From Antiquity to Modernity: The Many Aspects of Plaster

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to the nashor's 360 speaker series i'm curator of education annasmith and today we're pleased to be working with the Edith O'Donnell Institute of art history at the University of Texas Dallas to bring you a thoughtful discussion on the history and materiality of plaster our first speaker today will be Nasir chief curator Jed Morse who will offer a brief overview of the installation of plaster in the National collection currently on view in our lower level gallery next CD Dickerson curator and a head of the department of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington will present on plaster in Renaissance and Baroque Italy Lord Margery director of the French sculpture census was unfortunately unable to join us today but Richard Berto has agreed to share her presentation on French plasters in u.s. collections patel is founding director of the Edith O'Donnell Institute of art history Margaret McDermott distinguished chair of aesthetic studies and founder of the Center for the interdisciplinary study of museums at UT D finally Russell Buchanan founder and principal at Buchanan architecture will share his own work in plaster and his experiences with the medium we will conclude our program with a panel discussion moderated by dr. Patel and will welcome your questions at that time now please join me in welcoming our first speaker Jed Morse [Applause] okay I think this is on can you hear me great great so I just want to echo and as welcome we're so glad to have you all here with us this of course is what was was spun out of an effort to show a selection of plasters from the national collection the exhibition that you saw downstairs as you came to the auditorium is called a work in progress plasters in the Nasher collection and it features a small selection of works but in fact the national collection is fortunate let me see if this works well there I am ah there we go is fortunate to count among its holdings seventeen works in plaster including master works by Rodin Braun Cousy Matisse Picasso and de Kooning and important recent gifts of work by Jacques Lipchitz Manuel Neri George Segal as well as a really thrilling promised gift of a major work of contemporary artist Thomas house agos from Nancy Nasser and David Hema Sager the the collection also has at least eight works that incorporate plaster in significant and innovative ways including seven rare wax and plaster sculptures by Maduro so the most of any museum in the United States and a fantastic and very rare plaster and terra cotta construction by picasso these holdings as I mentioned inspired this small installation in the lower level gallery the exhibition examines the rich variety of ways that artists that from the late 19th century to the present have worked with this commonplace in seemingly innocuous material like Rodin who had hundreds of plaster casts of his compositions in his studio with him and would would frequently create new compositions from bits and pieces of old ones kind of cobbling them together as if they were these new constructions or Maduro so who conducted radical experiments with the casting process preserving the wax shell that's typically melted out in the lost wax casting process and reinforcing it with plaster or manual Neri who modeled directly in plaster and would then carve away at it so taking advantage of both the additive and subtractive qualities of the material and often then painting those compositions and of course Thomas house ago who made casts of clay forms on the floor from plaster soaked hemp then stood them up and reinforced them with steel rebar kind of combining two age-old techniques one of David Smith of composing on the grounds and standing them up and making them three-dimensional and the other of George Segal who used plaster impregnated bandages to make to make casts of of his friends and family I want to thank our curator Katherine Kraft for organizing this beautiful and insightful installation as well as our assistant curator Lee Arnold who also made significant contributions and a couple of our interns avi Varma and Tiffany Grasmick who wrote label texts for some of the works on view in fact you know Katherine if you haven't seen the exhibition please make sure to read all the information because it is dense and rich and and full of wonderful information and in fact Catherine's introduction I think serves as you know it is a beautiful and succinct description of the the variety of uses of plaster as well as its history and I think would serve as a good jumping-off point for the rest of the panelists so I I will read it for you here for millennia plaster has attracted artists through its remarkable versatility derived from powdered limestone mixed with water plaster was used by the ancient Egyptians Greeks and Romans although it was associated with architecture and painting as much as with sculpture poured into molds it can replicate three-dimensional objects as a material work directly it lends itself to both additive and subtractive approaches artists can add more plaster to a sculpture to model it further but they can also cut it apart or carve into it as if it were stone for sculptors working in the more pliable medium of clay making a plaster cast of the finished work allows them to preserve it in a less fragile substance less expensive than bronze a plaster cast can also serve as a preparatory step in producing a bronze sculpture becoming the source for a mold well though plaster has existed since as early as 7000 BCE its use mecan't became truly widespread in the 19th century in traditional schools for the fine arts for example artists learned anatomy art history and principles of artistic composition by studying plaster casts of classical sculptures even as artists began to turn away from academic studies in favour of live models they embraced the versatility and accessibility of plaster as a way of working through ideas completed plasters could then be exhibited in hopes of attracting patrons who had paid to have the mix executed in more durable and expensive materials of marble or bronze artists have also made and kept plaster casts of their own work in order to have the objects close to them for further thought and inspiration a work in progress plaster in the national collection illuminates only a portion of the ways that artists employed the material in the Nasher collection much less the 9000 plus years of its that it's been in use but it serves as a jumping-off point for the panel today to further explore the enduring appeal of this material thank you [Applause] thank you very much jad that was a great introduction thank you for the invitation to speak today and I'm gonna cut right to the origins of plaster as jed alluded to the origins of plaster have deep deep roots into antiquity and we don't have to travel far from where we are standing seated today to glimpse those roots at the Kimball Art Museum there's a fabulous plaster mummy mask that exists from its Egyptian cast during Roman times during the second century AD but it gets to the the essence of the fact that plaster is indeed a very very ancient material one with an enormous legacy now during the course of my very brief more remarks I may use plaster and the word stucco interchangeably and I think it's important to understand a little bit of the distinction between the two because point in fact is this is probably technically stucco plaster as Jed mentioned is made from taking limestone baking it to a high temperature then you have a friable material that you then cut up and slake in water and then that would then be dried out to create the powder that when you reintroduce water to you would have your your-your-your pliable substance that you would then model the key innovation that the Romans made is that they were using marble and travertine as their source of lime and then they would introduce very very fine beautifully white Carrara marble marble dust into the mixture to give this is it white that you see in the mummy mask here and that's that's a key point to make out now in Rome itself when you traveled to the via latina today you can go into a series of tombs that exemplify the great strides