First published on the occasion of Greer Twiss: Theatre Workshop
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki 8 March – 2 June 2003
Guest Curator: Allan Smith
© Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Greer Twiss, Allan Smith and Robin Woodward
All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process without prior permission from the publishers.
ISBN 0 86463 250 9
Editors: Ben Curnow and Allan Smith
Design: www.inhousedesign.co.nz

Published by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
PO Box 5449, Auckland 1, New Zealand

TABLETOP THEATRE: HALF AN APPLE AND A PAIR OF SPECTACLES

Along with the table-top, Degas, for one, explicitly projected his scene of action against a bare floor or stage … To arrange the action upon either table or floor allows it to be seen both as three-dimensional and as a flat silhouette of itself, and it permits it to be seen as in front of or on top of an absolute barrier to sight, a table-top or floor that marks an end to the space of the picture.
Philip Fisher, Making and effacing art
Faussone’s hands … illustrated and glossed his tales, imitating, as required, a shovel, a monkey wrench, a hammer. In the stagnant air of the mess hall they designed the elegant catenaries of the suspension bridge and the spires of the derricks, coming to the rescue of speech when it stalled. They had reminded me of distant readings of Darwin, of the artificer’s hand that, making tools and bending matter, stirred the human brain from its torpor and still guides and stimulates and draws it ahead, as a dog with a blind master.
Primo Levi, The wrench

