with an eye of unbounded objectivity, in a spirit of extreme dis-interest, over a length of time. From this cross-examination he produces a re-presentation of that Nature, to the intense, Mosaic fury of Nature Himself – who loves to hide. Then, if he is a sculptor, by means of the techniques of casting he proceeds to breed that re-presentation. This, as far as Father Nature is concerned, is an impudence too far. The artist must be done away with, or the art itself. This has been the project of the Twentieth Century, triumphantly achieved, it seems, if one cares to inspect any art school of renown today. Apparently paradoxically, but in reality necessarily, the invention of the camera assisted in this eradication of art. For Nature, the photograph is tantamount to a life-casting (life-casts abound in modern art-schools) and is near enough to a “found object” to cause no offence to the God of Nature, who “is that he is.” That the photograph, or the film, is not offensive to the modern fundamentalist Islamist is a weighty indication that it is not, and cannot be, a work of art. What art-photographer ever commissioned a photographer to photograph his photograph? My photography bill is considerable.
The greatness of that short-lived little societal and ethical phenomenon called the West, consisted in its capacity to confound, over a period of about 1500 years in total, the natural law proscribing the artistic representation of the forms and effects of the phenomenal realm. Before its delicate reign, there had always been some scratchings of more or less inarticulate forms and figures, always made in so abstracted a way as to affright Nature to no significant degree – that is, with a “fig-leaf” of crudity maintained over the possibility of any artistic virtuosity. It is called, usually in qualified terms, “primitive” art – and it gets this title because it safely proceeds no further than a “first principle” state. It is a sign for a natural form, but it is never likely to be taken for one. No birds will fly into that wall to attempt to peck at those grapes, no man of rude and strong will can ever mistake yonder figures on the braes of Easter Island for an army ranked behind a rival male. That art was sufficiently weak in re-presentation to have been tolerable all along, although it must be wondered why so many of the early artists in humanity’s dawn had to hide in caves when they wished to paint. When it came to Greece, however, in the inaugural gesture of the sculptor Kritios in first re-presenting that relaxed stance where one leg supports and the other “plays” (the contrapposto) – in that single gesture the instinct to push the heresy of re-presentation further than Nature might happily permit, commenced. A simple dropping of the pelvis and a bending of one leg, forming an asymmetry in deep repose, and an action in perfect stillness, was what made the Occident begin; for all the poetry and all the philosophy already going strong, yet there had to be achieved the visual art equivalent of those leaps towards Enlightenment, without which no self-knowledge could possibly be concluded. Kritios took that leap, in about 480 BC – terribly late in time. With it he inaugurated the idea of the transgressional artist, which has had a certain hardihood much declined in recent years, as art schools have become bastions of smoke-free obedience, political correctness, and Health, and a fully dreadful Safety. The clampdown upon what Winckelmann called the “imitation of antiquity” is the presiding piety of these institutions, which guarantees all the other, dismal proscriptions that they impose and see are observed.
In such a world of denial, the status of the plaster-cast is naturally questionable. If one is very honest and observant, one will recognise that there is something in the plaster copy, especially if it be of a work from a specifically classical original – or a neo-classical – that excites tremendous anger in certain hearts. Those who find themselves nevertheless drawn towards those objects have, beyond a museological or installational excuse to approach them, a third option with which to cover their erring steps. They can always claim they have a “great love of plaster.” To the real sculptor, who has nothing but a hearty contempt for this atrocious substance, his ten-thousandth bucket of which he has just mixed that very morning, this infatuation is both laughable and mendacious. If the plaster-lover is struck on the head by some of the revolting stuff falling on her from her rotten ceiling, she will likely alter her opinion in some haste, and were she to die, after a long career of inhaling its dust, of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, she might take a somewhat jaded view of the charms of powdered gypsum, hanging in the studio air, shafts of fairy sunshine glancing through its enchanted veil. She claws at her dermatitic forearms? She ain’t so enamoured. In her claim – to “love plaster” – the connoisseuse is really hiding behind a political shield of dialectical materialism. She knows her status as a paid-up member of the Marxian establishment will be seriously compromised if she professes a categorical love of the shapes, forms, handlings and pure aesthetics of the plaster-cast’s artistic substance; we all know that to adore these things is as politically suspect as it is to be seen drawing them. But if one invokes the material with which they are made, again one can move to cuddle up to these unholy totems without fear of censure. Never mention their beauty, nor their uninscribed eyes beaming “keen with honour”, nor that diabolical drop of the knee towards the centre of the earth, nor dare to proclaim their authority beyond time and place, and all will be well. Make no aesthetic comment, cast no glance of approval, above all make no recommendation on their example for generations past and to come – and you can “love” all you like. For the material, the stupid plaster, is nearly nothing about these things; to “love plaster” in the plaster-cast is similar to those modern architects who love “space”. Why does she feel so strongly about some matter, if it were not the shape that the matter is in?
