3 Sculptures
10 Jul - 22 Aug 2010
3 SCULPTURES
2010-07-10 until 2010-08-22
What’s in a sculpture?
The large scale works by Tommy Støckel are of a paradoxical nature: they are installations, but as such reflect on the idea of sculpture, in terms of scale, material and the presence of the viewer. And although static, these works relate complex and at times contradictory narrative structures, twisting time and perspective into ever new shades of present, past and future.Time is an issue in many of the works and suggested explicitly in several of their titles, that ring with the confidence of Sci-Fi novels: ‘Even Great Futures Will One Day Become Pasts’ (1, ‘This Could be Now’ (2, ‘When Past and Futures Meet’ (3 or ‘Tommy Støckel’s Art of Tomorrow’ (4.(Material)
Time becomes an issue in several ways at once. One aspect of temporality is reflected in the materials of Støckel’s works, that are precisely not hewn in stone, cast in bronze or resin, or welded in steel, but executed in materials, usually used in scale models for architecture and design: paper, cardboard, styrofoam and the plethora of recent composites. They emphasize a completely different set of qualities, than traditional artist materials: they come in a variety of colours and surface structures, are lightweight, easy to obtain and fairly simple to process. However what is constructed from them remains surface oriented and therefore structurally fragile.Their eye-catching surface qualities render them contaminated with a stigma of simulation, yet, as much as they are recognizably for what they are, they are at the same time known as materials to create the impression of another material, be it building materials like steel beams, blocks of stone, or reflective window panes. Contaminated like words one knows the meaning of, but can‘t help see them in relation to their common usage (or misuse), such as ‘freedom’, ‘choice’ or ‘liberal’.In Tommy Støckel’s hands again, these materials disclose how tricky they can be. Based on a conceptual approach to follow the way these materials have been designed for application, the artist resists any ‘creative’ use against the grain, or the assignment of extra-material aesthetic or narrative qualities (as in Joseph Beuys’ famous use of fat or felt). Rather Støckel uses materials the way they are sold, even terming them ‘readymade materials’. This is not only a reference to Marcel Duchamps‘ prefabricated art objects, but the presumed material properties their surfaces suggest, stone, metal, which indicate sculptural presence. On the other hand, it is exactly the real fragility of these materials, which renders the works susceptible to the slightest human touch. This construction leaves the work oscillating between sculptural installation and full scale model, flirting with the aesthetics of both at the same time: the executed, factual sculpture, and the model of an as yet unfinished or purely hypothetical project. This creates a dilemma for the viewer, as much as it is obvious that these works are notdummies, or mock-ups for some test, as the desirable sheen of their immaculate, hermetic surface purvey. Even if these surfaces are products of sophisticated industrial processes, the objects created from them breathe the air of hobbyist perfectionism, of ambitious clean-cut, low-tech and straightforward handicrafts.(Theatricality)The ‘ready-made’ quality is also apparent in the way Støckel puts his materials to use:as sheet materials they provide many works with a sharp angular, geometric quality.This is in keeping with a formal simplicity, renders them instantly comprehensible, likeroughly scribbled objects in comic books. But it also links them to a universe of magicgeometrical objects spanning the history of mankind, often over-invested with meanings:from the fetishized symmetry in Pythagoras‘ geometric objects, to the pyramids ofGizeh, to ‘Dürer‘s Solid’, the rhombohedron in his engraving ‘Melencolia’ (1514), andMalevich’s ‘Black Square’ (1913). But also in the slabs and cubes that form and informminimalist sculptures of the sixties and seventies, as well as futuristic structures inscience fiction films, comics and illustrations, such as Stanley Kubrick‘s ‘2001, A SpaceOdyssey’ (1968) or the fantastic designs and illustrations of Jean Giraud, better knownas Moebius.What all these geometric shapes, often set in contrast to a backdrop of a vast horizonor a cluttered mess, share in symbolism, is an agenda of purity and unalterable, eternalvalues, a resistance to conform to the times, and allusions to the divine. Difficult toseparate from pathos, it may be an inherent quality of their clarity, that belies any ideasof neutrality, that modernist artists and architects, from Vasari to the Bauhaus, wantedto invest in basic geometric forms.The art historian Michael Fried famously mentioned this aspect in his essay ‘Art andObjecthood’ (1967), about the theatricality of minimalist art. According to him, if thesingleness of shape was the most important sculptural value, then these works weresimply ‘hollow’, large, confronting and creating distance and space, and thereforenecessarily including the viewer. It is this very nature of the minimalist form, and thelack of ‘transcending objecthood’, that renders it theatrical. This is where it breaks withmodernist sculpture, where the syntax of the work creates a whole that goes beyond theobjecthood of the material. Fried builds a story that pits art and theatre as antagonists,and it is at this junction, where Tommy Støckel’s work develops its potential.