Dynamic Tactility – Ann Hirsch

Writing about Rachel Whiteread’s casts of rooms, Rosalind Krauss links life casting to the photographic trace. She argues that life casts and photographs are both "indexically produced forms" that "resonate with the sense that they have been cast (whether physically or optically) from life.

Dynamic Tactility

Ann Hirsch

 

 

 

 

Writing about Rachel Whiteread’s casts of rooms, Rosalind Krauss links life casting to the photographic trace. She argues that life casts and photographs are both "indexically produced forms" that "resonate with the sense that they have been cast (whether physically or optically) from life." The index is inextricably linked to modes of representation in contemporary painting and sculpture. Painters have explored the relationship of photography to the painted image at great length in any number of ways. Though ubiquitous in figurative sculpture for over five decades, the life cast and its impact on modeling in sculpture has not been as consciously examined by sculptors.

Life cast portraits, by virtue of the casting process, register the haunting, death-like absence of the person once present more than an autonomous presence. Their appearance is markedly different from sculpturally rendered figuration. Features reproduced through life casting are usually deflated and lifeless because the process documents the body weighted down by mold-making material. The cast, like the photograph, is a record of the body at a single moment in time. Evan Penny, who recently had a solo show at Sperone Westwater, comments that life casts "record what was there minus the other aspects that were the living, breathing dynamic whereas with modeling, a kind of consciousness is brought back into the work." Patricia Piccinini, Nina Levy, John Ahearn, Marc Quinn, Rona Pondick, Katharina Fritsch and Maurizio Cattelan, among many others, incorporate life casts in their work either by combining sculpted elements with life cast parts or by extensively modifying casts. No distinction is made between indexical and non-indexical processes in their work. In addition, sculptors such as Juan Munoz, James Croak, Kiki Smith and Robert Graham seem to reflect a life casting aesthetic in their work, even when life casts aren’t involved in the creative process. Has the proliferation of life casting led to a life casting aesthetic in sculpture?

In a recent show of new portraits and compositions at Project 1740, Dror Heymann and David Stern question the status of the life cast as an index in contemporary art. Both artists depart from indexical modes of representation by creating figurative images that pulse with movement. The two bodies of work assert the face as a locus of personhood in a constant state of becoming. The work resists definitive temporal or formal statement. Stern’s heavily impasto-ed, almost sculptural paintings of crowds and individuals oscillate between image and abstracted, bald, material fact. The paint limns shifting identity and echoes the accretion of time’s markings on a face. Images struggle to subsume literal interpretation by coalescing and then quickly disappearing in the shifting brushwork. The brushstrokes are as tactile as they are visual and this tactility, a quality shared in no small measure by Heymann’s busts but always absent in life casts, is what activates the relationship between the viewer and the painted or sculpted object. In his Sculptural Imagination, Alex Potts writes that sculpture is not enlivened by the illusion of reality so much as the viewer’s act of perceptual exploration of the sculpture’s surfaces: "It is then that [the sculpture] comes alive… in the ever-shifting, living dynamic of one’s perceptual exploration of it." Sculptural rendering therefore has a greater capacity than a life cast to close the gap between the viewer and the sculpture.

Heymann’s portrait busts document the act of modeling as a process by which a sculptor captures a presence or consciousness. His sculptures convey a vitality that is the summation of the many conscious decisions arrived at while sculpting each head and they demand slow, attentive readings. Forms are left in transition as if the process of sculpting them has yet to end. The potency of the rendering is heightened by the inclusion of a life cast as the fifth in Heymann’s series of five portrait busts. The cast is framed together with a sculpted bust after the same subject, mounted on the wall and titled The Twin Project; My Beloved. The two busts are like mirror images where one side represents the physical shell of the person and the other, the person’s inner image. The juxtaposition attests to the greater capacity of the modeled portrait to come to life in the mind’s eye of the viewer. The life cast acts as a counterpoint to the rest of the work in the show. By including this important statement, the sculptor shows us that if there is a life casting aesthetic in contemporary sculpture, there can be no substitute for finely crafted, traditionally modeled sculpture.