April 28 (Bloomberg) — Anthony Caro works in a vast warehouse stacked with dockyard leftovers.

Arriving at his north London studio each day, the 86-year- old sculptor has tea and biscuits with a few assistants, then gets down to the dirty, noisy business of making art.

Elderly Man Gripping Enormous Tool With Both Hands.

Caro is currently showing 13 new works at London’s Annely Juda Fine Art. Bulky creatures of steel and cast iron, they seem human, though Caro never meant them to give that impression. In just 18 months, he has made 43 of these upright sculptures.

“I’ve purchased a forklift truck, which makes a lot of difference,” says the artist over coffee in his studio living room, a wool scarf wrapped over his cardigan. “What used to take a morning or a day now takes 10 minutes.”

Caro, who sports a Hemingway-like white beard, is considered the godfather of British sculpture. At an age when peers might hang up their tools, he heads down new paths, displaying an appetite for life that his new works exude.

On his to-do list is a sculpture, three blocks long, that will run down the central reservation — the broad strip separating northbound and southbound traffic — on New York’s Park Avenue.

Traveling up or down the avenue, he says, “you’re going about 30 miles an hour, so you’ve got to make a sculpture which goes with you.” The project is on hold: “The police, the traffic, all that has to be resolved before I can start.”

….

The most a Caro work ever fetched at auction was 1.4 million pounds (then $2.45 million), paid in February 2006 at Sotheby’s London for “Sculpture Two” (1962). By contrast, Jeff Koons’s most expensive sculpture — “Balloon Flower – Magenta” (1995- 2000) — sold at Christie’s London in June 2008 for 12.9 million pounds (then $25.8 million).

The works in Caro’s new show range between 55,000 pounds ($85,107) and 320,000 pounds, according to the Annely Juda gallery.

“It’s a different world,” he says of today’s market. “The crazy-price things, I think, are destructive of the art because people get too conscious of money.”

Caro remembers a time when, after an exhibition, friends would ask how it went or whether critics liked it. “Now they say, ‘Did you sell?’” he says. “It puts the wrong emphasis.”

….

VIDEO

It is by now pretty much common knowledge that the Edgar Degas sculptures currently on exhibit in the AGA’s Poole Gallery are posthumously-cast editions of mostly non-extant, mostly wax originals, and that only one of the pieces was ever exhibited in its original non-bronze constitution during Degas’ lifetime. This information surely is germane to various academic –ologies, and students of art history should be concerned with scouring even the tiniest details of provenance for high accuracy, but I contend that delving into either tidbit diverts attention away from an appreciation of the things as they so stand. Fortunately, presuming one can avoid the pounce of an interpreter, the 40 or so bronzes in the show are beautiful enough, and carefully enough installed, that their allure is not much diminished by debates about authenticity or allegations of artistic intent.

The only impedance to clear viewing of the sculptures comes from a mundane source: plastic vitrines cause significant reflective and refractive interference. Within their encasements, many of the sculptures also find themselves situated among a gridlock of shadows that spotlights angle in through the pane joints. But the use of jewel cases is an unavoidable concession to critical museological functions. Bronze sculptures are durable objects, relatively speaking, but their patinas are sufficiently susceptible to the oils in a finger’s touch that putting 100 year old treasures under glass is a warranted concession: no less than when guarding against thieving or sneezing patrons.

The sculptures don’t suffer too badly for the ¼” plastic buffer though, as Degas’ human figures are generally most in focus between knee and collar-bone – there’s little need to look too closely for finer features. Despite extending from toepoint to fingertip, almost every sculpture is really more a concentrated study of the female torso. The appendages have been left relatively unworked, certainly not finished to the descriptive degree that the haunches have been fleshed out to; the extremities seem at times to have been grudgingly included as a mere suggestion of hands and feet and even heads. In most of the pieces this works out just fine. Subduing the intricate lineaments of an arabesque-ing dancer’s hands is an effective way to counter the dramatic outward gesticulation of her position – the eye is not caught and held at overly-fine details out on the periphery of the sculpture. Feet, when planted upon the ground, are as necessarily indistinct as a tree’s roots. Imperfectly formed heads tilt in approximate agreement with the pose but carry only faint facial expressions. All visual cues support the center of gravity, none distract from the bodily gesture.

“Little Dancer; Aged 14″ is an obvious exception to all these particularities: no leotard wrinkle too insignificant to be rendered. This, the biggest sculpture in the exhibit, is adorned with a real tutu, a hair ribbon, and polychromed bodice and shoes. Although she cannot not qualify as the definitive Impressionist sculpture, she is nevertheless iconographic – a literal poster girl for Degas’ Impressionism. It may be hard to dislike her since “Little Dancer’s” disposition is that of ‘beguiling sweetie’. But the crux of the sculpture lies in how inert the metal feels mated to the ribbon and tutu (which looks to be rotting away before your very eyes). Overly detailed, long-fingered, large-palmed hands, laced together behind her back, are just more evidence of a disparity of parts in this sculpture. Cute as she may be, as a sculpture she is less than – a fraction of – the sum of her parts; she is the odd one out and late to the party.

