Last week Pete posted a great text from Gilbert Simondon that uses the ‘press molding’ technique to picture how a form is always also a gesture.
‘…the gestures contained in the form meet the becoming of the matter and modulate it.’
I thought I would respond to this idea with an image of a projection screen from Julian Rosefeldt’s nine-screen installation Asylum (courtesy of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art) in preparation for our next meeting on Wednesday 6th December at 11.00 am in Graduate Studio Northumbria (GSN). Do come along.
‘…the gestures contained in the form meet the becoming of the matter and modulate it.’
I thought I would respond to this idea with an image of a projection screen from Julian Rosefeldt’s nine-screen installation Asylum (courtesy of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art) in preparation for our next meeting on Wednesday 6th December at 11.00 am in Graduate Studio Northumbria (GSN). Do come along.
Simondon’s idea brought to mind a discussion about casting in ‘The Raising of Lazarus’ (1996), an essay about the work of Anthony Gormley by the art historian Stephen Bann. His interest in the semiotics of visual culture leads him to puzzle over the ‘ontological communion’ that appears to unite forms that are molded with the cast reproductions made possible by molding techniques.
I have written about Bann’s ideas in relation to Rosefeldt’s ‘Asylum’ (2004) in which immigrants are shown standing amidst plaster casts of Græco-Roman sculptures of the kind once seen in academies and museums across the Western world. The sense of dislocation represented in Rosefeldt’s image seems to sum up our loss of any ‘communion’ with a Classical past. None of us can stand amidst cast collections and be meaningfully connected any more. I like the way in which this argument is based on practice-based knowledge. Those who have done a lot of casting have a perspective on the discussion. Here is an extract from my article ‘The pleasure of the holder’ (2017).
Sculptors do not expect the reproductive qualities of set plaster to bear any resemblance to those of the freshly mixed liquid handled by studio technicians. The sensuous weight of a bucket of plaster at the point it is ready to pour (just a little thicker than single cream) is very unlike the hardened matter that emerges when the mold is removed … At each stage this extraordinary casting material has little personality of its own, it simply takes on the characteristics of any surface it comes into contact with. Indeed, one could say that plaster displays an inherent inertness, a laziness that prevents it from maintaining its own qualities. This reproductive capacity has radical implications for our present-day dislike of inherited likeness, it involves prosthetic efficacy – in other words, it is not semiotic at all.
References:
Bann, S. (1996) ‘The Raising of Lazarus’, in Gormley, A. (1996) Still Moving: works 1975-1996, Tokyo: Japanese Association of Art Museums.
Dorsett, C. (2017) ‘The pleasure of the holder: media art, museum collections and paper money’, International Journal of Arts and Technology.