It is a marvel too little noticed that every movement of my eyes--even more, every displacement of my body--has its place in the same visible universe that I itemize and explore with them, as, conversely, every vision takes place somewhere in the tactile space. There is double and crossed situating of the visible in the tactile and of the tactile in the visible; the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one. The two parts are total parts and yet are not superposable.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1
the great interests of man: air and light, the joy
of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.
Mario Rosso 2
James Sullivan's drawings and sculpture engage the body and embodiedness through the visual and the tactile modalities of embodied perception. To term perception 'embodied' is to assert a reciprocity, if not a tautology, for embodiedness is the necessary condition both of perception and for perceptibility. In Sullivan's works, the condition of being-in-the-world as a subsuming unity of subject and object, the flesh, is made manifest. 3
The figure, the body-image, is the always available; embodiedness is the pregiven condition of human being-in-the-world. While the figure is the always available, it has not been the always engaged as a paradigm of spatiality. Since the figure, the body, is what we always already are, to engage the figure is thus a reflexive act, an act that once would have seemed so unproblematic as to be unexceptional, natural, inevitable. That the situation of the engagement of the figure can now seem problematic is to position the situation of the artist's act within a larger tradition of practices and theory, a tradition that renders the engagement of the figure a matter for attention. In addressing the figure, Sullivan's work is situated outside the modernist repudiation of the figure and illusion as posited by Clement Greenberg:
The human body is no longer postulated as the agent of space in either pictorial or sculptural art; now it is eyesight, and eyesight has more freedom of movement and invention within three dimensions than within two. 4Greenberg follows this assertion of a reduction of sculpture to visuality with the qualification that while modernism eschews "sculptural painting of any kind," sculpture is allowed to be "as pictorial as it pleases." This abrogation of the dictum of the purity of genre is allowed, on Greenberg's view, "thanks to the unique concreteness and literalness of sculpture's medium" "because the eye recognizes that what offers itself in two dimensions is actually (not palpably) fashioned in three." 5
Rather than carrying out the "modernist 'reduction'," 6 Sullivan's works are situated within the paradigm of sculpture as inherently a metaphor for the body. Thus the view posited by Donald Kuspit:
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. Such meaning is difficult to articulate, for it is fraught with the difficulty of knowing and mastering one's own body and the body of the other, especially an other to whom one is intimately related. As the symbol of one's self, one's body is privileged, and in a sense the first object in the world. As such, it is impossible to expunge, even through the pursuit of purity in art. Sculpture is optimally a metaphorical projection of bodily presence in alien material, a kind of phantasy introspection of the latently human in the manifestly inhuman. That displacement of material confirms the sculpture as a representation of the body's inner image, summarizing the most primitive experience of it. 7
As in all artworks, but in these the more emphatically by virtue of their reference to the figure, Sullivan's works engage the bifurcation 8 of the body as subject and as object: that which sees and that which is seen, that which is the sensible other of things, and that which itself is a thing for other sensible entities and for itself. 9 And as in all artworks, these artworks entail the distinction of art object and art work, that which is physically over against the subject as object of potential perception, and that which is engaged in the intentionality of perception as entailing a depth, as a quasi subject, 10 but in these again the more emphatically, explicitly, through their reference to the figure.
Underlying the bifurcation of subject and object are the categories of temporality and spatiality. Thus Mikel Dufrenne:
. . . space is contemporary with time, symbolizing it immediately. The opening created by withdrawal defines space, which is the mileau where the other can appear when I have withdrawn into myself. (This is why all allusion to otherness has recourse to spatial metaphors.) Temporality constitutes only the relationship of the self with itself definitive of an 'I'. It is by means of space that appearances appear and that seeing becomes possible. . . . The dialectic of subject and object is predelineated in the dialectic of time and space. 11
The viewer's encounter with sculptural space is informed by the lived experience of embodiedness, as entailing an interiority funding the withdrawal that enables the appearance of the other, a virtual space of an inner life-world of conscious and subconscious aspects. As Kuspit notes:
For whether it wishes to be or not, sculpture is dependent on the unconscious, inner relationship to the body. The body may not be subject matter, but it is the model for sculptural space. Since the body exists 'speculatively' in imagination as well as empirically in the world, sculpture's space and its tactility are necessarily as subjective as they are objective. 12This is to say that the sense of the body's embodiedment, always already available in and informing perception is of a body situated in-the-world. 13 While most obvious with respect to sculpture, the relationship to lived embodiedness is entailed in two dimensional artworks as well, particularly when, as in this exhibition, the two dimensional artworks are a sculptor's drawings, informed with concern for the thickness and density of volume. James Sullivan is a sculptor; all but two of the works in this exhibition are drawings.