THEATRE OF OBJECTS

In Greer Twiss’s collection of clippings pertaining to his youthful activity as a locally renowned puppeteer, there is a photograph of him in his Auckland Grammar School uniform operating the two-handed rig of a marionette. The intensity of concentration is obvious as Twiss manipulates a set of sticks and strings, controlling the jerky actions of a puppet on the stage below, outside the photograph. With a lifetime of making and investigation in between, there are both overt and subtle links between the preoccupations of the young puppeteer and Twiss’s most recent exhibition of small-scale soldered struts, ladders, movie cameras, birds, guns and boats, held at the 40 George Street gallery late last year. It became clear to me when I was writing about his 1993 installation Decoys and Delusions how, in one way or another, the dexterous manipulation of objects and a language of theatrical staging has always been of central importance in Twiss’s art.1 Twiss’s sculptural œuvre has developed as an ongoing narrative of theatrical contrivances, as a series of skillfully fabricated and self-consciously staged events. Subject to this theatrically shaded aesthetic, elements drawn from an everyday world of people and things are made strange,
undergoing various forms of disassembly, reconstruction and re-presentation as elegantly formal set-pieces.
A persistent feature of Twiss’s practice has been the devoted attention he has paid to the spatial deployment of figural components and objects on a stage-like platform, plane or base-plate. Twiss’s characteristic method for setting things out has most very often involved a tense play between spatial diagramming and the corporeal reciprocities of touch; between the optical organisation of the ensemble and the density of its physical traits. Severed hands and sections of bronze fingers point and push at key places in the work, enacting a discontinuous grammar of touch within a rationalized geometrical space. The linearity of tilted struts, angled brackets, ropes and diagonal lines of sight is constantly opposed to cast or modelled objects and to the emphatic materiality of lead, bronze or steel. Implements and devices such as spectacles, rulers and string-lines are presented as highly tactile objects that invite our prehensile grasp, as if to remind us that such aids for seeing and measuring the world are prosthetic tools which extend the capability of the body in the physical world. Twiss’s groups of objects or partial objects always appear as if they have just been moved into their current configuration to test out their dynamic interaction. They trigger the impulse to pick them up, handle, inspect and rearrange them, as we would the scaled-down props of a set designer’s model. The sense that we could almost remake, rearrange or go to work on the components in Twiss’s sculptures is heightened by the variations on the language of artisanal effects he has played out over the years, in parallel with his adoption of varying spatial formats.
Twiss’s attention to the solutions of joining and surface-finishing required by different materials is that of an artist whose models are machine-shop specialists, carpenters, metalworkers or pragmatic repairmen as much as other artists. His chosen materials and predominantly oily-grey, black and silver colour schemes (a number of late 1960s and 1970s pieces notwithstanding) have kept the aesthetic tenor of his work close to the worlds of the light-industrial factory floor and the metal workshop. However, his use of rolls of lead sheet, precut steel plate, sections of tread-plate, industrial fastenings and sheets of galvanized steel can be contrasted to the brute literalist use that American artists like Robert Morris and Richard Serra made of such materials in Minimal art. No matter how heavy and resistant the material – be it lengths of square-section steel or dull grey lead – Twiss always introduces an elegant lightening of its inert physicality through deft applications of the artisanal touch or gesture, even when he is not fashioning resemblances from it. By accentuating the manual processes of small-scale workshop techniques, such as cutting with snips or guillotine, folding, grinding, soldering and welding, staining, hand-painting, scouring and filing, Twiss insinuates the mark of the private craftsman into the industrial matrix of mechanization and abstraction.
Tools have always held a special fascination for Twiss, because they are, as he puts it, ‘objects that humans had been dealing with’.2 He has a collection of tools, some of which belonged to his father, a cabinet-maker and builder; he still has a saw which his grandfather sawed wood with. The megaphone on the table of his 1989 work Anonymous Builder: A Renaissance Dreamer3 is based on one that has been in the family since it was used on a ship of the line in Nelson’s fleet. As a child Twiss was always playing in his parents’ workshops and took a short cut to primary school through the cluttered yard of Auckland sculptor Richard Gross, whose bronze Athlete (1936) sits atop a gate of the Domain. Not only does Twiss concern himself with variations on the theme of artisanal processes, but often in his art he also turns the tools of his trade into virtual fetish-objects. Hand tools he has modelled or used as ‘found objects’ in his work include: a ball-peen hammer, claw hammer, trowels, dividers, pocket knives, saw-horses, soldering iron, drill, chisel, wooden plaster floats, steel rules, a wooden folding ruler, axes, brooms, telescope, binoculars, G-clamps and carry-straps.
For any artist who makes physical objects and retains intimate physical control, rather than merely creative jurisdiction over their production, the studio workshop with its equipment is obviously of central importance, as both an actual locale and an imaginary plenum. Even so, only a few artists incorporate or index the language of the workshop in their finished work in the way that Twiss has done repeatedly during his career. Twiss’s studio workshop serves as a storehouse, a properties room, and a clearing-house for ideas in the making. It is both a densely laden physical site and an originary psychic space. This double orientation is characteristic of Twiss’s sculpture, only with changing emphases at different junctures in his career: it pulls toward the robust, the literally physical and the objectively present, and it withdraws into a complex interiority.

THE TABLE AND THE MISE EN SCENE

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.

TOUCHING IS BELIEVING, NOT SEEING

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.

