Modern Sculpture, Essence, and Difference: Reflections on the Work of Constantin Brâncuşi

Paper abstract

Constantin Brâncuşi’s aphorism “the sculpture is nothing but water” resonates with his alabaster and onyx sculptures of the 1910s and the early 1920s like La Muse Endormie, Sculpture pour aveugles and Torse d’une jeune femme. In those works, the quality of materials and the polishing processes break the essential forms and their opacity, endowing them with a “humoral” feature through the perceptive evocation of solidified water.

In relation to the late 20th century developments of this idea of materiality, the present contribution examines a specific point of the “elective affinity” between Brâncuşi and Ettore Spalletti (1940-2019), who since the late 1970s dialogued with the work of the Romanian sculptor coherently with his distance from the ideology of the “icon-matters” of many Arte Povera and Process artists and the impersonality of Minimal Art (Corà, 1995; Chiodi, 2019).

Assuming a philological perspective grounded on the shared interest for the transformation of materials, the contribution visualizes Brâncuşi’s ‘water’ sculptures in relation with Spalletti’s alabaster works realized between the mid-1980s and the 1990s, by asking through which techniques and linguistic consequences the Italian artist reflected on the transitional status of sculpture in relation to the permeability to environmental light and the agency of colour.

Inspired by a statement which draws correspondences with the Brâncuşian aphorism (Spalletti, 2014), the study thus aims to understand how Spalletti, autonomously from Brâncuşi, rethought the centrality of the sculptural object, its receptivity and its bodily presence in the world by touching the threshold between opacity and transparency, autonomy and relation, solidity and liquidity, geometry and diffraction.

About the speaker

Dr Stefano Agresti is Research Assistant at the Fondazione Ettore Spalletti and collaborator at the chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza”.

In 2023 he received his doctorate in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza” with a study project on the dialectics between artists and gallerists in Italy between 1968 and 1979 (supervisor: Prof. Claudio Zambianchi).

His research focuses on the work of Ettore Spalletti and the Italian and German art scenes between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Paper abstract

In a crucial monograph on Richard Serra, the American critic Hal Foster, referring to Constantin Brâncuşi, stated that “with his ambition to convey near-Platonic ideas […] his work is an epitome of idealist sculpture”, dialectically obtained through “sheer material” (Foster, 2000).

The determining influence of Brâncuşi’s sculpture on North American object-based experimentations in the Sixties has been extensively recognized and debated since the 1970s (Krauss, 1977; Beyaert, 2003; Haase, 2004). Equally documented appears the Brâncuşi’s “idealist” interpretation established on unity, pure form, spirituality, and de-materialisation (Boime, 1970; Shanes, 2010; Morariu, 2017).

The study aims to question this reading of Brâncuşi’s sculpture, tracing the extraordinary role Brâncuşi played in the formulation of discourses alternative to the modernist narratives elaborated by American art criticism during the 1960s and 1970s, within a broader critical and transcultural investigation of the medium of sculpture. These theoretical positions were deeply influenced by European phenomenological thought and theories of material culture, being based on the ideas of embodied/imaginative experience and decentralisation.

Employing a philological and historical method, this paper initially analyses a pivotal juncture for the Anglo/American modernist debate on Brâncuşi’s work, comparing the antithetical perspectives drawn by Herbert Read (1956, 1964) and Clement Greenberg (1949).

The argumentation core focuses on selected essays by Max Kozloff, Lawrence Alloway, William Wilson, Lucy Lippard, Barbara Rose, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Philip Tuchman, Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen, and Sandra Miller, in which Brâncuşi’s sculpture, introduced in the North American scenery of the Sixties by Carola Giedion Welcker (1955; 1958) and Sidney Geist (1968), was exploited to assert the corporeal activation of free space through the object (Allowey, 1963), the “vanishing base” issue (Burnham, 1967), the relation among horizontality, kinaesthetic imagination and the “unseen” in term of “disjunctiveness” (Krauss, 1966; 1969; 1970; 1972), the extra-western roots of synthetic form (Jánszky Michaelsen, 1966).

About the speaker

Dr Valentina Bartalesi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Archivio del Moderno (Balerna, Switzerland).

Her main research interests concern the history of art historiography; the role of haptic perception in art criticism, historiography, and artistic practices of the 20th and 21st century; the influence exercised by prehistoric art in modernist narratives between Europe and the Anglo-American côté.

