Coming Across a "Modern Sculpture"

This post is about Sir Anthony Caro, an English abstract sculptor who was born on the 8th of March, 1924 (exactly 62 years before I was born on the same day in 1986). He is widely viewed as Britain’s greatest living sculptor.

He has used a variety of materials throughout his career, from steel, silver, bronze, wood, clay, terracotta and stoneware to collage and paper. He also used a wide range of found objects, from pebbles in his early figurative works to ploughshares, buoys and railway sleepers. He admitted, ‘Sculptors are scavengers.’ Barker, 2004, page 186. Most of his works are assemblies of “found” industrial objects such as I-beams, steel plates and meshes. He generally welds or bolts them together to create his compositions.

Below you can see some of his works:

Slow March (1985)

Steel, painted gold & red

Milbank Steps (2004)

Steel, rusted

Not So Flats (1975)

Steel, rusted & varnished

 

To see more of Caro's work click here!

The tribute work is not done by me this time. I found it in front of a mall called Kentpark in Ankara. I don’t exactly know who made this “installation” since it is done by workers of one of the stores. I guess pieces are going to be used as shelves in that store so the work is “an assembly of found industrial objects” like most of Caro’s works. I will try to find that store and take some pictures when they are in use (their actual use) then update this post. So here are the pictures of the anonymous work:

And some details of the "installation":

This installation made me think how easy to make modern sculptures and this is not a disdain of modern art. On contrary, it is exaltation because the ability to observe and the courage to see the esthetics of the simple are what make art, art.

Update: I found the store which used those hexagons. It is Harvey Nichols' Kentpark store which will open its doors today (June 7, 2010) Unintentionally, it sounded like an advertisement. So here are the photos of vitrines:   

MINIMUM with SUNFLOWER

One of the major sculptors in Turkey, Şadi Çalık, will be our second guest.

The reason why I make a tribute to Çalık is that I had great times under one of his sculptures. All of the students of Middle East Technical University (METU) know that sculpture because it is like a meeting place to relax between some boring lectures. The sculpture which is realized in 1966 is called METU Ataturk Memorial. It is a milestone for Turkish sculpture because it is the first abstract style Ataturk memorial in Turkey.

And for those who are not familiar with the Ataturk Memorial, here is a picture of another well-known sculpture of him: Galatasaray 50th Anniversary Monument, in the shape of an arrow reaching to the sky, a symbol of development and progress and a memorial in witness of three generations of Istanbul inhabitants. In this work his use of lines as a material can be seen. His obsession for using line and the idea that it could express many things is a feature of his understanding of clarity, lightness and volatility.

His work "Minimum" which he created in 1957 will be the main inspiration of this post’s work. Şadi Çalık explains his Minimum as “the worth of a single line in space”. For this tribute, I used a dry sunflower which I’ve picked from our garden. When I picked them up I didn’t know how exactly I was going to use them but I loved them because they were so straight and stiff. They had still their roots on them but no leaves. They looked very potent. I think this immediate attraction was because of the power of a single line as Şadi Çalık mentioned before as “the worth of a single line in space”.

Below you can see the original "Minimum" of Şadi Çalık and my "Minimum with Sunflower" respectively:

The abstract expressionist painter Hans Hartung and the German sculptor Uhlmann interested him. He admired Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo and Max Bill for their movement towards natural science. Later he became interested in Rothko and Fontana, and Mary Vieira, whom he saw at the 1967 Venice Biennale, had a profound influence on him. Here you can see works of Hans Hartung and Lucio Fontana, respectively:

  

ENDLESS COLUMN with EGGS

Constantin Brancusi’s well known sculpture “Endless Column” will be the first art work which I will reproduce with some different materials. Let me first tell the process:

One morning, while I was having my breakfast, eating soft-boiled eggs, I put one of the shells on the other. Then I just realized how it resembles a module of the Endless Column. That was the morning which I have started to collect egg shells to build my Endless Column of Eggs. This was a great opportunity to think about and get familiar with Brancusi’s work. I was feeling that I was having my breakfast with Brancusi. In two weeks I had about 30 egg shells which was enough for the 16,5 modules column.

The original sculpture was erected in Târgu Jiu, Romania on 27 October 1938 and it had a restoration between 1998 and 2000. One of the things I have learned about the sculpture during this process was that it was made as a tribute to the young Romanians who died in World War I, and is a stylization of the funerary pillars used in Southern Romania.

Here you can see the original Endless Column by Brancusi:

And here is my Endless Column With Eggs inspired by Brancusi's:

Column has been an inspiration for lots of sculptors. As an example the work “Philosophy of Time Travel”, of five artists based in Los Angeles who studied together at California Institute of the Arts (also known as CalArts) — Edgar Arceneaux, Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros, Rodney McMillian and Matthew Sloly, can be shown. In an article at The New York Times it is said that “Their goal was to strip the Endless Column from its context as a Modernist World War I memorial and drop it into a different time and space: to present new, liberating meanings and the possibility of nonstandard histories.”

The sculpture is not only an inspiration for sculptors, but for all artists. For example György Sándor Ligeti, a composer born in Transylvania, Romania, named his “Etude for Piano Solo no.14” as Infinite Column after the sculpture. The Etude is composed within the proportions of the Endless Column (16,5 modules), as a spiral of endlessly rising musical scales. Here you can listen the etude and see some pictures of the original Endless Column: