william tucker drawings by david cohen

The Meaning in Mass
William Tucker’s Drawings after Sculpture

by David Cohen

“We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects. Cézanne even claimed that we see their odor.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty. [1]

“Aesthetic appreciation appears to be an exercise in the perception of an outside structure that elicits strongly and pleasurably a perception of an inner structure.” – Adrian Stokes. [2]

William Tucker Untitled 1991 charcoal on paper, 47x42 inches,
courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York, photo Michael Korol

William Tucker does not draw from life. He draws from sculpture–-his own. He sculpts, in turn, from an apprehension of life that is not limited to observation. “Apprehension” is to be preferred to “perception” or “vision” in Tucker’s case because its root is in the Latin verb “to lay hold of,” in contrast to so much of our vocabulary of understanding that privileges the “noblest of the senses,” in Descartes’ phrase, the eye. See (sic) how often one talks of “speculation,” “focus,” “scope,” “illumination,” or so forth, without necessarily needing to imply optical meanings. Tucker’s art, in whatever medium, makes a compelling case for taking in the world with the totality of one’s senses. Indeed, it goes further, demanding of appreciant and maker alike a fusion of thinking and feeling that snubs the classic Cartesian separation of body and mind.

And yet, a Tucker demands to be seen. It is true that a blind person would get more from one of his sculptures than from most other objects in a gallery, but a Tucker drawing--framed and sealed behind its sheet of glass--also has tactile values, ones that are exclusively for the sighted. We look at it, but the message our sighting sends to the brain is haptic, to do with touch. The eye is forever searching for internal objects to validate what it sees. In the case of sensual, abstract art like Tucker’s, which is not in the obvious first instance depictive, the appeal is to muscle memory more than it is to the memory bank of images. The corresponding internal object appropriate to a William Tucker, in other words, is itself visceral rather than flat, 3D rather than filmic.

William Tucker Study for Victory, #4, 2000, charcoal on paper, 26 x 22¼ inches,
courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York, photo Michael Korol

What an adventure the eye has had at the hands of the twentieth-century avant-garde? The doors of perception were unlocked one moment with a magic key, and then kicked off their hinges the next. As painting freed itself from mimesis in the first decades of the last century, explosions occurred in the possibilities for color, tonal relationship, the actuality of paint, the physicality of surfaces. But at the same time, this “liberation” unleashed iconophobic and anti-aesthetic forces that militated against this newly accentuated visuality. One art scene produced Matisse and Duchamp.

Modern French thought, it has been propose, spawned a “denigration of vision.” [3] That force, eventually going global, has animated various deconstructive tendencies in art that culminated, it could be argued, in the “dematerialization” that characterized the 1960s, with minimalism and conceptual art. These in turn marked the demise of modernism and opened the Pandora’s box of postmodernism. High modernism, seen this way, was the last triumphant splurge of the eye. Clement Greenberg, its chief theorist, preached a gospel of pure opticality. Interestingly, in his aesthetic scheme, the physical, three-dimensional medium of sculpture actually threatened to supercede the eyes-only medium of painting as the torchbearer of modernism: “The human body is no longer postulated as the agent of space in either pictorial or sculptural art; now it is eyesight alone, and eyesight has more freedom of movement and invention within three dimensions than within two.” [4]

The sculpture William Tucker has produced since the mid-1980s, when his art underwent a radical transformation, might almost be read as a conscious simultaneous rebuttal of two extremes: the ultra-opticalism represented by Greenberg and the anti-material, anti-fetish stance of conceptual art (which is antagonistic towards all sensuality, perceptual or otherwise). The characteristics of Tucker’s art became weightedness, bodiliness, surface texture, gravity, hapticity, encrustation, ambiguity. Gravity, in particular, rebutts formalist sculpture, with it fondness for drawing lines in space and its insistence on planar values.

Greenberg credited Rodin with bringing sculpture back from the grave, but saw the monolithic aspect in his work as the swan-song of the Renaissance tradition. Illusion was overturned, in painting, by collage, which in turn spawned a progressive new direction towards constructed sculpture, a tradition pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez and brought to paradigm-shifting preeminence in the late 1950s by David Smith and in the 1960s by Anthony Caro. William Tucker trained, briefly, under Caro at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, at a time when Caro was beginning his experimentation with welded, colored, open forms. Tucker went on to establish his own reputation with stark, pared-down minimal sculptures, favoring new materials like fiberglass in his polychromatic inventions. Furthermore, he played a leading role in formulating the theory of modernist sculpture with his seminal book, based on lectures delivered in the late 1960s, The Language of Sculpture (1974). This work consolidated an early modernist canon of Degas, Matisse, Duchamp, Brancusi, and Picasso in terms that effectively underwrote the formalist developments of the 1960s. Thus, all the more startling was his conversion, therefore, in the early 1980s, from so resolutely cerebral, abstract, dehumanized, and exclusively optical a modernism to an awkwardly romantic, modeled, feeling-imbued idiom nestled somewhere between the postmodern and the primordial. The spectacle, almost, was of a modernist scribe blinded on the road to Damascus.

But, of course, things are never so simple. It is true that his adoption of bronze, with all its connotations of tradition, the expressive handling of this material and of plaster, the renewed centeredness in his work, its ambiguous figural references, its new humanism, all seemed to tie in with the neo-expressionism and figuration of the period. Comparisons were made with the return to a personal iconography of Philip Guston, a coincidence now reinforced by the fact that Tucker’s New York gallery, David McKee, also represents the Guston estate.

