Reification moves sculpture from its passive state as contemplative art toward more precise approximations of the systems which underlie operational reality.
Jack Burnham 1

The three fabricated steel works by Tony Schraufnagel in this installation of sculpture are manifestly static objects which, in the interpretive encounter between subject and object, manifest their dynamic aspect. Objects are objecta, problema, problems. Both the Latin ob + jecta and the Greek pro + blema have the sense of what is 'thrown against' and are fundamentally distinct from yet correlative with the self, the subject, sub + jecta. 2 The relation of subject and object is at once a separation entailed by their mutual alterity, and a joining through their mutual equiprimordiality in the situation of encounter. In their reciprocally dependent co-location, subject and object are not simply given, but rather each enables the coming-to-stand of the other. To begin to regard the manifestly static, conspicuous mass of a work of sculpture in this way is to begin to shift the regard to encompass the dynamic as entailed in the engagement of the object in viewer response. This shift from the static to the dynamic occurs both in perceptual encounter with the physical objects (the art object qua object) and with the interpretive objects constituting the artworks as such, and underlies the felt liveliness of the form of the artworks.

Though abstract works, the felt liveliness of form in Schraufnagel's sculpture inevitably engages the viewer's lived experience of embodiedness. As Donald Kuspit has urged:

In genuine sculpture outer appearance counts for less than the subtle sense of bodiliness conveyed. Sculpture may renounce the overt illusion of the body but covertly it represents the most intimate conception of the body. . . . Metaphor is the vehicle of subjectivity; to see matter unmetaphorically is to slay sculpture's profound subjectivity. 3

Circuit consists of seven stainless steel components arranged in a circle, with a gap in the circle at the position of an eighth absent component. The diameter through the circle passing through the full cylinder and the gap in the circle corresponding to the position of the absent component forms an axis of symmetry; about this axis the forms wax from the gap to the full cylinder and wane from the full cylinder to the gap. This waxing and waning determines Circuit as a three dimensional correlative of the phases of the moon, as does the gap in the circle corresponding to the new moon. So also does the lunar coolness of the polished stainless steel, an alterity to flesh, siting the work beyond the sublunar human realm. In turn, this assimilation of the form of Circuit to the lunar cycle opens the work to the symbolization of other waxings and wanings, notably of Fortune:

O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variablilis,
semper crecis
aut decrescis; . . .4

Similarly, but even more insistently, In Stride demands the viewer move around the work to grasp its structure. The pivoting of the central door motif elicits this movement of the viewer, even as it serves as a signifier of turning and swinging about a tilted vertical axis, and as such references the gesture of the body in striding and turning. That the work is titled In Stride is in itself suggestive, referencing the movement of the body and reiterating the symbolic form of sculpture as a body projection. Allusions to other representations of the dynamic lived experience of embodiedness in sculpture are elicited by the title: for example, Rodin's Walking Man, Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Giacometti's Walking Quickly Under the Rain. 5 The door as a figure of passage and thus of time includes the ancient association of Janus with doors 6 and the notion of Augenblick as the moment of vision in which an individual's past, present, and future generate themselves. Thus, in Nietzsche's "On the Vision and the Riddle," Zarathustra considers the significance of a doorway leading at once to the eternity of the past and the eternity of the future; past and future converge in the doorway itself, which Nietzsche titles Augenblick. 7 The door is hinged from a tilted jamb, and skewed into a trapezoid. The inset grated cast bronze window in the door is also a skewed trapezoid, but inverted with respect to the door. The trapezoidal form of door and window, along with the tilting of the axis of the jamb, and the slightly lower than conventional height of the door, are disconcerting. This disconcerting effect is appropriate for the door motif regarded as site of passage, as liminal locus between two conditions of being-in-the-world.

