Anam Cara

The Silence of Sculpture

Sculpture attempts the same presence. The pure silence of a piece by Barbara Hepworth can catch the quiet symmetry at the heart of things. Giacometti creates such poignant shapes, long slender figures who seem to be thinning out into the nothingness of the air and the gallery. It is almost as if they are inhabited by some mystical humility which urges them to let go. I remember once visiting an exhibition in the museum in Cologne. There was one special room for a piece by Josef Beuys, called The End of the Twentieth Century. It consisted of huge blocks of stone piled in a scattered way on each other. Each column had a hole at one end. It was as if the stones had waited for millennia for the arrival and adventure of human presence to bring voice, warmth, and belonging to the earth. Human presence had indeed come. But something awful had gone wrong. Humans had destroyed themselves and all that was left now was huge stone columns used and abandoned. Beuys had so clearly anticipated the huge sadness that would issue from the placing and context of these stones. Sculpture is a powerful and wistful form of presence. There is an old anecdote that when Michelangelo was finished carving the sitting Moses, he was so enthralled with the figure’s presence that he tapped him on the knee with his chisel and said, “Moses, get up.”

Within a fixed frame, the artistic imagination strives to create or release living presence. The human imagination loves suggestion rather than exhaustive description of a thing. Often, for instance, one dimension of a thing can suggest the whole presence that is not there or available now. From the tone of a friend’s voice on the phone, your imagination can fill in the physical presence perfectly. Imagination strives to create real presence. Imagination is rarely drawn towards what is complacent or fixed. It loves to explore the edges where cohesion is breaking apart, and where new things are emerging from difficulty and darkness. The imagination never presents merely the idea or the feeling, but reaches deep enough into the experience to find the root where they are already one. As beautiful and inspiring as art might be, it can never reach the power of presence naturally expressed in a baby’s smile or the sinister glower that can cross an old woman’s eyes. Human presence is different from everything else in the world. To fields, stones, mountains, and trees we must be amazing creatures, utterly strange and incomprehensible. Because we ourselves are human presence, we are blind to its miracle.

No concept, image, or symbol can ever gather or hold down a presence. Indeed, the very existence of words, music, thoughts, and art are the voices of longing which ripple forth from the shimmering depths of presence in us and in creation. Presence is longing reaching at once outwards and inwards.