Robert Klippel: Alchemist with a vision
Robert Klippel’s works took various forms but always there was emphasis on the potential materials possess.
From the earliest stages of culture, human beings have made pictures and formed images in an effort to understand and control their environment and the forces that govern it: images of the animals they hunted to ensure their proliferation, images of fertility to guarantee the continuity of the tribe, images of spirits and ancestral ghosts to avert their anger and win their benevolence.
The earliest form of sculpture must have been wood carving, made with rudimentary stone tools, but stone carving, too, is of great antiquity: the Venus of Willendorf is dated to the Palaeolithic period about 30,000 years ago. Modelling in clay is probably also very early, although unfired images would have dissolved back into the earth long ago. In historical times terracotta figures — pressed in moulds rather than modelled — were produced in great numbers as votive figures by the Greeks, Romans and other peoples.
In later centuries, modelling as a sculptural form in its own right is used for highly naturalistic portraits from the Florentine quattrocento — think of Donatello’s strikingly lifelike Niccolo da Uzzano in polychrome terracotta — to the 18th century, with the great terracotta busts by Jean-Antoine Houdon and Augustin Pajou. Modelling also was used for stucco decorations, which became popular in the 16th century and reached its final flowering in the virtuoso work of Giacomo Serpotta in Naples in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
On the whole, however, the two principal modes of sculpture from classical times until about a century ago were carving and modelling, the latter conceived mainly as a prelude to casting in bronze. Models, however, also were produced on a small scale in wax and on a larger scale in clay as three-dimensional sketches, maquettes or bozzetti for works to be completed later as carvings or as bronze casts.
The two modes involved fundamentally different approaches to and even conceptions of the nature of sculpture. The modeller builds form by an additive process and can always remove a section and start again if it is unsatisfactory. This way of working is more forgiving of errors; on the other hand it could be thought of as analogous to the way that God formed man and woman from the earth in Genesis.
Carving, on the other hand, is a subtractive process, where matter — wood or stone — is cut away to produce a figure. It is a far more unforgiving process, since what is taken away cannot be put back; and it is also a subtly more abstract one, since every carving begins with a block, and the memory of the original block survives as a virtual three-dimensional frame within which the figure has been constructed and can still be understood.
This is certainly the way that Michelangelo thought of sculpture, and he liked to use the matter of the block as economically as possible: the outstretched limbs of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, for example, would have been unthinkable to him.
But he had a still deeper poetic insight and a conviction that the figure he was to carve already existed virtually in the block and was only waiting to be revealed or released by his intervention: this way of thinking about his own art, combining with Neoplatonic spiritual symbolism, is particularly evident in the majestic unfinished figures of slaves or captives.
In the later 19th century, sculpture was dominated by Auguste Rodin, who epitomised the art of modelling. But towards the end of the century and the beginning of the 20th, several modernists returned to carving, inspired by the rediscovery of Archaic Greek sculpture and explicitly attracted to the more abstract nature of carving and the Michelangelesque respect for the nature of the material and for the original shape of the block.
These are the influences that are particularly visible in the early work of Constantin Brancusi and Jacob Epstein, with their deliberately block-like forms, and of Henry Moore, although his reclining figures originate with classical rather than Archaic art, and especially with the reclining goddesses of the Parthenon pediment.
At the same time, another kind of sculpture appeared in the 20th century, and that was the art of assemblage, based on neither carving nor modelling but on putting together elements of existing materials, in a process akin to that which Claude Levi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind (1962), would later call bricolage. In colloquial use, the French word means tinkering, but Levi-Strauss adapted it to describe the way the tribal peoples re-arrange the elements of their symbolic worlds without fundamentally changing them.
Assemblage is comparable to collage in the way it reuses materials and elements originally made for some other purpose to express new meanings. Collage may employ everything from pieces of wallpaper or fabric to newspaper mastheads, postage stamps, labels from wine bottles, old photographs or technical diagrams and encyclopaedic illustrations. Different materials evoke a variety of ideas and experiences, and there is a correspondingly huge difference between the careful compositions of Kurt Schwitters and the surrealist narratives of Max Ernst.
Assemblage sculpture, similarly, can be differentiated according to the specificity of meaning inherent in the materials it uses: at one end, classic modernist abstract sculpture was usually made of neutral sheet metal or some very simple fabricated elements; at the other extreme, objet trouve or found object sculpture reuses specific industrial products, like the notorious urinal, with little if any modification.
