|
In a slide talk given to
the New Zealand Society of Sculptors, Painters
and Associates in 1986, Greer Twiss sought to
differentiate the primary concerns of sculptors
from those which preoccupied painters. [9]
Twiss opposed the ‘real time, real space’
resources of the sculptor to the unreality and
surface-based illusions of painting. He then
declared: ‘Touching is believing, not
seeing’. Behind Twiss’s aphorism
lies the popular adage that ‘seeing is
believing’ and the biblical account of
Doubting Thomas, who was sceptical
of reports concerning the resurrection of Jesus
and wanted evidence he could both see and touch.
[10] Twiss’s
art practice is predicated on continual intersections
and close negotiations between the tactile and
the optical, and, as we shall see, upon a number
of productive substitutions between sculpture
and painting.
Twiss’s bronze Touch
(1972) is cast directly from life. The act of
touching, enacted by a hand on a shoulder, and
doubled by the impress of a bikini strap on
the shoulder, has been cut away from the bodies
of the two participants. The two-part amalgam
of hand and shoulder suggests a reciprocity
of touching, a metonymical freezing of the two-way
relation between subject and object, between
the protagonist touching and the world touching
back. Twiss’s frequent use of cast hands
engaged in pressing, holding or tentatively
touching things has a historical link with Cézanne’s
making of paintings to answer the density of
the world’s simultaneous closeness to
and distance from us, through an affectionately
dense matrix of touches and readjustments of
touch. Much closer to his generation, and a
likely influence on Twiss, is Jasper Johns,
who used cast body parts and hand and object
imprints on his painted surfaces. Among the
major theoretical influences on artists working
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflected
in the art theory discussions that Twiss helped
lead in the Elam sculpture department during
these years, was phenomenology. One aim of phenomenological
discussion was to increase awareness of the
body in space as caught-up in a related world
of things and therefore unable to be abstracted
from what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called its ‘communion’
or ‘coition’ with the world: ‘Our
body is both an object among objects and that
which sees and touches them’. [11]
The 1974 work Full Stop
Clamp enacts a particularly intense and
anxious relationship between seeing the world
and getting a physical grip on it. A small G-clamp
has been screwed down on a bronze cast of a
pair of spectacles, which had belonged to the
artist’s father. The work was made shortly
after the father’s death and exists as
a type of relic signifying absence, transposed
into the concentrated physical actions of placement
and applied pressure. As part of his deceased
father’s effects, the spectacles made
Twiss think of all the traffic of images and
information which had passed through these lenses
but had now been stopped. [12]
Full Stop Clamp is part of a group of works,
including Full Stop Knot and Full Stop Sight,
which the artist made with a job lot of steel
discs the size of bread-and-butter plates passed
onto him by a metal-shop. To Twiss the discs
were like full stops, abrupt punctuation marks
in a grammar of objects. Full Stop Sight
has a pair of spectacles folded flat, cast in
lead and attached to its plate with a rope staple;
again Twiss has turned to the concept of blocked,
or arrested vision. Twiss has produced another
meditation on the constriction and extinction
of eyesight with a suite of three old spectacles
cases, although this work has never been publicly
exhibited. The first case contains a small brass
keyhole, the second two flat silver buttons,
and the third two small spikes. The three cases
offer a choice between an uncomfortable narrowing
of vision, the opacity of eyes blind for life,
and the pain of punctured eyeballs.
The title of Twiss’s
major series for 1976, Barriers and Sight
Screens, promises further investigation
of seeing imbricated in difficult relationships
with physicality – of seeing as a stop/start,
on/off, speed-up/slow-down sort of experience.
It is worth quoting Twiss’s 1986 slide
lecture commentary again as he explains how
he thought about this series. ‘I was interested
in the idea of stoppages, of stopping things
happening. So these were barriers, based on
just ordinary road barriers, except I wanted
to shift them out of that context in some way
… I saw these as physical barriers; I
thought they were barriers that also were barriers
to seeing, like sight screens on a cricket field
are barriers to see things against. And there
are other barriers that are put up, like trig
stations, you know, trig things on top of hills.
They put up a plate for you to sight against.
You can’t see beyond them.’ [13]
Barrier 1
sits low to the floor, its long, horizontal
and pivoted diagonal lengths of rectangular-section
steel providing an immovable obstacle at shin-height
and knee-level. In Sight Screen (1976)
and Trig (1976), stubby steel bracing supports
thick plates of steel, cast bronze rags inflect
the implacable rigidity of the welded steel
assemblage. Sculptures in the Barriers
and Sight Screens series and the Site/Sight
series which followed, all deliver a high degree
of optical appeal because of the diagrammatic
and spatial intrigue of their criss-crossing
and skewed struts or leaning and propped sheets
of steel. The sturdiness of the lengths of steel
and the brutal opacity of the metal sheet, however,
resist this optical mobility. The syncopated
accenting of the works with various details
such as tabs, lugs, cast rags and pieces of
rope not only increases the frequency of optical
events but also serves to intensify the staccato,
disruptive nature of the process of looking
which the sculpture ensnare us in.
Twiss’s variations
on the theme of visual and physical barriers
seem tailor-made for what has alternatively
been called ‘sculpture-as-obstacle’
and ‘blockaded space’. [14]
Both James Hall and Philip Fisher have discussed
the way the modernist sculptural object or installation’s
occupation of space has been assertively physical
and disruptive. This has developed as a recurring
ingredient in modern and contemporary art to
the extent that art which signals a resistant
and obstructive demeanour in either a literal
sense (either physically or optically) or in
an interpretative sense, has been regarded as
more worthy of our serious regard. Such art
requires greater effort to overcome its contradictory
overtures to the viewer of defiant ‘come
on’ and indifferent alienation; this effort
is the viewer’s reward. Examples of paintings
and wall-based works which are deliberately
blocked interpretatively, to the point of triggering
our recoil from what is a virtually autistic,
inertial object, would be Jasper Johns’
paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s
and the wood, rope and lead constructions of
Robert Morris from the early 1960s. Both Fisher
and Hall take Anthony Caro’s work of the
1960s and 70s as exemplary of the literal-impedimental
school, particularly through Caro’s ‘decisive
occupation of floor space’. [15]
Whereas Twiss’s patinated steel plates
with epigrammatic attachments (such as Link
and Push Line from 1974) put me in
mind of Johns and Morris, when Fisher talks
of the willful ‘danger, sharpness, resistance,
and frustration’ [16]
that Caro built into his sculpture I am reminded
of the experience of walking around and in between
a dozen of Twiss’s Site/Sight Works assemblages
in the Barry Lett Gallery in 1977. I still recall
an irresistible impulse to become engaged with
the tense junctions and disjunctions of these
crossed, splayed and cantilevered lengths of
steel, but also the passive-aggression of their
low-slung projections and jutting angularity.
NEXT
PAGE
|