SEEING SHADOWS

Another example of the occluded vision thematic, from a decade and a half later, is the wedge-shaped, lead-covered block which Twiss’s anonymous Renaissance builder has across his eyes. Twiss explains this covering of the eyes as merely guaranteeing the builder’s anonymity. But surely there is more at stake. Any form of blanking out the eyes, whether with blindfolds, black rectangles or pixellated blurring, triggers a disconcerting sense of stalled exchange between viewer and viewed, an interruption of the empathy effect.17 Could the anonymity that this builder enjoys be akin to the anonymity Twiss has said he valued as a puppeteer, acting unseen by the audience but manipulating events on the stage within their field of vision – an animated body in one location and a directing intelligence in another? A further implication of this masked figure is perhaps that restriction of one faculty is the cost of superiority in another. In this case, loss of external sight may promise an enhancement of internal vision; the small hot air balloon, a sign of imaginative drift, which sprouts from the back of the builder’s head, would support this reading. The history of art is full of images that couple a condition of blindness with a renewed and more urgent sense of touch; supposedly, an enhanced sense of touch would be equally desirable for a maker of things. Jacques Derrida,who has curated an exhibition of such imagery, writes: ‘the mise en scène of the blind is always inscribed in a theatre or theory of the hands’.18
At the very least, Twiss’s blind ‘maker’ seems to be an advocate for a renewed application of tactile intelligence to our variously scaled world-making endeavours. It is telling that Twiss chose a Renaissance mannequin to stage an implicit critique of different forms of perception. It was in the Renaissance, at the dawn of modernity, that all forms of visual representational practices – most importantly the artifice of linear perspective – were established according to geometrical and mathematical principles. In his brief historical look at architecture’s relationship to the senses, Juhani Pallasmaa summarises what this meant for the faculty of touch: ‘During the Renaissance the five senses were understood to form a hierarchical system from the highest sense of vision down to touch … The invention of perspectival representation made the eye the centre-point of the perceptual world as well as of the concept of the self. Perspectival representation itself turned into a symbolic form, one that not only describes but also conditions perception.’19
Although a hot air balloon growing from the head of a blinded artisan is quite plausibly about imagination, or flights of fancy, I would like to suggest that Twiss’s intermittent fixation on the motifs of the hot air balloon and the
airship has much to do with meditations on the reduction of confidence in optical prowess. Most of Twiss’s balloons are lead, which popular wisdom tells us always go down; many of them are already collapsed, deflated; one is suspended from heavy chains. Some look like empty shells, or curious and alien devices. One of the key novelties of early balloon flights from Montgolfier to Nadar was the dramatic expansion of the visual field they offered, as map-like patchworks of town and countryside came into view. Yet what takes over all of Twiss’s balloons in the end is inertia: the melancholic weight of materiality triumphs as they succumb to gravitational slump. The balloons trigger rather morbid reveries of the survival of mass, weight and density over images of
free-floating opticality.
The Anonymous Builder is thus part of a melancholic body of work, including the balloons and airships from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The emotional tenor of these works is determined by two things primarily: the charcoal tonings and dingy silver bloom of their lead sheathing and soldered sutures, and the ironic vein of abandonment, temporal displacement and disenfranchised monumentality that runs through them all. They look like works made for a twilight or nocturnal world; like stage furniture for some forsaken historical tragedy. The lead-skinned canoe of Even With a Paddle (1988) with gas mask attached and an absurdly long paddle, waits for embarkation on its Dante-esque journey down the river Styx. There is a portentous lead curtain, Window Cover (1988) which echoes the lead painting-like objects that Twiss used in the1980s as opaque tableaux of absence and blindness, propped up on easels or hung on the wall with dividers to measure the darkness or a trowel to accompany the dead. Though originally designed to cover a window which the artist
disliked in the gallery where it was first installed, this work now haunts me with its lugubrious folds covering a blank section of wall wherever it is newly installed. The hexagonally sectioned missile of Dreaming of S.A.M. (1988) with cast straw boater, mask and apron, promises some sort of post-apocalyptic, homemade mayhem combining festivity and death. The lovingly crafted lead surfaces of all these works is fatally alluring; it soaks up light and vision, returning a smoky blankness to the viewer’s inquiring gaze (indeed Twiss has spoken of the ‘evilness’ of the lead’s appearance as well as its beauty).