that the Romans took in the art of bronze and you have to imagine going in torch-lit and seeing the flickering fire dancing off these very very shallow reliefs that were executed again probably 1st 2nd century AD in this tomb of the Valerii and the point that I want to make here when you look at something executed in stucco here is that it's freely modelled it's it's not made from a cast in the case of the Romans and they were not using molds to produce these stucco forms and you can see the way that the artist has sketched very very quickly probably with a wooden stylus the forms of this very beautiful figure modelled just a little bit to give it some relief but otherwise this is all executed freely through hand much as you might play with play-doh and sort of stick it against the wall to build up a form and then use somebody some sort of sharp instrument to give relief now I'm going to fast forward many hundreds of years to the Renaissance during the time of Raphael circa 1500 1510 the Romans began to go into tombs like that one the great Minnesota artists and realized that there was something absolutely exquisite and magical that needed to be transported to the present and they began experiments to figure out exactly how the ancient Romans had been doing their stucco work it had become a lost art form there was certainly plaster sculpture a much less fine form of plaster sculpture being executed but they couldn't figure out how to make it so exquisitely white that it could really be used as a substitute for Carrara marble and there was this bloke from Venice named Giovanni du da who sort of cracked the secret according to piss re and again it was this introduction a very fine marble dust to be able to create these glistening white form on the ceilings of structures such as this one called the villa madama outside of Rome now an important distinction here is that as opposed to what the ancient Romans were doing these were all cast from molds wooden reliefs would be made they would be carved out they would be packed with stucco and then you would sort of score the place on the ceiling that you wanted to join the the the the mole that you made you'd stick it up there and then you would get these fabulous relief so there's a distinction here with what is happening in the Renaissance a very very much a preoccupation with creating stucco sculpture from molds and this very quickly translated into the fact that you could go around Rome and you could look at some of the fabulous antiquities that were being dug up at the time such as the Lacroix and around 1506 the Paolo Belvedere II you could take your plaster and that you've now accomplished with working you could create what is called a piece mold around said figure you could take that off the original sculpture and then you have a mold that you could pack with stucco and you could begin to create casts of famous antiquities that proliferated across Europe to form the great cast galleries of the famous courts of Europe one of the artists who was involved with his exploration was an artist named Francesco Prima TCO and he was a great artist who traveled to France to the Chateau a Fulton blow outside of Paris and it's no surprise not only was he receiving commissions to execute these plaster copies of great antiquities but he also rendered what is conceivably the most marvelous works of stucco of the entire Renaissance these very full-figured beautiful female figures that decorate this wonderful gallery at the Chateau de Fontainebleau again outside of Paris this was a great innovation that you were able to do in stucco which you would otherwise want to do in marble but of course you couldn't do it in marble because for someone to come in and try to carve something like this along the entire length of gallery simply impossible and and besides in France where you're gonna get your Carrara marble easily and cheaply now I'm gonna make a short digression to the reason that I should be at this stage at all and it has to do with the chapter I wrote in my dissertation that that made me absolutely fascinated by stucco and it centers on a small time sculptor who was working in Venice during the second half of the sixteenth century named Camillo Mariani and I don't have time to go into a full exploration of his earth but suffice it to say that this sculptor was able to do in stucco what no other sculptor was really doing at the time he was able to bring a sensitivity to his sculpture he was able to avoid the the Mannerist formula that had creeped into sculpture during the late renaissance and to bring to it a new sensitivity that was directly derived from the beautiful inventions in painting that were occurring simultaneously with Varanasi Titian and others and it's reflected in figures such as this one again executed in stucco and then later right around 1600 he would go to Rome and bring a similar sensitivity to sculpture there but again they were being done in stucco so why should a sculptor who was working in stucco be the one who's on the cutting edge of stylistic innovation basically a generation before Bernini would take the world of sculpture into the brook and it made me think deeply about what is it about stucco that might lend itself to stylistic innovation and I began to think seriously about what it took to make a stucco sculpture at this point in time and I'm just using an example that's drawn from a great work of stuck of sculpture everything you see here is in stucco this is the great Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza Italy executed by Andrea Palladio and I'll just look at one of his the single figures that was executed here and as I began to think about this figure and how it was made I realized that the first step is essentially you're taking iron wire to make a under structure for the figure and this was all documented and technical research done on this group of sculptures where this guy Camilla Mariani in fact trained I'm seriously making a stick figure out of a pliable bendable substance that you can do whatever you want to with it you didn't have sense make a scarecrow you would surround it with hay again you're dealing with pliable materials you can move you can adjust the figure the pose however you want during the process of creation then you begin to use really concrete the first round to begin to bring the composition into focus you keep slathering it on more and more but but the great thing I realized about stucco is that if you suddenly get yourself into a corner you don't like the solution that you've arrived at you just chisel it off and and reinvent whereas in marble once you've made a false blow of the chisel you're stuck so again stucco is a material I realized that that really breeds innovation that's something that's very sympathetic to what artists are doing and it's only finally at the end to the depth of maybe two or three centimeters that you're applying that beautiful Sheen of fine white stucco and then you're using your modeling tools to help bring that form to completion so I began to realize with camilla Mariani this the sculptor i became fascinated with that point in fact his sympathies towards the medium of plaster were absolutely crucial to his ability to walk into this church in Rome which you all should visit and completely do something that no other sculptor was doing at the time in terms of style right at the moment that john lorenzo bernini was coming into his own and i i thought this was kind of an interesting and fascinating thing and it also depended on the fact that this guy was from venice venice is not a place that has a great supply of great Carrara marble they're forced to use stucco and as a result the sculptors attach real prestige to spec of sculpture where's in Rome Carrara marble is a dime a dozen you don't have to look very far to have great marble so there's no prestige attached to stucco you have to have a great attitude and great respect for your materials to want to take them to the next level and that's what Camilla Mariani brought to his sculptures again right at the moment before john lorenzo bernini begins to do things like this which are absolutely extraordinary in the history of sculpture point I want to make about this and stucco this is this great sense