V22 ASHWINSTREET

OWEN BULLETT

Leafing through a bundle of old press releases, I came across the following summary of an important piece of art history:

‘With Minimalism, sculpture climbed down from the pedestal of classical antiquity to graze on the pastures of the expanded field.’

The indulgent metaphor almost diverts us from a common oversight. It was Donald Judd who said that the majority of work dubbed ‘Minimalism’ was not sculpture but ‘neither painting nor sculpture’. A tacit consensus has nevertheless arisen that Minimalism was not a caesura in sculpture’s development but, rather, a rebirth or metamorphosis, leading eventually (with the critical consolidations of Rosalind Krauss) to the postulation of an ‘expanded field’, in which sculpture forsakes its ‘essential’ characteristics for a series of negative definitions: ‘not architecture, not monument, not landscape’ etc.

The legacy of the expanded field is significant not just for those artists who perpetuate its spatial and material liberty in the form of ‘hybrid’ or ‘pluralist’ practices, but for those who have maintained––or reverted to––a more essentialist sculptural rubric. Few would disagree that a defining characteristic of sculpture (before or after the advent of the expanded field) is the ‘animation’ of the space around it. But of course the more space a sculpture physically occupies, the less space there is to animate. It is often said that the most effective sculptures fill a room by occupying little space (Robert Morris’s geometrical forms were not huge, but were invasive enough to make Michael Fried reach for that famous pejorative ‘theatrical’). What is meant by this is not that they emit a sort of ‘metaphysical energy’ that is pleasingly disproportionate to their mass, but that their mass implies a notional choreography of the space it inhabits. To locate a particular form in a particular area of a space is to imply other, hypothetical forms that might occupy other parts of that space. The viewer must feel that there is such a highly specific relationship between the form and placement of a sculpture that any spatial change should engender morphological changes. Or vice versa: one sculptor may decide that a form initially placed in the centre of room will have to be altered if moved nearer a wall; another may be interested in observing the same form in different spatial contexts. Such choreography pertains to any kind of sculpture, be it anchored to a single point or (to narrow down Krauss’s concept to entirely spatial terms) ‘scattered’ across an expanded field. Sculptors who favour a ‘scattered’ approach actualise this choreography, replacing the hypothetical extension of form with actual extension. Hence, through the proliferation of form, the expanded field becomes a colonised territory, a ‘known’ quantity. For sculptors who favour a more anchored approach, like Owen Bullett, it is a more mysterious hinterland.

During our discussion about the relationship between sculpture and choreography, I initially thought that Bullett’s statement that ‘I want from the outset to animate’ was better underpinned by earlier, readymade-based work (such as Constance and Cavalier, assemblages of familiar objects physically altered to make them balance) than by the recent wood constructions. But a tableau that threatens to topple over at any moment (à la Fischli and Weiss) perhaps ‘animates’ space too straightforwardly. Subsequent pieces ditched the ‘slapstick’ format of the assisted readymade for the more homogeneous materiality of laminated timber, while retaining the temporality that comes with balancing individual components against one another. These components––arcs, parabolas, involutes, squiggles and loops––look like they may have developed from drawings, but in fact often originate directly from discarded pieces of timber and other material. The shape of each large component may, therefore, be thought of as an elaborate extrapolation from a smaller fragment. In other words, Bullett ‘infers’ sculptures from small details.

The problem of how to hold these often convoluted forms in space is solved not just by joining them together, but by introducing elements (stands, trestles, props etc.) that operate functionally, and that provide a starker aesthetic counterpoint. The relationship of these pragmatic ‘engineering’ components to the more ‘stylised’ elements varies. The stout, brutal uprights and crossbars that support the wispy laminated spiral in Dawn Chorus (2006) create an incongruity that feels deliberately perverse; the horizontals of the tall trestles in Just a Moment (2005), on the other hand, are curved to echo the undulations of the surrounding forms; while the more recent Snagged (2006) appropriates an existing architectural detail (the central pillar of Ashwin St. Gallery) as a functional component. The relationship between formal and functional aesthetics is paradigmatically different in Low Council (2005), a high ring-shaped table on which are presented ten maquettes (the functional element now operating as ‘ringmaster’ rather than ‘assistant’); and undergoes a further paradigmatic change in the photographic pieces Hanging Out (2005), which utilises a sculpture as an apparatus for the artist’s quasi-gymnastic manoeuvres (recalling Bruce McClean’s Pose Work for Plinths), and Choreographed Sculpture (2003), for which Bullet had himself photographed leaping off a plinth in a sack lined with dowelling (recalling Chris Burden’s Deadman).

