[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

The Plummet-Measured Face

The Geometries of Ronald Bladen

Page II

And that brings us to Ronald Bladen, one of the principal sculptors of Minimalism and one of the originators of the mode. Bladen is also another of a number of artists, and a number of recent sculptors in particular (see “The Form of Feeling” in this issue), whose reputations are nothing comparable to what they were and what they should be, and are at risk of being omitted from the art history books and their works forgotten. (Or limited in general exposure to their small number of public works, such as Bladen’s The Cathedral Evening, 1969, which is installed on the Empire State Plaza in Albany. And it should be noted that one website referred to Sonar Tide, which is in Peoria, as having been created by “architect Ronald Bladen.” The site also observes that the sculpture “holds the distinction of being voted 2005’s #1 biggest Peoria eyesore by readers of the River City Times.” And so goes the tale.)

Bladen, who died in 1988, is nevertheless something of a legend among those adept enough in their awareness of recent art history to be familiar with his work, and a periodic sequence of exhibitions is at continual effort to give him back his name.

The exhibition at Jacobson Howard Gallery is the latest instance, and it is, as were all those this writer has visited, a joy to behold, as well as a revelation of the ways in which the simplest structures of volumetric geometry can spark the imagination of an artist who was evidently born to work with them. The exhibition contains 14 works: nine sculptures, both small (models and maquettes) and full scale (standing or stretching up to 156 inches), four drawings, and one painting from Bladen’s time as an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s, before he turned to sculpture. The sculptural works are, without exception, exhilarating things to see. There is a dynamism about them, a sheer verve and feeling of velocity and moment, of momentousness, a quality that is distinctive among the broader range of work of sculptural Minimalism.

The essential reason is easy to note. Bladen worked in diagonals, whereas typical Minimalist sculpture was done in right angles. Judd worked strictly in boxes, ingenious arrangements of blocks. Carl Andre typically works in square panels laid on the floor, as well as cubes and wooden beams. There are other examples of Minimalist angularity—Andre does employ triangular panels, sometimes in triangular arrangements, and Tony Smith owns the reputation for infusing Minimalist works with seeming gestures through the simulation of stances and actions. There are others, but none of them has the sense of inner drive and force of Bladen.

Of course, in this, Bladen—or this response to his work—is relying on an easy and hoary formula that is the chestnut in every basic drawing class, or should be: horizontal lines imply stability and stasis, vertical lines imply growth, diagonal lines imply movement and action. It is supposedly innate in us to react that way, and perhaps it is, but there is something else here.

It is the quality of moment, as if each of these works had selected the perfect millisecond in a continuously changing action to represent the action in its essence—despite the fact that these are abstract works, works of pure geometric form and not representations of figures in identifiable actions. The principle of the perfect moment applies to figurative work, and most notably, potently, Michelangelo—to select the moment that embodies the intention and meaning of the action represented. (Think of the David, in the midst of turning towards his enemy—a second’s difference either before or after, and it would not be the David.)

It is difficult to say, perhaps it is impossible to say, how this can be with Bladen—as abstract works, these sculptures create no fictional world, they do not portray an action we see a figure in the midst of, we do not know what would precede this moment or follow it, we don’t know what this moment typifies as a continuous gesture. With Black Lightning (Model), 1981, the form is, of course, ready made for Bladen. He created (in the full-scale work) a monumental lightning bolt on pedestals. But in the other works here, he had no such support, no such prepared reference. And for that, they are more stunning in their effect. Flying Fortress (Maquette), 1974-78, looks nothing like a fortress. Yet, one can feel the warrior-like impetus and assault and pure power of righteous defense, the knowing that one is battling for a just cause, in its slated-forward, recklessly thrown configuration. Light Year (Garden), 1979, seems a revelation of a portion of the substructural grid work of dynamic space, the space of light waves and galactic distances, and colliding nebula and exploding stars. Cathedral Evening (Model), 1971, is nothing of a cathedral. Yet, you don’t need to be told. It appears the very essence of striving aspiration to reach beyond our limitations, beyond our earthly confines, to the place where secrets are revealed and purposes shown.