st. Longinus that occupies the crossing of st. Peters if you were standing next to and you would come up to about you know right there just to give you an idea of the scale plaster was crucial to john lorenzo bernini nice working habits as it was to all baroque sculptors we know for a fact that in terms of this sculpture he made this composition first in plaster he wheeled it in to st. Peter's put it in sight marched the pope in front of it just to make sure it looked right but the fact that he was forced to first work in plaster and work out the composition of plaster again he's bringing a pliable attitude to a work that would ultimately be committed to a completely unforgiving material which is marble now I just conclude with really Bernini successor in Italian sculptor and that's the great Antonio Canova who was born about 1750 in Venice and he was a great adherent of plaster stucco sculpture one thing that is particularly to recognize is the systems by which sculptors in 17th and 18th century Italy would make a full-scale version of the work that they wanted to translate into marble and use a system called pointing to translate that particular model into stone and you see this illustration I think it's from Diderot showing this sculptor looking at the model or well looking at the model over here using this complex system of lines and jibs to try to make the coordinates correspond to what he's carving over here and this is what Antonio Canova was doing but the interesting thing about Canova he hated plaster he really didn't like to work in plaster so what he would do first is to create his compositions in clay as soon as he had realized a full-scale model in clay he would then cast it in plaster to create a durable model that can be used in perpetuity to carve his marbles from so he essentially if you went to his studio you would have a full catalog of the sculptures that you commissioned from them you would look around the walls recognize the composition you wanted and plaster choose it and say you want to ship to London and and this was a great innovation in fact that he brought to the way using plaster for the proliferation of sculpture that would continue into the 19th century which brings us to Rick Patel and large Marjorie [Applause] well this lectern and none of us have notes it's very bizarre I looked down at this screen I'm channeling Lorde - Marjorie and I know I don't look like Lorde - Marjorie and that was him this is on behalf of Lord Marjorie Lord and Marjorie is in fact this weekend moving into Lauren Libya's new house on Spring Street in Williamstown where olivia is going to take over the directorship of the Clark and Laura is going to continue her work at UT Dallas and the Nasher Sculpture Center on her French sculpture census the sculpture the census of French sculpture in American public collections there now more than 3,000 works from that census online the Nasher is hosted on the site of the French sculpture census and it's really an extraordinary site and I urge you to look at it through the Nasher site and lore with interns and on her own dime and on UT DS dime has gone all around the country and found an extraordinary marvel of French sculptor sculptures all throughout the United States and tiny museums and city halls and parks in cemeteries and in museums and that census is a long-term effort and we asked her to make a selection of works of art in the medium of plaster and so it's prepared by Laura and I'm her I'm channeling her I'm I I'm equipped to channel her because in my sort of continuation of prostate cancer I'm on so many female hormones that I'm probably more female than Laura - Marjorie at this particular point what what we're doing now is dealing with the purpose of the sculptures and lore has organized this into lifecast used in a creative process in other words not part of something else and here is a life mask of George Washington which was made it was not made by you dome but it was used by Udo to create his famous marble portrait of Washington of course he whom he couldn't see um here's a cast of the right hand to Victor Hugo which is in the San Francisco Legion of Honor which is literally a cast of the right hand to Victor Hugo and then one can see how it's used in the Rodin sculpture for which it was made so if you can't see somebody or if you can't stand have them hold still or if they're in a very distant place you can use a cast in order to understand their physiognomy this is one of the most fascinating works this is a cast of Rhoda's hand made by somebody else with a cast of a Rodin sculpture in rodas hand so part of the of this plaster was made by Rodin and the other part is Rodin and it's a it's a recognition of the fact that sculpture comes as much from the hand as from the eye and this is in the Metropolitan Museum given by the great sculptor Melvina Hoffman who was given it by Rhoda himself then this is plaster used in the creative process sketches and models for founder's or others this is Bentley's great colored sculpture of a Python killing a good do in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles which is wax covered plaster a little bit like the the plasters that you see outside here in at the Nasher here is Duchamp violas wonderful colored plaster in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in which he's colouring the plaster obviously thinking about transforming it either into a honey colored stone or into bronze um this is a beautiful plaster in the Zimmer Lee Museum in New Brunswick New Jersey of the painter are Marshall by dumped an artist who even if Jed Morris has heard of him I would be very surprised and it's one of the great things about the French sculpture census is that we're all learning that there are many sculptors we've never heard of who happened to be French and this is obviously used in a process of making a more complex portrait either in bronze or in stone the great plaster by Giacometti at the Yale University Art Gallery on the Left which is the only surviving work associated directly with brung with Giacometti's and at Yale and on the right is the bronze cast using the sculpture as a model which is in the National Gallery in Washington we have these wonderful casts of feet and legs and arms which are in the San Francisco Legion of Honor in the Metropolitan Museum given by Rhoda in the case of the Metropolitan Museum and given by the wonderful alma de bruit revealed Spreckels who created the museum in the park in in San Francisco and you can see how artists used plaster casts in order to study particular parts of the human body as they're creating imaginative human bodies this is a fascinating assemblage of heads of the burghers of Calais that this great sort of spider it'd be wonderful in a in that kind of science-fiction movie at the Philadelphia Museum in the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia and one can see how in many senses plasters are either fragmented or put together in ways which are much more modernist than the finished works then there's a category that she does put together of plasters as original works of art when there are no other works that relate to them in the last category everything that I showed you relates to something else so in another medium or something an imaginative work made with the material and here are these hilarious michelin legend sculpt bus in the Detroit Art Institute from the 1830s and 40s these are in the great age of caricature and we think tend to think of caricature in terms of domi a but there was as much plaster caricature as there are sculptural caricature as there was painted and these are even weirder by a guy named de hell which I gave I've never heard of him either it's a pseudonym for somebody whose name we don't know either so it's an obscurity upon obscurity and these are on this in the Zimmer Lee Art Museum which I don't know has anybody ever been to the zoo Murali Art Museum yeah we have a taker it's really wonderful it's full of obscurities that it's really great for French turn-of-the-century art then painted plasters the whole idea of making something and then painting it in a way to sort of see how it would do as a bronze in the middle as a polychrome sculpture on the left and all of these are by Alexander