On Sculpture
Joan Jonas
May 15, 1964
Submitted in partial fulfillment for MFA degree in sculpture
An idea of form or personality is something that develops through one's work and should come from the inside and not from the outside. It does not exist before the act and should not be preconceived even though certain individual traits, past experiences and influences all combine in the process of making something new. It depends on one's ability to free oneself of unimportant things and to concentrate on the physical act of fusing the outside world of matter with the inside imagination of the artist and to attain a result peculiar to the individual. It is not a purely visual process because all that goes into it involves a conception of what is happening, an idea of what is behind and under the actual surface, on the other side, and bringing everything in one's experience to focus on that moment.
Nothing is completely new or original, its beauty or value lies in the sincerity of expression, the closeness to the true nature of the person who made the object. This involves an extension of the imagination of the artist out into the world, ordering experience and perception to make something of his own and I think that in the actual process if one really gives one's self to the piece then one is able to draw unconsciously on all valuable knowledge and experience without leaving the present, without imposing old ideas from the past and in this one should discover something new in each moment. One has to be free of logic and rationality occasionally to get the value of the accident, the random gesture.
There really should be no such thing as accident because one cannot work without direction and whatever direction one takes will result in certain things happening, all of which should be used. Of course works may turn out badly and there may be periods of time in which the artist cannot produce satisfactory work, but all this is necessary. Often one is fooled by one's own efforts if they are too easy and facile and one must be constantly wary of the cliché. This means that either ideas are borrowed or that a solution is reached too easily, something that I am aware of in my own work sometimes. An effort must be made to break away from each piece and to go on to the next, to forget the last and all the ease of knowing what was there and to find a new form or idea, to experiment.
It is hard to separate the self from the work, but it has to be done in order to learn anything. Matisse said that he looked for something in all his early works peculiar to him that helped him to see what he was and where he was going. This is as important as achieving a consistency in life, a strength, a thread to hold onto and to follow, to work from, knowing the limitations but realizing that infinity can lie in a limited space.
It may seem strange, but I don't really like sculpture. This is not to say that I don't like my own things, I do. It is just that I am more interested in the enjoyment of painting than in the experience of looking at most sculpture. I would be a painter but at the moment all my ideas relate to a three dimensional space. I find it frustrating to try to create the illusion of space, and far more meaningful to actually work in space, to manipulate it (even though I never think of space but of the object in it, and if it does not manipulate the space, then I have failed to make a piece of sculpture). Maybe an awareness of negative space will eventually help my sculpture, but until now I have been working around it and not with it. Often when sculptors try consciously to manipulate the space they fail and the space remains as dead as it was before.
Space may be used in a new way. Perhaps in further exploration of environment the idea will also relate to things far away and not the immediate surroundings.
When I say that I don't like sculpture it means that my taste is far more limited here than in painting. I only like what is useful to me. Giacometti has always been an inspiration and has remained interesting through other phases of influence. Medieval sculpture is also beautiful to me, obviously these tastes will change, in fact they are now changing, but they have held me during the last year. Gorky and medieval painting have also influenced me. These things may not be evident in my work, but I have tried a lot of different things and have borrowed from many different places. The quality in Giacometti and medieval sculpture that I like is the spirituality, their lightness and subtlety. I can't stand heavy-handed things and am trying to get away from an awkward kind of expression and from things that look painful because an idea or emotion has not been realized or fully understood through the form.
There should be, in an idea of sculpture, one that does not include the stipulation that it must have weight and that it must rest on the ground. If the past has been concerned with gravity, then the future should, in a way, try to fool gravity. Lachaise does this in using what are known intellectually as heavy forms, and which are actually heavy but instead they float away from the ground.
I have gotten many formal ideas and subject matter from painting and although I have never tried color in sculpture I think it could be used in a way that wasn't just to take one's attention away from the lack of formal interest. Medieval sculpture was not least interesting in a formal sense than the Renaissance just because it was painted. Of course the age and quality of the paint gives it a particular charm.
The city is the only place to live and work now, and eventually I will be able to use it in the same way I have used the country. Right now it generates a force, an energy, and if one is in tune then the pace is a part of life. In the country the experience is different. Things do not move in the same way. They move slowly and imperceptively. Even a thunderstorm has its own cycle, its own beginning and end within the framework of growth. The violence is of a different order than the violence of a large city, which is a random violence, but one's own experience of both are the same or should be because the pace remains constant in keeping up with time.
Some past experiences were felt in the country away from anything man made, or around things that were natural such as trees, birds, rocks, the sea, mountains, or flowers. Because you are alone you can feel different things. Nature is continually changing and flowing, undulating back on itself, and in the experiencing of this endless variety there is the pain of loss in the pleasure felt in the transitory beauty. Pleasure lies in the ability to flow with the light, to float in the air, to sense all the minute changes in light, color, and form so that one's personality dissolves and fuses with the atmosphere.
I don't mean that one should hold onto the pleasure or the pain of the past, but that if something is made out of it then you are able to leave it behind as it has been useful and not destructive. Just as leaving a work of art behind, experiences must be left behind. I realize that holding onto certain memories is sentimental and sentimentality is not the concern of art now, neither is the past as it once was. I don't believe in romanticism as an aesthetic concept.
Listening to music, looking at a painting or a piece of sculpture has the same quality of endless relationships, continuous undulation and rhythm. In music one travels along from one moment to the next and stays with each note and phrase, sensing the weaving of the parts, unable to rest on any moment or to hold a phrase except in the memory. It is impossible even to hold the musical memory even in order to enjoy the passage. Time is in the experience of grasping spatial relationships, in traveling over the surface and through the forms again and again understanding and seeing new connections.
Growth is violent and carries its own destruction. Forms are related to this movement of falling, tumbling, surging of continuous climax, of creeping back and forth across a surface, going in and out endlessly unable to stop because of a fear that life will cease in a less intense experience.
It seems unimportant to discuss material except to say that the color and weight of plaster lends itself to these ideas in which lightness is the most important element. Plaster has endless possibilities and I have only been able to explore one or two methods.
An intuitive method has been used in order to allow things to form themselves out of old experiences. Forms grow out of one, taking on their own identity as they emerge. Plaster, wire forms and cloth allow one to work quickly and freely, achieving effects very like those in drawing and painting where one is not hampered by gravity and the difficulties of construction.
The heads and figures are exercises in a different kind of tight closed form. Eventually they should float and capture light.