Valentina has published several contributions in academic journals and participated in national and international conferences and workshops, including Iulm University, Milan; Università Statale, Milan; University of Washington, Seattle; Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague; KNIR, Rome.

Paper abstract

The question of Brâncuşi’s continuing influence resonates in my own contemporary sculpture practice. In my early self-taught practice, the geometric flattening of forms and dynamic balance of materials of Brâncuşi were as vital to my development as the biomorphic smoothness of Moore and intercut organic shapes of Hepworth. I aspired to capture both essence and energy of human figures in motion, distilled into semi-abstract shapes of plaster or bronze.

My practice shifted through postgraduate education and political upheaval, as austerity politics and cuts in the arts in the UK made me similarly unravel the unity and smoothness of my own sculptural forms. Working increasingly with found objects and direct-burnouts of organic matter, my developing interests in social change, ecology and gender resulted in a messier aesthetic.

In my PhD I explored horizontal ways of thinking and making, re-considering relationships between the human and non-human, informed by feminist new materialism, queer, trans and critical race theory. In questioning the verticality of patriarchal structure, I also questioned early, male, historical influences such as Brâncuşi.

Yet the forms I repeat in my practice still trace a Brâncuşian approach, as I fragment and subvert gendered organs, abstracting the body into shape via plant matter. In my recent ceramics I slab-build columns of clay, daring upwards, reaching height by multiplication. It is just that now I also cut into the vertical, and populate it with vegetal totems, some like Brâncuşian birds as they reach skywards, others swimming sideways, split open and complicating the tower they inhabit: their essence and difference intertwined.

About the speaker

Dr Lana Locke is an artist and Early Career Researcher, practising in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, video and performance.

Lana has had solo exhibitions at LUNGLEY Gallery (2019, 2020 and 2023), Liddicoat & Goldhill project space (2018), DOLPH Projects, (2016) and Schwartz Gallery (2014).

She has taken part in group exhibitions at White Conduit Projects (2024), Matt’s Gallery (2023), Hales Gallery (2022), National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Taiwan (2021), OOF Gallery (2021), Kingston Museum (2019), MOCA Taipei, Taiwan (2018), the Nunnery Gallery (2018) and Block 336 (2015). She is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts.

Paper abstract

The focus of this moving image work is the role of photography in Brâncuşi’s practice, and in turn the relationship between object and image in his work.

Photography was used by Brâncuşi to document his work. The images could be reproduced and distributed in postcard form, which he did in the early 1900s. However, most of his photography transcends this and like other aspects of his practice, he tests the process to open up new possibilities for his work.

To make this piece I have used a time-based medium and digital technology as a way of visually exploring images and objects associated with Brâncuşi’s practice. The process has been experimental and exploratory, which I connect to the approach taken by Brâncuşi when he first started to use photography: providing an unfamiliar method to examine an object, its surface and limits.

A sculpture can be seen from many perspectives. We can walk around it, it has a physical relationship to our own bodies, and light interacts with the surface as we move. A photograph of sculpture disrupts this form of encounter, which is what I want this moving image work to test.

About the speaker

Ella McCartney is a visual artist and lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2017 she was the Leverhulme Trust artist in residence in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck.

Recent exhibitions include The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, (2024); Shaping Objects, Alma Space, UK (2023); Space, XVIIX Programme (2021); Movement as Dialogue, The University of Hong Kong (2019); Forms of Address, Laure Genillard Gallery, London (2019); 참여작가, CICA Museum, Gimpo (2018); Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media, (2019) Ed. Dr Madeleine Campbell and Dr Ricarda Vidal, London: Palgrave and McMillian.

Paper abstract

In the catalogue of the 1986 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne? Rosalind Krauss revisited themes from her book Originality of the Avant-Garde and other modernist myths (1985) to underscore the erosion of the monumental logic inherent in modernist sculpture. One of the examples she chose was Constantin Brâncuşi’s tripartite monumental complex in Târgu-Jiu, created in 1937 on commission from the Women’s League of Gorj to honour soldiers who defended the city against a German force in 1916.

Krauss, echoing observations by American scholar Sidney Geist, argued that the three elements of Brâncuşi’s complex were only mentally related and presupposed a conceptual space that was neither physically present nor easily identifiable. This absence, she contended, constituted a deviation from the very logic of monumentality.

