Two preparators jumped into the AGA‘s cubevan and headed south onto the prairies a few weeks ago to take care of a little gallery business. It’s at least five hours drive between Edmonton and Lethbridge (not counting lunch, piss, or delivery stops in Calgary) and the ditches got noticably more lush the further they drove. Like foreign migrant workers, springtime comes north to Alberta with hopeful trepidation.

Dis-romantical, highly realistic sculpture does not need an extra hook, but dismayingly skilled artists like Penny (or, say, Ron Mueck with his exercises in gross shifts of scale) still seem to seek some spectacular hence indisputable justification for their talents. Or, possibly, their market savviness has simply been as finely tuned as their airbrushes. Does the art world demand of its favourite artists these skin-deep visual tricks to create the salable illusion of cultural relevance? Is it a societal phenomenon where consumers of spectacle are the majority and the majority accept any simplistic distortion as sufficient evidence of cultural salience? Is it merely a minimalist style of curatorial pedagogy that goes hand in hand with current educational strategies?

Ron Mueck’s A Girl being readied for final installation at the AGA
(clipped from the Edmonton Journal)

One-note songs are called drones, one-flavour dishes are called bland, and one-act plays are… well, those are an accepted art form, I’ll admit. But surely, sculpture that is one-dimensional must be recognized to be a problem. Having seen the Penny and Mueck sculptures shown above in person I can attest, and must emphasize, that they look significantly more attractive in photos than in person. This I attribute to the highly developed craft of TV & movie FX, which both artists worked in at a master level (I understand Penny has X-Men on his resume, and Mueck Labyrinth on his). Whether scaled way up or way down, seen in person both artists’ sculptures exhibit problems with proportionate hair – an unrecognizable failing on film. And for all their proficiency and attention to detail, ‘in the flesh’ their figures still look plasticky and cold-blooded, if not downright reptilian.

Penny and Balkenhol shown side by side made for an all-too-obvious juxtaposition of hyper-fine finish vs. hypo-crude, but share in common the platitude that “they’re hand-made.” This is a separate but no less simplistic rationalization for figurative sculpture; it’s commonly trotted out as a backstop trope (for Mueck no less than Penny), preempting any consumerist scepticism that might lead to the suspicion that an eerily lifelike thing is the product of outsourced – and possibly sweatshopped – mechanization, or worse, digitalization. Stephan Balkenhol’s sculptures, however, are unabashedly handmade. The figures are usually weak-kneed in stance, but chopped crudely enough out of wood or clay or whatever it was to keep them upright. They are ugly things – I found myself resorting to sneaking peeks of Penny’s casting intricacies to avoid sustained study of the Balkenhols.

Stephan Balkenhol, Frau im Kleid

That stop in Calgary provided plenty of grist for ranting the rest of the drive through to Lethbridge interrupted only by a two block detour into an outpost called Claresholme. We eventually deposited the remaining items with University of Lethbridge staff, then went for a li’l cowboy espresso in town. Having missed visiting hours at Nikka Yuko, we strayed back across the river to the by then deserted ULeth campus. A preliminary walk about its behemoth of an A. Erickson-designed building yielded interesting architectural observations, (parts of the concrete structure have slipped away from other parts down-coulee towards the river, with as much as a foot of divergence), lots of parkland, but no sculpture. A couple emerging from the building, when asked for the directions to the university’s sculpture park, replied, “sculture, scul-pe-ture, you mean like statues?” I ain’t ne’er heerd o’ nonesuch.

It’s always in the last place you look. At the far end of the parking lot we spotted a hillock that had an open structure upon it with no apparent reason for being there – it had to be a sculpture. Hiking up and over the gopher-hole strewn mound revealed a pond, a path and lo and behold sculptures: the fabled Papokan Sculpture Park (f. 1992).

A statue.

The next one we came across was immediately recognizable from a distance and through the trees as a Royden Mills. But just where had I encountered this one before – a Big Things exhibit, or an ECAS show? I don’t usually go inside Roy’s sculptures, and I didn’t this day; besides the general aversion I have to haunted houses and thrill rides, I don’t usually fit through the entrances, which I’ve heard he builds only big enough to squeeze in through himself (I’m not a flexible man, and a few inches taller). So I most often content myself with contemplating his sculptures from the outside.

I seem to recall Inside a Dissonant Society having a dissatisfactory kink in its stem, which was not evident this time; either it was fixed prior to AFA purchase or in vague recollection I’ve jumbled this piece with another of Roy’s stemmed sculptures. I’m afraid IaDS does not coalesce as a unified whole, and merely calling it ‘dissonant’ does not for me adequately justify it’s disparate nature. As I prefer the lower section, I would like to see everything attached above eyelevel removed in favour of some more architectural growth or extension. The elegantly elongated proportions of the doorway, the sculpture’s predominant and most attractive feature, demand a taller structure rather than a squatter one.

Royden Mills, Inside a Dissonant Society

I cannot confidently put a name to the next sculpture we saw (like most of them, it was plaque-free). Although I can list a dozen possible artists, it seemed to suit none of them well – except myself. Although I distinctly remember not making this one (and not selling it, for sure), I can list a hatful of reasons why it might’ve been a Rob Willms: the surface and juncture touches are familiar, as is the plateyness of it, its squareness from dead front and back, the slenderness of its side views, the jutting round volumes, and awkward unresolved placement of a couple of the elements. Plus, I kinda like it in the way that I very often only kinda like my own sculptures.

[not] Rob Willms, Unnerving
[update: my latest information attributes this piece to Clay Ellis
(I keep forgetting to ask him when I see him)]

Peter Hide, [update: Pete told me the title,
I wrote it down then promptly lost the slip,
but from vague memory it is,
Heart and Soul]

Nearer the lake and under some trees was a horizontal piece by Ken Macklin, entitled Milk River. I very quickly resolved upon a host of changes I would make to this sculpture, were it mine – it was, evidently, unresolved. And then I went around the back.

Ken Macklin, Milk River

I was astonished to discover a well and complete sculpture there, as though the front had been only a study for the worked-up final version. Something very similar had occured for me when viewing a show of Ken’s work a couple years ago at Peter Robertson Gallery. The most sensitive touch and rightness of arrangement was housed in each sculpture’s backside view, while its front ran amok. If I could have easily bought one of those ones, I would have, then sited its front to a wall, and enjoyed a wonderful sculpture. It’s probably best that I couldn’t.

Ken Macklin, Milk River (rear)

The UofL grounds were, except for a few joggers and yoga-ers, deserted. Since we had an appetite to work up before soaking in sushi, DJ and I wandered the university’s hills and halls. Unhindered. There were a number of other sculptures on the grounds, of course, most too poor to make mention of – like this one, which I’m not mentioning:

DJ on an extra-terrestrial chairlift (0ut-of-order)

But one unexpected and excellent exception was Moses by Sorel Etrog, acquired by ULeth in 1968. It’s a two-storey tall bronze sculpture mounted on an elevated, cantilevered concrete base in the main hall’s main stairwell. It is viewable from many different vantages on at least seven levels (including the stair landings) and it maintained a lordly presence from every view I could access. Though its attachment to the concrete left something to be desired, I very much enjoyed studying this sculpture.

Sorel Etrog, Moses

But for an early morning stop at the very pleasant, mildly inspirational Japanese gardens we’d missed the evening before, the return trip to E-town was not notable. Peter’s milkshakes for lunch threatened to force a siesta at about Innisfail, but our wills were stronger than foothills winds and we arrived home in good pace. I like road-trips.