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The stage is a type of table,
the table a type of stage. A dining table, a
writer’s desk, a painter’s trolley,
a metal shop’s workbench, a computer workstation,
are all supported or propped-up surfaces on
which one gathers, sorts, stacks and works on
things and sets things out for special attention.
Each type of tabletop has its formalities, its
typical organization, layout and generic patterns
of use that we adhere to or depart from as need
dictates. We stage so many aspects of our lives
of thinking, making, eating and presentation
on tables of one sort or another. There is something
fundamental about the familiarity and proximity
of tables.
The depiction and use of
tables or table-like surfaces in modern art
has a significant history in itself. In an intriguing
and sustained discussion of the place of the
table within modernism, Philip Fisher explains
how the table functions as ‘a human measure’
because of its relation to ‘the radius
of the will’. That is, the fabrication
of a primary object like a table, the sort of
uses it is put to, and its presentation of what
lies within arm’s reach, gives it status
as a preserver of the basic integrity and connectedness
of human physical activities in a special way.
‘The table, and with it the entire world
of traditional craft objects, was uniquely adjusted
to the radius of the individual will in a way
that the George Washington Bridge or a computer
chip is not’, says Fisher. [4]
Representing the space of
activity for the ‘radius of the will’
and ‘the artisanal working space of hand
and eye’, in modern painting the tabletop
gradually displaced the Albertian paradigm of
the painting as a ‘window’ to look
through. In modernist sculpture, a similar shift
of orientation occurred when artists began to
abandon the plinth and spread works laterally
across the gallery floor, treating the floor
as an extended surface for staging events and
setting things out. In both sculpture and painting,
a traditional hierarchy of vertically oriented
composition was thus supplanted by a concept
of horizontal aggregation and distribution.
Centrally important to this paradigm shift is
the implicit primacy given to the physicality
of touch and manual activity over the merely
optical; the ‘seeing’ is dependent
on the ‘setting out’. Twiss’s
work, while asserting a primacy of touch over
disembodied vision, is continually caught up
in a productive dialectic between sight and
manual intervention. The artist has assembled
numerous works as though their elements were
deployed on some kind of tabletop. Twiss’s
surrogate or actual tables, with their objects
arrayed in varying states of elliptical incompleteness,
reference the active benchtops of the studio
workshop, the designer’s draughting table
or the set designer’s drawing board, where
work on objects or diagrams proceeds in stages,
with a selection of appropriate tools to hand.
Although Twiss’s figure
sculptures from 1958 up to 1965 do not include
tables as such, they are predominantly of an
intimate scale which makes them at home on a
table or a book shelf. Even in these early works,
the attention to a figure’s placement
on a base or as an object in relation to a surrounding
space begins to take hold. For Twiss it was
important that the figures function as things
in reach; as a newspaper reviewer claimed in
1964, ‘Twiss believes that indoor sculpture
should be small enough to be picked up and handled
readily’. [5]
Also important to many of these early works
is Twiss’s use of a fragmented structural
element to locate the figures and their frozen
movement in space, providing a highly abbreviated
mise en scène. The wire and pole of the
Acrobat (1963), the hurdle frame of
Hurdler (1964), the bar and stand of
Jump (1965), and the scaffolding of
the Welders (1959) all serve to frame
the figures and to construct a small, tightly
defined arena in which they act. In the Runners
series of 1964-65, Twiss sometimes developed
the idea of movement within carefully marked
out boundaries by using long strip-bases, analogous
to running lanes, thus increasing the sense
of directionality and pressure within a demarcated
zone.
In the Frozen Frame
series of 1967-70, variously reclining figures,
partial or complete, lie or sit on their rectangular
ground planes, occasionally offset by small
vertical poles acting as positional markers.
Adjustments of location were felt to be crucial.
When the bathers had their shadows painted on
the base-plate, or were sliced through, parallel
to the side of the base, the figures appeared
as tiny, manipulable objects which had been
positioned to accentuate the surface and edges
of the base and the tensions of the unoccupied,
in-between spaces of the ensemble. Some of the
groups of Frozen Frame figures were
installed on low, table-like bases. But the
most obviously table-type compositions were
the 1970 works Frame of Reference 1
and Frame of Reference 2. Each used
a long table, made from a welded one-inch square-section
steel framework, with segmented sheet metal
tops – the first like a waist-high lunch
room or office table, the second like a long,
low coffee-table. In the second work, one segment
of the tabletop had been removed, so that a
cut-out shadow was all that crossed the gap
between the divided sections; the table opened
up to space below it, as would a stage with
a trapdoor.
Between 1972 and 1975, in
his Intersections and Of Lead Lines
and Links series, Twiss produced some of
his most intense explorations of the tabletop
paradigm with cast bronze items on steel sheet.
The following works will suffice as examples:
Now (1972), Coil (1972), Warp
2 (1972), VW Split (1974), and
Sight Line (1974).
The contents of these works
are as follows: (1) Two cast hands, from different
models, are opposed at either end of a flat
steel plate, which has been finished with a
grinder; they are like hands on a card-table
waiting for the deal, the space between them
is charged. (2) A cast hand clasps a coil of
real, thick rope resting on a square of tread-plate,
sometimes known as footplate. The cross-hatched
steel plate is both a propped up, displaced
section of the floor and, because of the relaxed
angle of the hand, it is also a type of table
surface. (3) A cast model motorbike, a female
body minus an arm and a head and a leg cut off
above the knee, all of a different scale, all
bronze, are dispersed on a metal plate with
a sphere whose scale remains unverifiable without
further information. (4) A model VW cast in
bronze is cut in two, the alignments of its
separated sections marked by the taut V of a
string-line pinned to the steel base by a brass
nail, a severed bronze digit and the finger
of a cast hand cut off at the edge of the base-plate.
