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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the artist's archives under inventory number bv98s23 and is eligible for a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
“My sculptures are all about how they are made and how metal resists. They’re a test of strength, a battle between the metal and me. It’s a battle between the piece of metal and me”—Bernar Venet
Bernar Venet’s powerful sculptures are the result of the artist’s uncompromising beliefs in the inherent nature of art. Breaking rank from many of his contemporaries, Venet believes that his dramatic works are not the fictive displays of abstract or figurative objects, ideas or emotions, but instead are pure manifestations of his creative process—displays of the “battle” between an artist and his material. “Venet’s entire production seems to be organized as an affirmation of the thing-in-itself and as a barrier against subsequent discourse. The work has to be made for a specific reason, which it makes no attempt to hide; its purpose is not to make way for, nor to provide an excuse for, a multiplicity of meanings” (A. Pierre, Bernar Venet, Milan, 1999, p. 72).
Standing over six-foot-tall and nearly eight-foot-long, the continuous piece of twisted steel begins at a seemingly arbitrary point in mid-air before beginning a journey that involves a series of twists and turns before coming to its conclusion and finishing, again, in mid-air. The contortions in this work are not the smooth, precise curves of his earlier work (which were based on the methodical precision of mathematical equations); instead they display the physical struggles that Venet engaged in when conceiving the sculpture, witnessed in the way the metal has been worked by the artist’s hand. Placed directly in (and on) the landscape, the sculpture does not conform with, or seek to control, its environment. Instead, it forcefully imposes itself on the immediate landscape.
The governing principle of Venet’s Indeterminate Line sculptures is the revelation of the process of production. Each sculpture is the physical record of its creation, of the tussles between the artist’s intentions and the resistance of the metal to these aims. The artist himself has proclaimed that he does not always get his way. “There’s one obvious thing about my work: I can hardly deny that the raw material takes precedence over my intentions,” Venet says. “My sculptures are all about how they are made and how metal resist. They’re a test of strength, a battle between the metal and me. It’s a battle between the piece of metal and me. It’s a question of ‘who makes do what’ to the other, a struggle between the artist’s will and the rigid nature of the laminated bar […] I suggest a direction to go, but I am guided by the metal bar, which resists me and will not yield to my desire for domination. There’s an interplay of concessions, I have to let the bar remain autonomous. The result is a testimonial both to the act of forging and to the possibilities of a material which I do not change beyond the limits of its natural characteristics” (B. Venet, ibid., p. 88).
The inherent nature of the looping, lyrical form that comprises Indeterminate Line has parallels with the work of Cy Twombly, and, in particular, a series of paintings which the American painter began in 1966 and which became known as his Blackboard paintings. Much like Venet would come to discover two decades later, in these paintings Twombly released the line from all its figurative associations, liberating it from form and function and celebrating it purely for its own existence. To achieve this, Twombly ‘un-taught’ himself to draw by sitting in a darkened room and making continuous marks on a surface guided purely by intuition and only referencing their own physical appearance. When the spiraling loops of Twombly’s first Blackboard paintings were first shown in 1967, their comparatively austere, grey-grounds and simple graphic forms were seen as much more in keeping with the times. Greeted as a necessary purging of the ‘Baroque’ tradition of art, these works were immediately hailed as a much-needed return to form. The critic Robert Pincus-Witten wrote, for example, that, “handwriting has become for Twombly the means of beginning again, of erasing the Baroque culmination of the painting of the early 1960s…it has been drowned in a schoolmaster’s blackboard …[and]… reduced to rudimentary exercises” (R.Pincus-Witten “Learning to Write,” Cy Twombly, Paintings and Drawings exh. cat., Milwaukee, 1968, n.p.).
Born in 1941, in the small town of Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in southeastern France, Bernar Venet made his name as a conceptual artist in the late Sixties after moving to New York. He has exhibited worldwide — including at the Venice Biennale and Palace of Versailles — and in 2005 was made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor. In a bid to explain his artistic practice, Venet once stated that “…a sculpture should have its own identity, and that it should be able to preserve that identity everywhere” (B. Venet, quoted in A. Pierre, op. cit., p. 72). As such Indeterminate Line displays its identity without compromise, and made up of a single piece of metal—with no other added elements or interventions—it is a radical break from the constructed, assembled, and compositional traditions of sculpture.