Between these two poles, some of the most interesting assemblage sculpture employs and repurposes metal forms made for specific industrial uses but that are nonetheless parts, rather than whole objects. And most interesting of all, perhaps, is the sculpture that reuses elements and parts that have already had one life as part of some functional piece of plant or machinery, and that now, obsolete and dismantled, lend themselves to the making of a new whole.
Seen in historical perspective, as we can now ponder the art of the 20th century, the art of assemblage also raises questions about the relation of nature and culture in modern times. What does it mean when we find ourselves no longer making things in a primary sense, modelling them out of clay or carving them out of stone, but instead building them out of bits of industrial salvage? Have modern cities and factories replaced nature? Has art been reduced to the role of a kind of parasitic growth on the fringes of an overwhelmingly industrial and mechanical reality?
These are precisely the processes that we witness in, and the questions raised by the work of Robert Klippel, one of Australia’s most original and inventive sculptors. And one of the most interesting things about his sculptures is the way they evoke natural forms and processes of growth, yet are almost entirely composed of artificial and mechanical elements.
In Klippel’s earliest work, he experimented with carving in stone and wood, and these works are interesting in the fascination they reveal with living shapes, patterns of growth and the sense that matter is never a neutral mass but is composed of living and unfurling organic forms.
In the works of his early maturity, however, Klippel adopts assemblage, and produces complex and delicate structures of metal wire and small metal plates, worked together into exquisite balance and poise. Balance is an intrinsic element of sculpture, and it is in equilibrium, as we see also in the work of Alexander Calder, that unity and harmony are achieved.
In the next phase, however, Klippel takes his work much further by replacing these neutral and thus more easily malleable materials with found industrial elements that are technically harder to handle because of their decided and idiosyncratic shapes, and aesthetically more complex to deal with because of the freight of meanings and associations they bring with them.
For a variety of reasons, and partly because he liked to work on a relatively small scale, the mechanical parts that Klippel adopted for his sculptures came from office machinery such as typewriters and cash registers. The machines to which the parts once belonged had all been discarded because of age, after years busily employed in tasks that once seemed urgent, in communications that were thought important at the time, and they bear a kind of vestigial aura of that lost authority.
Klippel’s assemblages of office machine parts have acquired a further patina of age for us today when their technology has become obsolete. Rows of alphabetic keys, like broken jaws, remind us of the time when we typed with machines that physically struck the paper, printing letters one after the other through an inked ribbon; metal gears, hinged rows of levers and other once functional elements recall a mechanical regime of moving parts, long since replaced by electrical circuits.
This additional distance overlays sculptures made a half-century ago with a veil of nostalgia that is not present in the more timeless work of Calder, but it does not diminish their poetic effectiveness for it serves only to reinforce the theme of lost purpose and forgotten history; and the real aesthetic point of Klippel’s sculptures is to re-create purpose and meaning out of the wreckage of the past.
All art can be considered an act of resistance to death and entropy, but the sense of living in an age of ruins, surrounded by the remains of structures that have lost their original sense, has particularly haunted the West since the Great War, which caused so much unprecedented material destruction but even greater damage to the credibility of social institutions. These absorbing and poetic creations touch us because they restore wholeness to things that had lost both structural and functional integrity. Klippel’s late works are on a very different scale. He had been collecting for some years the wooden patterns that were used to make machine parts. These were large objects whose forms were often hard to interpret, painted in a variety of bright primary colours to distinguish their different sections for the purposes of the factories in which they were to be used.
I recall visiting Klippel’s studio at some point during these years and finding it filled with a daunting quantity of these patterns heaped up in apparent disarray, but I had already seen some of the impressive totem-like constructions that he had made out of them, and I was struck with the conviction that the artist would not rest until each one of these elements had found its place in a new construction.
The exhibition includes a late interview with the artist that confirms this impression. Klippel was not an intellectual artist, and his remarks are not enlightening in a critical or historical sense, but they do offer a fascinating insight into the process of a man obsessed with making, with the inherent potential of materials and with putting things together.
Assembled: The Art of Robert Klippel
TarraWarra Museum Of Art, Healesville, Victoria
Until February 16
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