Learning to Think: Sculpture as Physical Intelligence (lecture) Sorry but you have unwittingly walked into an experiment: less

spectacle, more workshop. Thanks to all for providing the slides. You may wonder why this talk has such a pretentious title: I probably should have called the talk: learning not to think or to think again. Learning to think: challenge to thinking as a rational 'logical' exercise by making physical propositions that have their own internal necessity. I stand in front of you in fear for two reasons: the reason I went to sculpture was to escape words , or to communicate in a physical way, and in trying to make an account of my work that is not the work, I realise that I am betraying my resolve. That I will not in fact be able to convey to you what sculpture means to me, why I love it, but that is what I want to do or to try to eavesdrop on the conversation one sculpture might have with another, how it communicates amongst its own kind , and then to observe how it might communicate with the world around it and as an extension of that with us. I think of sculpture as something coming up from under the earth , becoming as we all are earth above ground , but retaining a feeling of having been hidden and then revealed , a revealed energy still embedded in matter, and it brings that earthiness with it right back into the middle of the constructed world. Looking at the arena of sculpture: The carved The constructed The modelled Gave way to a hybrid of ways and means. Sculpture as: Souvenir, memory, mnemonic. Object as witness. Marker in space and time. Tableau, actor in narrative. As measure. Self-referential container. As body: beautiful, surrogate, ideal. Revealing the grain or structure in the material. The found object. Formal proposition.

I turned to sculpture because it was a way of confronting the way things were , of getting to know that in material terms. It was for me a challenge to make matter matter in a way that the idealisations of my upbringing did not allow. As a child I was always encouraged to look up: to God, heaven, Daddy, teachers, and escaped into playing with matter , whether that be inging crab apples with a green bamboo ower cane over the garden fence in Hampstead Garden Suburb , sticking them in and icking them off or messing about in the mud of the creek at West Wittering in Sussex. There was regression in this but also a sense of excitement. Material could be moved and you could in a small but real way make a difference. I do not want to elevate this as special , on the contrary it is very commonplace and it is the fact that everyone more or less has made sandcastles that makes the experience of sculpture so potentially universal , we all make bumps and hollows , sitting or gardening. How to link the common experience of delving and dyking into one that can carry more than the experience? How do we enliven the object which was the inspiration of the art of the 80's? How can we make a work that works apart from or against the sense of distraction, fragmentation and loss that surrounds us? How do you make something that resists the availability of the visual and commands attention not to itself but to the witness? Art can reposition itself in the place traditionally associated with the icon, the idol, the fetish, the graven image and then empty itself. Not in order to be powerless but in order to replace certainty with doubt and succour with anxiety. An alternative to the body in sculpture is the body used as object in: Reliquary Mummery Performance Ritual The painted body within non-literate societies. But even within the great trajectory of western art there is a secret thread opposed to the one of the muscle-bound heroism. Cycladic , Barberini form, Michelangelo's Slave, Age of Bronze, Sleeping Muse, Lost Subject.

In all of these works the reexivity is absolutely in evidence. The movements implied in the sculptures are all lost in an internal consciousness of the body, what all of these works share is a consciousness of the body which is internal and subjective, projected onto a relatively passive male body, and in all three cases sexualised: an element of languor which deals with the same reconciliation of the mind/ body divide. The image , or totem , or fetish object is made through a repeated private performance that is now a ritual since its re-enactment is conscious even if compulsive. We think we have abandoned ritual when in fact it is commonplace. Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas: 'The Dinka herdsmen hurrying home for supper, knots a bundle of grass at the wayside, a symbol of delay. Thus he expresses outwardly his wish that the cooking may be delayed for his return. The rite holds no magic promise that he will now be in time for supper. He does not then dawdle home thinking that the action will itself be effective. He redoubles his haste. His action has not wasted time, for it has sharpened the focus of his attention on his wish to be on time (Lienhardt). The mnemonic action of rites is very familiar. When we tie knots in handkerchiefs we are not magicking our memory, but bringing it under the control of an external sign.' Sculpture: the bringing together of being and materiality, a question of balance. And I mean that quite literally. I don't know whether it's a state of grace, or luck, a gift or a necessity, but for me the process of making work and the process of looking at it, is about trying to regain one's balance from a situation of consistent falling into distraction. What is this work that I do?A kind of mad DIY ritual for one in which I am the altar, the sacrice and the celebrant , trying in some pathetic way to make something of my life: to make moment matter , an act of resistance against amnesia and the way that moments have of disappearing into oblivion. So what is this 'physical intelligence'? It has to do with using your body, using your body as a sensor in the production and appreciation of objects in space: your body as an object in space but also an object that contains space. S. Heaney talks of St. Kevin and his roosting bird that took his outstretched arms as he knelt in Glendaloch for a tree and laid her eggs, and tells how he stayed in position till the chicks had hatched and they had own: we have to stay constant and in position till the birds of imagination that settle in our lives have grown and own on their own: constancy.