The oppositional exchange between touch and sight is closely mirrored in the intermittent dialogue Twiss has pursued between the sculptural object
and the rhetoric of painting. At times this means playing with the permeable boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality. A case in point is Red Legs 2 (1969) with its juxtaposition of legs, cast from life, and the almost cartoony clarity of the cut-out metal shadow on the floor, doubling as a silhouette for the total figure in another pose. It is almost as though the profile of this total figure is beginning to come alive in a liquid pool of
freshly spilled bright red paint. What is most noticeable about shadows in Twiss’s work, apart from their ubiquity between 1968 and 1974, is their overtly graphic nature. The way Twiss will cut around a shadow like a tailor’s pattern, and use the shadow to become a virtually independent object occupying its own space, fetishises the shadow’s flatness. This effect is enhanced when lighting in a gallery casts an actual shadow, challenging the artificial one. The shadow seems to continually assert its two-dimensional life as over and against the body; it operates as the painted or drawn doppelganger to Twiss’s sculptured figures.
Twiss’s shadow-play tells us something about several of the artist’s pre-
occupations. The flip between flat and round was part of the perceptual mechanism at the heart of the Frozen Frame series. The sliced or complete figures, angled or vertical rods, the painted shadows and affixed parts all depend on this flat/solid dynamic. Even without a shadow attached, the flat top of Red Legs 2’s sliced legs is cleanly and graphically legible as a geometric rather than corporeal reality. Though no cut-out shadows are involved, a tabletop work such as VW Split also combines, as does any board-game frozen mid-play, a specific graphic order with a set of solid objects. Airship (1988) is a drawing on lead sheet which looks like the faintest impression made by a cut-out pattern for a small model airship. It is the graphic promise of the various zeppelins and hot air balloons that Twiss made in the round. Twiss is a collector of paper and cardboard models. He has slightly dilapidated, assembled light card models of Florence Cathedral and the Statue of Liberty in his studio and various folios of unmade paper planes. The tabs, slots, dotted lines and flattened multi-part imagery of the printed sheets for card modelling all add up to an aesthetic of possibility. The unmade printed sheets are haunted by imagined three-dimensionality, and the assembled models look capable of collapsing back into flatness. The folded and faceted galvanized steel construction of Twiss’s various Queen Victoria figures give them the appearance of assembled metal variants of his cardboard Statue of Liberty. One of Twiss’s earliest experiences of making things as a young boy required the forming of three-dimensional objects from flat, cut-out components; Twiss would sometimes help with the spot-welding of metal frames for lampshades in the family workshop of his parents’ business. The lamps were made by stitching oil-soaked paper to wire armatures. The paper shapes were cut out expertly by Twiss’s mother, who was a trained pattern cutter.
Twiss’s shuttling focus between form in the round and the flat diagram, and most particularly his protracted interest in shadows, continually rehearses the traditional myth of the invention of painting and sculpture. Citing Pliny as an ancient source, Victor I. Stoichita explains in his study of shadows in Western art, that the art of painting ‘began with tracing an outline around a man’s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way’.20 According to Pliny, sculpture too had it origins in shadows, as told in the story of Butades the potter, who built up a clay relief from the outline that his daughter had drawn around her departing lover’s silhouette, and hardened it with fire in the kiln; it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs. The shadow in Western art came to be seen as an essential sign of being, of the soul and of the life of the body; only the dead were understood to have no shadows. At the same time, the shadow guaranteed the power and authenticity of depictive representation. To take away the shadow, to steal it, as did the grey man in the famous story of Peter Schlemihl’s shadow, would be to diabolically rupture this primary metaphysical link between the individual and their signature of being.21 The image of Peter Schlemihl’s shadow, folded up and put in the grey man’s pocket, is one that would appeal to Twiss, and actually has a kind of parallel in the story he tells of once putting a figure with a set of detachable shadows into an international group exhibition. The figure itself was stolen during the exhibition, so Twiss distributed all of the shadows to the other artists in the show, thereby dispersing multiples of the missing figure’s shadow around the globe. It is the very separability of the perceptual field into its constituent and often contradictory parts that has often motivated Twiss’s art – the sense that an object or ensemble of things is susceptible to all kinds of dismantling and folding-away.

