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Contradictions in Modern Sculpture: Still Motion

A short essay comparing two modern sculptural works: Rodin's The Walking Man(1905) and Richard Serra's T.E.U.C.L.A. (2001). Form and context are thoroughly explored, and conjectures regarding meaning proposed.

Serra's T.E.U.C.L.A. towers before the viewer, a solid sheet of rolled steel, coiled imperfectly to form one of Serra's "Torqued Ellipses." The expanse of matte and evenly flattened metal protrudes from the sand into which it is lodged, the rust of its surface starkly contrasted by the sterile white and radiant metallic of the Broad Art Center in the background. Its tilted cylindrical volume escapes full closure, as a vertical gap provides access to its hollow interior, allowing the viewer to experience an altogether different perspective. Rodin's Walking Man represents a male torso devoid of head and arms, with its muscles tensed as the right leg strides forcefully forward, lunging solidly down upon a slab of bronze stone. Pitted and gouged, its cast bronze surface wavers between smoothed definition and unfinished terrain, its deep and sordid color eerily reflecting the light that filters through the trees. Elevated slightly above the undulating lawns of the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, it stands isolated on a horizontal grid of concrete and brick.

In both pieces the tension between movement and stability is a dominant theme resultant of the artist's chosen medium. The material used to construct T.E.U.C.L.A. drastically opposes rising flight and transitory movement. It is the fatiguing heaviness and sheer bulk of the medium that create a sense of fixed mass. The rust patina of the thick steel walls of T.E.U.C.L.A. clearly indicates the material from which the work is formed, immediately associating the piece with the weight and strength of metal and industry. Our logical preconceptions lead us to conclude an impossibility of movement based on our knowledge of the uses of steel. As products of the twentieth century we inherently equate permanence and solidity with bridges and skyscrapers, metallically forged and fortified, unmovable and indestructible. This association is not unfounded, for as such functional structures have been created by the mechanization of industry, so too is Serra's rolled steel T.E.U.C.L.A. What lies before us as art, is in fact a product that is engineered, calculated, and formed by the machine. Machines that are themselves engineered, calculated, and calibrated. This unwavering process yields a work that is stable, contained, solid, and immobile, the result of scientific calculation. At the same time however, T.E.U.C.L.A.'s medium aids in suggesting upward motion. The immaculate uniformity of the rolled steel expanse seemingly sprints toward verticality. The smoothness of the surface facilitates the eye's unhindered movement upward across the steel walls, while sharp contours cut vertically into space, making the structure appear sleek, aerodynamic, and capable of frictionless motion.

Rodin's chosen medium and his consequent production process are contributors to the interplay of permanence and motion present in The Walking Man. Like the immobility implied by the weight of rolled steel in Serra's work, Rodin's use of cast bronze infuses his sculpture with an indisputable sense of solidity and resilience. Once again the association between industrial metal and irreconcilable permanence help to reinforce stability and stasis within the work. Unique to Rodin's piece however, is the sculpture's brazen resistance to the effects of the elements. While Serra's T.E.U.C.L.A. sports a coat of premature rust, Rodin's Walking Man resiliently gleams despite exposure to the outdoors, suggesting sheer indestructibility and a firm defiance of the wearing effects of time and movement. The impression of stasis is contradicted by the rapid motion and transcendent movement implied by the mode of production employed by Rodin. Rodin initially sculpted a quick clay "sketch" from which a plaster cast was formed, which preceded the final cast bronze sculpture. Instead of smoothing the roughly hewn surface of the sculpture, Rodin opted to leave the finished piece incised, cracked and jagged, the marks of production clearly visible in the completed work. Such texture recalls the method of the Impressionist painters, the visible signs of the medium (brushstrokes) overtly present in the final product. These techniques are more than just a testimony to artistic labor, and serve ultimately to capture the fleeting moment and transitory movement. Rodin's Walking Man, in a similar manner, displays visible aspects of sculpture, its artistic process heavily alluded to in the surface of the work. This texture promotes the illusion of rapid formation and launches the figure into action, granting motion to the stable legs of sturdy bronze.