arch' panco and none of them if you saw them in the galleries of the museum and museums in which they reside would think of them as being plaster because the surface does not look like plaster and then ARP plasters some painted in some nod and some he did in multiple copies and the Nasher thank god is working on a great ARP exhibition Katherine craft is she still working on it yes yay they will be able really to look at one of the greatest twentieth-century sculptors and a sculptor who used plaster enormous Lee and you can see why with these sort of sinuous interconnected biomorphic forms then their addition plasters plasters that were cheaper to make than bronzes and easier to sell than bronzes because they're lighter and you can sell them for less but you have to make a lot of them in order to make money and this is preyas this was bought by Olivier so it sit across the street in the DMA called ceilings even though it looks like to me she's eating her finger I've never quite understood what it is but it's a very creepy and bizarre object that when you look at it in the room you're not exactly sure of its medium and that is part of the beauty of painted plasters or waxed plasters is they begin to think of them as something else these are two plasters by carpeau the his portrait of Dumas feasts which is in the Clark Art Institute and Laura has counted more than a hundred plasters from this cast which were made according to the studio records of carpeau but only two of them survived one in France and one in the Clark and in the Manila collection whoo which as you know has a great collection of representations of people of African origin throughout the centuries and art why be born a slave by carpeau which also existed in numerous plaster copies this is a Rodin plaster thinker and if as as we learned from Jed Morris at the very beginning Renoir did a lot I mean Rodin did a lot of exhibitions in his lifetime and one of the things you don't want to do if you're doing a big road exhibition somewhere is to borrow a lot of heavy bronzes and marbles so what you do is you borrow plasters and Rodin would make plaster casts paint the ones he wanted to paint put them in a railroad car and send them to whatever city they were going to and it was the plasters that were the things that people in Strasbourg and Genoa and Marseille and London saw in place of the works that we see now in bronze then reproduction plasters this is another category these we're done oftentimes there are these large groups that make reproductions and one of them is the Atelier de moulage damu janeshia know that means that if you go to one of the national museums and France and you want a cast of a sculpture by gujo from the the sculpture in in in situ in France then you get them and you can have you can you can buy them you can cover them with things you can do what you want with them you can use them in your own interior decor you can get plasters this is a plaster by carpeau which is in bloomington indiana which relates to this bronze which is in the Musee d'Orsay this is another case this is a reproduction rather than an original plaster it's not a plaster by the artist it's a plaster made subsequently and used as an exemplar by the artist um this is a terrible slide of another one of the the coal bale sculptures by de shardana in the New Orleans and the ritz-carlton this there is no place that lore has not gone as a public place I guess she stays in fancy hotels than I do but she found this here we have Udo and of course if you're interested if you are a collecting institution that are not interested so much and the greatness of artists but in the greatness of the subjects of the art it's just as easier for you to have a cast made by the Latoya to moulage and put that inexpensive cast in your space there's a this is she's fascinated by this company that which is now it's it's caproni most of the cast in American museums that are from Renaissance and ancient works of art were made by the caproni brothers in Boston and the that's now the juste gallery in Woburn Massachusetts and when when lore went into this place she was you know she was in heaven looking at all of these plasters and here we see caproni Pat plasters all from all through American museums and she's of course selected the ones that are French sculptures and we have chef who and we have sure and other things now I'm this is that was lore this is me and I'm just going to do a little bit of code I CD mentioned the importance of plaster cast and for me as an art historian I've always thought that it was really important to have plaster casts of great works of art because the most important aspect of sculpture is scale more than material its scale if you can relate the sculpture to your own body if you understand what it means to you as you walk around it as a human being of your size then you understand it much more profoundly than if you see a photograph no matter how good and this is a painting by koepka a plaster cast made in Rome from the antique that were in Copenhagen in the early 19th century and here you see a room in Vassar College here you see a room at the Metropolitan Museum and this is a room of plaster casts where you can learn the history of sculpture not through the originals but by works of art that are exactly the same size as the originals my favorite cast room is the cast calorie and the VNA Museum and if you haven't been there it's worth dropping everything going to DFW getting in a plane and going because you're surrounded by works of art that of their scale and looking down on the great columns from the second floor makes you understand really the scale of these original objects here's another one of the rooms I've never quite understood the paint colors but the sculptures are wonderful this is another room I love you know Don and Doris tourists in this wonderful room of allegorical figures looking totally out of place another this is any University Art Museum and this is the closest collection of plaster casts when I was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 70s a colleague of mine who taught Greek and Roman art Carolyn Hauser and I found a huge collection of damaged caster cast cast produced by caproni in Boston that had been bought by UT classics department in 1910 and we had them all restored because we wanted to teach from them and now they're up in the Blanton Museum and so the cat that the cast went out of fashion the students at the Art Institute of Chicago and 19:32 through the cast out the window and broke them because they were so opposed to them and so you can go and see these cast now at Austin this is a beautiful photograph of Henry Moore carving a Henry Moore in plaster and though it's not the same figure as the little one down below which is in the collection of the dma it gives one a sense of the relationship between the hands of an artist which was reinforced in that row down I showed you earlier on the tool and the material the kind of the cradling of this figure in the hands of Henry Moore his tool to carve it and then what it becomes when it becomes bronze I was in I'm on the Gauguin committee in Paris and I saw this weird thing on the left at my last committee and it relates to bronze on the right which exists in only two copies one of which is in the musee d'orsay and the question is who made the plaster and was the plaster made by Goga and colored by Gauguin was it made by the founder who was working on the bronze and the question of the authenticity of the plaster is a question that I had to deal with but when I went to end with is five plasters that I saw just two weeks ago in the kunst house in Zurich by Giacometti and they made me understand how important that medium is for one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century and for a sculptor who is so well represented in the National collection this is a sculpture of the of the 1930s the mid 1930s that looks you know almost like a realist sculptor it was made when when he was making mostly lamps and end irons and jewelry and other things because he needed to survive in the 1930s this is a sculpture sorry sorry this is a sculpt this is a plaster this is a slightly better photograph of it and this is the beginning of a sculpture which is about