This month sees a conference at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design entitled "Matrix 3D: sculpture, method, research" (14-15 September).
Critic Stella Santacatterina took the opportunity to speak to two leading figures in the field of sculpture in Britain on behalf of The Art Newspaper. Jon Thompson is an artist, independent curator and theorist. He is currently director of fine art at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht.
Richard Wentworth is one of the leading international artists working in Britain today. From 1971 to 1987 he was a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London.
WHERE DOES THE NOTION OF A TRADITION OF BRITISH SCULPTURE COME FROM?
JON THOMPSON: There isn't much of a tradition of British sculpture. It really starts with the generation of Henry Moore: with the cross-fertilisation of the English obsession with landscape through the Picturesque tradition in painting and the surrealist object. The two key figures in the latter were Graham Sutherland and John Piper. English surrealism is also a sort of hybrid. The radical break really came with the Second World War, which created a break or gap with what had gone before.
WOULD YOU SAY THERE WAS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BARBARA HEPWORTH AND MOORE?
Hepworth was very much influenced by Naum Gabo which brought the notion of abstraction into English sculpture. You can never see Moore as an abstract sculptor-his work always reminds you of the figure, it always involves representation of some kind or another. Hepworth is much more capable of understanding the abstract; but even so it is brought back to nature in some way. English sculpture doesn't understand abstraction in the continental sense. It is always "abstracted" from the landscape, from the figure, but it is never figurative.
HOW WOULD YOU SITUATE THE WORK OF ANTHONY CARO?
Caro acted as assistant to Moore, and his early pieces were figurative. But the great moment for Caro was when he went to America and met David Smith. However, although Caro appeared to open up a new sculptural space, which at the time seemed very radical, if you look at it in retrospect, it is a diagrammatisiation rather than a physical transformation of space. The relationship to the body is very strong, it's very gestural, and ultimately very pictorial. All this continues up to the present day with Richard Deacon or Tony Cragg. In Cragg, much is made of his use of found objects, but the way he uses them is still like arranging stones, a device for structuring the sculpture; or nature as a standard for ordering.
AND RICHARD LONG?
Long takes the equation the other way - he wants to impose the abstract mark upon the natural. But he still relies upon nature because he has to have the world in order to make the mark. If you look, for instance, at the idea of walking a straight line through Peru, you find a simple opposition between geometry and nature, to make you look at a natural order.
OR TO REPLACE A NATURALISTIC ORDER ...
Yes.
WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP WITH SPACE IN BRITISH SCULPTURE?
Space is another thing they don't handle very well. It is always neutral, or a tabula rasa on which you make a sculptural mark. So the notion of an active, concrete activation of the space as with Arte Povera in Italy or neo-Minimalism in the US never took form in English sculpture. If you look at Italian sculpture at the same time you see that the sculptural object is always in active relation with the architecture in which it is placed, which goes back to the Renaissance tradition. Whereas post-war English sculpture is extremely defensive about the identity of the sculptural object, and I can never quite winkle out what it is defending. It is almost as if they must bring the object back to some notion of sculptural unity. So that, for example, Cragg accepts, as a principle of making, something like fragmentation. But in the end there has to be a symbolic wholeness. There's a kind of fear of the loss of the object.
THE EXHIBITION "GRAVITY AND GRACE" THAT YOU CURATED AT THE HAYWARD GALLERY IN LONDON IN 1993 INVESTIGATED ABOVE ALL THE RELATIONSHIP WITH SPACE.
If you looked at the difference between Anselmo and Richard Serra, which were in the same room, they were both dealing with the notion of danger, but with Serra there was simply a presentation of danger. The viewer is directed how to behave in the space, which is a relation of dominance. I call this operatic and schematic: it sets up a stage in which the viewer is placed, as it we were present at the same time as not being present. This is how I understand Michael Fried's criticism of minimalism as "theatrical". With Anselmo, on the other hand, there is a negotiation not a presentation of experience; not a relation of dominance but one of exchange. In the end, English sculpture was influenced by Minimalism but still retained interest in the object. There really isn't such a thing as English Minimalism.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE 1980S?
I think of the Eighties generation of English sculptors as very mannerist. You could say that the hole postmodern period is mannerist, or the whole of contemporary art from the end of Sixties never produced new forms, it only reproduced earlier ones. I wonder to what degree this notion of British sculpture isn't a play by the marketplace more than anything else. In fact I think this generation of English sculptors is made to appear more coherent than it really is: they are actually quite different and separate artists.
In any case, the idea of presenting what could be called British sculpture is a very short history to begin with.
RICHARD WENTWORTH: A SCULPTURE'S RESPONSE
HOW DO YOU CONTEXTUALISE YOUR WORK WITHIN THIS NOTION OF A TRADITION OF ENGLISH SCULPTURE, BECAUSE YOUR WORK SEEMS TO ESCAPE THE OBSESSION WITH OBJECT OR NATURE?
RICHARD WENTWORTH: To put something in context you have to use the word "influence" in its proper sense. To listen to Jon is almost like listening to a weather report; his view of English sculpture is that we are adjacent to the continent, which is where the weather is coming from. And we take our cures from it; and there's a lot of truth in that in the pre-war period.
After that, the weather came from America. For a teenager in the Sixties, a very different situation from pre-war Britain - the loss of Empire, greater material possibilities - there was an almost animal desire for air, and that air came from America, American pop music and art, even if it was misunderstood. For those at Saint Martins, like Bruce McLean and Gilbert & George, and where Caro was teaching, there was a big impulse to get out of English stuffiness.
WHAT OTHER INFLUENCES WERE CIRCULATING THEN?
Among all these echoes of Minimalism and also Joseph Beuys, two important things were happening. Early Barry Flanagan was very interesting.
AND FLANAGAN WENT AGAINST CARO.
And the way he went against him was very like Arte Povera.
AND HE WAS VERY CLOSE TO THOSE ARTISTS LIKE PISTOLETTO.
That seemed quite brave. Then the other artist of importance was Eva Hesse.
AND HER WORK HAD EUROPEAN ROOTS.
You can make a map with Beuys, Minimalism, Eva Hesse, all sorts of "process art" activity, like Robert Morris, all mixed up with the language of used parts, the insides of London nineteenth-century houses that you find in skips. In Deacon this gives the sense of DIY. English modernism was never more than nailing a piece of hardboard on one of these old panelled doors, then painting it to make it look as if it was a flat door. For my generation the ideas of process, or procedure, was very important, as with Tony Cragg.
TONY CRAGG USES FRAGMENTS BUT HE DOESN'T PRODUCE BUT RE-PRODUCE. IT'S A KIND OF FAKENESS.
All this comes back to what Jon says about naturalism. For me these cigarettes are today's sculpture. In the current culture, talking about materials, they are "natural". I liked it when Jon talked about the naturalism of putting this down on the table. Where I get nervous about it, is where they have to be smoked in order to make the piece of work.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'British sculpture: filling a void'