DISPERSED HISTORY IN EMOTIONAL AND FORMAL FRAGMENTS

One of the aspects of Greer Twiss’s art that I find myself continually returning to when looking at or thinking about his work is its language of parts and fragments. Inextricably related to all the separable parts, of course, is the syntactical emphasis on links, joints, weld-lines and soldered seams. Twiss’s part-to-part language of relations puts him in a well rehearsed tradition of modernism which begins in earnest with late nineteenth nineteenth-century artists such as Degas, Manet and Rodin, and which becomes a foundational trope of twentieth-century art with Picasso, Schwitters, Giacometti, and Brancusi (not to mention the literary tradition and writers such as Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, or architects such as Carlo Scarpa, Morphosis and the early Frank Gehry).22 The legacy can be tracked through scores of late modern and postmodern artists into its proliferation in the digitization of contemporary culture. Twiss’s work has no obvious truck with digitization except for keeping as complete an image bank of the œuvre as possible. His culture of parts and fitments combines a late nineteenth-century, Rodin-inspired aesthetic of reusable casts, parts and foundry piece moulds, with a metal-shop pragmatism of marking up steel plates, chopping, grinding and welding.
Twiss’s métier of collecting, arranging and assembling parts follows metonymic and synecdochic principles of organization. Metonymy is to do with syntax, with chains of connections, contiguities, sequences, links, joinings and couplings of units of language employed like parts from an inventory, or a lexicon of prefabricated parts. It has also to do with lacunae, gaps, breaks, disjunctions and displacements, rather than organic wholes and seamless narratives. Synecdoche means the part standing in for the whole. As evidence for this principle at work in Twiss’s art, one need only make a list: amputated arms and legs; severed fingers; sections of torsos sliced through; an apple and a pair of spectacles cut in half; display bases interrupted by a missing section; knots; sections of rope; cut lengths of steel; hooks, clasps, clamps, shackles, wing-nuts, bolts, ringbolts; thick soldering seams; welding lines; tools standing in for absent artisans; isolated objects like the attributes of saints; domes and cupolas representing a lost world of Italian architecture; birds on poles like an ornithologists catalogue array; fake museum objects in clusters with tags; and bowler hats, wind-up gramophones and muskets standing in for colonial baggage.
What is apparent from this list is that it encompasses both Twiss’s attention to a staccato, differentiated syntax of fabrication, and also the collector’s passion for things; the psychology of one feeds the other. Twiss’s practice attests to the desire to accumulate, compile, arrange and rearrange. It also declares his attraction to things, which come to stand in for something personal, historical or cultural that has in some way become inaccessible or displaced, and recoverable only through memory or a physical re-membering and re-construction into talismanic, surrogate objects. Tools recall actual people, codes of working class culture, specific making technologies. Domes, ladders and empty steps conjure up a de Chirico-inspired imaginary locale of deserted Italian piazzas, suggesting nostalgia for lost paradigms of cultural integration. Twiss is constantly trading in what Jannis Kounellis has called, in his own work, ‘dispersed history in emotional and formal fragments’.23
One relatively recent example of Twiss’s eye for the object as fragment, as metonymic object of a past era, still haunting the present, is the bowler hat featured as the catalogue cover image, which shows Bowler and Flower (1993). It was originally one of the nine bowler hats used in the Decoys and Delusions installation, and four of these had emblematic objects attached – a tank, a hammer, a bird, and a flower. A semi-circle of plain lead bowler hats also sat on the floor in the 1995 installation A Right Royal Summer. Twiss’s lead bowler, beautifully shaped over a milliner’s block, combines the traditional craft of the milliner with that of the metalworker, and, with theatrical flourish, gives dignity to a melancholy object. The associations of the bowler hat are very rich, and whilst foremost in the artist’s mind was the notion of the bowler as a sign for colonial baggage, washed up on local shores, he could hardly be unaware of the hat’s unusual power of being at once so simple and archetypal, yet overdetermined with possible associations. For most viewers, a few key links will be made first-off, including perhaps Magritte’s paintings of anonymous gentlemen in bowler hats; Charlie Chaplin’s use of the hat as an accoutrement of the beleaguered modern everyman; Laurel and Hardy, always wearing theirs, and Samuel Beckett’s insistence (with the comic duo in mind) that the four main characters of Waiting for Godot should all wear bowler hats; John Steed in the 1960s TV series The Avengers; and Oddjob’s steel-rimmed bowler in the James Bond film Goldfinger. Some may even know that, in its earliest form, the bowler was even harder than Twiss’s current version and that some shipyard workers wore it as protective headgear. It is intriguing to know that Le Corbusier included it in his list of classic type-objects, and believed the arrival of modernism was declared as ‘the bowler hat appeared on the horizon’.
Allan Smith

