Reconsidering
the Sculptural Practice of Alina Szapocknikow

While regarded in her native Poland as one of the country’s foremost sculptors of the postwar era, Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) has only recently begun to receive significant international recognition.

The Exhibition presents the range and scope of Alina Szapocznikow’s work in the period from 1955 to just before her untimely death in 1973, at age 47. The loosely chronological installation includes approximately 60 sculptures and 50 works on paper from the last two decades of the artist’s career. It sheds light on the experimental quality of Szapocznikow’s artistic practice as she transitioned from traditional sculptural media such as bronze and clay to different materials and methods that involved using her own body as the principal matrix of her art.

Szapocznikow’s work can be associated with Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, and Paul Thek — artists working during the same period and whose exploration of new sculptural methods and materials have helped to reimagine the traditional concept of sculpture in the 20th century.

The ephemeral condition of the human body and the fragility of life are at the core of Szapocznikow’s art — Her investigations of the human figure become more visceral and more poignantly tactile as she began to make casts directly from her own body. Her work jostles between permanence and impermanence, from carvings in Carrara marble, to the precarious assemblages of lips or breasts cast in translucent polyester resin.

She experimented as much on paper as she did with sculpturalmaterials, as evidenced, for example, by series of semi-abstract, allusive monotypes. An avid draftsman, her drawings and prints relay the same open, expandable forms as her three-dimensional work. In some, heavily diluted watercolor imparts a dreamy eroticism t0 Szapocznikow’s emaciated figures.

“As she immersed herself in casting isolated parts of her body, a simultaneous decomposition of the figure occursin her drawings whereby she undoes the figure and reconfigures its parts into singular organisms of her own imagination,” says Allegra Pesenti, Curator of the Grunwald Center at the Hammer Museum, who coordinated the exhibition at the Hammer.

Alina Szapocknikow >>

Alina Szapocznikow, Femme illuminée (Illuminated Woman), 1966-67. Plaster, colored polyester resin, electrical wiring, 155 x 57 x 40 cm. Collection Alexandre Stanislawski. © The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/ADAGP, Paris. Photo © Fabrice Gousset, Paris, courtesy Piotr Stanislawski and Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Cologne.

The Raft as a Notion of Shared Comfort and Consolation

By HALLIE SMITH
The title of Bill Viola’s video installation The Raft, 2004, on view at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is inevitably evocative of Theodore Gericault’s large and notable painting The Raft of Medusa (1818-19). However, the video's opening scene may temporarily leave a viewer to question the validity of this initial association. The silence and minimal aesthetic is at first deceptive, but it later becomes obvious Viola is paying more the than the average artistic homage to the work from which the film has drawn its title. Midway through, The Raft begins to unfold more as though it were a living, moving, breathing extension of Gericault’s painterly images, a two-dimensional drama that has been recaptured through human choreography, displayed in new form, and brought to new life through the medium of video art.

In both works, the dominant theme is the strength of human spirit, life, and the collective struggle against imminent threats of death. Despite the time span of nearly two centuries between the two works, Viola’s version of the same subject matter begs the question that despite the progress made (although progress is always a relative term) since Medusa sailed the sea, we are no safer from harm. Hurricane Katrina and other recent random acts of nature are continual reminders that the answer, of course, is obvious.

Viola’s minimalist backdrop and soundless use of sound serve to magnify the quiet and subtle intensity of the tensions found in a seemingly mundane everyday setting. Each actor’s pre-disaster behavior and body language reveals banal acts of self-protection, an instinct we all have for our own self-preservation above all, a form of self-preservation that is arguably as psychological as it is physical. Clearly avoiding any racial stereotypes, The Raft’s multicultural cast can be read as an expression of the universal yet diverse scope of human behavior, and Viola seems to suggest behavior is not always a matter of culture, but is perhaps equally rooted in the ego and its quest for individuality. Differentiating oneself from others, and the subtle ways in which one attempts to separate oneself from the group are expressions of this effort, and are inevitable extensions of less obvious, daily acts of self-preservation.

Bill Viola, The Raft >>

Bill Viola, Three Women, video still, 2008, Video installation, Performers: Anika Ballent, Cornelia Ballent, Helena Ballent, © 2008 Bill Viola, 9:06 minutes, courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of funds from Alida Messinger 2010.97.