(Narrative)By successfully suspending the notion of permanence of an art object, Tommy Støckelprolongs the life of the artwork in the form of an assumption, an idea or a projection. Hisinstallations exactly need not convey any sense of being finished, resisting time and thech-ch-changes it brings. Rather each work lends itself to viewing as something, that, inspite of being before our very eyes, may still be in flux, don‘t exist as yet, maybe evenwill never exist, or, in the case of his latest work ‘3 Sculptures’ that has ceased to exist.Or has it? The narratives, that Støckel’s works relate are carefully crafted and complex,be it the twenty meter long sculpture ‘From Here to Then and Back Again’, an elongatedcolumn based on a hexagon shape, that at first looks like a big solid block. But theveritable indoor hike it requires to circumnavigate the piece discloses a story of decayand abandon. The structure is corrupted at several intervals, revealing a variety ofinterior structures, with different references. At one point the sculpture appears tobe hollow, as if moulded over some kind of plastic mesh, such as used for renovatingfaçades.5 At another point, the sculpture seems to have been constructed over an innercore of either garish blue, or Armani-grey triangular polyurethane foam rods, that jut outat the crunch point. The tip of the work at the end appears to have been painted black,but now the colour seems to flake off, but on closer inspection, it is again a perfectsimulation executed in paper. Except that the strict geometrical random rhythm of thecracking ‘paint’ echoes the familiar Photoshop effect ‘stained glass window’. And somebizarre computer virus appears to have escaped the digital world, and vandalized thebroken down structure with a pixelated spray-can squiggly tag in neon-yellow runningdown the ‘back side’, as if disputing ownership of the piece, leading the viewer back tothe beginning.Other pieces appear to expand the present tense into eternity, such as the field ofidentical geometric forms of folded-up cardboard, among others in cream (a circle), red(sheets with drawings), and turquoise (Albrecht Dürer‘s aforementioned polyhedron),entitled ‘Exposed Superstructure’ (2006). Composed of units of nine individualelements, arranged in five levels of scale, it forms a square three-dimensionalspreadsheet of sheer endless repetition without variation, as if sculpturally stuttering,stretching the notion of the individual pieces to infinity, and beyond any notion of thesingular or monumentality. A similar idea was extended to even greater proportions for his work ‘Tommy Støckel’s Art of Tomorrow’, where, at Arnolfini in Bristol, the artist gaveup repetition in favour of endless variation, visually spelling out different options for hiswork to develop, once again in varying scale, but also materials, subject matters, formsand so on, ad infinitum, a carcinogenic maze of potential leading nowhere.In his project here, Støckel combines different aspects from these works in asuccession of three large, solid looking, serialist and minimalism-inspired – andsurprisingly monumental – structures, covered in polystyrene faux-stone tiles6. However,also another idea is introduced: documentation. What at first looks like a visual logof the construction of the sculptures on view, turns out to be a series of photographsthat inherently challenge their presence. With clear references to the actual exhibitionspace, they show a process, that depicts the immediate (and inevitable) future of all artinstallations: the dismantlement of the work. But the work is there – it is as if somehowthe timeline has been messed up. Just where the starting point is set, is unclear. Iswhat appears to be a flashback actually a prevision of what the future must inevitablybring? Which story to trust?The photographs also reveal something else, the inside structure of the sculptures.Suddenly bright colors pop up in their interior, adding a different layer to the story andthe sculptures, that increasingly appear to have more in common with Las Vegas thantraditional notions of art, look more like special effects than traditional sculpture andfeel more like Hollywood drama than any kind of historic truth. Suspension of disbelief isat a critical point here, where does this work really begin, and where does the simulationend?