German Sculptors Abroad
Piri Halasz
sculpture is all too often considered beyond the postmodernist pale, since it
allows (indeed, requires) the artist to impress his or her personal vision upon
the material, instead of eliminating the human touch through the use of
unworked industrial materials or the assemblage of mass-produced objects. I’m
happy to report that Germany has recently been exporting two fine
constructivist sculptors, David Evison and Thomas Kiesewetter. Evison has
traveled all the way to China and South Korea to make monumental work, but
then, he was born in China in 1944 to English parents who were Methodist
missionaries. The family left when he was still a baby, to escape the Japanese
invasion, and the artist was educated in English schools, but he’s been a
professor for sculpture at the Hochschule der K�nste in Berlin since 1982.
During this past semester, he has also been an artist-in-residence at the
university in Nanjing, China, and next September, he will be making a partially
underwater sculpture for the Sea Art Festival in Busan, South Korea, but Silken
Thread was his first major project in
South Korea. He was kind enough to describe it for me, as follows:
“The sculpture was commissioned by
the City Hall of Busan, who were establishing a sculpture park at the
international stadium. The city is in the south of South Korea, the second
largest after Seoul with circa 5 million people packed in densely, because the
terrain is mountainous and green, spilling down to great beaches right in the
city. It is modern, successful and thriving. I was invited by Koreans who also
invited other sculptors from Germany and other countries. They paid air-fare,
hotel, all meals, car/bus and driver and interpreters and an honorarium. The
delegation saw some small sculptures in my Berlin studio, made from wood and
lead, and we discussed the possibility of scaling these up.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> The sculpture itself was made in 10
days during August 2002, at the San Jin steel works. The San Jin steelworkers
were professional technicians. An engineer made drawings with his computer from
my 50 cm. sculpture, and the bending was done by a specialist working from
these drawings. I worked with a team of three professionals and an interpreter,
welding the basic structure together horizontally before it was craned up.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> The rolled tubes were then fitted in
sections using intense heat, ratchets and hydraulic jacks. In its general character
the large version changed little from the smaller one, but decisions about
lengths and proportion were made up to the last minute. I was satisfied that it
looked right, at the size that was achieved.
“Silken Thread
style=’color:black’> derives from many sources. I love the way Greek sculptors
used snakes and other things against the human body, Laoco�n
style=’color:black’> in the Vatican being the most famous. I have long been an
admirer of the baroque sculptors and architects of South Germany and Bohemia
with their oblique angles deriving from Bernini, and over the years have
attempted to suppress my Gothic/Englishness. When I first saw the Jinci Temple near Taiyuan in Western
China, I was speechless. So I
guess I’m trying to express myself abstractly and using the past as a guide,
going for a contrast of opposites: the four-sidedness that Greek sculptors are
so good at, square against round, curve against straight, top against bottom ,
the way Adolph Gottlieb uses two halves and goes for a total contrast between
them. And of course the language I’m using is the modernist canon, which I see
no reason to abandon or react against— there’s so much unfinished business!”
Closer to home was the sculpture
show of Thomas Kiesewetter at Jack Tilton in SoHo. Kiesewetter was born in
Kassel, Germany in 1963 and lives in Berlin. This was his first solo exhibition
in the U.S., and presented complex compositions of sheets of thin metal,
screwed or riveted together, each painted a different color, and stood on small
white wooden tables (also made by the artist). Every piece was untitled, except
for a parenthetical allusion to its color, for example, Untitled, 2003
(bright orange). These sculptures had a
jaunty, cheerful quality, even if their paint was artistically weathered, with
the edges of the sheets of metal shining through. The tables were also
artistically weathered, in both cases producing a dingy postmodernist overlay
on a fundamentally fresh modernist idea – fresh in spite of the fact that some
of the pieces called up ghosts from the past. To me, the piece painted silver
was reminiscent of the famous horse head by Raymond Duchamp-Villon, while the
purple one resembled a striding human figure was not unlike Unique Forms of
Continuity in Space, by Boccioni.
(© 2004 by Piri Halasz. This
article is excerpted and adapted from Ms. Halasz’s online column, From the
Mayor’s Doorstep, http://piri.home.mindspring.com)