Otherwise, the exhibition may be dually faulted in its selection and arrangement of dancers standing on one leg: too many, and all in rows. Chorus lines of arabesques and positioning dancers appear rather more like a flailing studio rehearsal than stage-ready choreography. Including even half as many dancers in the show would have magnified their poise. And poise, not motion, is the dominant theme of the 40 bronzes.

There is another sense in which the title of the exhibit, Figures in Motion, is a flawed premise: Degas’ intention may very well have been to capture in wax or plaster the flicker of a dancing ballerina or prancing horse (art historians love such tidy surmises) but no matter how they’re lit the bronze casts we have here stand oh so very stock still. Darkly patinaed sculptures provide high-contrast surfaces that cause an apparent gain in mass, such that guesses to heft might figure as greater than hollow bronze and maybe as much as solid lead. Viewers are from most available angles reduced to searching out silhouettes for accurate clues to each thing’s specific gravity and balance – its poise.

Moving back to the essence of any visual art exhibit, what about the sculptures that look just too good to simply read about, walk away from and forget. Which ones are the good ones? What’s good about them? I could select easily half of what’s in this exhibit to approve: “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot”, “Woman Taken Unawares”, “Spanish Dance”, “Woman Seated in an Armchair Wiping Her Neck”, “The Tub”, “Picking Apples”, “Pregnant Woman”, all four riderless horses.

One sculpture stands out from the rest as it actually is a figural fragment. “Woman: Rubbing Her Back with a Sponge” is a thick, truncated torso with certain brazing seams left visible (as is a regular feature of Rodin bronzes). It has a single skinny arm, which does not from most viewing angles wholly belong with the modeled logic in the rest of the body. The arm might reasonably have been shortened to a stub, but because its cocked elbow acts as a starboard jib, loss of the arm would likely diminish the sculpture’s expressive twist and intriguing contours. The relationship between this lone de-limbed piece and the rest of the be-limbed dancers lies in a taut bit of balance. The torso appears to be quite over-weighted to the rear, almost as if, should the lower portion be restored, the figure would be kneeling.

“The Tub” is another unique piece; its configuration landing it in some grey zone between the ranks of ‘sculpture in the round’ and ‘sculptural high relief’. The girl reclining in an half-empty/half-full bath seems the greater part of a whole figure, but upon inspection is made almost entirely of limbs. This may be the only sculpture in the show in which the figure’s limbs are up for consideration, but not its torso. The tub’s rim is a natural framing device that reinforces the tub water’s flattening force resulting in a 3d sculpture that emerges from, somewhat at odds with, its 2d ground – a tension that is only exacerbated by the decorative (art deco?) bronze slab that the whole thing rests upon. In a sense, its worth as an artwork lies in its embodiment of contradiction and exploration of semantical space.

Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot

There are sculptures in Degas: Figures In Motion that do not depict poise so much as describe an instant of inertia: the pent up energy of potential motion. “Picking Apples” is a gleeful, off balance dance of life that only remotely depicts its titular subject matter. Perhaps recalling the days when she was the agile “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot”, the “Pregnant Woman” cannot now lean forward far enough to see even the tops of her toes. The “Woman Taken Unawares” is wildly indecisive and caught, psychologically as much as physically, between demureness and demurring.

Woman Taken Unawares

It is of course the equestrian sculptures that are most suggestive of motion. Each of the riderless horses has one or two special sculptural traits that set it off from the others. One, with a wonderful muzzle modeled by only a couple pinches in the wax, rears upon wire armatures unadorned with hooves. Another has an exaggerated neck and narrowness of shoulders that emphasise its side view: serving as a portrait of a remarkable, memorable horse friend. The one with no neck at all (only its twisted-wire armature holds a down-turned head in place) seems to carry a cumbrously affective yoke upon its shoulders. Smeared daubs of wax that evince surefooted horse hooves equate directly to Degas’ treatment of the dancers’ light feet, but at so much smaller a scale the effect draws rather more attention to itself, to the light canter of the animal, and away from any of the top-heaviness apparent in an unmoving horse.

It is art historians’ place to know by whose hand(s) these things were made, to whom attributions should refer, and in what regard. A handsome hardcover catalogue raisonné accompanies Degas: Figures in Motion; its scholarship regarding the serialization of Degas’ works seems comprehensive. What may never be agreed upon is whether displaying artworks that were never intended by the artist to be exhibited constitutes a moral dilemma. In any event, not only is a deceased artist’s mind unknowable, those responsible for casting the things have passed away by now as well – unless our great museums are to be implicated in illicit duplication of the things, there can be no one left to prosecute.

Given the quality of even this remnant of Degas-derived sculpture, surely no one will disagree that it is a special thing that his originals were salvaged for sharing with the world. Dubious of origin or not, they are very fine things worthy of conservation and exhibition. The breadth of Degas’ sculptural explorations, a mode of art-making for which he is not best known, is instructive – I find that it sets the bar for a committed sculptor very high indeed. Inspirational stuff. My congratulations and thanks to the AGA for bringing this show to town and displaying it to benefit.

[Edit: added picture here of a few versions of the most famous of the Degas sculptures.]

Detroit MI:
Chicago IL:

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.