(Touch One)What Tommy Støckel introduces to sculpture and installation is an understanding ofnarrative that is told within the materials – or as Fried would have it, “transcendingobjecthood.” But with it he brings an idea of scripted sculpture back into the realm ofthe arts, that is more familiar in the way films are scripted, or the experience of events,museums or Luna parks. This links back to historic examples of garden design, withpaths, vistas (from sunrise to sunset), and benches to experience them, ruins andhermits, all in all an effort at controlling the experience of the viewer.Yet Tommy Støckel’s work is less invested in fantasy, than it may appear. Rather, hisworks introduce their narratives as a way of probing the reflection of reality in thesimulation, on model scale and as scenario. His works unfold a narrative requiring belief,but unlike the bible, stock market results or instruction manuals – without a givenreading. There is nothing sacred in this work, and despite its formal clarity, in fittingideas to a given format in how it requires specific references, it is rather informal, as towhat it suggests: a hymn to potentiality? To indecision? Or maybe rather a celebration ofthe pleasures of suspending decision making and dreaming? Or looking at the options?So what is in a sculpture? The narratives of Tommy Støckel leave us with one certainty:the challenge of perception, and of individual choice.
(1) Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, USA, 2006
(2) Sølyst Slotspark, Jyderup, Denmark, 2008
(3) The Nordic Embassies, Berlin, Germany, 2008
(4) Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, 2009
(5) As in eastern Berlin, where exterior walls often carry an outer lining of purple, green, white or pink styrofoamboards for insulation, glued directly on the bricks, and covered up with plaster, which is applied over a plasticnet in bright orange or black, until finally a layer of plaster and paint conceals everything and reinstates a pastelcolorednotion of late 19th century bourgeois grandeur - that is shattered once the facade is slightly damaged,and turns the elaborate historicizing into some Disneyland-ish stage set.
(6) An inspiration from former trips to the Netherlands, the artist said, “where you see lots of tiles, not many ofthem from Delft.”
2010-07-10 until 2010-08-22
What’s in a sculpture?
The large scale works by Tommy Støckel are of a paradoxical nature: they are installations, but as such reflect on the idea of sculpture, in terms of scale, material and the presence of the viewer. And although static, these works relate complex and at times contradictory narrative structures, twisting time and perspective into ever new shades of present, past and future.Time is an issue in many of the works and suggested explicitly in several of their titles, that ring with the confidence of Sci-Fi novels: ‘Even Great Futures Will One Day Become Pasts’ (1, ‘This Could be Now’ (2, ‘When Past and Futures Meet’ (3 or ‘Tommy Støckel’s Art of Tomorrow’ (4.(Material)
Time becomes an issue in several ways at once. One aspect of temporality is reflected in the materials of Støckel’s works, that are precisely not hewn in stone, cast in bronze or resin, or welded in steel, but executed in materials, usually used in scale models for architecture and design: paper, cardboard, styrofoam and the plethora of recent composites. They emphasize a completely different set of qualities, than traditional artist materials: they come in a variety of colours and surface structures, are lightweight, easy to obtain and fairly simple to process. However what is constructed from them remains surface oriented and therefore structurally fragile.Their eye-catching surface qualities render them contaminated with a stigma of simulation, yet, as much as they are recognizably for what they are, they are at the same time known as materials to create the impression of another material, be it building materials like steel beams, blocks of stone, or reflective window panes. Contaminated like words one knows the meaning of, but can‘t help see them in relation to their common usage (or misuse), such as ‘freedom’, ‘choice’ or ‘liberal’.In Tommy Støckel’s hands again, these materials disclose how tricky they can be. Based on a conceptual approach to follow the way these materials have been designed for application, the artist resists any ‘creative’ use against the grain, or the assignment of extra-material aesthetic or narrative qualities (as in Joseph Beuys’ famous use of fat or felt). Rather Støckel uses materials the way they are sold, even terming them ‘readymade materials’. This is not only a reference to Marcel Duchamps‘ prefabricated art objects, but the presumed