Rebecca Warren
‘Made’ sculpture – as distinct from the readymade or found-object assemblage – has had perhaps the roughest ride of all since the Postmodern watershed of the 1960s. If painting was proclaimed dead at the time, then sculpture was already well buried. When Rebecca Warren emerged around the turn of the millennium as one of a generation of referencers, samplers and semiological jugglers, it seemed she was not so much reengaging with traditional sculptural tropes as wielding them for what they might still be worth. Warren treated the sculptural medium as a trove to indiscriminately plunder. Applying for the obligatory role of ‘traditional sculptor’ within a pluralistic field, she was keenly accepted by an establishment that registered a gap in the spectrum. And yet her work’s refinement over the past decade has been achieved by cultivating the artisanal methodologies that characterize ‘made’ sculpture, despite retaining a strategic wariness of ghettoizing her work within its parameters.
Warren’s recent exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler was polarized between co-opting the vocabulary and values of sculpture – whether figurative or abstract – and deconstructing them. Eight painted bronze ‘figures’ stood on squat white or pink plinths – although the term ‘figure’ is a stretch for these piles of lumpen materiality, out of which approximations of body parts or items of clothing sometimes emerged. Warren applied each bronze cast with brushstrokes of household gloss, mostly in satiny-metallic flesh tints. The colour qualifies each edition as a one-off, and the naked cast as illusionistic. In the past, Warren’s gestural moulding has mostly been left unmediated, in unfired clay. Here, however, the classical casting process – and the expensive medium of bronze – generated a high-art aura, spotlighted by the museum-scale ampleness of Hetzler’s gallery and the generous reaches of empty space offsetting each work. This was a show that trumpeted museum-bound, mid-career maturity.
And yet its punctum was an industrial-style MDF palette on wheels, sagging under the weight of a four-foot cubed mass of loosely kneaded, unfired clay (If the Dead Rise Not [Cube 2006], 2006). Vacillating diagonally, in contrast to the square-on plinth works, this object was the unformed to their resolution, the original to their multiple. Among the figural sculptures, it functioned as a sign for the process out of which they had come, even as it refused to represent anything – except, perhaps, materiality and process itself. The Cube was a deconstructive window through which Warren ironically questioned, and even partly disowned, the formal finish that the eight remaining sculptures proffered. It occupied a position between artisanal modesty and the inheritance of a rich, pre-Modernist sculptural tradition.
The ‘figures’, poised between brute irreverence, heiratic presence and wistful nostalgia, were burlesque, vaudevillian presences on their formal stages. Their ruggedly detailed verticality may have suggested Alberto Giacometti, or even Auguste Rodin, but remained esoterically totemic, riddled with obscene protuberances, tumorous masses, wobbly ridges of cellulite, breasty swellings like studded melons stuffed down the front of a shirt. The forms refuse to gel into focus. Compared with the gender-studies blatancy of Warren’s early sculptures – with their Robert Crumb asses and mammoth high heels – her recent, more elusive figuration leaves the unfired clay cube as a wayward off-note more than a stark antithesis. This slipperiness is a chip off Giacometti’s block – an artist whose figures always seem to be straining into disappearance under the pressure of our gaze. Warren’s figures also recall Degas’ sculptures of pubescent ballet dancers, their vaunting postures yearning incarnate. Toto (2012) struck a coy stance, its Degas-esque red and green bow cresting what might have been a tall beehive hair-do. Two identical casts (both BB, 2012) attended this figure, each painted a slightly different shade of blue-green. Their functional doubling undermined, by association, the aspiring individuality of Toto.
Warren’s need to disabuse the illusion she constructs of an integral language of sculpture at one with its own purposes might be her burden. As her work develops, she is continually impelled to reinstate the inverted commas that qualify it as ‘made’ rather than found. The formal display of three makeshift arrangements of studio effluvia in vitrines (odds and ends of Styrofoam and wood, a sliver of old soap) belied their studied slipshod air. The trope of raising detritus to aesthetic consideration while asking it to function as a sign for its own inconsequentiality was as oxymoronic as ordering someone to ‘try’ to relax. The aestheticism of these vitrines, it seems, is only acceptable to Warren so long as their contents are generalized under the heading of leftover studio chaff, and their ambiguities placed under the aegis of deconstruction. I wonder what it would mean for Warren to wholeheartedly claim a notion of made sculpture for which it is not required that the sculptural object be continually justified by an aura of doubting critique. Would it constitute a step toward complacency – as she appears to judge – or toward risk?
