Can sculpture ever be truly new and pure? Can it completely renounce its relation to the human body? Can it exist without spontaneously evoking the subjective sense of the body? When a sculpture-even an abstract sculpture-carries the kind of conviction we call "presence," we are unconsciously reading it as a metaphoric symbolization of the body's emotional meaning. . . . Sculpture is optimally a metaphorical projection of the body's own presence in alien material, a kind of phantasy introspection of the latently human in the manifestly inhuman.

Donald Kuspit 1

Katie McNeely transfigures the natural forms of wood, vines and so forth into elegant, exquisitely crafted sculptural forms, strongly charged with presence and animated gesture by a graceful wit.

Prior to the facture of artworks is a transformation of material into medium, a transformation usually rendered invisible and unconsidered in the encounter with artworks. Because of the customary nature of traditional materials qua medium, e.g., bronze or marble, or oil paint, even if attention is given to the use of the materials, their transformation into medium is taken for granted. Because of the materials McNeely uses and her manner of using them, this transformation is rendered visible and must be considered; indeed, it is crucial to these works being as they are.

The dialectic of culture and nature this entails is intimately connected both to the work's form and consequently to viewer response. McNeely's precision and care in working with found natural wood, vines, seed pods and the like conceal the trace of her intervention in the material. This concealment of the transformation of found natural materials into artworks that appear as if they might be formed of relatively unaltered found materials at once heightens and complicates the opposition of nature and culture in her works. Cultura fit secunda natura: culture becomes second nature, eliciting responses to its perception as if it were nature, as if it had its being without human agency. This is of course not true in McNeely's works, yet it may be (mis)taken to be so. This is far from exhaustive of the basis of affecting presence 2AME="r2"> in McNeely's work, but it is one aspect, and not the least. The possible structural relations of nature and culture as metaphorized in the presence or absence of bark in McNeely's works may be explicated utilizing a Klein Group:

bark:	present		absent
	nature		culture
	bark intact		bark removed
	not nature		not culture
	bark replaced		found already without bark

The effect of McNeely's transformation of the material into medium is to displace the sense of foundness from the artist's finding-as-acquisition of the material, an acquisition which may or may not be coincidental with the artist's recognition (complete or partial) of the formal potentiality of the found natural material, to the situation of the viewer's encounter with the artwork. The material found and gathered by the artist becomes part of the material cause of the medium precisely in the artist's intuition of its potentiality to provide the form requisite to a given work, while the recognition of the potential requisite form in the found material conduces to the facture of the work. Certainly physical manipulation of the material is entailed, which is preceded by the intuition of formal potentiality and which induces the intuition of formal potentiality. And certainly this is circular, though not visciously so; it is rather a matter of a hermeneutic circle, as a dialectical operation of schemata and revision. 3 The displacement of the sense of foundness is a transference of the moment of recognition from the artist to the viewer. This moment of recognition is central to representation, a matter as simple and as complex as that commonplace of childhood: picking up a stick and using it as a hobby horse. 4 In its use, the stick is a horse, charged with the presence of horseness and animated with liveliness.

To say that an artwork is 'charged with presence' and 'animated' is to attribute the status of a quasi-subject 5 to the work: it is to say that the work has about it a sense of embodiedness. One's response to these works is that of projection from the lived experience of one's own body, the reflexive understanding of one's body in response to gravity and the mechanics of tension, compression, torsion, and the semiotics of gesture. The extent to which one's response is to the kinesthetic physical forces manifested in the work's configuration, and to which one's response is to an animistic attribution of gesture, varies with the particularity of each of McNeely's works as an index to the degree of perceived abstraction of the work. Both, however, ultimately entail what Paul Crowther terms body-hold, consisting of:

the possibilities presented by the individual's awareness of both his or her body's relation to the world and also the scope and significance of embodied action in general. It is by reference to body-hold that terms present to perception are defined and given meaning. 6

