Sculpture exists in and defines space, positioning the viewer in relation to the work. Since this spatial positioning entails duration for the viewer-and of course duration of the works-it follows that a temporal aspect is entailed. These new works by Bruce Humpheries do that; all sculpture does that. If one understands 'positioning' to be simply the spatial and temporal situation of the viewer with respect to the works, one opens a phenomenology of the viewer's embodied presence-to the work. To do so is fundamental to any consideration of viewer response to three-dimensional artworks. Yet merely to do this is only a prolegomenon to an adequate hermeneutics of the works. 'Positioning' is to be understood to have a conceptual as well as a spatial and a spatial-temporal sense.
First, however, the prolegomenon; while preliminary, this is a necessary if not sufficient moment of analysis. One enters the space of the gallery to be faced with-to be face-to-face with-ten small figures in two groups on the wall opposite the gallery entrance. Transformed from plastic and wood to aluminum, the ten figures are a group of five identical male figures at the left, and a group of five identical female figures at the right. The heads of the figures are replaced with cubes, each cube bearing a single letter of the alphabet, alphabet blocks repositioned as aluminum block heads, or blockheads. While he figures are identical within each group, the letters on the block heads vary. The letters on the male figure's heads are S-P-E-A-K; the letters on the female figure's heads are S-P-E-L-L. SPEAK and SPELL are performative speech acts, and as such is neither true nor false.1 As performatives, SPEAK and SPELL position the viewer to actively respond, and in so doing to implement the action specified in the speech act. To the left of the gallery entrance and the facing wall of Speak and Spell, in two vitrines, are two additional groups of figures, in bronze. These small figures, also with block heads, are the Male Boxes, with the letters S-M-A-L-L-L-A-R-G-E. SMALL and LARGE are constative speech acts,2 and as such are true or false. Here, the form given to SMALL and LARGE are the same size, obviating their facile reflexive application as true or false. One is thus positioned in an aporetic situation of disjunction between the evidence of the text and the evidence of the eye.
On the wall at the right of Speak and Spell doll heads slip cast in ceramic and glazed red, black and white form a representation of the famous face of an iconic mouse Titled I Need This Like I Need a Hole in the Head, the heads are attached to the wall with a nail through a hole in the heads, giving a physical manifestation to the figure of speech, but in contradiction to it. The figure of speech indicates some thing utterly not needed, but the physical hole in the head is essential to the installation of the heads on the wall.
Clockwise from I Need This Like I Need a Hole in the Head, Sarcophagus rests on the gallery floor. The top of the white-painted wood base is covered with modules of doll parts cast in plaster. Both the doll parts qua doll and qua parts, and the modular configuration of their casting, are salient. Dismantled, the dolls are reduced to their components. Juxtaposed in the cast modules, the individual components form larger components of the configuration. Nevertheless, within the overall configuration the doll reference is inescapable. A doll is a simulacrum of the human, an instance of a mode of representation as a multiple, having the potential for and typically the actuality of mass production. The plaster cast from a mold of the doll is itself a multiple reiteration of the distinction of representand and representation, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, a double removal from the human representand. This, and the multitude of the components in their modular configuration obviates the individuality of the representand.
On the wall behind Sarcophagus, Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes is an iconic representation of an American flag formed from slip cast ceramic doll heads, glazed red, white and blue; the union without stars being comprised of a seven by eleven grid of blue glazed heads. Without stars in the flag structure's union, the stars cannot get in one's eyes. The text of the title is manifested in the physical form of the object.
The artwork, as distinct from the art object, subsists in the viewer's response to the disjunction between the perceptual and the conceptual. One's response might entail being, equiprimordially, of "people of the eye" and the "people of the mind."3