"Bells are of the sky. Bells are of nature. It
wasn’t a conscious decision, they just came out." This was the
spontaneous response to a question I asked Gloria Kisch regarding her reasons
for creating her new series of sculptures, "The Bells." I’d been
thinking about these works since my visit earlier in the month to the artist’s
East Village studio. I’d seen images on the internet, but this body of work
requires first hand observation to really start to appreciate not only its
formal qualities, but also to begin to decipher its other qualities, those
characteristics that are summarily dismissed by many contemporary viewers. The
qualities that I’m speaking of are the spiritual, the emotional, the ephemeral.
Wassily Kandinsky’s treatise, Concerning
the Spiritual in Art,
must have been one of the first manifestos of modern art in which a concept of
the mystical as a possible solution for advanced art’s search for appropriate
content was developed. Though rejected by Duchamp and the Postmodernists as
sentimental and unintellectual, there is a paradoxical relationship between the
poetic koan, proverbs of the mystics, and the nuts and bolts scientific
discoveries of modern physics. A mystical statement like �€Ã¯Â¿Â½ life is an illusion
of vibrating energetic mist�€Ã¯Â¿Â½ is ironically parallel to descriptions by atomic
particle physicists of their discoveries of aspects of quantum theory. In a
similar way, Kisch’s bells, though evoked through an unconscious intuitive
desire, have a direct and vital connection to contemporary sculptural practice.
"If any social function can be ascribed to art at
all, it is the function to have no function."
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>
Adorno’s quote above quote, though perhaps intentionally
provocative, even fashionable in our current PoMo epic, bears the seeds of
nihilism, which are at the heart of much Neo-Marxist theory. Yet art can have a
function, for artists especially. Over her artistic career, Kisch has produced
bodies of work that are functional as well as those which are nonfunctional.
"At different stages, I’ve just decided to address different issues. In
the case of "The Bells", the functional and nonfunctional just seemed
to come together," said Kisch. In my research on bells, I’ve found that
there are basically two types of bells, the liberty bells and the religious
bells. In the case of the first, they are used to express freedom, victory,
joy, mourning, the measuring of time, and the sounding of alarms, in the second
case, as a call to prayer and as an aid to meditation. It wouldn’t be far off
to say that bells are about spiritual freedom.
"Keen lemon-yellow hurts the eye in time as a
prolonged and shrill trumpet-note the ear, and the gazer turns away to seek
relief in blue or green." – Wassily Kandinsky
Various artists and psychologists over the years have
attempted to prove the analogy that there is a direct relationship between
color or other visual forms and music or auditory (sound) forms. Kisch’s
"Bells" are an apt physical rendition of this conjunction. The
artist has said that, "the ringing of some of the "Bells"
reminds me of the sounds of Buddhist monks chanting." What might
initially seem discordant and unmusical becomes upon further listening
strangely harmonic and uplifting. By being hung from the ceiling rather than
standing on the floor, the pieces imply an inverse force of mass. In
"Bell Singing", the pod-like forms are visually self contained,
placed on a linear center, with an extension of chain descending below the
bottom form to reinforce its verticality. The potentiality of ringing accords
an implied radiance of sound that gives the piece a kind of trans-sensual
dynamism, a transfer from visual to auditory anticipation. There is a further
association to musical notation. The pieces can be read from top to bottom, or
bottom to top, the spacing of the elements, their form and mass, present a
linear statement and make use of a devise that in music is called interval and
in sculpture void. The linked forms encourage the eye to travel along the
chain and crossbars and create a visual narrative that may be unique in
contemporary sculpture.
"Steel possesses little art history. What
associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure,
movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality." –
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> David Smith
In the brushed stainless-steel forms of "The
Bells" there are echoes of the classics of American high Modernism. The
material itself derives much of its appeal from the utilitarian qualities of
ifs subdued metallic shine. The "Big Men" of American sculpture,
David Smith, Alexander Calder and Mark Di Suvero, all used steel. Its strength
and durability makes it a natural material to allude to the tough
macho-industrial sensibility these artists wanted to project as their vision of
20th century sculpture. It would be presumptuous of me to infer any
intentional feminist statement in "The Bells"; however, the artist’s
choice of shapes, finish and design do have a softer, more playful, and even
whimsical, though none the less formal structure than the above mentioned male
sculptors. An example of this might be "Bell 11." With its balance
beam and large hoops, it alludes not only to those props used by magicians and
jugglers in their performance, but the conical forms that recall classical
Oriental bell shapes as well as the "Atomic Age" Modernism
popularized by designers during the early sixties. Other pieces like "Bell
5" have a spare even elegant horizontal linearity, with a silhouette
reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy, or of flickers of light off a surface of
water as seen through a narrow slot.
Art is not philosophy, politics, or theory. It’s an
organic constituent of the human psyche. It represents, if not a need, then at
least a desire that is nearly as profoundly humanistic as that for survival and
reproduction. Like any attempt to analyze love or sex, to try to quantify,
classify and codify art can only lead to extinguishing the spark of magic
energy that animates all creativity. "The Bells" may be Kisch’s way
of letting that spark ring out, sending it skyward in hopes that it might start
a flame of creative fire, even in locations that do not expect or anticipate
its arrival.
Notes
1. All quotes by Gloria Kisch are taken from a
conversation in her studio (July 8, 2003) and from a phone interview (August 4,
2003)
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>. (Trans. G. Lenhardt New York:
Routledge, 1984; p.322).
3. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>. (Trans. M.T.H. Sadler. New York:
Dover Publications, 1977; p.24).
4. Davis Smith quoted by Mel Bochner in "Primary
Structures," Arts Magazine, XL (June 1966) |
