Tap, tap, tap. Chip, chip, chip. Tap. Chip. Photos by Andria Peters
Jennifer Marshall is carving rough grooves into wood, the medium of American sculptor Robert Laurent. A photocopy of a masterpiece lies off to the side, covered in wood chips subtracted from the slab with her tools—gouge, palm gouge, jack and block, plane.
As an art historian, Marshall is entering the world of the artists she studies by learning basic methods for working in wood, stone, and bronze.
“Splinters come with the territory,” she says ruefully, applying a palm gouge to basswood in the wood assembly room of the Regis Center for Art.
Sculpture is an art form to which critics and historians of American art haven’t given much serious attention. Marshall is changing that. With support from a two-year McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, which began officially July 1, she is undertaking research to write a book about sculpture in America from the late 1800s to the Cold War.
Why did sculpture, made mostly with metals—especially bronze—in the 1800s, move toward more “natural” un-smelted materials like wood and stone? Why did the surfaces, lumpy, hand-worked, and expressive before the turn of the century, become smoother, simpler, and more expressively opaque?
“I’m not satisfied with the old catch-all explanation of modernism,” Marshall says.
Clues came during work on her first book, Machine Art, 1934, about a landmark exhibition in New York where ordinary objects like ball bearings and steel springs were displayed as works of art. When she saw the objects in a museum vault, they were more different from their modern-day counterparts than she had imagined.
“Mainly, they were much, much shinier,” she says. “Gritty, greasy ball bearings became luxurious jewel-like things. The loop of steel spring became an opportunity—literally—for self-reflection.”
The discovery led her to reconsider how viewers must have experienced such plain objects when polished for display at the Museum of Modern Art.
It was in the period between World War I and the Cold War that American manufacturing reached out to define a global consumer marketplace. Hand-carved works and simplified forms represented an alternative to the dizzying additions and multiplications of consumer goods, Marshall argues, and “subtraction” emerged as the dominant motif of sculptural practice and criticism.
After this period, notably from 1960, three-dimensional arts would come to dominate art practice in the United States. Yet no major study of modern American sculpture of the early 1900s has been completed since the 1970s and ’80s, and that scholarship was mostly monographs about individual artists.
For Subtraction, Marshall chose a variety of sculptors including Laurent, Alexander Archipenko, and William Edmondson as case studies. Her scope is broad and thematic.
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Because her research focus has always been on materials, she has had to visit museum archives and storage vaults so she can see, touch, hold, and lift the objects she writes about and understand what they meant to people in the past.
“In some ways, it’s a lot like archaeology,” she says, “but instead of digging up fragments of a buried past, I’m handling treasured museum pieces dating back to my grandparents’ generation in the Great Depression.”
She suspects that the high financial demands of studying sculpture have prolonged its second-class status in art history scholarship. The McKnight opens the door to new possibilities. Marshall has devised an ambitious schedule of site visits to original three-dimensional artworks in galleries, museum storage, civic buildings, and parks. Most will take her to U.S. cities, but she will also travel to places where her principal subjects got their starts.
Already this summer she visited Brittany, where Robert Laurent grew up, and she saw a large collection of Archipenko’s work in Tel Aviv. She finished an essay for an upcoming exhibition at Stanford. She also took woodcarving lessons from Mark Knierim in the University woodshop.
Since the modern sculptors of the ’10s, ’20s, and ’30s emphasized their materials—and their procedures of working with them—as decisive to their work, Marshall says, she has to do the same thing. Even if it means subtracting some of her own skin now and then, she is committed to the methodology she teaches.
“As a scholar who is constantly telling herself and her students, ‘It’s the materiality, stupid!’—it is amazing to have the resources to engage American modern sculpture’s materiality so thoroughly,” Marshall says.
Read more about Jennifer Jane Marshall, assistant professor of art history, at http://arthist.umn.edu/faculty/marshall_j.htm
September 15, 2010
Faculty & Staff, Profiles