material properties their surfaces suggest, stone, metal, which indicate sculptural presence. On the other hand, it is exactly the real fragility of these materials, which renders the works susceptible to the slightest human touch. This construction leaves the work oscillating between sculptural installation and full scale model, flirting with the aesthetics of both at the same time: the executed, factual sculpture, and the model of an as yet unfinished or purely hypothetical project. This creates a dilemma for the viewer, as much as it is obvious that these works are notdummies, or mock-ups for some test, as the desirable sheen of their immaculate, hermetic surface purvey. Even if these surfaces are products of sophisticated industrial processes, the objects created from them breathe the air of hobbyist perfectionism, of ambitious clean-cut, low-tech and straightforward handicrafts.(Theatricality)The ‘ready-made’ quality is also apparent in the way Støckel puts his materials to use:as sheet materials they provide many works with a sharp angular, geometric quality.This is in keeping with a formal simplicity, renders them instantly comprehensible, likeroughly scribbled objects in comic books. But it also links them to a universe of magicgeometrical objects spanning the history of mankind, often over-invested with meanings:from the fetishized symmetry in Pythagoras‘ geometric objects, to the pyramids ofGizeh, to ‘Dürer‘s Solid’, the rhombohedron in his engraving ‘Melencolia’ (1514), andMalevich’s ‘Black Square’ (1913). But also in the slabs and cubes that form and informminimalist sculptures of the sixties and seventies, as well as futuristic structures inscience fiction films, comics and illustrations, such as Stanley Kubrick‘s ‘2001, A SpaceOdyssey’ (1968) or the fantastic designs and illustrations of Jean Giraud, better knownas Moebius.What all these geometric shapes, often set in contrast to a backdrop of a vast horizonor a cluttered mess, share in symbolism, is an agenda of purity and unalterable, eternalvalues, a resistance to conform to the times, and allusions to the divine. Difficult toseparate from pathos, it may be an inherent quality of their clarity, that belies any ideasof neutrality, that modernist artists and architects, from Vasari to the Bauhaus, wantedto invest in basic geometric forms.The art historian Michael Fried famously mentioned this aspect in his essay ‘Art andObjecthood’ (1967), about the theatricality of minimalist art. According to him, if thesingleness of shape was the most important sculptural value, then these works weresimply ‘hollow’, large, confronting and creating distance and space, and thereforenecessarily including the viewer. It is this very nature of the minimalist form, and thelack of ‘transcending objecthood’, that renders it theatrical. This is where it breaks withmodernist sculpture, where the syntax of the work creates a whole that goes beyond theobjecthood of the material. Fried builds a story that pits art and theatre as antagonists,and it is at this junction, where Tommy Støckel’s work develops its potential.(Narrative)By successfully suspending the notion of permanence of an art object, Tommy Støckelprolongs the life of the artwork in the form of an assumption, an idea or a projection. Hisinstallations exactly need not convey any sense of being finished, resisting time and thech-ch-changes it brings. Rather each work lends itself to viewing as something, that, inspite of being before our very eyes, may still be in flux, don‘t exist as yet, maybe evenwill never exist, or, in the case of his latest work ‘3 Sculptures’ that has ceased to exist.Or has it? The narratives, that Støckel’s works relate are carefully crafted and complex,be it the twenty meter long sculpture ‘From Here to Then and Back Again’, an elongatedcolumn based on a hexagon shape, that at first looks like a big solid block. But theveritable indoor hike it requires to circumnavigate the piece discloses a story of decayand abandon. The structure is corrupted at several intervals, revealing a variety ofinterior structures, with different references. At one point the sculpture appears tobe hollow, as if moulded over some kind of plastic mesh, such as used for renovatingfaçades.5 At another point, the sculpture seems to have been constructed over an innercore of either garish blue, or Armani-grey triangular polyurethane foam rods, that jut outat the crunch point. The tip of the work at the end appears to have been painted black,but now the colour seems to flake off, but on closer inspection, it is again a perfectsimulation executed in paper. Except that the strict geometrical random rhythm of thecracking ‘paint’ echoes the familiar Photoshop effect ‘stained glass window’. And somebizarre computer virus appears to have escaped the digital world, and vandalized thebroken down structure with a pixelated