The true sculptor, who has no illusions about plaster, is strongly drawn to a metaphysical view of the world – the world as a material illusion. This is because he knows all about the action of casting - the process of making a multiple material conversion through a sequence of geometric exchanges between positive and negative forms. First the sculptor makes a clay model (he makes it – not some underpaid fabricator, grateful for the pittance and accustomed to the exploitation) upon which he puts a plaster negative – the mould. He then opens the mould destroying the clay original (at this point certain contemporist pants become moist as the promise of destruction arises). From this negative another positive is made, in plaster, swilled into the mould interior. Once the cast is set within the mould, the mould is then chipped away (that is, destroyed; more joy in the underwear). What is released (Marxian emblem of Fidelio-style deliverance) is the plaster cast. It stands as the surviving print of the lost form of the original clay. It concludes the first phase of the material dialectic and because it is a little terminus of action, so it tends to disappoint the vitalist sensibility. Thus it becomes vulnerable to attack, especially by its furious author, if he be young. I know this from within, for I was young once, sort of.
After the plaster cast is dry it is sent to the foundry. A further mould, made of rubber, is constructed around this master form. The mould, when taken off the original plaster, does not destroy the latter. This is a great disappointment to the aesthetic Trotskyite, who loves, like Moses, to see a statue destroyed. Yet there is promise of more fun in the future, for the wax cast that is taken from the rubber mould will be invested in a third mould, fireproof this time. This mould, with the wax copy encased within it, is put in a kiln to be melted out. This ought to satisfy the violence-craving contemporary artist philistine, yet the process is concealed and the wax disappears as a vapour, so it is altogether too ethereal an iconoclasm to count in the aggregate. Next there is fire again, which is Nature’s fundamental element, so Nature is once more appeased. In goes the molten bronze, down the ducts in the negative. There is a rumble of mixed anger and pleasure on Sinai at this point; God himself is in a certain turmoil about the whole thing. Then the mould for the bronze is chipped away, and what a dull ending – for a work of art has been secured in a hardish material or no great distinction (since it is all material rubbish in the end.) But the process has stopped, and no promise of further destruction stands in the future. The sculpture has won – for the moment. But shortly the art schools will train their students to embrace an aesthetic of destruction, Jehovah will be thrilled and the desperate old Dialectic will start up all over again, in which words will trump objects, talented people will be ousted and a great many people will be terribly, terribly hurt. And the bust might be toppled, and if done so in an “interesting” or “thoughtful” way, then the toppler might gain a Degree from Edinburgh University, First Class.
Words will trump objects… Yes, the art schools are full of students writing about plaster-casts. Where are the students who, in silence, are sculpting about plaster-casts – and making plaster-casts of their own in the process? They are nowhere to be found. Always keep the profound truth of the Molten Calf story close to hand when you go among contemporary artists. Always remember what it was that Moses opposed to the Calf before he had it smashed to pieces and ground to a paste and forced down the throats of the innocents dancing round it. He opposed a text, the second clause of which read “Thou shalt not sculpt.”
And never forget what that old sculptor Kritios did. He affronted Nature, by showing Him so clearly, with that relaxed stance and “playing” leg. Don’t think my view of the enormity of what he did in Athens in the 5th century BC is fanciful, nor suppose my idea exaggerated - that some great transgression was committed when he went first to cut that little Boy of his, under four feet tall in its surviving fragment. For if you look carefully at the work you will find that the head is made from a different piece of stone than the body. Some grown-up specialists in work of this period believe that the piece, which is entirely intact on a stylistic level, its parts conclusively carved at the same time, might well have been damaged in the studio. Who knows? Perhaps Kritios himself, or his Department Head, “freaked out” at the sight of such closely re-produced Nature and “lost it.” You have to forgive my use of modern terminology at this point. I only use it to indicate that Dialectical Modernism, which loves to ding down a statue, is perennial, persistent, nothing new and terribly, terribly vulgar. The story also supposes some man of taste and sensibility in the scene who recognised the moral significance of what Kritios had done, and stood as protector while the most important sculpture in the history of the world was repaired.
Alexander Stoddart, Paisley 2012