What can sculpture do? It can concentrate a part of the material world which metaphorically reaches out a hand and says 'be with me a while and live more intensely'. Sculpture for me is a reinforcement of the physical in order that life itself should become more intense. Also from Heaney the twin poles or axes of truth:Talking about the calling of an artist to 'An order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of a poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and out across the water in the scullery bucket: an order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.' In sculpture, the subject of the visible is not illusion but material and in the sculpture that matters to me this materiality becomes a way of thinking, but the thinking is not about the separation of mind from body, but the reafrmation of its most profound connection. Make something plain and simple and secure the bastion of sensation. No art has a divine right to its own existence. Art has to be continually renewed, reinvented and reconsidered in the time in which it nds itself and it's no good just saying that I'm a sculptor because I make sculpture. I was brought up in fear of God, school, Daddy, failure , my anxiety has shifted but not much. I fear not to tell , or make the truth , but where to nd it? I want to believe in redemption through suffering but so far I can only see the suffering , and this is not enough , not enough and not good enough. The subject of sculpture has to be being: what does it feel like to be alive? Set aside all ideas of representation and replace them with reexivity. We have to allow for a heightening of awareness that links the act of perception with being itself. The perception of art is similar to that of nature. When you stand beneath a mature oak, or looking at a glacial lake, or at a mountain, there is a sense of being held in the presence of something that is greater in terms of time and more resilient in terms of space, rooted, present, and the present-ness of that perception enters into your being. I think works of art aspire to this condition of present-ness and so can endow the viewer with this heightened sense of self. Where does the spirit live? Inside or outside things remembered, made things, things unmade. The primary condition of sculpture is stillness. Sculpture has a peculiar kind of stillness. Lessing's description of Laocoon 'A work of art in its co-existent compositions can use

but a single moment of action and must therefore chose the most pregnant one , the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.' Necessary art,i.e. art that answers a need , or are we all the children of art for art's sake?The focus for hope in a time of deciency: to try to celebrate the absoluteness of subjective experience the core of the local , that is less the 'me' of Thatcher's nonsociety than the constituent part of the 'we' that needs re-enforcement. Once you dispense with the idea of narrative, and certainly I would dispense with all narrative, and you have to then reconsider this stillness not in terms of an isolated moment that has to capture the whole dramatic narrative in a single frame, but a moment taken out of the continuum that has to endure, and that duration has to interface with the stream of consciousness of the viewer. To take on as radical the challenge of the necessity of that which has always been found necessary: to be guilty of repeating the commonplace , the body has been in art as long as the human body has been on the planet, and if we are to believe (and I would like to) the most recent nd longer: 250 000 years. What is this stillness in some objects where have we seen it before? I'm always saying that the stillness of sculpture should be like a seed or a bomb, that there should be a fullness about it that allows it to implant itself within our consciousness and some way be the reason for an explosion of new sensation or feeling of aliveness. Why does one agree to do these things, the sleepless nights, the worry about making an account that may not add up , making a fool of oneself and then betraying the real stuff, the stuff that needed doing because it could not be said, had to be shown , showing not telling as a friend once put it , probably it is a useful device to measure.Was it worth doing? Make an account of yourself Do not simply react But make Originate Post-modern re- not true to experience. Stillness in The Sleeping Muse, but also in Walter de Maria's High Energy Bar or Ronnie Horn's copper blocks: examples of the kind of sculptural paradox that stillness can express its opposite, that gravity can express weightlessness, that silence can express a kind of joy, that movement is best encouraged by a static object.

The work I've done in the last four years has continued an essentialism that was in Brancusi and concluded with Andre and Judd. The Insiders are the body reduced to one third of its mass that acts rather like dark matter, matter subject to excessive gravitational force, that becomes like an absolute antithesis to the surrounding space. An Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body - attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture - to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate. The idea is that the pieces carry in concentrated form the trace of the body and its passage through life. These Insiders for me were the last terminal point in a mass/ space dialectic. I was in a crisis. I had to make a radical shift and it came with a realisation that I could make a random matrix and explode the body into a eld activity., and this is the critical thing here: that the body allows itself to be lost in a chaos of projectories that are omnidirectional, and one cannot be certain of whether the body is a condensation, of the energy or the energy is an emanation of the body. This kind of breathing, this kind of in/ out that has been going on in my work for many years for the rst time it became an active ingredient, in other words the viewer perceives a body but in some way also has to make it. The great thing about this that I consider a breakthrough is that while keeping the body still and non-gestural, it is active, energetic, mobile. Cannot be noticed and stay without. Dialogue with past ages: Ishtar Egypt The non-sculpted body in shamanism and incantation. - praying to false idols the shame and disappointment of it there was nothing there Why have we continually erected false gods Why do we need them The totem The graven image Yet I need them Balancing of the inner and the outer world External image of inner state. Nakedness , something to do with standing for truth: base facing the world barely clothed in a skin that contains and yet exposes.

Attempt to use geological time to test technological time. Dialogue: with life And with art With life as it evolves, changes, human and sidereal. And with art as it has been necessary , from prehistoric to now. An art that can endure in time and place (Camus) Fit , tting , not tting Of its time, out of its time. 'A work of art in its co-existent compositions can use but a single moment of action and must therefore chose the most pregnant one , the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.' Lessing Camus: 'Sculpture pays not a little attention to the resemblances, in fact requires them but it does not seek them above all else. What it has sought in the great epochs is the gesture, expression, or the empty glance that contains all gestures and glances around the world. Its intention is not one of imitation but of stabilisation, to catch in one signicant expression all the passing furore of the body and its innite variations of attitude. Only then does it erect on the pediment above the tumultuous city the model, the type, the perfect immobile symbol, which for a moment, cools the incessant fever of man. The lover robbed of love can nally circle round the kouroi and gain for himself that which in the body and visage of man survives every degradation.' http://www.antonygormley.com/ link texts.