“My sculptures are all about how they are made and how metal resists. They’re a test of strength, a battle between the metal and me. It’s a battle between the piece of metal and me”—Bernar Venet
Bernar Venet’s powerful sculptures are the result of the artist’s uncompromising beliefs in the inherent nature of art. Breaking rank from many of his contemporaries, Venet believes that his dramatic works are not the fictive displays of abstract or figurative objects, ideas or emotions, but instead are pure manifestations of his creative process—displays of the “battle” between an artist and his material. “Venet’s entire production seems to be organized as an affirmation of the thing-in-itself and as a barrier against subsequent discourse. The work has to be made for a specific reason, which it makes no attempt to hide; its purpose is not to make way for, nor to provide an excuse for, a multiplicity of meanings” (A. Pierre, Bernar Venet, Milan, 1999, p. 72).
Standing over six-foot-tall and nearly eight-foot-long, the continuous piece of twisted steel begins at a seemingly arbitrary point in mid-air before beginning a journey that involves a series of twists and turns before coming to its conclusion and finishing, again, in mid-air. The contortions in this work are not the smooth, precise curves of his earlier work (which were based on the methodical precision of mathematical equations); instead they display the physical struggles that Venet engaged in when conceiving the sculpture, witnessed in the way the metal has been worked by the artist’s hand. Placed directly in (and on) the landscape, the sculpture does not conform with, or seek to control, its environment. Instead, it forcefully imposes itself on the immediate landscape.
The governing principle of Venet’s Indeterminate Line sculptures is the revelation of the process of production. Each sculpture is the physical record of its creation, of the tussles between the artist’s intentions and the resistance of the metal to these aims. The artist himself has proclaimed that he does not always get his way. “There’s one obvious thing about my work: I can hardly deny that the raw material takes precedence over my intentions,” Venet says. “My sculptures are all about how they are made and how metal resist. They’re a test of strength, a battle between the metal and me. It’s a battle between the piece of metal and me. It’s a question of ‘who makes do what’ to the other, a struggle between the artist’s will and the rigid nature of the laminated bar […] I suggest a direction to go, but I am guided by the metal bar, which resists me and will not yield to my desire for domination. There’s an interplay of concessions, I have to let the bar remain autonomous. The result is a testimonial both to the act of forging and to the possibilities of a material which I do not change beyond the limits of its natural characteristics” (B. Venet, ibid., p. 88).
The inherent nature of the looping, lyrical form that comprises Indeterminate Line has parallels with the work of Cy Twombly, and, in particular, a series of paintings which the American painter began in 1966 and which became known as his Blackboard paintings. Much like Venet would come to discover two decades later, in these paintings Twombly released the line from all its figurative associations, liberating it from form and function and celebrating it purely for its own existence. To achieve this, Twombly ‘un-taught’ himself to draw by sitting in a darkened room and making continuous marks on a surface guided purely by intuition and only referencing their own physical appearance. When the spiraling loops of Twombly’s first Blackboard paintings were first shown in 1967, their comparatively austere, grey-grounds and simple graphic forms were seen as much more in keeping with the times. Greeted as a necessary purging of the ‘Baroque’ tradition of art, these works were immediately hailed as a much-needed return to form. The critic Robert Pincus-Witten wrote, for example, that, “handwriting has become for Twombly the means of beginning again, of erasing the Baroque culmination of the painting of the early 1960s…it has been drowned in a schoolmaster’s blackboard …[and]… reduced to rudimentary exercises” (R.Pincus-Witten “Learning to Write,” Cy Twombly, Paintings and Drawings exh. cat., Milwaukee, 1968, n.p.).
Born in 1941, in the small town of Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in southeastern France, Bernar Venet made his name as a conceptual artist in the late Sixties after moving to New York. He has exhibited worldwide — including at the Venice Biennale and Palace of Versailles — and in 2005 was made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor. In a bid to explain his artistic practice, Venet once stated that “…a sculpture should have its own identity, and that it should be able to preserve that identity everywhere” (B. Venet, quoted in A. Pierre, op. cit., p. 72). As such Indeterminate Line displays its identity without compromise, and made up of a single piece of metal—with no other added elements or interventions—it is a radical break from the constructed, assembled, and compositional traditions of sculpture.