FOOTNOTES

1. Allan Smith, Decoys and Delusions: Greer Twiss, Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 1993.
2. The artist quoted in Babara Maré, ‘Greer Twiss: sculpture’, thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History, University of Auckland, June 1988, p.176.
3. When first exhibited at Gow Langsford Gallery in 1990, this work was titled ‘The Anonymous Architect’. By the time it was shown at Artis Gallery in 1997, however, its title had changed to Anonymous Builder: A Renaissance Dreamer.
4. Philip Fisher, Making and effacing art: modern American art in a culture of museums, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1991, p.150.
5. The artist quoted in Maré, op. cit., p.16.
6. See Maré, op. cit., p.172.
7. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in modern sculpture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1988, p.118.
8. Fisher, Making and Effacing Art, p.218.
9. See transcript in Maré, Greer Twiss: Sculpture, pp.169-185.
10. ‘Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.’ John 20:24-29, The Holy Bible, New International Version, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1984, pp.808-9.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty quoted in Juhani Pallasmaa, The eyes of the skin: architecture and the senses, Academy Editions, London,1996, p.11.
12. Greer Twiss in conversation with the author, December 2002. All other references to the artist’s comments are from the same source unless otherwise stated.
13. The artist quoted in Maré, op. cit., p.176.
14. See James Hall, ‘The Education of the Senses II: Hollows and Bumps in Space’, The world as sculpture, pp.279-301.
15. Fisher quoted in Hall, The world as sculpture, p.298.
16. Ibid.
17. Note Twiss’s playing with the idea of an identity-denying blindfold in the photograph of him with Wystan Curnow and Rodney Kirk Smith on page 73.
18. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p.26.
19. Pallasmaa, The eyes of the skin, p.7.
20. Quoted in Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, Reaktion Books, London, 1997, pp.11-12.
21. See Stoichita, A short history of the shadow, pp.165-68.
22. For a reading of details of legs and feet in Manet, which chimes with Twiss’s Red Legs, see Linda Nochlin, The body in pieces: the fragment as a metaphor of modernity, Thames and Hudson, London, 2001. pp.34-41. For discussion of metonymy and fragmentation in Jasper Johns, see Fred Orton, ‘Present, the Scene of My Selves, the Occasion of these Ruses’, Figuring Jasper Johns, Reaktion Books, London, 1994, pp. 17-88. See also Albert Elsen, ‘Notes on the Partial Figure’, Artforum, November 1969, pp.58-63; and Victor Burgin, ‘The City in Pieces’, In/different spaces: place and memory in visual culture, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles/London, 1997, pp.139-160.
23. Jannis Kounellis, in Kounellis, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Prato, 2001, p.255.

COLLATERALS

Ladder for an Albatross 2002
Shift 3 (dancer) 1972

Acrobat 1963
Welders 1959

Frozen Frame 1968

Measure 1974
12 x 6 1974 (detail)

Frames of Reference 2 1970
Standard Banner: Axe, Standard Banner: Compasses 1986

Warp 1 1972
Alberto Giacometti Man, Woman and Child c. 1931 Kunstmuseum, Basel
VW Split 1974

Show and Tell 1984
Vacation 2 Gone Fishing 1984 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
Anonymous Builder: A Renaissance Dreamer 1989 (detail)

Touch 1972

Footplate 1974 Private collection, Auckland
Now 1972
Touch 1972

Spectacles cases, collection of the artist
Full Stop Sight 1974

Coil 1972

Jasper Johns Painting with Two Balls 1971 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
Robert Morris Untitled 1962

Anthony Caro Cool Deck 1970-71
Barrier 1 1976
Sight Screen 1 1976
Small Sight Screen 1976

Shadow 1972

Hobson’s Baggage 1995

Statue of Liberty cardboard model
Collapsed Balloon 1988

Full Stop Knot 1974

Bowler hats in studio, 1993

Boxed Rocket 1988
Airship 1988
Over the Hills 1990