(5) An apple cut in half and half a pair of
spectacles, sliced through, we are to believe,
by a laser-like optical vector, and left to
roll on a large flat plate.
The best of Twiss’s
steel-plate works operate as compressed perceptual
diagrams containing potent psychological tensions.
These tightly constructed set-pieces configure
a matrix of tensions between self-conscious
acts of seeing and manipulating objects in a
visual field. Twiss conceived of them as demonstrating
conundrums and incompatibilities of viewpoint,
conflicting vantage points, ambiguities of scale
and the provocative cues provided by incomplete
information. In the 1970s particularly, the
artist was greatly taken with analyses of vision
being undertaken by perceptual psychologists.
[6] Twiss talks
about the way the incomplete bodies or segments
of hands serve to provoke speculation about
the complete body, which remains unseen. This
tension between a part and its absent source,
between a sectional detail and an invisible
remainder, may also be suggestive of deeper
psychological anxieties. The strangely disjunctive
components and dismembered body parts, incommensurable
in scale, suggest a game in progress wherein
primary psychic trauma is domesticated through
play.
This combination of an investigative
sense of playful experiment and a jarring psychology
of disjunction puts these works in a lineage
coming out of Giacometti’s early tabletop
pieces. Rosalind Krauss has said that what Giacometti
had invented with his early works such as No
More Play (1933) and Man, Woman and Child (c.
1931) was the ‘sculpture-as-board-game’.
[7] Although
Twiss’s works have no literally moveable
parts, there is a sense that the horizontal
ensemble is to be looked at from above and mentally
engaged from all four sides, as we would a pool
table, for example, with the game in progress
and much at stake. When discussing these works
and my response to what I perceive to be their
mapping of a psychologically weighted and visually
constricted space, Twiss reminded me of Picasso’s
comparison of the space of a painting to the
arena after a bull-fight. Being an accumulation
of past actions, the work of art displays evidential
remains, like the patches of blood and kicked-up
sand in the arena, as traces of a complex event.
Perhaps, in the end, the most appropriate model
for these tables on which strange dissections
occur is the infamous Surrealist one evoked
by Lautréamont’s image of ‘the
chance encounter on an operating table of a
sewing machine and an umbrella’.
Other works in which tables
or improvised tabletops play a central role
include Vacation 1 Burnout (1986),
Anonymous Builder: A Renaissance Dreamer
(1989), and the installation Decoys
and Delusions (1993). The floor-based installation
Vacation 1 is part of a group of works employing
outdoor holiday furniture such as folding canvas
stools, deck-chairs and tents, and generic objects
like wineglasses, lampshades and brooms, assembled
on thin lead tarpaulins or groundsheets. The
lead sheets also resemble tablecloths –
soft tables, in other words – spread out
for a picnic, or mats on the ground in a marketplace
for displaying wares. They temporarily establish
a spatial territory semi-independent from their
surroundings for the performance of a particular
activity. (I am also put in mind of a very Twissian
shot from Dziga Vertov’s film The
Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, showing
an itinerant conjurer’s hands hovering
on the edge of a cloth spread on the ground
for the performance of the cups and balls mystery.)
Vacation 1 has a whiff of the crime scene about
it, too: a site in which spacious summer holiday
banality is frozen into strangeness through
the alien presence of the broken figurine and
the broom, which may well have swept up other
circumstantial evidence.
The Anonymous Builder
was partly constructed to provide an archetypal
wearer for an artisan’s apron. In the
preceding year Twiss had made several lead
aprons with pockets containing objects such
as rolls of paper, paper darts, model steps,
templates, squares and duck decoys – all
clues to artisanal practice and perceptual gaming.
One such apron is draped over the missile in
Dreaming of S.A.M. and contains a mask.
Twiss wanted the figure to acknowledge the hundreds
of unknown skilled craftsmen who physically
constructed the Renaissance temples and palaces,
converting into stone the paper dreams of their
architects. He also intended this figure to
stand in as surrogate for himself as creative
director and maker of the 1990 exhibition in
which it was first shown. In a sense though,
the table the builder sits at is the real subject
of the work: it is the table and what it represents
in terms of a working space and a wider culture
of manual construction that makes the role of
the artisan possible; the table dreams the builder
into being. The model of the large Act One
Scene One, a theatre of memory assembled
from stage props of dome, tower, steps and hill,
sits in front of the builder as the ideal object
made on a studio table. The theatrical model
is a miniature world, fashioned by a Robinson
Crusoe-like designer at a table that is itself
like an island where one is free to order, direct
and build, making, to quote Fisher again, a
‘world out of the seeds and parts of a
prior world from which only fragments have been
recovered’. [8]
In Decoys and Delusions,
the artist constructed an expansive and meandering
fantasy, merging studio and garage imagery,
theatre flats and props, with oversize toys
all made from lead and galvanized sheet steel.
The work includes two long tables each with
a row of bowler hats and two chairs co-opted
as tables. Twiss’s adaptation of the chair
makes me think of Picasso’s pioneering
collage Still-Life with Chair-Caning
(1912) which indicates, through an ambiguous
series of semiotic displacements, a chair being
used as a small café table or domestic
side-table, or at least a chair being referenced
by the covering on a table. I am also reminded
of the way Italian artist Daniel Spoerri fixed
a narrow plank-table to a chair: attached to
the plank were plates, cups, tins and other
mealtime remains, thus constructing a sectional
slice of time spent with objects. Putting things
on tables, or improvised ‘tables’
such as saw-horses or chairs, as Twiss says,
gives objects a sense of scale that a plinth
does not provide. Supports such as saw-horses
moreover bring with them an associated work
ethic, so the objects retain a personal, non-precious
valency that the anonymous formality of art
gallery pedestals would erase.
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