Closer examination of the transition in Tucker’s career begins to reveal all sorts of anticipations in the earlier work of the switch to come, however, as this early work turns out not to have subscribed, after all, to the orthodox Greenbergian formalism that might have been assumed. In particular it is drawing that cements certain commonalities between the Tucker of pristine, geometric fabricating days and the Tucker preoccupied with “mass, substance, the solid core” (his own words).

If drawing provides visual clues, a philosophical attitude—existentialism--clinches the unity of Tucker’s career. The titles of some of his 1970s works relate to his reading of Kafka and to brooding, tragic themes: The Prisoner, Portrait of K, and (referring to the painting by Cézanne) House of the Hanged Man. While still a modernist in many key respects, Tucker revealed a Gustonian dissatisfaction with the superciliousness of the aesthete’s life. Just as Guston excoriated himself for fiddling with a color while the war raged in Asia, so before his shift in gear the author of The Language of Sculpture told the critic Norbert Lynton how he wanted to “speak a human rather than an art language.” And it turns out that Tucker’s epiphany was gradual, not sudden. His work of the 1970s already found ways to connect welding in the modernist idiom with a poetic awareness of the life force. As Andrew Forge wrote in 1972, presenting Tucker at the XXXVI Venice Biennale, “It was as if some over determined barrier, an ideal division between sculpture and the rest of the world, had been broken.”

“Ideal,” perhaps, is the operative word. For the real shift in Tucker was from idealism, with its connotations of the preconceived and the progressive, to empiricism, to that which is personally experienced. Of course, empiricism also connotes measure, which it might be objected had more to do with the precise, geometric Tucker of yesteryear than the fumbling, ambiguous, exploratory Tucker of today. Tucker is the least interested of any artist in verifying his observations against any rule, even the rule of thumb. But what if we recast measure along existential, multisensory, and kinesthetic lines: not measure in inches or pounds, checked by the eye, but the matching of the worked external shape with the sensed internal object? Of course, if “internal object” is described in Jungian terms as--say--an archetypal goddess within the unconscious, then we are back to idealism. The artist’s fondness for mythic names--Greek gods, for instance--might initially lead us to think this. But actually Tucker favors the pre-Olympian gods, the pre-individualized and anthropomorphized deities, brutal in shape and chthonic in impulse.

If Rodin heroically reconnected a monolithic conception of sculpture across the centuries to Michelangelo, it would not be hyperbolic to say that Tucker has reconnected to Rodin across the modernist century. It is not just to the monolithic, however, but also to the fragmentary in Rodin that Tucker connects, and that, as he himself had theorized, was an essential aspect of the French sculptor’s modernity. In Tucker, the fragment stands for the whole. As Andrew Forge so convincingly demonstrated in a moving essay of 1988, a Tucker can be read multiply as foot, fist, penis, torso, and all the while stand as a whole. [5]

One other point needs to be made about idealism and empiricism. Not a few critics, including sympathetic ones, have remarked on the turd-like quality of Tucker’s massed shapes. If we can overcome squeamishness at the analogy, this becomes a rich signifier of sculpture in relation to the body, of sculpture as a vivid metaphor for the commonality of all bodily shapes. The aloof idealism of smoothly rendered limbs gives way to biological fact at its most basic. The internal and generated shapes are as much of the body as perceived anatomy. With this line of thought, the sterile cleanliness of formalism, with its “determined barrier” and “ideal division,” is truly violated.

There are telltale signs of the sculptor’s hand in Tucker’s drawings. Scale, which ensures presence and immediacy, is also about the denial of intricacy. His art, in all media, is energized by awkwardness. It seems better for him to have the space in which to be ham-fisted than to be seduced into observational delicacies. The sizeable sheet is the equivalent of the imposing mass. He goes at his sculptures heavy-handedly, punching and jabbing with the heel of his hand. Even his dozen small bronze studies from the early 1990s, minute yet monumental like the Venus of Willendorf, seem clasped by the ranked mass of fingers rather than pinched by each finger individually. As surely as his modeling is not digital, so his drawing avoids the calligraphic. His mark making is hefty and visceral; erasures are as expressive as accretions. There is rich diversity of touch and technique from one drawing to the next.

And yet, for all these assuringly tactile qualities, his drawing is depictive. Forms resolve quickly and stay fixed in contrast to the kind of jumping gestalt typical of the sculptures, where the viewer sees a body part one moment, a face within it the next. With most sculptors, drawing is exploratory, if not preparatory; Tucker’s is expository. As John McDonald argued, it shows the artist familiarizing himself and his audience with his bronzes. In a drawing, he sees what he has made, rather than plots what he might make. In his sculpture, light clarifies the dark and contradictory mass into form; in drawing, his eye is the light. In drawing, he commits to an interpretation.

I see an unexpected resemblance between some drawings by Tucker (the Rembrandtian Untitled 1998 in this exhibition, for instance) and the graphic work of Tucker’s near contemporary Frank Auerbach, an artist of a different milieu. Had Tucker studied with Auerbach’s master, the maverick expressionist, David Bomberg, the latter’s legendary injunction would surely resonate with this sculptor’s drawings: “Seek the spirit in the mass.”

David Cohen is gallery director at the New York Studio School and editor of Artcritical.com.

[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945); reprinted in Sense and Non-Sense (translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p.15

2 Adrian Stokes Greek Culture and the Ego 1958; reprinted in The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes (edited by Lawrence Gowing) Volume III, London: Thames and Hudson, 1978, p.110

3 see Martin Jay Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993

4 “Sculpture in Our Time” in Arts Magazine 1958; reprinted in John O’Brian [ed] Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1986, iv; Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, p.59

5 Andrew Forge “As Many Dimensions as We Have Muscles: The Sculpture of William Tucker” in William Tucker: The American Decade 1978-88, Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, 1988