John Gibbons

Texts, Commissions & Steelworks

JOHN GIBBONS: ABSTRACTION AND BEING HUMAN Visitors entering London’s National Portrait Gallery during the six months between mid-September 2009 and mid-May 2010 were confronted by five mysterious objects on the wall at the top of the long stair leading to the second floor galleries: an installation entitled John Gibbons: Portraits. The small, provocative exhibition was part of the NPG curator Paul Moorhouse’s “intervention series,” a program focusing on what are described as “twentieth-century artists who have developed innovatory approaches to portraiture” that has included such surprising works as a series of overscaled bronze heads by Anthony Caro (Bacon,Warhol). As Moorhouse himself acknowledges, the Irish-born, London-based Gibbons, who since the mid-1980s has steadily declared his presence as one of Britain’s strongest and most original abstract sculptors, might seem an unlikely candidate for a show of portraiture defined in the usual sense. At the National Portrait Gallery, in fact, his enigmatic constructions, poised on narrow, projecting shelf's (brackets), seemed initially to have little in common with the unequivocal images of specific individuals that the museum is known for. Gibbons’s exhibited works – three large, rounded “cages” made of stainless steel and two smaller, dark, chunky “containers” – seemed to posit ideas unrelated to portraiture’s traditional considerations of recognizable traits and overt reference to appearances. Instead, they appeared to explore purely sculptural notions of the relationship of interior to exterior, of volume to surface, and of openness to enclosure. Their varied surfaces, some sleek, some dull, some bearing the traces of effort, bore witness to a dual allegiance to the industrial and the made; this simultaneous dependence on the inherent qualities of metal and the transformative effect of the artist’s touch forced considerations of the importance of materiality and physicality to sculptural expression. Cumulatively, the ideas and questions proposed by Gibbons’s compelling works seemed to belong entirely to the province of abstraction, in general, and, in particular, to the realm of the kind of abstract construction in steel that he has investigated for almost three decades. Yet the five apparently abstract sculptures placed above us against the wall also announced themselves as watchful but unyielding presences. Far from reading as dispassionate or inanimate, they seemed to be eerily alert, acknowledging anyone who approached them, yet at the same time, they appeared to withdraw from the viewer’s gaze, like self-sufficient individuals who turned inward, lost in their own thoughts, challenging all comers to penetrate their secrets. When, on becoming increasingly aware of this latent, elusive anthropomorphism, we sought confirmation (or denial) in the titles of the works, we discovered that the three cage-like stainless steel pieces, all made between 2008 and 2009, were identified, suggestively, as Jane/E/And Still, Your Story/White Blackbird (Olmec), and Gráinne/Saying Hello (Electric Brain). Each of the three was a roughly oval volume just under three feet high – larger than life size, but clearly with the proportions, more or less, of a head. Each of the three had a distinct character, in part because of the idiosyncracies of its form, in part because of its component materials. Jane/E, for example, built of flat straps and planes, was the most elongated and rounded. A relatively smooth, enclosed upper section was caught in a ribbony, open-work structure of narrow, mostly vertical, apparently subtle slats of steel. The elegant form, combined with the delicate hatchings and incisions that animated the surface of the straps, along with a few notes of carefully inlaid copper, seemed strangely feminine, with associations with antique caps and bonnets. Your Story employed similarly scarified but more robust bands and carefully adjusted planes to conjure up a squarer, “jowlier,” more masculine form – as we should have expected from the reference to the massive stone heads of the pre-Columbian Olmec culture in the subtitle; a short, centralized stack of copper plates made the Your Story confrontational and a little truculent. Gráinne, the visually lightest and most open of the three, seemed to have been momentarily formed out of strings of cylindrical stainless steel “beads” of varying dimensions that arc-ed, bent, twisted, zigzagged, and magically stopped, frozen as they described a loose, swelling form. Even though we could penetrate the forms visually – seeing completely through them, in fact, was unavoidable – the sculptures retained a potent sense of exterior and interior. This kind of paradoxical evocation of inside and outside, as well as mass and volume, by means of structures that are, in fact, completely transparent, first appeared as one of Gibbons’s major preoccupations during the late 1990s and the early 2000s. He produced a