the gaze it's about something that looks at you and you look at it and what's riveting about this I was staring I took the hideous photograph on the left and I staring at it in the case and I was remembering that the Nasher has this this is another bronze this is a bronze this is another bronze this is a marble and Betty Blake who died only three weeks ago in Newport had this which was cast in 1951 and stainless steel and so you can see the incredible importance of material to your understanding of a work of art this was my this is absolutely my favorite placer and I had to show it to you because what is is it's a it's a it's a study for a passage and it was in theory to be done full-scale with a human being being a little tiny thing moving through these spaces going upstairs and into the last space it's about this long and it's in the kunst house and it's the most environmental work of art ever made by Giacometti and it only exists in this one sculpture or this the the whole the sculpture about making sounds and words and here it is in plaster and here it is in wood at the Museum of Modern Art this my favorite I considered stealing it actually it's with this wonderful it's a still-life done in 1937 with this wonderful sculpture on the table and books and other things then beneath it and it made me think looking at these materials made by Giacometti made me realize that for Giacometti plaster is the primary medium more than anything else he worked in plaster and one sees him here surrounded with plaster and it's armatures he even took bronzes and covered them with plaster because he liked the look of plaster in the in the sense of its occasion this and this is my last slide and it's very difficult to see what is Giacometti and what is the sculpture because they're both covered with plaster thank you I [Applause] must confess I've learned more about plaster in the last 30 minutes than I have in the last 10 years I I'm an architect in Dallas plaster interestingly has has an interesting relationship to architecture as a building material and so I've always had a kinship with the use of plaster in architecture as a result I've run across some very dear friends who've introduced me to other uses of plaster one in particular an artist here in town Otis Jones who in taught me about the use of plaster to make objects Otis uses plastic not plaster he uses a marble emulsion with pigment where he'll apply it and sand it and apply it and sand it and that is the approach that I've taken in some of these works what I'm going to share with you this afternoon as a couple of images of technique of objects that are fairly small and then we're going to work our way up to objects that are architectural models and then we'll finish off with some images of some furniture I'm one of those architects and there are many who are very interested in architecture but we also are interested in furniture design and and although I'm untrained I still like working with my hands and so I do three-dimensional objects as well as drawings and sketches and other things so let's take a look first at some process this was an idea that had been brewing for a while the work that I do in plaster is very much applied to an object it would this as opposed to casting the object I would say that the image on the left is fully conceived piece however I wanted to reproduce it I would need to make a mold and then reproduce it the idea of the object on your right sorry is as an interest in using a very very common material a shipping bag we've all received packages that are packed in with shipping bags which you can see on the left the the idea was to take a shipping bag and to deform the shipping bag which in the middle picture you can see is a piece of string that's tied around the shipping bag the shipping bags are semi inflated with air so by tying a string around it I can tighten that string and get it to fully inflate again however I have now distorted the shipping bag and then I think you can see as that then goes to the next step which is in effect encasing the shipping bag and my process or way of thinking I was freezing the shipping bag in time I was capturing it at a moment that I could and in fact encasing it in plaster the plaster that I use as CD referred to earlier is actually a marble emulsion so that might make it a stucco but that's the material that Otis had introduced to me and that's the the medium that I chose to work with the other thing that Otis taught me that is so important is to use a reinforcement for that plaster and in the work that I do I use cheesecloth so the process that you're looking at here is first the creation of the form and then the encasing of that form which in this particular application requires multiple editions of the cheesecloth and plaster followed by multiple editions of sanding it all away the object on the right is probably six to eight weeks worth of applying and subtracting applying and subtracting all the while creating a huge amount of dust from very very diligent sanding let's continue then the the ideas then of these shipping bags grew what you can see on the left was the second piece where I had taken a shipping bag and I had folded it over on itself and tied a string around it I would say these earliest pieces were very much experimental I did not know how to do this I was untrained I was literally using a scalpel and applying the plaster and cheesecloth to these objects letting it set sanding it letting and then doing it over and over again the object on the right is a further experiment with that a slightly larger shipping bag and this time the string is tied in both directions again distorting the shipping bag filling it back up with air if you will and giving me a surface to then apply the plaster to as the process as I gained a little confidence was able to explore some other uses of the shipping bags and don't know if it's noticeable in these images or not but the idea of these shipping bags is always related in my mind to architecture and so it was very early on that I was trying to get the shipping bags configured in a way that they would stand up on their own so much as was discussed with some of the earlier objects building them laying down and then trying to get them to stand up that was very essential in this really novice process but very interested in trying to get these objects to stand up and these were some very early experiments with it the ruffled edges that you see around the perimeter these shipping bags come fully inflated but oftentimes there's a there's a little bit of the plastic that's left over between that and where the next shipping bag picks up and it became a very very intricate process of trying to capture that edge if you will and freeze it in time and then it gave me an opportunity to really go back in and experiment and test with the actual sanding and carving out of the plaster itself and then these two are probably what I would argue by the way these are about 12 inches by 12 inches they're not that large these two are what I would say is a culmination of these experiments with the shipping bags probably to my most favorite pieces of that collection or of that series of objects you can see on the left the shipping bags there's actually two shipping bags tied together and they form a tripod if you will with one leg sticking up those are all part of an ongoing thought process of both architecture and sculpting shapes and then these are objects that were people had seen the shipping bag pieces and had requested that I might consider doing wall mounted pieces these are actually very very small very delicate the ideas here were much more advanced though my skills had improved and I was able to really manipulate the shipping bags into shapes that I thought were provocative and challenging for me to try to capture and this is a group of four of these objects again they're fairly small I would say if if you if you cut one in half you might be able to see about an eighth of an inch of thickness of the combination of the plaster emulsion and the reinforcements which in this case is the cheesecloth this seems like a very obvious leap but actually to quite a bit of thinking there's a couple of objects that I found an interest in and they're cardboard boxes