Hands, art, sculpture (2003)
artdesigncafé | café library | Reposted 15 April 2011
The following is the text for a lecture in November 2003 at a symposium on computer-generated sculpture at the Department of Art, Brooklyn College, New York organized by Karin Giusti.
Toland Grinnell on curators and dealers, “art-world figures with their hands on the levers of power…who just recently bought cell phones and don’t yet know how to use the speed dial.. They are still trying to impose rules and expectations on art.”
A 2001 Panelist in the Computers and Sculpture Forum said VR and CAD modeling gives him the ability to ignore gravity while creating his work. Audience member said, well, yeah, that’s drawing.
Tony Smith called in the specs to a steel manufacturer for Die— over the telephone.
Jacques Lipchitz was profiled for Life magazine late in his life, and they wanted to photograph him working on a monumental sculpture. They put him up in a bucket truck to chisel on the head, and in the resulting photograph, it’s obvious that he has neither been off the ground nor had a chisel in his hand in years.
One of the creators of a rapid prototyping machine told the Boston television news, on the occasion of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, “When I meet a sculptor, I’m fond of saying, Oh, You’re a sculptor? I thought there were machines for that now.”
The phenomenologists talk about the world “at hand,” and “grasping” as a notion of incorporating the material of the world into the understandable reality of everyday life—but everyday life is actually a mental construct rather than a material reality. I can give you an example from archaeology. The French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan was looking at the cave paintings in the south of France and elsewhere, and trying to make sense of the handprints that are on the walls along with the animal paintings. Some caves are mostly handprints rather than paintings. The handprints are made like stencils: a hand was placed against the wall and paint was sprayed (most likely spit) over the area, leaving a print when the hand was removed. Artists and others have usually understood the handprints as the primal gesture of the hand— I am here, I’m doing this and leaving a record of it. Some Neo-Expressionist artists of the 1980s used the image explicitly, to portray themselves and their work as “genuine” or “authentic” in the same sense that outsider artists are often described using those words: there were several exhibitions subtitled with a description of the artist as a “paintspitter.” But Leroi-Gourhan wasn’t satisfied with that notion of a primal act, the pre-linguistic, essential, I am here! Many of the handprints are missing fingers, and the usual explanation was animistic ritual mutilation rather than accidents, because of the frequency of missing fingers. But Leroi-Gourhan couldn’t understand why hunter-gatherers would have removed so essential a tool as a finger, regardless of the ritual significance. So he wondered, what if the hand wasn’t pressed against the wall palm first, but palm out. Raising the possibility that the fingers weren’t missing, they were simply shifted down out of the way. He did a statistical analysis of the hands and the various missing digits, in comparison to the distribution of animal species in the cave paintings, and found a direct correspondence between specific hand gestures and specific animals— and more than that, the hand gestures corresponded more or less with signals still used in Bushmen cultures to warn fellow hunters silently of animal ahead of the group. So the primal, authentic gesture of the hand is really already a complex system of metaphors: a language— it is already infected with the inauthenticity of the social rather than the solitary hunter, the very image of the solo artist in his garrett. The hand gesture already has what phenomenology calls intentionality: the embodiment (literally, embodiment or incarnation) of the mind’s intention, in the context of the social web of everyday reality.
Hands, art, sculpture - Glenn Harper: 1 | 2
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