No. 73. Contra-Narcissus. Having pursued Tatlin for a couple of weeks, he felt the need to make a large-scale figurative sculpture. The result was a prodigious mermaid. He built her on the beach, out of local clay, after which he had her cast in bronze, painted white, and brought back down again to the shore. He found himself bitterly disappointed with her. Her body was okay (he was especially pleased with the graceful fish’s tail he had given her), but he intensely disliked the empty, singer-songwriter vapidity of her expression. He wanted a goddess, a shard of the eternal-feminine. Instead, he’d made a six-ton girl-next-door.
No.72. Corner Relief. Perpetually moved by the work of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953)--and who isn't?--and especially by his astonishing Corner-Counter Reliefs from 1915, he set out to make a corner piece of his own. Unlike the Tatlins he admired--which were installed in corners--his piece, clumpy by comparison to Tatlin-esque buoyancy, was itself made up of corners.
No.71: The Line of Beauty. He was making large shaped constructions out of wood. He had intended to be rough, relentless and severe, but grace kept breaking in. He recognized, for example, the swooping S-curve of the upper element of the piece to be William Hogarth's famous "Line of Beauty" (1753), and decided straightaway to give up his pursuit of the brut. He titled the work "Harlequin," because of the two huge nails that now looked like eyes.
No. 69. In the Eye of the Beholder. Someone emailed him last week, rather smugly pointing out that his little sculpted rabbit of the week before was "cute" but didn't look like a Giacometti! Since it wasn't intended to, this note made him almost uncontrollably angry--to the point where he spent the next four days making this big, black, retaliatory, dagger-like piece bearing one of his paintings on its handle. He titled the work "In the Eye of the Beholder." A stab in the dark.
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