Expanding on this formal-functional dualism, we might say that the functional elements that hold the work in place constitute its ‘deportment’, while the parabolas and loops that (in the case of Dawn Chorus and Just a Moment) deviate from this load-bearing posture constitute its ‘gesture’. In some pieces (Dawn Chorus) there is a complete schism between the former and the latter, whereas in other pieces (Just a Moment) deportment and gesture exert a direct, though still antagonistic, morphological influence on one another. In the performative pieces the antagonism gives way to a sort of playful sparring (exemplified in Hanging Out), and in Choreographed Sculpture there is a harmonious coexistence of deportment and gesture. Enumerated in this order (which is not quite chronological), these pieces seem to represent an important odyssey for Bullett, in that they move from a consideration of how a sculpture might be ‘staged’ to a consideration of how it might be ‘improvised’. The loops and sp irals in Dawn Chorus and Just a Moment may look improvised (in the sense of resembling doodles) but are obviously to lesser and greater extents ‘designed’ for reasons of pragmatism, whereas the actions and results of Choreographed Sculpture and Hanging Out seem to operate both within and against the design of the overall work. The result is a more strident morphological unity.

Whether these pieces constitute formative moments or are merely performative hiatuses remains to be seen. The most recent pieces are not performative but perhaps intuitively capitalise on the greater morphological unity proposed in Choreographed Sculpture and Hanging Out. I say this because they forsake the props, stands, trestles and tables of earlier pieces––what less charitable critics might call ‘ancillary’ elements––in favour of completely integrated methods of support. These pieces are more economical, making less contact with the floor, thus focusing our attention more intently on the points where floor and work meet; their more pared-down formal relationships also show greater interest in how we ‘get’ from one area of the work to another. In fact, the formal teleology is on the whole more exact: in Drawn (2005), Spring (2005) and Blue lookout/Outlook Blue (2006), the geometric and gravitational logic of how something is propped up, of why one element is joined to another, is more self-evident and somehow less arbitrary than in Just a Moment or Dawn Chorus. Drawn’s expressive dynamism is consolidated by just a single element, a gently curving timber that joins a floor-based horizontal to a vertical right-angle. The curve feels like a simple mediation between two more innocuous supporting elements, but of course in a work comprising just three elements, nothing is innocuous. However, the formal relationship between the curved component and the other elements is adventurous enough to risk making them seem innocuous, like rigid bystanders to a more ‘expressive’ geometrical event. It is as though, in this piece, Bullett has looked carefully at one of the relationships between the stylised and functional elements that we find in, say, Just a Moment and attempted to understand it by pursuing it as a single sculptural operation.

Returning finally to the issue of how relevant the ‘freedom’ of an expanded field might be to a sculptor like Bullet, perhaps his desire to ‘animate’ and his interest in choreography have something to do with examining where, exactly, the ‘territory’ of a sculpture ends and where the expanded field begins. That is to say, perhaps this grey area is the spatial zone he seeks to animate. Certain of Bullett’s sculptures seem like embryonic installations; their boundaries are indeterminate, their autonomy neither nuclear nor, despite the arcs and loops, slavishly linear. Their linearity is not so much a way of ‘drawing in space’ as a means of transferring weight and mass from one area to another. Perhaps the reason Bullett uses the word ‘choreography’ to define his procedure is that several sculptures––and I refer particularly to Dawn Chorus, Just a Moment, Drawn and Either Liquid Land or Solid Ocean––feel like ‘finishing positions’ in a dance that may have turned out differently: we look at their forms and feel that they could be otherwise.

Sean Ashton

5th September 2006