Anthony Caro on Sculpture and Architecture (March 1991)
In this century it was not the sculptors who revitalised sculpture – it was the painters. They were outsiders who spoke an almost foreign tongue, so they were not trapped within real or imagined regulations. I think now that by looking outside our own disciplines we may glimpse new possibilities for our work. Directions and methods are very important. Generally speaking, if one takes care of the way of thinking, the art will take care of itself. Modernism had a clear feeling for space, but nothing stands still and if we are to justify our existence as artists we need to keep culture moving. History is dynamic, not static, and as well as understanding our own time, we need to learn from history. Looking sideways at what is happening or has happened in other fields can sometimes bring new life to a subject. This kind of nourishment can enliven our work. After all, since the Sixties, sculpture has not been far away from architecture. In the Sixties and after, sculpture extended itself so it explored almost the same space as the architect’s. Not quite the same space, because sculptors’ space always, it seems, demanded an invisible wall between spectator and work. In those days sculptors were absorbed with making a new vocabulary for sculpture and that meant getting right away from old-fashioned modes and methods. Styling solves nothing. Nevertheless, to have realised the closeness of abstract sculpture to architecture would at that time have horrified us. All the same we were using rods that felt like handrails even if they were not for grasping, making intervals like doorways even though one could not go through them, enclosing space in works that felt like rooms though one could explore them with the eyes only. What we wanted to do at that time was to make sculpture work as something in its own right, not as something that depended on its likeness to nature. We wanted to make it more fully abstract, just as music is abstract. But sculpture’s materiality always tries to suck the sculpture back into the world of things. It was for this reason we had to open sculpture up. Our intent was to repudiate the object – and naturally our starting point was painting, Cubism and Matisse. Abstract sculpture began to take charge of the space it occupied, first by standing on the same literal ground as we do, then by bringing the floor itself to bear on the work, and later by taking into its realm table height and the wall. In terms of appearance and detail, a few architects had been influenced by the New Generation sculpture, but there was no communion of thinking. It was not like the Renaissance, where architect, painter and sculptor had all understood one another. But in those days architect and sculptor worked closely, often practised both disciplines. Alberti and Brunelleschi were sculptors as well as architects; as well as painters and sculptors, Giotto and Michelangelo were great architects, so it is natural that there should have been shared understanding of form, space and scale. Today again the aesthetic concerns of sculptors and architects match one another’s. Although the enterprise is different, the materials are often the same or similar. Form and space are the subject of both disciplines, scale and how the viewer relates to the work are of vital importance. The architect’s approach is more conceptual, he works from the general directly down to detail: the sculptor on the other hand can be looser, perceptual, additive. We sculptors move freely, begin from a unit, even discover the concept as we go along. The edges of subjects are interesting, where sculpture meets drawing, where sculpture meets architecture. When the architect thinks how his building will work or will look, he draws it, then tries it out with small models. Since sculpture is essentially physical, sculptors tend to think directly, using actual material, actual size. The problem the sculptor has to solve is a problem he has set himself. Far from having a competition, a brief, a site, even a given size, the sculptor may start from a rule he makes for himself or from the parts in his piece-bin, from a reproduction of a Cézanne or even from the joint between two units. At the start I have a general idea of the way I want to go: I need, say, more richness, more volume, or to float the work. And I go about this by taking a piece, be it a beam ten feet long or a part measuring as little as six inches, and placing it so that it hovers or springs. Adding needs must make it more significant, just as adding his pink figure makes Matisse’s blue bluer. And so I add, bend or roll the material, or cut it away until I feel right about what I have done. With helpers to facilitate the fabrication of the work, it is no different. I must still have physical hands-on contact with the work. Nowadays I prefer to work on a piece, get it up to a certain stage, then put it away while it is fabricated, ground, cleaned. Then I look again, and make changes, and this happens again and again so that each time I come to the work afresh. I try always to work in a spontaneous way. It is his own vision, his own aesthetic that the sculptor must satisfy. That is his brief. If his sculpture is inert, he can turn it upside down and start again, he can cut off whole areas and re-focus, or completely alter the centrality or the size by adding or cropping. The sculptor and the sculpture are talking to one another. The sculptor goes on making changes according to the demands of the work until it says ‘yes’, and that is when it is finished. The sculptor came to collage, adding and cutting parts in order that there be no gap, no waste between feeling and stroke. Working directly, in self-supporting material, the sculptor tries to make