Luciano Fabro

[abknight@zzzzzz]

Hi Robin, Don,

I posted some pics here:
http://public.fotki.com/abknight/luciano_fabro/

The last picture, The Birth of Venus, appears in the
current History of Art book by Janson and son.  The
picture in the book is much better.  The column is a
gorgeous sea-green onyx.  Janson maintains that the
drooping marble body is somehow a rough portrait of Venus.
 First Janson is dismissive of contemporary sculpture,
then has the great sense to address a recent, beautiful
work in stone and for which I am thankful, then, to my
mind, misreads the work.

Don,  The NY Times has a bone to pic with you and a member
of your household:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE4DC1638F937A15750C0A963948260&sec=&pagewanted=1

Janson also repeatedly brings up "Why Sculpture is Boring"
an 1846 essay by Charles Baudelaire, which according to
Janson "sets for a general theory of sculpture from the
Romantic point of view...To (Baudelaire) there can be no
such thing as Romantic sculpture.  every piece of
sculpture is a 'fetish' whose objective existence prevents
the artist from expressing his subjective view of the
world, his personal sensibility, because its
three-dimensionality presents a hundred different points
of view that prevent him from taking up a unique point of
view."
I must be a fetishist.
I don't think Baudelaire stopped the train on idealized
academic sculpture, but I think he did loosen things up.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/carp/hd_carp.htm

Janson ends his bit on Fabro with instructions to all
sculptors at large:
"Contemporary sculpture has lost its "idol" quality, in
the full meaning of the term that Baudelaire intended: not
simply its solid space-filling reality but its role as
fetish--an object to be worshiped for its demonic power,
the symbol of something mysterious and profound--even if,
according to the author, it prevents the artist from
expressing his unique point of view.  But how is it
possible to endow sculpture with the status of a fetish in
this post-modern age, with its pervasive belief in nothing
except the failure of Western civilization?  It can be
done, but only by rediscovering the power of myth and
using to invest sculpture with new meaning."

One of my favorite Fetishists:
http://www.tanyapreminger.com/mother/pic/mather.gif