There is a tendency to suppose that drawings by an artist who works in another medium are preparatory studies, the initial manifestation of an aesthetic idea in its potentiality, intended for actualization in another medium. Whether a drawing is regarded as a preparation for a subsequent work, or as an end in itself, is a matter of the sequential position of facture of the artwork within a body of work, seen within a system of production predicated on the presupposition of a hierarchical schemata of media qua material cause. To thus consider a drawing as a preliminary work is not to consider the drawing in itself, nor is it to regard the shift of medium as such. It is important to distinguish a change of medium from a change of materials, for while the concept of a medium entails materials, a medium does not consist in materials as such, and hence is not exhausted by nor equivalent to the notion of materials. The notion of medium subsumes materials in an articulation informed by a tradition of practices such that a medium is a vehicle for signification. Regarded in itself, a shift of medium has the singular utility of entailing a restatement of the concern inhering in an aesthetic idea by other means. As Kimon Nicolides suggests in a somewhat different context,
. . . change of medium might be likened to a change of language. The experience of using two languages makes each more rich than it can possibly be by itself. And, more important, the attempt to convey a thought from one language to another makes possible a finer comprehension of the thought. 14It is this capacity of a shift from one medium to another to not only direct attention to the significatory potential of one medium or the other, and thus to the significatory potentiality of the materials of that medium, but to the signified apart from the means of its articulation (insofar as this is possible) that makes the change of medium valuable in itself, apart from the instantiations of the artworks in the several media. This obtains not only for the artist, but also for the viewer of the artworks.
Perception of the artwork is not only a matter of the encounter between viewer and artwork, here at once a matter of distal visuality and an insistent proximal tactility. It is also a matter for the artist, the artwork's first viewer certainly, but also and more strongly in the dialogue of hand and eye in the facture of the artwork. 15 It is the privilege of the artist's hand to experience the tactility of the artwork directly and as such, in the course of facture of the work and in the completed work, as physical texture proximally experienced in the character of the materials of a medium; for others, the physical texture of the work is experienced distally, vicariously as it were, in visual perception. In visual perception of the physical texture of three-dimensional artworks, and in visual perception of visual texture in two-dimensional artworks, the gaze replaces the touch. The proximal, the close-to, is not merely a matter to be ascertained by measurement of physical distance. 16 Rather, is a matter of concernful comportment-toward.
The majority of these works reference the head, that part of the body to which an interiority is perhaps most readily attributed. 17 This interiority is metaphorised spatially as depth, as in Heraclitus: "You would not find the boundaries of the psyche, even by travelling along every path, so deep a logos does it have." 18 The frontality of Sullivan's drawings of the head engages the inherent bilateral symmetry of the head, which conduces to a quietness, as with his monumental sculpture of heads. In the drawings, this is emphasisized by the generally central placement of the figure within the ground. But this quiet is in tension with the animated surfaces, of the drawings no less than of the sculpture, surfaces which are dense, vigorously treated, richly textured. This density both stops the gaze at the surface and implicates a depth, an interiority, beyond the surface. It is this implicit interiority, no less than the figural character of the image, that underwrites one's engagement of the artwork as a quasi-subject. 19
Sullivan's works in this exhibition shift scale from that of life; this qualifies one's physical approach and affective response to the works. The Swiftian bifurcation into the much smaller than life and the much large than life informs the viewer's encounter with the miniature or the colossal. The experience of the relatively small artwork is one of intimacy, privacy: the small is seen at any moment by one viewer. Implicitly, the experience of the small relative to the viewer's body is that of dwarfing, of overwhelming the object and hence of potential mastery over the encountered object. Yet Sullivan's small drawings have a sense of magnitude about them: the drawings are small, but the head seems large. This is in part the result of the proportion of figure to ground, but also from the expansiveness of the handling of the material, the trace of the gesture, in the physical act of drawing. The experience of the very large artwork is necessarily more public: it is large enough to be encountered simultaneous by several viewers. Given a scale that positions the viewer to be dwarfed by the object, the very large has long been regarded as the precondition of the response of awe and the sublime. 20 Sullivan mentions the sculptural program of the Altar of Zeus from Pergamon in the State Museum, Berlin, as an analogy with his large heads: the large figural fragment as synecdoche for the figure. One might suggest, additionally, the fragments of the colossal figure of Constantine outside the Capitoline Museum in Rome. But the fragment, independent of its size is perhaps a more general precedent and concern here. This is the condition in which much classical sculpture has survived. Indeed, it is the condition in which classical civilization is available to us. This fragmentary survival is metaphorized in the artwork as fragment. The notion of the fragment entails a lack of the whole. Yet the fragment sometimes has the quality of integrity, unity, requisite to the traditional analysis of beauty 21 that the whole figure would not. 22 The present fragment, in tension to a posited absent whole, metaphorizes the condition of a culture knowing its lacunae, and a self within that culture, the historicity of its being-in-the-world subsumed in an identity transcending the differences entailed in its historicity, finding a unity, however tentative, in refereence to the presence of an absent but whole.
Rosalind Krauss argues that the expansion of the sense of the term 'sculpture' in postwar American art has been accompanied by an exoteric vanguard aesthetics and an esoteric historicism, serving
. . . to diminish newness and mitigate difference. It makes a place for change in our experience by evoking the model of evolution, so that the man who now is can be accepted as being different from the child he once was, by simultaneously being seen--through the unseeable action of the telos--as the same. And we are comforted by this perception of sameness, this strategy for reducing anything foreign in either time or space, to what we already know and are. 23James Sullivan's engagement of the figure, and through the figure the embodiedness of perception and the perceptible, moves oppositely, through the arche, to render what we always already are as other, different, and visible. Made visible, the invisible interiority constitutes the depth of the quasi-subjectivity of the artwork. This depth of this quasi-subjectivity constitutes an other, the foreign in space or time, co-present with the viewer in the encounter with the artwork. It is this sense of depth in the affective co-presence of the quasi-subjectivity of the artwork that renders the work inexhaustible, and that renders possible an encounter in which, as Rilke wrote of an archaic torso of Apollo:
. . . here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. 24