every change count. Each move has to be art, has to be expressive. All artists take themselves by surprise. Could the architect try using the sculptor’s methods? Imagine designing a building starting from, say, a joint or a staircase and working outwards, or turning an entire building upside down, make the site fit the work instead of the work the site, or maybe take a sculpture as skeleton and build a building round it. Questioning the assumptions of the architectural method opens up new areas and this is happening: witness the Serpentine Gallery pavilions, where an architect works like a sculptor, making a building which has no practical function. I like it when architects feel free to be racy, to take a deep breath. Once at a workshop, I collaborated with Frank Gehry. We made plywood parts eight to ten feet high, enlarged from corners or other sections of my sculptures, and used a light crane to move them around. On a smaller scale this is the way a sculptor works, placing, moving and cutting, but for an architect to work like this was innovative (Gehry’s openness was impressive – his assistants could not grasp the process, they needed to draw and re-draw). When I had put the parts together, Gehry threw up a walkway to give them unity. We could easily have reversed it, the architect making the structures, the sculptor a sculptural enclosure. When Norman Foster, Chris Wise and I designed the Millennium Bridge, architect, engineer, sculptor and their teams designed together throughout and this, I believe, is the right way to collaborate, right from the start, right through. Some years ago I was interested by the idea of a sculpture one could enter and I made a wooden tower like a tree house for kids. A few years afterwards I enlarged an eight-inch bronze sculpture of mine to make a kind of plywood pool house. Later I destroyed that version and remade it with only small alterations as a stainless steel sculpture. This shows how close the disciplines have become. Nonetheless there is a difference. Architecture invites, sculpture is a thing in and of itself, architecture sits grounded, sculpture flies. The architect, necessarily designing with the inhabitants in mind, conceives from the inside out, while the first thing for a sculptor, even if he is concerned with interior space or with skin, is still the visual. Even though there is a time for reaching out, there is an edge which must be respected. Gaudi, correctly described as ‘a fringe figure’, showed the way, but it was le Corbusier, the true architect, who transformed his innovations into architectural language. Architecture is perhaps the purest abstract visual form. It activates ambient space, sky and light. This is the intention for public outdoor sculpture as well, so it is logical for sculptors to look to what great architects did and ask why they did it. Just as I learnt not so much from the history of sculpture, but more from painters like Manet, Courbet, Matisse, Picasso, so today’s sculptor could benefit from looking at the great architects, past and present. Right now sculpture in the city is welcomed in a new way. The pressure is on sculptors to meet the challenge not just with bigger, but with better art. Public sculpture is as different from intimate sculpture as mural painting from easel painting, and making it is as different as designing a skyscraper from designing a house. Large-scale sculpture cannot possibly be made with the directness and spontaneity of a studio sculpture: you cannot make big changes high up on a massive piece with the immediacy or directness of working on a piece small enough to handle. For the architect his drawings are a kind of picture-writing, a manual of instructions which he can work on with imagination just as a novelist can conjure up a scene. Yet for the sculptor there is as yet no working shorthand. So the sculptor who finds it difficult to imagine size differences simply gets his maquettes mindlessly ‘blown up’ into monuments by foundries or fabricating firms. The result is public sculpture that is mostly scaleless, unadventurous or merely decorative. And public expectation is low. What the city gets, in Robert Hughes’ words, is ‘abstract ironmongery’, ‘sculpture that means nothing, most of it larger than it needs to be… It manages to look both arrogant and depleted’. What is needed is public sculpture expressive of human feeling, eye, brain and heart. Therefore it is necessary to tackle the problem right from first principles and the one discipline with similar pre-occupations is architecture. Architecture relates to a person’s size and space, it is clear enough to be grasped whole. For me Picasso’s large head made twenty-five years ago is one of the few modern city sculptures of a size and quality that meet today’s needs. Although it is in fact an enlargement made by architects, its size and thicknesses are felt, the joints more natural than Calder’s gussets. Above all the work relates to the piazza and to the people in it. Perhaps it works so well because it implies arches and encloses air; this is more significant than the fact that it happens to be the image of a woman’s head. It stands in Chicago, a city where the skyscrapers often form hollow squares like the walls of giant rooms. These present-day versions of the Italian piazza are perfect settings for sculptures, containers in the heart of the city. The problem facing the sculptor in London or New York is that in neither city do the settings invite contemplation of the art; in London we surround our sculptures by heavy traffic, in New York City sculpture becomes no more than punctuation, breaking the monotony of an avenue. If a sculpture is to be viewed from a car at 30 miles per hour, it needs to be altogether different and such a project would