Sculpture That Spooks

Phyllis Kulmatiski  , who makes beautiful figurative sculptures inspired by Romanesque art, posted an  article by Michael Kimmelman in which he laments the near-oblivion into which traditional European pre-modern sculpture has fallen.

Baudelaire seems to have put his finger on what bothers us moderns about figurative sculpture when he called it “Carib art,” by which he meant art that is too close to its primitive, religious, animistic roots.  Somewhere inside our brains, we all still carry  the three-year-old who endowed dolls and teddy bears with souls and personalities, just as we still carry the paleolithic carver who believed that his round little "Venuses" had the power to ensure the fertility of bison, reindeer, and women.

Because three-dimensional figures touch us at a level we would rather not acknowledge, we turn away from them, and won't have them in the house.  Interestingly, we are more comfortable with sculptures in the garden--that middle ground between the wildness of Nature and the civilized space of the house--where mystery and imagination are still allowed to have some play.

Me, I am not spooked by figurative sculpture.  In Spain in the 1950s, religious sculptures were household objects as common as soup tureens.  Every room of the house had its appropriate statue.  A crucifix hung above my parents' bed;  a wooden carving of the Sacred Heart presided over the dining room;  a terracotta Immaculate Conception stood on my dresser.  At Christmas, our Nativity scene included, in addition to the Holy Family, tiny painted clay figures of kings, shepherds and peasants with their retinues of camels, sheep, cows, geese, chickens, and pigs.

Next door to our apartment building there was a statuary maker, and I could watch the progress of his work every day on my way to and from school.  On Sunday, in church, there were statues everywhere, and I used to imagine that at night, when the great doors were closed and the church was dark except for the lamp that burned perpetually in front of the Blessed Sacrament, Saint Joseph with the infant Jesus in his arms came down from his plinth and went to visit his wife on her altar, and Saint Francis and Saint Theresa walked around in their brown habits, talking quietly and breathing the incense-saturated air.

No wonder Luther banned sculptures from his church.

Not long after I was married, as my father lay dying, my mother took down the crucifix above their bed--the crucifix, she reminded me, under which I was conceived--and gave it to me, to hang over my marriage bed.  As crucifixes go, this one was pretty subdued.  Both the cross and the corpus were metal, and the look was stylized and vaguely Byzantine.

I thanked my parents and put the crucifix in my dresser drawer, under a stack of sweaters, where it lies to this day.  I never could bring myself to hang it over our bed.  I found it...spooky.

Adventures In Self-Promotion

If I've heard this once I've heard it a hundred times, from art biz gurus great and small:  if artists and writers don't take charge of promoting their own work, they are condemning themselves to a sales record equal to that of VanGogh during his lifetime (namely, zero).  And, the gurus add, with Twitter, Facebook, and all the wonders of the web within easy reach of everyone, those who fail to advertise have only themselves to blame if their paintings, pots, sculptures, symphonies, novels, and lyric poems are left to molder in attics and basements, their disposal one more post-funeral imposition on the hapless heirs.

I am happy to report that I have spent the last three weeks engaged in intensive self promotion, partly out of consideration for my heirs, and partly because it gives me real pleasure to see something I have made go to a good home.  The first week I spent getting ready for Open Studio, polishing and attaching bases to my sculptures, taking photos, inventing titles and prices, designing a display, packing up, setting up, buying (not baking--there's only so much I can do) dozens of cookies for the potential visitors, and making and posting signs to direct said visitors to the venue I was sharing with a friend.

Two of my pieces went to new homes, fewer than in years past, but what can you do with these gas prices.  One ("Small Meditator," see below) was bought by a man for his youngish but extremely frail-looking wife.  He handed it to her with a tearful kiss and said "Now you can have her with you every morning when you meditate," and she leaned on him and closed her eyes.

When Open Studio was over, I removed the roadside signs, packed everything into the car, unpacked and stored it at home, and hurried to do minimal maintenance on the garden, which had exploded over the hot weekend.

I also took a nap.

After that, as directed by the gurus, I made a new "artist page" on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/EulaliaBenejamCobb.artist.writer).  To do this, I had to retrieve the pictures of everything I'd ever made, sort them into categories, and select the ones to post.  This took me, literally, days to accomplish.

But the wondrous promise of this "artist page" was that, if I got 25 people to "like" it, it could then become a URL that would make my work accessible to the entire planet.  This meant that I had to go through my list of Facebook Friends, select the ones whose e-mail address I knew, and send them a bizarre little message asking them to "like" my new page.

In 24 hours, I had most--but not all--the "likes" I needed.  So I posted a status update on Facebook sort of begging people to "like" the page.  The response got me more than the required number of "likes," but did not eliminate the feeling that I was taking advantage of my friends.  True, asking for a click is not like asking for a kidney, but still....

After I get the new Facebook URL set up, I'll need to find someone to spiff up my ancient website, which when it is done will require some more trumpeting on my part.  Meanwhile I must be sure to sign up for "Foliage Open Studio" in October, and Art on the Green in September.  Must not miss deadlines for shows at Southern Vermont Arts Center or the Chaffee Center for the Arts, either.

All this--especially the vision of thousands of artists all over the globe simultaneously revamping their websites, getting friends to like their Facebook pages, and waxing eloquent about their work--was making me feel pretty discouraged with art as a business.  It was time to get back to the long-neglected real thing.  I went down to my basement studio, where the Madonna of the Bats (in honor of the East Coast's endangered bats) awaited.

I pushed the clay around, fixed her smile and her left knee, and gave her a couple of bats for company.  Three hours later, feeling much better, I came upstairs, washed the clay off my hands, and wrote this post.

Speaking Of Foxes...

In yesterday's post I wrote about the fox that lives at the bottom of the front field and occasionally steals one of our chickens.  Here is a clay sculpture I made recently, inspired by our fox.  I have titled it, with heavy irony, "Guardian."