In sculpture the visible exists as a quality of touch, contingent upon the sense of bodiliness that the sculpture conveys. Every sculpture proposes a mode of touch, which is the basis of its visual effect. And every mode of touch is rooted in an imaginative, unconscious sense of the body. 9

We refuse-or have refused for many decades-to acknowledge the traces of animism in our own perceptions and responses to images: not necessarily "animism" in the nineteenth-century ethnographic sense of the transference of spirits to inanimate objects, but rather in the sense of the degree of life or liveliness believed to inhere in an image. 11

In those works where the reference to the body is manifest, as in Don King and Ventriloquist, the animism entailed in one's perception of the work is clear. Even without the denotation of the title of Don King, one's attention is drawn to the cactus (perhaps yucca) forming the 'hair' of the work, in large part because it is proximal in the viewer's gaze: the vertical axis of the 'head' (formed, it seems, of a cypress 'knee') it rotated forward to be perpendicular to the wall plane. The title Don King limits the field of interpretation to the well known boxing promoter, fixing the reading of the cactus 'hair' as hair. The two sections of Ventriloquist, emphasized in their difference by the left section being bare, light colored wood while the right section is of dark wood, and the gestural thrust of the right mass upwards and to the right, away from the left section, (as if creating a distraction from the left section) no less than the strong resemblance of the left section to a hand puppet or ventriloquist'' dummy with mouth gaping open, evokes the reading of the form as a ventriloquist at work. The title serves to limit the field of interpretation, and also provides a propaedeutic for the visually illiterate.

Reach is a three-tined branch of wood, thickest where the three tines join, with bark removed to reveal the pale, light wood beneath. Each of the three tines tapers and curves down to rest on the base at two points and then upward to their ends. The ends of two of the tines are covered with dark, coiled, rather delicate sections of vine. The third tine terminates in a knob of dark bark.

The Noodler projects off the wall, as if to penetrate into the viewer's space from behind the wall. Dark and bark-covered from the wall to about half its extension, light and with bark removed from midpoint to terminus, the form is a twisting, tapering line. Although the form is abstract and represents no particular human gesture as such, it is nevertheless precisely the right form to strongly suggest noodling: to improvise at something in an idle or tentative way. An aside: compare and contrast noodling and bricolage.

In the more abstract Split, signification is contingent on the interpretation of the form as manifesting the physical forces requisite to forming it into a circular arc. Split consists of a single thin branch is bent into an omega-shape, rotated to position its base vertically against the wall plane, or rather with the ends of the piece emerging from and seemingly penetrating the wall plane. The branch is somewhat thicker at the upper intersection with the wall, thinner and bifurcated to produce two points of intersection lower on the wall. The shadow cast by the piece falls on the wall so as to join with the points of intersection with the piece and the wall, sharp and distinct and heavier when proximal to the piece, less sharp and increasingly indistinct and lighter where distal from the piece. The variation in the sharpness, distinctness and value of the shadow heightens the effect of the piece continuing behind the wall plane to articulate a space not accessible to the viewer. This inaccessible space is mapped to the wall plane by the shadow, though of course the shadow is in fact the indexical projection of the physical object in the physical space of the viewer.

Kink is comprised of three seamlessly joined pieces: a bare, bent, piece of wood projecting from the wall flanked to left and right by long withes with intact bark. As with Split, the shadow cast by the object reads at once an and behind the wall plane, particularly in the center where the shadow is projected from the kinked section of wood. Extending in relatively straight lines, the flanking withes suggest stretching from tension applied at their distal ends, while the bare central section of wood suggests its forming by the application of compression and torsion.

