Soft Looking Shapes and Sculpture

    Soft Looking Shapes and Sculpture 

Jean Arp the German-French pioneer of the art movement called Dada which arose after World War I made artwork that was based, at least partially, on chance.  

He also made artworks based on automatic drawing or painting.  Automatic here means avoiding input from the conscious mind.  That appears to be possible when doodling while you are occupied doing something else like working or talking on the phone.  A variation on this is to draw while walking keeping your eyes ahead.  In any case, that drawing could be a start, afterwich you could adjust whatever you produced automatically.  Even Michelangelo suggested looking for images in marble patterns as input for art creation. 

In the 1930s Arp made a series of linoleum and woodblock prints he called constellations.  Those typically have separated arbitrary smooth zoomorphic shapes.  We will look at a collage from about forty years later in 1963.  Rather than consisting of a number of separate pieces as the ones from the 1930s, this one is just one piece.  It has the merit of  having a sense of unity and completeness and an interesting negative shape on the inside.  Also the color is some old tarnished warm purplish stone gray that enhances and doesn’t distract from the shape. 

 To investigate our human perception let’s ask ourselves some questions.  What anatomical parts can you find in the image?  If you had to make up a name or story for this image what would it be?  Isn’t it peculiar how many small resemblances and vague feelings this image generates.  Notice how the contour doesn’t settle down.  Is it a soft or fluid looking shape?  squishy?  Why is that?

The negative shape is so pronounced you could switch over to regarding it as the positive shape, as if the lighter color was in front and we are seeing through a cutout to a dark background.

                

Arp made soft looking sculpture, such as Etoile - The Star from 1939.  It is made of plaster and is 13.5 inches tall.  It is a fabulous pirouetting star with graceful arms, or are they fingers or tongues.  And the hole ‒ is it a mouth and if so what is it expressing?  As with the collage we just saw every point resides on a transitional curve.    It seems like a living thing.  Perhaps you know the story from Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses of the sculptor Pygmalion who fell in love with the nude female sculpture he created.  Similarly, Arp created a star for us to fall in love with.

                             

Sculpture that is Actually Soft  

Less abstract but soft and fun constructions were done by Claes Oldenburg.  Please look at his hamburger on a bun which is soft but not inflated.  A real hamburger bun is soft to begin with.  Oldenburg pushed the idea further by making interesting and incongruous soft sagging versions of originally hard objects like toasters, telephones, and toilets. 

 All of Oldenburg’s soft sculptures can be considered pop art and sometimes their artistic merit is questioned, perhaps due to triteness, but not as much as for the contemporary artist Jeff Koons.  Oldenburg’s soft objects are reported to be deteriorating.  That poses a new and formidable challenge for conservators.