yes these are completely encased actual cardboard boxes the trick with these is it's very very difficult to get the leaves of a cardboard box to stay in place and that's the trick to this to these objects this is the same piece seeing it from two different angles but again the process is very similar taking a cardboard box in that box is again about a 12-inch square and then very very carefully applying the plaster emulsion and being very very careful to try to make sure that even the subtlety of the folds that are on the back of that cardboard box and I don't know if they're visible sorry inside but the that actually became the most interesting for me aspect of working in this medium was capturing the very subtle nuances that occur of the object itself you can see some of that in the shipping bag pieces where the the the fun of the of the of the process was getting in and working with the detail this is there are only these two of the cardboard boxes again you can see the simplicity of the first piece and then I became a little bit more adventurous with the second piece again the trick here is not the application of the plaster the trick is how to keep the leaves of the box rigid before the plaster gets applied to it and finally we're going to go through a series of architectural models I brought this along because what you can really see here is the the texture of the cheesecloth this again this is an ongoing I'm not finished with this it's one model so you're getting four images of the same model this is actually a house that's under construction right now here in Dallas and the idea of the project is really a very central component of the residents a secondary component and then a tertiary component don't worry about this this is really just a base for the piece but this isn't a stage where the piece is very rough and very raw and you can you can kind of see how the cheesecloth literally gets embedded within the plaster and then additional layers of plaster will be added sanded added sanded added sanded for many many times this is also one of the first times where I experiment experimented with again a notice Jones concept of mixing in pigment with the plaster you know the in the previous pieces they were all just plaster these are plaster but there's been pigment introduced and I'm still interested in that and continue to work on that this is the same house this is the same project still under construction but this is a more refined model what you can see is the central portion of that model the secondary box and the tertiary box don't worry about that that's just an aspect of the model that is more part of the landscape here the model is actually crafted in a very very fine chipboard and it is very very crisp and sharp-edged then layer upon layer of plaster and cheesecloth is applied and sanded applied and sanded to get to try to maintain a certain tailored edge to the piece but not not trying to make it look like something that it's not it is definitely a plaster object the base is wood that has also been completely encased in plaster on all sides and this is a an object that was probably done maybe five to seven years ago what you can see in this object why I really wanted to show this was again Otis is so influential in some of this work but it's the idea of being able to apply a layer of plaster that might be white and then apply another layer of plaster that might be black and then another layer that might be white again and through the sanding process you can see how edges and colors begin to reemerge from layers that were put down well before you can see that a notices work and I was very very interested in this idea once I became familiar with the process came much more confident in being able to apply materials and then reveal them by sanding them away and then in probably what is my most ambitious project this is an actual full-size chair much the same size as the chairs you're all sitting in now this is a completely functioning chair that is cast or I'm sorry a encased in plaster the and it is a working piece of furniture the concept of this is to write angles that are interlocking and this uses only one sheet of corrugated cardboard that's a an aside to this project but essentially the piece is made entirely out of multiple layers of corrugated cardboard and then a skin of cardboard is put on it and then multiple layers of plaster are then applied to that skin again it's a plant it's a process of applying it and then sanding it smooth applying it and sanding it smooth and you can see some of the revealing plaster that is underneath particularly on in the black this I would say is one of the more as I mentioned early adventures projects trying to push the limit of what our capabilities are with the use of this plaster and I would love to koutou to cast this piece I think it would be a very very castable piece since it is two pieces that can be separated and that will finish up my presentation for you this afternoon [Applause] can we maybe have the lights up maybe that would be so great to see you you that possible yeah great III thought that I wasn't gonna be the leader but I'm the leader so I'm gonna be the leader you had a kind of chronological survey and then the idea of ever having an artist who actually works himself and plaster as the as the concluding speaker is an idea that is in fact really important and it's important to a place like the Nasher Sculpture Center which is not just about things that were produced in the past but things that are produced now and the relationship between the two things and I actually have one of those objects in my kitchen one of his wall objects in my kitchen and I look at it every day several times and it looks like the Venus of Willendorf to me but you know maybe that's my parent imagination plaster has this sort of sense of purity to it because it is white and it's to me what was interesting and looking at both CDs and my slides is how often artists are almost afraid of that surface and want to cover it and want to do something make make it want to look like something else and I was wondering whether you might comment about that yeah it's interesting because the reinvention of plaster and the Renaissance it was all about maintaining the purity of the whiteness yeah and it's really only in your age 19th century that you begin to see that well but what your guys kind of beige things what's that is the those niche sculptures that was a bad photograph a band-aid buff yeah those are why those were really meant to be pristinely white again yes they were trying to rival marble and what couldn't be achieved in marble that was a cycle of monumental freestanding sculptures surrounding an ancient Thera my actually as a bathhouse that had been reconstructed into a church and you just couldn't hire one sculptor to do eight monumental sculptures so stucco was the easy solution still had to look like great Marvel yeah and it does because you can't touch it right you're it's it's distant from you I'm curious the the the most of them are of the plasters in the Nasher Sculpture Center collection are covered in some way or another the Duchamp vo isn't the Picasso is though it's white it has a kind of painted surface the the Matisse is definitely painted painted yeah well no it's interesting and I think color is is is such an important element and one that we overlook all the time in terms of sculpture but in terms of how we read it you know you may remember it back in 2004 we did this symposium variable states that looked at variations in modern sculpture and we had forecasts of Rodin's age of bronze our plaster and three bronzes and it was really striking to see I mean not only the variation in the colors of the bronzes but also this stark white plaster McMunn them and then just being confronted with all of those different with all of those that was different that kind of whole palette of colors and how you know we have to realize that you know we we may study these things and see a number of of casts all over the world but most people they're they're exposed to one thing they may see one particular version of the aged bronze their entire life and that's it and seeing a white version versus seeing one that is you know it's emerald green because