Form, here discussed as composition, lighting and spatial setting, is another venue through which the contradictory interactions between movement and stasis unfold. T.E.U.C.L.A. is dominated by a composition that epitomizes movement, shift and volatility. Viewed from the west the sculpture appears as a slanted cylinder, a Pisa transposed, while viewed from the south it appears to be perfectly symmetrical, the mouth of a funnel half consumed by the earth. Such vastly different structures emerge out of the same physical object, merely by a rotation of ninety degrees. Such a phenomenon suggests that this heavy structure of immobile steel is in fact an embodiment of change and movement, ungrounded and impermanent. The very ease with which the steel seems to bend suggests the capacity for continuous movement and unrestrained fluidity. It is as if we are viewing an object that is dynamic and evolutionary, not restrained and anchored, as it first appears to be. This movement can almost be seen a precarious balancing act, the sculpture itself an object on the verge of toppling over. Before the viewer it wavers and falters, barely evading complete collapse.

This sense of movement and fragile balance is further enforced by T.E.U.C.L.A.'s interactions with its surroundings. Flirtation with natural light and interplay with the Broad Center's architecture create further ironies between stasis and movement. Soaring expanses of steel reach obliquely upward, juxtaposed by the architectural grid of the Broad Center, its horizontal corridors and vertical east end stand in contrast to the diagonals and undulations of Serra's creation. The grid reinforces the perception that the sculpture is one dominated by geometric perfection and symmetry, making the realization that it is not, even more shocking. The curvilinear nature of T.E.U.C.L.A. is exposed and emphasized through the juxtaposition of its mathematical shortcomings and the grid of its backdrop. An ironic feud erupts between its apparent strength and its implied instability. The surface bows inward at places that should bastion the structure against its own weight, creating subtle regions of darkness. These shadows highlight points of weakness, allowing the viewer to slowly realize that this frontal assault of strength, dominance and unfaltering stability is little more than a masquerade. Light and shadow also call attention to the sculpture's hollow interior, visible through the oblique vertical slit down the southwestern rim. The crevice curves downward revealing the ebony chasm of the interior, pulling the eye into a hollow abyss that is empty, unfortified, and insubstantial. These attributes suggest that T.E.U.C.L.A. is nothing more than a two dimensional plane, delicately coiled and precariously balanced on its paper-thin edge.

T.E.U.C.L.A.'s form, examined in terms of composition and spatial interaction, overwhelmingly emphasizes the implied movement of the structure, while the form of Rodin's Walking Man acts to affirm the domination of permanence over the fleeting and the transitory. The composition embraces the perfect geometry that Serra's work desecrates; the elongated sturdy legs form a triangle, anchoring the subject and forming the basis upon which a cylindrical torso rests. The figure lacks both head and arms, as though Rodin has rejected any forms that would tamper with the balance between the mass of the torso and the support of the legs. The limbs that do appear are anchored securely in the base of the sculpture, their movement inhibited by the mass of rock to which they adhere. Without the interference of upper limbs, there can be no implication of swinging motion or rhythmic step. Though the verb in the piece's title suggests the constant change and continual action that is the act of walking, in actuality the sculpture embodies a timeless stance. This enduring pose merely alludes to the repetitive, physical and fleeting act it represents, affirming its presence as something that is innate and unchangeable. Rodin has managed to render the fleeting as everlasting, the temporary as timeless and change as static.

The Walking Man interacts with the spatial setting it inhabits, reflecting natural light and incorporating the landscape, further perplexing the viewer with contradictions between movement and stability. Melancholy light filters through the trees that surround the work, its luster further dulled by the darkness of the bronze sculpture. Shadow harshly exposes the deeply modeled nature of the forms, highlighting the flexed muscles of the legs and the strained physique of the torso. These attributes point to an exertion of force, a display of strength, and a mastery of nearly irrepressible energy. It creates an impression of solid weight, immobile, sturdy and unarguably permanent, but at the same time hints at combustibility, instability and volatility. Further breakdown of the notion of strength and permanence occurs when the sculpture is viewed in context of its spatial surroundings. It rapidly becomes an emblem of movement as the grid of the pavement it stands upon reinforces flow, continuity and constant change. As the eye follows the lines that run parallel to The Walking Man's stride, it equates the continual linear motion of the line, with the continual linear motion of a walking man.

In summation, the pieces by Serra and Rodin create perplexing contradictions between the eternal and the ephemeral, the stable and the fragile, as well as the permanent and the volatile. Through both its medium and form Serra's T.E.U.C.L.A. exists as a structure of harnessed strength and solid mass, but contrastingly escapes the stability of geometric forms and exhibits precarious balance and disguised fragility. In a similar fashion Rodin's The Walking Man exudes, through its form and composition, a timeless quality and static existence, but simultaneously implies movement and constant change. It is a modernism of uncertainty and fraudulence that is presented by Rodin and Serra, an age in which power and strength thinly veil weakness and fragility.