Close to the stone ++

["Clive Murray-White" <cow_artclive@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Rick,

One of the reasons why your "Close to the stone + +" has had my mind going
so hard is that I'm in the very early stages of one of those commissions
that many of us must dream about.

Total freedom to produce what I think is an appropriate work for the
situation, a thoroughly adequate budget and more than a year to complete it.

It is therefore a very good time for me to remind myself what my priorities
really are and make some kind of inventory of the issues that underpin my
work. My first reaction was to jump straight into your questions and shoot
 from the hip, that's why I was not happy with my answers.

Thank you for providing me with the motivation to undertake this activity at
precisely the most relevant moment.

By my way of thinking it does not seem to matter how much we tried to reduce
art to a minimal core we never get down past 4 irreducible components
History, Materials and processes, Formal issues and those things that relate
to our own place in world.

In very simple terms my original success as an artist in the 60's was based
on my observation that all of the earlier twentieth century movements that
sought to find a single truth were fundamentally flawed. This was because
there are always numerous truths, I found myself observing that reality was
like an iceberg; the only really truthful thing that you could say about it
is that it could never all be seen at the same time.

It seemed to me that I was on far sounder philosophical ground by just
making the tips of the icebergs that they left so much to the viewer's
imagination that they completed the work in their own minds.

This concept has stayed with me ever since.

Back to the 4 irreducible components; I personally enjoy the idea of giving
them all roughly the same status in my work, so material is no more
important than History, the formal issues or my own things. Sure sometimes
one thing gets a bit ahead of the others but if one was to look a body of
work it probably average out pretty evenly.

It all becomes a very exciting juggling act because often the only way to
reconcile the demands of each component is to invent ways to let things do
more than one thing at a time.

History: However hard we try we cannot escape the fact that everything we do
as art will always contain a historical context.

My current thinking: Reductionism led us to purge so many components from
sculpture that we have actually left ourselves with a very limited space in
which to move, in essence we have agued ourselves into a terribly tight and
inadequate corner. This may have been a result of the less is more
philosophy but my feeling is that we have really taken it to a point where
less is usually LESS these days.

The way round it is not to reject the whole concept out of hand but to keep
what we feel are the productive bits.

The idea is really simple, there must be a way to have both MORE and LESS at
the same time.A good model for this is to take a very good look at one of
Michelangelo's Slaves.

This kind of thinking led me to accept that you could have Abstract and
Figurative at the same time, though I can never help asking how anybody can
bump into an abstract thing. I am always amused by the way words are
consistently misused to the point that their meaning eventually gets
changed.

What gets very exciting indeed is the fact that by thinking in these kinds
of ways you can wind up feeling immensely liberated. By removing all the
residual modernist constraints from my own thinking I have given myself a
fantastic vocabulary to utilise. The best way of explaining this is to say
that I have just as much respect for Marcel Duchamp as I do for Giacometti,
David Smith, bits of Rodin and Henry Moore, Michelangelo, or Medardo Rosso.
There is no reason why my sculptures cannot be described as "assisted ready
mades" because that's what they are according to that line of argument.
Similarly the massing of volumes etc can owe more to David Smith than
anything else.

Of course it must be obvious to anybody who looks at what I do that I am
influenced by the damaged remnants of Roman and Greek sculpture.

To save this from turning into a book, it is probably best to say that just
as we use the internet all the time we, as artists, have a similar resource
in everything that has ever been made before us. I like to think that
nothing is out of the question right now; everything that has ever been in
art is back on the table.

Re Metaphor: the human head as fragment of a whole is my tip of the iceberg,
the greatest thing about it is that the head/face is the one thing that
communicates more to human beings than anything else, it is capable of the
greatest range of expression, can stand the greatest amount of distortion,
you can take more liberties with it than anything else and coincidentally it
is the first thing that people look for in any shape. What is particularly
useful about it is that once it has been recognised the viewer is usually
prepared to travel on the complete and often very complex journey that you
have laid out for them in the sculpture.

Materials and techniques: To me the stone of my country is the correct
material simply because it is a chunk of the land that I live on, it has a
meaning in itself. The fact that very little of it is actually quarried, I
have to do that myself, means that I have a thoroughly unique material that'
s available to me in unlimited quantities. As an aside, I am perverse enough
to enjoy the fact that most contemporary sculptors still think that stone,
because of its associations with the past, is an inappropriate material.
There is something fabulously radical about trying to make serious and very
contemporary art out of stone.

This leads me to my last point, at least for the moment!

I suppose what drives me the most is a conviction that Modern/Post
Modern/Contemporary Art has largely run out of puff. What started out in the
1850's as an enthusiastic overturning of a soggy, bloated and largely
irrelevant Academy has become, only 150 years later, exactly the same thing,
another boring, hidebound  Academy. The revolution has unfortunately gone
full circle.

I don't think it matters if my views are right or wrong because the point is
that by feeling a need to think differently I now find myself making an art
that is quite unlike anything else that is going around.

Hope this goes some of the way to answering your question.

Regards Clive