it's been outside for a hundred years and it's just got this gorgeous green patina or we're almost a black bronze like the one in San Francisco which has been inside for almost all of its life you know that these have a distinct effect on how we interpret those things what's interesting of course with a lot of these plasters in the National collection is you know they've been used many of them were used in the foundry and so they have been encoded so that you can easily take mold off of them and that leaves that leaves a residue the the de Kooning plaster of the clam digger has this extraordinary coating that involves linseed oil and soap but it has this wonderful deep brown kind of look to it and it's something that you know de Kooning kept that in his studio because he loved looking at that and thinking about it and it inspired him for the rest of his career but you know so when we encounter these things there are lots of hands that have been been involved in them and and so whether it was by the artist or by virtue of the foundry or maybe the founders did it but the artist really liked it and looked at it that way for the rest of their life you know there are all these particular variables that I think come into play with plasters yeah it's very much a correlation between function and the kind of plaster being used I can guarantee you that that full freestanding model that Bernini created for the Saint Longinus would have been a grubby ugly con a grayish plaster yeah that he wouldn't have spared any expense to try to create because it was making for scale and I'd have to look back I think there is a document that it was whitewashed in fact to give the appearance of again what it looked like at the end if you've use black you be an architect there are two colors yeah black and white have you thought of other colors no no I'm busy with black and white that's keeping me just right and if you cast that chair what would you cast it in bronze oh well if there were no budget yeah yeah on the same on the same as the when I heard that that was the way to a master would would cast a piece that he may not do it in bronze he might do it and in plaster I would be in the same category yeah because you have to pay for it yeah it would be it would be expensive but I certainly have newfound enthusiasm to go and take it to that next casting step and that chair you know that's one of those chairs that doesn't need to be moved around unlike a lot of the other furniture that I do which is entirely mobile so yeah casting in a material that was a heavy material me would be perfectly fine yeah I was one of the one of the interesting aspects of my own thinking about Giacometti has to do with writing about the the thumb de venise those tall skinny figures the Nasher you have one two and the meadows has one and there were eight or ten yeah some number like that and the story of them is a fascinating story because actually there's states of the same sculpture what what he was doing is that he would be working away in plaster on a metal armature on a wood base in his studio and he worked feverishly on it and his brother cast them when he was asleep and then he would go back to it and work on the others and so they're literally states of the same sculpture cast and they were first shown in there called foam to Vinnie's because they were shown at the Venice Biennale for the first time and they were shown in plaster the first before they were cast they were in bronze because yours are bronze and the meadows as bronze and the additions are what like 10 or what are Giacometti additions they're they've they're nine yeah yeah I I've always wanted to see the plasters I wonder if this vendace Dorne so they have most of most of the plaster has to found at the foundation yeah and in suruc yeah and then the end yeah are in Paris yeah yeah but when I was at the Countach Zurich they had just received their gift incredible gift and then they had them displayed on these raw wooden tables and like laid out yeah like you know like oh like they were like it was a scientific experiment gone bad yeah but it was the most incredible you know a direct open and generous way to display them because they were they weren't sure they weren't sure how they were going to treat them treat them like like vaunted art objects or treat them like they were studio yeah but that comes right out of Rodin and I don't know the exact relationship but he was casting multiple plasters breaking them up yes or showing them at one place and then putting them on a training themselves dance dates because they're easy and cheap to send around right and if they break so what you just make another one right yeah it's a you know I mean now that we look at that age of bronze and plaster by row down here and it's so rare and it's so important the idea that it was like this thing that you could make another one of during his lifetime it doesn't spring readily to mine well now only five exists in the world so yeah no I know I'm I've always I saw the 2008 exhibition of Giacometti at the Pompidou which was mostly about plasters and I've always had this kind of dream that someday the Nasher would deal with Giacometti and plaster except probably it's hard to do because they're so fragile now yes and borrowing a lot of them would be I assume difficult be difficult and yes so they they are very fragile and if you did see all of these things kind of lay it out on a table you would have a clearer sense I mean you've you know think of the women of Venice they're so tall and thin and in plaster this particularly plaster that's been around for 60 years very brittle they're they're very fragile things and so yeah I mean it would be fantastic to do an exhibition Giacometti and plaster and it's it's it's actually something that we've been looking into so I love that photograph of Giacometti covered in plaster yes yeah it was so perfect I know in this process that I go through I'll I'll be I'll have worked all day on something you know I'll come back inside and I will be completely covered head to toe with dust white dust pull off my goggles and take my earplugs out and it's just it it reminded me seeing that photograph was was quite wonderful really he you could tell he was involved definitely do we you're all here please ask questions of us yeah certainly you know the only thing I would say is the the reason that I'm doing the these objects is so that I can use my hands no he doesn't they're not cast at all yeah mine aren't cast would be doing that it's it's it's out there certainly it's it's on my mind the technology is changing so quickly it's almost difficult to keep up with but but we'll see again what I wanted to reflect on was that I'm one of the architects that went from doing everything by hand meaning building models and drawing drawings by hand in my lifetime that has completely changed and all of our drawings are done on a computer and all of our renderings are done electronically what I miss about I don't miss not drawing by hand but I do miss building models by hand and this gives me a way because of the scale of them it gives me a way to use my hands to create objects that are experimental more than anything else [Music] yeah I have and haven't haven't made it there yet when I have done the objects it's it I have yet to create a form that I'm interesting in capturing what I do instead is I'm like on the shipping bags to me the concept was not necessarily the end product it was the idea of taking the most common thing around and in casting it or capturing it same with the cardboard boxes there's nothing magical about a cardboard box but for me it was taking a very common object and then capturing it and I have yet to take the step into actually forming or creating something from my imagination and then capturing it yeah it would do well yeah no you're right that's a great idea that's a perfect application would be for the chair yes and most of your presentations and talked about the benefits of working with plaster by artist but I was wondering how you as curators thought about the controversial issue of you know caste being done by someone other than the artist or after the artists lifetime like by the Atelier do moulage and you know how you thought about that if it takes