powerful series of lattice-like works, carefully constructed with layered bars of metal – or, on occasion, of woven flat bands – which, despite being completely penetrable by the eye, had the unignorable presence of monoliths. Often, the literal openness of their construction notwithstanding, we felt constrained to visually enter these uncanny constructions first through the larger, framed openings that Gibbons made in his grids, openings that somehow announced the difference between exterior and interior, underscored the notion that the volume described by the transparent exterior was, in fact, substantial and weighty, and made the distinction between surface and what was contained immensely significant.. Yet even as we acknowledged Gibbons’s cages as fictive masses, we became deeply involved in the nuances of the open grids that enclosed those illusory forms. Variations in the thickness and the spacing of the bars, how things touched, what was in front of what, all assumed enormous importance. Among the most impressive of these sculptures were paired of rectangular, boxy baskets woven out of flat straps of contrasting materials – stainless steel and copper. Like the heads at the National Portrait Gallery, they seemed somehow pregnant with meaning despite their minimalist associations. One of the largest, Om, 2000-02, balanced the “baskets” side by side on a wheeled platform, suggesting contingency and the possibility of change, as well as connecting us to the everyday world, through associations with utilitarian, industrial objects; by contrast, a smaller, tabletop iteration of the theme, As One, 2001-02, evoked ritual objects or reliquaries, perhaps because of its intimate size. Gibbons’s hand was visible in all of these sculptures, meticulously formed, as they were, by virtuoso technique and a certain amount of obsessiveness. Looped ends of elegant, round bars, shifts in layering or in spacing, in works such as Light, 1999-2002, along with slight irregularities in the deployment of the flat metal bands in works such as Om and As One, forced us to consider the physical history of their construction, just as the seams and marks in Gibbons’s heads did. But the more we concentrated on the material qualities of the exteriors of these constructions, the more convinced we became of the reality of their interiors – the chunks of space they delineated. Like the emphatic edge drawing in Jules Olitski’s spray paintings of 1960s, which called attention to the limits of the pulsing expanse of color and asserted the difference between what was the painting and what was not, the bars and bands of Gibbons’s cages stressed the difference between the visible space within the lattice boundary and what was outside of it – that is to say, between what was the sculpture and what was not. Large sculptures of this type recalled both standing stones and human presence. Just as the open volumes at the National Portrait Gallery clearly asserted themselves as heads, as well as abstractions, stalwart constructions like Rhythm/Play and Until, both 2000, conjured up the body. Upright, confrontational, proportioned like massive torsos, they demanded that we considered them as personages as much as, or more, than objects. Other works of this period, similarly proportioned and similar in scale, but horizontally oriented, such as The Crib, 1995-96, and To Be, 1996-97, provoked recollections of beds, biers, or ritual furnishings of some kind. Occasionally, Gibbons underscored the implicit narrative of such works, most dramatically in The Crib, when he placed a rough hewn wooden stool beside an ambiguous hooded structure, unequivocally invoking human activity and habitation, and sounding a bracing “wrong” note of the anecdotal, certainly of the unexpected. Gibbons has said that he was wary of revealing such allusions for a long time, using them as part of his process, to animate the evolution of his sculptures, but resisting making them wholly visible. Eventually, however, he felt compelled to allow them to become explicit. Once he “opened the door,” as he put it, he found the enriched layers of meaning that attached themselves to his sculptures to be, paradoxically, liberating, It was as if acknowledging the multivalent sources of the things that he made gave him permission to tap into still more deeply felt experience, both emotional and perceptual. By the mid-2000s, he intensified his exploration of ways of alluding to the corporeal and the physical in sculptures that were as opaque and seemingly impenetrable as the caged and woven works were transparent: irregular masses, apparently created by wrapping and folding intractable sheets of stainless steel. (The sense of “shrouding” and “protecting” inherent in these works, as well as their intricacy, may have had something to do with the fact that the stainless had originally belonged to David Smith, a sculptor Gibbons reveres and whose “delicate” touch he has often praised.) In the stainless “packages,” Gibbons’s