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Guy Bar Amotz
DARK MATTER Guy Bar-Amotz’s new work is a refl ection on time and transformation in the act of making sculpture, and a playful exploration of the how sculpture might make a direct, unpretentious address to our everyday life and culture. Both are connected, because Bar-Amotz’s use of techniques of mixed modelling and casting establish a dividing line between objects as they are, and as they become once they are remade as cast versions of themselves. This has its roots in old modernist approaches to cast This has its roots in old modernist approaches to cast sculpture. Rather than sculpt into a single medium such as clay, and then cast from the original in bronze, modernist art found that a cast could be made from an assemblage of objects, and that this assemblage could be reproduced in a single, permanent medium. Bar-Amotz understands this tradition, and exploits the developments in the technology of casting to produce objects in which the detail of the cast is so fi ne that it is sometimes diffi cult to distinguish the cast copy from the original object. But Bar-Amotz uses the new sophistication of his technology not only to collage objects into single, synthetic forms, but also to collage different stylistic approaches to the sculpted object: for example, there are more than a few references in these new sculptures – often almost quotations – to the work of the Italian Futurist sculptor Umberto Boccioni, and the fl owing, dynamic curves to be found in a work such as Unique forms of Continuity in Space (1913). These curves are a recurring element in Bar-Amotz’s new sculptures, and the reference to Boccioni is made even more explicit and humorous in Bottle (2007), which bears close resemblance to Boccioni’s Development of a Bottle in Space (1912). But in Bar- Amotz’s work, there is no pretence at a single, integrated sculptural approach. Instead, the ‘bottle’ form is fused with both non-representational additions, as well as other recognisable objects, such as a metal can and chunks of polystyrene. Bar-Amotz says that is as if Boccioni’s original had exploded, and that some of the pieces had landed and fused with other objects from its immediate environment. Unlike Boccioni’s utopian vision of static sculptural forms representing time and movement in space, Bar-Amotz makes a more pragmatic and sceptical interrogation of sculpture, of how mimesis is confi rmed and confounded by the process of casting. In these new sculptures, various types of sculptural activity are brought together under the same, equalising aesthetic level of the cast surface. Because Bar Amotz excludes all colour from the sculptures, we are left to focus on the tension between the objects as integrated, whole entities, and their identity as ‘after-images’ of the original objects. But we also become aware of how the cast reveals contrasts between forms of sculptural activity: there are objects that we recognise here, but there are also appendages and extensions, fusions and melting transitions between one form and another. There are also, in works like Disco Ball (2007) primitive, unrefi ned additions of what might be clay or Plasticine. And in the grid of squares that cover its surface, a simple iconic ‘smiley’ face has been picked out, as if the artist is satirising the creative impulse to ‘leave his mark’ through making art. Like the sound-speaker/sculptures, the appearance of the human face in sculpture offers a return to a psychological and emotional space that sculpture has for a long time excluded. Brought together in the graphite hardness of the fi nal object, these different types of sculptural intervention are suspended in a sort of conversation about their relative aesthetic values. In Disco Ball, pieces of mirror, now cast in grey, have the same visual value as the other additions, their original qualities now lost, now existing only as a sort of visual memory. The diversity and inconsistency of Bar-Amotz’s sculptural elements, contrasted with the strict monochrome of the cast end-products, (even when combined with found objects) proposes an understanding of how sculpture can be both part of the ordinary world of objects, yet also transcend it. But that movement isn’t achieved by moving away from ordinary life to some secluded or abstract aesthetic space – instead, that movement happens through the transfi guration of ordinary objects, and of different sculptural acts, into things ‘transfi xed’ by the process of moulding and casting. It produces an object which is ‘out of time’, which is why Bar-Amotz talks about seeking to give his sculptures a sense of antique age, making them into objects that refer to the prosaic hereand- now as if it were a seen from the far future. As the products of moulds, taken from objects now lost, Bar-Amotz’s sculptures are memorials to the many possibilities of sculpture. Different histories of sculpture co-exist within them. Stretched across the history of sculpture, they suspend the passing of time, and bring that sense of perpetuity to the ephemeral objects and gestures that they touch. The recent sound-speaker/sculptures, which memorialise and reactivate the memory and the persona of great popular musicians, similarly present a question of memory, action and suspension. Bar Amotz’s sculptures live amongst the objects and the images of the present, but by the fractional movement of translation into the hard, impenetrable matter of the cast, allow us to see those objects and images as projections of a past and future history – the present, only bigger. JJ Charlesworth |