Schraufnagel's Double Chair combines two chair-forms. The conjoining of two chairs is not without precedence in sculpture: e.g., Ben Langlands' and Nikki Bell's Interlocking Chairs, 1989. 8 Like the work of Langlands and Bell, Schraufnagel's Double Chair opens the question of what is sited in the site of the work. 9 Double Chair defines a space for conversation, and a mode of conversation: dialogue between two persons. Double Chair consists of two arm chairs separated and joined by a common seat several feet long. The common seat is at once a figure of the joining and the separation entailed in dialogue. The common seat is bivalent: subsuming what is at once a separation and a connecting, the common seat is the reinscription in the form of the work of the relation within dialogue which equiprimordially requires and enables the overcoming of intersubjective distance during the conduct of discourse. This discourse, this back and forth,10 is figured in the spatial structure of Double Chair; as the back and forth of discourse entails duration, the site of Double Chair is no less temporal than spatial.

"Towering up within itself, the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force." 11 Thus all artworks. Sculpture, especially sculpture in the landscape, thematizes the aspect of duration that Heidegger notes, inscribing it in the perduring materiality of the work. In so doing, the work engages the temporal not only in the disclosing of three dimensional form in viewer response and the iconography of the referents of the form of the work, but also as a metaphor for the fragile transience of the lived body, and the longing for its constancy in weathering exposure to the elements.

Tony Schraufnagel is an alumnus of Brookhaven College, 1987-1989; he completed the Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of North Texas in 1992, and the Master of Fine Arts University of North Texas in 1996. Recent exhibitions include: Recent Work, Gallery 414, Fort Worth, 1999; 13 Hours, Squares, and 20 x 500, the three-person exhibition Jo Ann Mulroy, Steven Price, Tony Schraufnagel, and 500 Expo, all at 500X, Dallas, 1998; Critic's Choice 1998, Dallas Visual Arts Center; Portable, Square Works Gallery, Denton, and New Texas Talent, Craighead-Green Gallery, Dallas, 1997. He is an adjunct faculty member at Brookhaven College, and Owner/Manager of Aesthetic Design Source L.L.C., Krum, Texas.

1. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Brazilier, 1968), p. 8. Back
2. See Robert E. Wood, A Path Into Metaphysics: Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Dialogical Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 7ff, for and explication of 'object' and 'subject.' Back
3. Donald Kuspit, "Material as Sculptural Metaphor," Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art 1945 - 1986, ed. Howard Singerman (New York: Abbeville [for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles], 1986), p. 106-125. Back
4. Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, in Carmina Burana: Cantiones Profanae, ed. and trans. Judith Lynn Sebesta (Waucaonda: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1937, 1996). The lines quoted are from the twenty four poems selected by the composer Carl Orff from the Schmeller edition of the Beuron MS (Stuttgart, 1847; Leipzig, 1928) urtext of some 200 Goliardic medieval Latin poems collected as the Carmina Burana in the late thirteenth century by a Benedictine monk at the monastery of Beuron in Bavaria. In translation, the quoted text is:
   

   O Fortune
   like the moon's
   condition of changing,
   always waxing
   or waning; . . .

   
   Back
5. Auguste Rodin, The Walking Man, 1905, bronze, The Joseph H. Hirschorn Coll. Washington, D.C.; Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, bronze, 1913, coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walking Quickly Under the Rain, 1949, bronze, coll. Mr. And Mrs. Gordon Bunshaft, New York. Back
6. The Latin words for 'door' are foris and janua; the association of Janus with doors may have derived from placing a representation of Janus bifrons (with two faces) at the principal door of a house, which might then be designated janua foris. The temple of Janus in the Roman forum consisted in a small bronze shrine with doors on the east and west elevations; the doors were opened during war and closed during periods of peace. Back
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Vision and the Riddle," Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1884); the complete work is online in Thomas Common's translation at http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/nietzsche-zarathustra.txt . Note that Common renders 'Riddle' as 'Enigma' and 'Augenblick' as 'This Moment.' Back
8. See http://langlandsandbell.demon.co.uk. Back
9. Langlands and Bell, Interlocking Chairs, 1989, beech, glass, lacquer. See Andrew Benjamin, "Material Events: The Work of Langlands and Bell," Art and Design 6:3/4, 1990; Andrew Benjamin, "Material Events: Langlands and Bell," Object Painting (London: Academy Editions, 1994), pp.38-53, ill. p. 38. Back
10. The English 'discourse' is from the Late Latin discursus, 'conversation,' from the past participle of discurrere, 'to run back and forth.' Back
11. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 17-87. Heidegger's emphasis. Back