This paper aims to examine whether, in the context of the blossoming of studies on Constantin Brâncuşi after his death in 1957, such a reading of the Romanian sculptor as an exponent of the modernist paradigm aligned with studies like Geist’s and attuned to the liberal political agenda of the United States could serve as a model for other monument sculptors in post-war Europe. Essentially, it aims to investigate what Brâncuşi’s Târgu-Jiu monument signified for artists (such as the Italian Pietro Cascella and the French François Stahly) striving to define a new monumental language after the post-war devaluation of the genre, particularly in the highly polarized climate of the Cold War period.

About the speaker

Chiara Pazzaglia is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the Université Paris Nanterre. Her thesis focuses on public monuments by Italian sculptors in Europe after 1945 from a transnational perspective.

Chiara graduated in Art History (BA 2019, MA 2021) at the University of Pisa and obtained a second-level Master’s Degree at the Scuola Normale Superiore (2022).

In 2023 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Her main research interests concern Fascist art and 19th-20th century European sculpture, with a focus on public art.

Paper abstract

This study brings the works of Constantin Brâncuşi into conversation with transgender studies to explore the open-ended question of the body while questioning art history’s methodologies and biases. Drawing from both modern and post-modern cultural theories, my argument takes a close look at three related aspects of Brâncuşi’s sculptures: confusion, fragmentation, and finish.

I begin with confusion, analyzing the critical reception of Princess X and the gendered ambiguity inherent in Brâncuşi’s mature work. While ostensibly concerned with reception studies, this initial section also provides an opportunity to consider Brâncuşi’s ideas and ideals surrounding bodily representation, most notably his aversion to naturalistic sculpture.

I then move to fragmentation, building on the writings of Linda Nochlin, Paul Preciado, and Jack Halberstam to problematize notions of wholeness and legibility.

The final section deals with the highly finished quality of Brâncuşi’s sculptures. Appreciating ‘finish’ as both a process ingrained in the creation of a work as well as a characteristic of the completed sculpture, I use the artworks as an illustration of identity formation beyond assigned sex and accompanying gender roles.

Ultimately, I argue that Brâncuşi’s work can help art history move away from its reliance on traditional conceptions of gender and representations of the sexed body and towards a more inclusive method of scholarly inquiry.

About the speaker

Born in south-west Wyoming, Chase Pendleton is a writer with a degree in art history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her specialities include queer history, transgender studies, feminism, and modern art.

Her most recent publication in Volume 14 of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies focused on the queer history of performance art and the productive relationship between the American composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Chase now lives in Philadelphia where she continues to write about history, art, and culture.

Paper abstract

In his essay on Brâncuşi’s work, Joseph Margolis claimed that the form of the artist’s sculptures always seems to be a spatial response to the essence of the represented object. For the philosopher, however, the essence consisted not in the physical or corporeal constitution of the model, but rather in its function, a characteristic form of movement in its “environing medium.”

The concept of form as a plastic expression of the vital function, referring to the motor capacity of the organism, was repeatedly emphasised by Brâncuşi himself. “When you see a fish,” as the artist stated, “you think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through water. I want just the flash of its spirit.”

Following the same principle, Brâncuşi worked for more than fifteen years on the concept of flight. Like the Fish whose elongated shaft is held on its base at best by a cylindrical joint, the Bird in Space seems to be an impossible sculpture. In one of its last versions from 1927, the artist deflects its body so much from the vertical axis of its base that, without proper attachment to the pedestal, invisible to the spectator, the sculpture would not be able to sustain itself on it.

If Rosalind Krauss has already drawn attention to the modularity of the bases of Brâncuşi’s sculptures, which reveal static contradictions, this proposal would like to focus on their relation to the sculpture itself. We understand the essence of Brâncuşi’s work, with Margolis, as a material expression of vital functions, but what if the artist involves them in forms that are incapable of functioning as such?

This presentation will examine physical impossibilities as Freud understood them in his essay on “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” from 1926, namely as effects of inhibition which the psychiatrist defines as a “limitation of the function of the ego.”

About the speaker

Michał Sobański is currently a student in the preparatory class at the Institut national du patrimoine and the École du Louvre in Paris.

He studied History of Art, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Vienna and the Sor-bonne as a scholarship holder of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research and the Government of the French Republic.

His research is focused on gender-related questions, psychoanalysis as well as art theory in the 20th and 21st century.