Lyre floats against the wall plane, a single vertical thin branch, bark removed to bare, blond wood. The upper end, emphasized by being a section of darker wood, divides into three tines, the two to either side of the heavier, shorter central tine are more delicate and at their ends terminate in a spiral, lyre-like. The form is suggestive of a thyrsus, a rod twined with ivy and grape leaves and tipped with a pine cone, carried by Dionysus and his attendants. But it is suggestive also and more strongly of Hermes' wand, the caduceus. The initial form of the Greek kerykeion (caduceus is a Latin transliteration) was of a central shaft and two lateral shoots, intertwined at the top to form a knot. The two lateral shoots are subsequently replaced by intertwining serpents, and this is the form Botticelli represents Hermes holding aloft while skimming the clouds at the left side of the dance of the Graces in Primavera. The lyre-form in McNeely's work is apt, for Hermes was regarded in ancient Greece as the inventor of music, and of the shepherd's pipe and the lyre.

Why does Botticelli depict Hermes skimming clouds in Primavera? It is an odd motif. There is a literary source in Virgil: illa fretus agit ventos et turbida tranat / nubila "he drives the winds and skims the stormy / clouds."12 Hermes was many things to the ancient Greeks: hearld of the gods, conductor of souls, patron of merchants and thieves, and of the ingenuity of the intellect. To the Florentine Renaissance neo-Platonist Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco who commissioned Botticelli's Primavera, Hermes was something more as well: patron of learned scholarship, inquiry, and interpretation. To this enterprise he lent his Greek name: hermeneia, or as we have it, hermeneutics. Hermes skims, but does not dispel the clouds concealing truth, letting truth be perceived without blinding the beholder. 13

This, in an analogous way, McNeely's sculpture does for us: it allows the disconcealing of the coming-to-be of meaning in the perception of form. Unconcealedness is for Heidegger the modality of aletheia, truth in the proper sense, the uncovering of beings:

In the work, the happening of truth is at work and, indeed, at work according to the manner of a work. Accordingly the nature of art was defined to begin with as the setting-into-work of truth. Yet this definition is intentionally ambiguous. It says on the one hand: art is the fixing in place of a self-establishing truth in the figure. This happens in creation as the bringing forth of the unconcealedness of what is. Setting-into-work, however, also means: the bringing of work-being into movement and happening. This happens as preservation. Thus art is: the creative perceiving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth. 14

Katie McNeely is an alumna of Brookhaven College, and lives and makes sculpture in Dallas.

1. Donald Kuspit, "Material as Sculptural Metaphor," in ed. Howard Singerman, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art 1945-1986 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986 for the Museum of Contemporary Art / Los Angeles), pp. 106-125. BACK
2. The term 'affecting presence' is from Robert Plant Armstrong; see his The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), Wellspring: On the Myth and Source of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), and The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). BACK
3. The notion of a hermeneutic circle is that of the problematic of grasping a whole from its parts, which are discernible as parts only in relation to a whole. The notion is schemata and correction is appropriated from E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, 1961). BACK
4. I allude, of course, to E. H. Gombrich's essay "Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form," in his Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (Greenwich, Connecticut: Phaidon / New York Graphic Society, 1963), pp. 1-11. BACK
5. 'Quasi-subject' is Mikel Dufrenne's term characterizing the aesthetic object: "luminous through its very opacity-not by receiving an alien light by which the world is outlined, but by making its own light spring from itself in an act of expression." Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 146. BACK
6. Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 29. BACK
7. I use 'intentional' in its phenomenological sense of the always already filled condition of consciousness, i.e., that one is always already conscious of some thing, insofar as one is conscious, rather than in the quotidian sense of deliberate action which is derivative of and contingent on the phenomenological sense. BACK
8. For a useful introduction to the functioning of the titles of artworks, see Hazard Adams, "Titles, Titling, and Entitlement To," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46:1 (Fall 1987), 7-21. BACK
9. Donald Kuspit, "Material as Sculptural Metaphor," in ed. Howard Singerman, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art 1945-1986 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986 for the Museum of Contemporary Art / Los Angeles), p. 107. BACK
10. Lucas Samaras, Box 6 (Treasures of the Metropolitan); Book 4, coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York. BACK
11. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 32. BACK
12. Virgil, Aeneid IV, 245-246. BACK
13. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1958, 1968), p. 123. BACK
14. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp.17-81. BACK