masterly ability to manipulate his materials came into play, yet we were engaged by the delicacy with which the famously recalcitrant metal was scored, bent, or pieced together only after we had begun to ponder the suggestion of something invisible and unidentifiable contained within. In small works of this type, such as A Thousand Dreams, 2005-07, or She Said/…., 2007-08, it is impossible to guess at the contents of the enigmatic “parcel;” the addition of colored vinyl “strapping” on some of these sculptures intensified the sense of containment and added an unexpected element of both literalness and discord, like the stool in The Crib. Larger works of this period were both more forthcoming and more explicit. Tall, vertical, opaque sculptures such as Presence, 2005-07, with its form-enhancing belt, insisted on being read simultaneously as vaguely architectural and as slim, armless torsos. Their proportions and orientation made them body-like, absent any literal representation of the body, in same way that the portrait heads were about specific individuals without referring to their appearance. Like the transparent works that preceded them and the allusive “portraits” that followed them, Gibbons’s opaque, impenetrable sculptures also forced us to think about the difference between exterior and interior – about volume as something defined and contained by unpredictable structure. The installation at the National Portrait Gallery made clear that this kind of oblique reference and insistence on the metaphorical possibilities of interior space has long been part of Gibbons’s practice, even when he seemed fully engaged by abstraction. Mounted below the large, open heads were two small, angular sculptures made of dark, patinated steel, dated 1981-1984, unequivocally labeled with the names of Gibbons’s children, Portrait of Sharon and Darragh’s Place. Rather than suggesting heads or bodies, they insistently recalled reliquaries and tabernacles, or miniaturized buildings, with all abrupt transitions and sharp junctures softened into subtle transitions. At the time, Gibbons was making large, enclosed sculptures like confessionals or shrines, scaled to the body, impossible to enter and impenetrable to the eye but redolent of secret, inhabited places within; their vaguely architectural vocabulary could be read as alluding to the church furnishings of his Catholic upbringing in the West of Ireland. As Gibbons explains it, in making Darragh’s Place, he didn’t intend from the start to make a sculpture about his son, but rather recognized qualities in the evolving work that made him think about it as a head of the boy – “a container,” as Gibbons puts it, “for his personality.” “I’ve been thinking about the head as a volume, as a container for ideas and thoughts, a container for experience,” Gibbons told me recently. The titles of his recent abstract volumes at the National Portrait Gallery turn out to be quite literal; each sculpture was conceived – or at least recognized – as embodying a particular person, evoking a particular personality. Yet it would be disingenuous to deny that, certainly at first acquaintance, the formal differences between the small “reliquary” portraits of Gibbons’s children on view a the National Portrait Gallery and the generously proportioned portrait heads seemed greater than their similarities of intent. At the same time, tracing the evolution of Gibbons’s work makes it clear that the acknowledgement of human presence, whether by allusion, metaphor, or implication, turns out to provide a continuous thread, from the “confessional,” “shrine,” or “reliquary” sculptures of 1980s to the cage-like heads of recent years. The proportions of the human body inform of almost all of Gibbons’s efforts, obliging us to consciously or unconsciously measure his sculptures against our awareness of ourselves. This animating sense of human dominance manifests itself in even the most architectural and seemingly non-referential of Gibbons’s sculptures, not only the “confessionals” of the 1980 but also a series of generous, extended constructions distilled from industrial structures – walkways, railings, entrances, walls, and the like – that devolved from them in the early 1990s and triggered the cages. All of these works resonate with memories of our gestures, the length of a stride, the reach of an arm, so it comes as no surprise that Gibbons has says that his work, however apparently abstract or concerned with the physical and formal aspects of making three-dimensional objects, has always been “a reflection on the nature of being human.” The works at the National Portrait Gallery made this more explicit than anything Gibbons has done in the past and make us eagerly await what he will do in the future. Karen Wilkin New York, March 2011

Commissions

Steelworks

Jindal Art Foundation, first international artists residency at the Jindal Iron and Steel Company, Mumbai, India.

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