And most impressive, despite the fact that it is the “quietest” of such works here, is Coltrane (Model), 1970. (Also shown is Coltrane (Structural Model), 1970, which reveals the wooden armature of the final work.) It is simply a rectangular box resting on one of its points, which is set into a pyramidic base that has had the top cut off. Little enough it would seem, yet it also seems the very essence of Coltrane’s manner, of his, as it was called among jazz musicians, “scrambled eggs” style—for no reason one can think to name, despite the fact that it is undeniably so.

One can easily dismiss the effect of these works by claiming that this is merely a talent for design, for developing what amount to emblems, like logos that strangely bespeak the identity one wishes to assign to something. One can claim these are just augmented chevrons, devised one by one to fit the titles Bladen gave them. But they are not so easily explained, or explained away, because their sense of moment, of portentousness, ought to make them seem somewhat human, somehow figurative, but it does not. It opens a door to seeing, or beginning to sense, precisely the opposite.

The nearly figurative, the gestural, is how Bladen often is taken. In the catalogue essay to this exhibition, Irving Sandler quotes Bladen in remarking on the development of his style, “I desired something in the grand manner since I’m still a romantic.” Sandler assents: “He rejected their [other Minimalists] anti-romantic attitude and what they termed ‘anti-anthropomorphism,’ that is, their purging of any sign of the human body and its gestures. . . . If Three Elements was Minimalist in appearance, it was anything but anti-romantic and anti-anthropomorphic in spirit.” (Three Elements was the work Bladen showed at the influential 1966 exhibition “Primary Structures,” which was the first comprehensive survey of the new artistic mode.)

Mark Stevens takes much the same tack in “Maximal Minimalism,” his review of the 1999 exhibition of Bladen at P.S. 1. “There is no better example of an artist escaping the straitjacket of a movement than Ronald Bladen (1918-88), who is typically identified as one of the cool ‘fathers of Minimalism’ but looks more and more like an American Romantic.” Stevens goes on to note that Bladen sought to achieve what he called “presence,” that he wished to “create a drama out of a minimal experience,” and that he said his own works “seem very human to me.” For Stevens, the ultimate achievement of Bladen’s work is “to recover earlier—even ancient—patterns of feeling.”

But it is not this we are provoked to see, not when these works are taken at their best—the way we ought to take all works of art—seen for what they might be claimed to disclose, what they might spontaneously reveal, regardless of what has been said of them, even by the artist. The challenge they present is to see in their atmosphere of moment, of presence, something that is not figurative, not human (at least not the normally human), not us (or at least what we think we are). The challenge is not to “overwrite” the works by seeing figures that are not there, just as Sontag warned us not to overwrite works of any art, of any mode, with interpretations designed to install our own intended meanings in place of those of the artist.

Look at these sculptures with an innocent eye, with an eye cleansed of expectation and the urge to see something responsive, something like us, and you will discover something quite different from what has been written about these works. Relax into seeing the diagonal linearity without associating in the human strain, the craning, the stretch, the reaching towards. They start to become something else, something alien, something remote but immediately accessible, something detached, withdrawn, inwardly turned, and austere, inwardly turned away from us for all their moment and immediacy, for all their presence. They begin to seem the detailing of an alien landscape, the artifacts from somewhere else, the deposits of some other life form, almost the result of another physics, of another world, of another reality.

But they are not, for nothing could be more here and now, more ordinary even, than geometry, than rods and boxes, triangles and chevrons. These works become familiar and strange, intimate and unapproachable, embracing and overbearing. They become us and not us, and that is perhaps a more pertinent and authentic conception of the uncanny.

Both us and not us—perhaps that is our first step away from the intellectual reflex action that paints our image on everything we see. Perhaps it is merely the us we did not know, not something ultimately beyond us. Perhaps that is all we are capable of—to see something of us that astonishes us, and we will never escape the prison we make of ourselves. Even if so, it requires the best of us to achieve it, it takes the most penetrating of our artists to bring us that far, and Bladen showed us something few have seen since.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
—W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.
—W. B. Yeats, “The Statues”

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2008)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | “The Plummet-Measured Face”

| page up |