something away from the you know its originality or its value I'm all for plaster casts I think that I think the more the merrier and I think that it's great to be able to look at something in the original scale that's what I was stressing we if you can't go to Rome and you can't see something and the other thing that we've learned I remember when I was working on the plaster cast and made by caproni and then century in in in Austin well what's happened is the lot of the Scott the original sculptures have deteriorated severely since the cast was made and oftentimes in some cases the casts reveal things about sculpture that their deterioration prevents us from knowing about themselves so there's even a scholarly advantage to them the other thing is that we we become so honest in the 20th and 21st century that a lot of ancient sculptures have their their improvements and extensions and missing arms and legs and ears and Chin's taken off because they're not by the original sculpture and of course they were all there in the 19th century when the plaster casts were made and so we see much more what our ancestors saw of Renaissance art and in classical art I don't think a plaster cast if something takes away at all from the original any more than a photograph does from a painting I think that it's good the more reproductions there are more scattered throughout the world the better our understanding of the original is when we actually confront it so I'm not an enemy of them I mean we have that we have the whole problem of posthumous casts is a general problem in any mode that is cast you know there's no such thing as an authentic Digga bronze because do God didn't make any bronzes and there's no such thing as an authentic Gogan bronze because GoGet didn't make any bronzes and so and yet there are certain things that survived in bronze that don't survive in any other way and that have a kind of value so I'm not an enemy of casting at all but I was just thinking I look at the same time when you go to the V&A and you know the cast court I mean that's an appropriate display where you have a group of cast they're set in a proper context to understand that they aren't duplicates if you were then to wonder into the great gallery of Brooke sculpture and how about John Bologna duplicated in plaster that would be detracting in the same way that you're not going to walk into the National Gallery of Art and expect to find a plaster of a Michelangelo who never gave a consent to ever have multi aid of any of his unless you say that that's what it is right but there's still I would argue a detraction from the appreciation of the marble in the original technique that was I mean that's why plaster casts don't exist in museums anymore unfortunately right I mean the first floor of almost every American Museum was full of plaster casts and Americans understood the history of sculpture much better in the nineteenth and early twentieth century than they do today right but you can still go to Europe and yeah we were just talking about the AIA to lead the the great sculpture museum in Spain and they have a whole section of the museum devoted to plaster casts just like the DNA yeah but that's gone away from America yeah sadly well I think in modernism in it it really depends a lot on the artist you know because you know soot let's take Rodin for instance you know the he he bequeathed to the the the rights of reproduction to the French state and the musee rodin oversees that and so they decide when and how and who is going to cast a Rodin sculpture Rodin himself rarely cast any of his sculptures yeah he always worked with a variety of foundries and in many cases didn't see the finished work before it left the foundry now if he found out there was a problem he wouldn't use that founder again but for the most part if he was working with a foundry he trusts he trusted then he would say I want you know I want this patina and send it to this person and that was it and and so you know when we when we when we did this little you know exhibition brought these casts together we had the plat the flashier the plaster in the Nasher collection two lifetime bronzes and one parchment and one posthumous there was it was cast by the Musyoka dan and the musee rodin cast was actually was actually an extraordinarily fidelity scale I mean it was it was a really beautiful thing you know they did a great job they did probably a better job of making sure that that was that was what Rodin would have wanted then Rodin did himself during his lifetime and so you know they think there are a number of different situations where you can say well yes in this case it's not so good in this case well maybe maybe that's great so I think once you get you know once you get into this day and age it's very dependent on what what the expectation is be interesting too because there if you go across the street to the DMA there are also really fascinating plasters there's one of the huge scale Henry Moore plasters on the landing which is one of the great objects and Dallas and there's one of the most beautiful and complicated carpo plasters in the Reeves collection when you go right in the door of the Reeves collection and one of the problems with plasters is it's sometimes they go through the market and somebody buys them and and you have to figure out really what they are are they PLAs that were plaster cast that were made by the artist were they made by a foundry to show the artist where they made subsequently and so it's a problem to to figure out the nature of the plaster cast and the of the the carpo the the the DMA has a bronze and a plaster that look as if they are done by two completely different artists and yet they're probably both carpo and it's both it's about process so I think it the great thing about the arts district is that you can see that glorious room of plaster is here and then go across the street and see other plasters except you have to look for them in the DMA it would have been nice to do a plaster map yeah it's I thought I was telling people this morning about this this this this topic and to me it's so interesting but when you say a symposium on plasters it's sort of so I think all of you are very courageous for having spent such a beautiful afternoon are there any more questions before we have wine and bubbly and look at the things out of doors not even for CD he was the first and the first as always you know we always forget about the first by the end yes both materials are lime based you need some form of lime that you're baking to create a powder but in the case of stucco you're adding and using for that lime really high-grade marble and travertine and also at the end you're coming back in introducing pulverized beautifully white marble dust you're creating a substance that it's just much finer this Venetian plaster is that what similar stucco similar to that it would be yeah I mean across Italy stucco and then when you get to a lower level of stucco you're getting into plaster and then what's the difference between stucco and cast stone I mean that's a great I've always understood cast stone to be to be a much harder substance that it also has but it has to be poured but it has some kind of aggregate in it yeah so it's so maybe it's like plaster stucco cast stone and it kind of grayed because we have a fantastic cast on Lipschitz yeah from the teens in the collection and and that is it I mean that is a chunk that is a heavy heavy object well it's also essentially impossible to tell that it's not stone oh yeah yeah yeah and then you hear of plaster of Paris that simply signifies that the line being used is the the gypsum that was found near Paris in those quarries that were being used and plaster of Paris should be yellow reason limestone is yellow thank you all very much I hope you enjoyed it [Applause] you

Channel: Nasher Sculpture Center

Views: 11,513

Keywords: sculpture, nasher, nasher sculpture center, plaster, casting, renaissance, italy, france, picasso, george segal, medardo rosso, art, modern art, classical art, statue, rodin, abstract art, museum, lecture, utd, university of texas at dallas, richard brettell, rick brettell

Id: VbxfeRkz0nY

Length: 81min 43sec (4903 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2016