need to be thought through afresh. But to be truly ‘seen’, public sculpture still has to be sculpture for pedestrians. However that may be, contemporary environments call again and again for bigger size, so without compromising our art we must expect to get used to making sculptures more akin to piers, bridges, arches, colonnades, towers. All these demand reference to give them scale. Reference from without – trees or buildings – to give them a setting and to hold off the vastness of the sky; reference within to connect them to human size in the way the architect makes reference to human size with doors, windows, staircases. Public sculpture identifies place. It gives the city-dweller a sense of ‘being somewhere’. And so it has to call to its surroundings and to the public. It can – and I believe nowadays it often should - invite participation. How a sculpture is seen by the viewer is always of extreme importance. Whether it is turned on a revolving base, looked down or viewed from below, or whether it asks to be walked through – these are the crucial keys for grasping a sculpture’s intent. Public sculpture can allow openings that let in light or colour, explore floors that slope, stairs that turn inside out, walkways that are part engineering, part sculpture; sculpture is even free to exploit illusion. I am hungry for what I can learn from. The architects are there to teach us: the Greeks about proportion, scale, repetition; Alberti, Brunelleschi, Bramante about enclosed space, unity, mass. Gothic architecture comes close to sculpture where it uses an engineering device, the flying buttress. In India the Moguls made almost purposeless stairways, sculptural ends in themselves; the Romans and the Romanesque had an obsession with vaulting; le Corbusier revitalised the wall; in Sydney Opera House Utzon makes a building into a kind of landscape sculpture; Ando uses light as his subject matter; Louis Kahn gives voice to that most given of shapes, the circle. These examples are chosen at random; they are by great architects, but every good architect understands size and thickness, how air eats into form outdoors so that units need to be beefed up if they are not to look feeble, how to make joints read frankly and give scale. The architect’s canvas is the open air. What I am talking about are ways of thinking: they would be second nature to visual artists if architects and sculptors could come together at the beginning, at the most receptive time of life, in the colleges and schools of art. The applied and commercial arts are strong in art schools, but they are not basic. Designers or photographers have an influence on style, but they have not yet contributed to fundamental thinking about art, so the movement of visual thinking has been one way. Not so with painters and sculptors; throughout history the development of painting and sculpture is so closely intertwined that it seems as if they are interchangeable, first one discipline, then the other pointing the way. I would like schools of art to become schools of fine art again: painting, sculpture and architecture, the disciplines closely integrated, students catching fire from one another. Architecture is the art that controls and uses space. Architecture is not about building bathrooms, it is a visual poetic medium, and we three, painters, sculptors and architects, are at the root of the visual business together. When I taught sculpture to architects, I asked them to ‘behave stupidly with reason’ – to visualise what they were doing in a physical way. How seldom can the architectural student fully grasp the space of a room from a drawing? I suggested they make hollow shapes in plaster and fibreglass. They get their heads inside and turn around; the internal space naturally relates to the external configuration. As the work proceeds, walls change character, soon there is interpenetration of inside and outside. It is Cubism, the world of painting and sculpture. But now architecture and sculpture students are separated, their studios are in different schools. They should be working alongside one another. With less emphasis on theory, philosophy, techniques, this side-by-side discussion, experimentation, project-making would be the way forward. We need to think grandly. At Lichfield Cathedral, the entire Gothic west front was turned over to the sculptor. Nowadays the sculptor has a role in the team, integral to the thinking of the project. It means that the architect forfeits some control, but gains new richness in return. I see that as fruitful, it is no longer the sculptor being asked to add icing to the cake, to add big costume jewellery to embellish an unexciting elevation. What I am suggesting are these three things: architects and sculptors learning from one another’s approach and methods, sculptors making large-scale works for public places looking to great architecture, and the teaching and practice of architecture and sculpture coming close together. Then there will surely be greater understanding, influence both ways and a new possibility of growth together. Thirty years ago, Giedion writing on the Art of Ancient Egypt wrote: ‘the sculpture does not dominate the architecture, nor does the architecture dominate the sculpture – they complement one another. They have become indivisible: to unite sculpture and architecture, so that each enhances the other instead of being intent upon leading its own independent existence, is one of the most delicate of all problems – very seldom is the union achieved. When it is, we have a rare and blessed occasion.’ This is what I hope to see – it is the cave in the mountain, the end to which both sculptors and architects can aspire. Anthony Caro Edited lecture delivered at the Tate Gallery, March 1991, revised June 2001 |