spray-can squiggly tag in neon-yellow runningdown the ‘back side’, as if disputing ownership of the piece, leading the viewer back tothe beginning.Other pieces appear to expand the present tense into eternity, such as the field ofidentical geometric forms of folded-up cardboard, among others in cream (a circle), red(sheets with drawings), and turquoise (Albrecht Dürer‘s aforementioned polyhedron),entitled ‘Exposed Superstructure’ (2006). Composed of units of nine individualelements, arranged in five levels of scale, it forms a square three-dimensionalspreadsheet of sheer endless repetition without variation, as if sculpturally stuttering,stretching the notion of the individual pieces to infinity, and beyond any notion of thesingular or monumentality. A similar idea was extended to even greater proportions for his work ‘Tommy Støckel’s Art of Tomorrow’, where, at Arnolfini in Bristol, the artist gaveup repetition in favour of endless variation, visually spelling out different options for hiswork to develop, once again in varying scale, but also materials, subject matters, formsand so on, ad infinitum, a carcinogenic maze of potential leading nowhere.In his project here, Støckel combines different aspects from these works in asuccession of three large, solid looking, serialist and minimalism-inspired – andsurprisingly monumental – structures, covered in polystyrene faux-stone tiles6. However,also another idea is introduced: documentation. What at first looks like a visual logof the construction of the sculptures on view, turns out to be a series of photographsthat inherently challenge their presence. With clear references to the actual exhibitionspace, they show a process, that depicts the immediate (and inevitable) future of all artinstallations: the dismantlement of the work. But the work is there – it is as if somehowthe timeline has been messed up. Just where the starting point is set, is unclear. Iswhat appears to be a flashback actually a prevision of what the future must inevitablybring? Which story to trust?The photographs also reveal something else, the inside structure of the sculptures.Suddenly bright colors pop up in their interior, adding a different layer to the story andthe sculptures, that increasingly appear to have more in common with Las Vegas thantraditional notions of art, look more like special effects than traditional sculpture andfeel more like Hollywood drama than any kind of historic truth. Suspension of disbelief isat a critical point here, where does this work really begin, and where does the simulationend?(Touch One)What Tommy Støckel introduces to sculpture and installation is an understanding ofnarrative that is told within the materials – or as Fried would have it, “transcendingobjecthood.” But with it he brings an idea of scripted sculpture back into the realm ofthe arts, that is more familiar in the way films are scripted, or the experience of events,museums or Luna parks. This links back to historic examples of garden design, withpaths, vistas (from sunrise to sunset), and benches to experience them, ruins andhermits, all in all an effort at controlling the experience of the viewer.Yet Tommy Støckel’s work is less invested in fantasy, than it may appear. Rather, hisworks introduce their narratives as a way of probing the reflection of reality in thesimulation, on model scale and as scenario. His works unfold a narrative requiring belief,but unlike the bible, stock market results or instruction manuals – without a givenreading. There is nothing sacred in this work, and despite its formal clarity, in fittingideas to a given format in how it requires specific references, it is rather informal, as towhat it suggests: a hymn to potentiality? To indecision? Or maybe rather a celebration ofthe pleasures of suspending decision making and dreaming? Or looking at the options?So what is in a sculpture? The narratives of Tommy Støckel leave us with one certainty:the challenge of perception, and of individual choice.
(1) Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, USA, 2006
(2) Sølyst Slotspark, Jyderup, Denmark, 2008
(3) The Nordic Embassies, Berlin, Germany, 2008
(4) Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, 2009
(5) As in eastern Berlin, where exterior walls often carry an outer lining of purple, green, white or pink styrofoamboards for insulation, glued directly on the bricks, and covered up with plaster, which is applied over a plasticnet in bright orange or black, until finally a layer of plaster and paint conceals everything and reinstates a pastelcolorednotion of late 19th century bourgeois grandeur - that is shattered once the facade is slightly damaged,and turns the elaborate historicizing into some Disneyland-ish stage set.
(6) An inspiration from former trips to the Netherlands, the artist said, “where you see lots of tiles, not many ofthem from Delft.”