The Primitive and the Base

John Haber
in New York City

Constantin Brancusi

On film, the camera's eye ascends Endless Column as the eye never could in a museum. Constantin Brancusi forms his pillar from truncated pyramids, stacked alternately right-side-up and upside down. Set outdoors, its zigzag outlines give the ascent an inexorable rhythm, and it really does seem endless. And then it comes to an end, making it what it was all along—a part of the sky.

It began, though, indoors in 1918 with the first of several versions, in oak and barely six and a half feet tall. It occupies the space of the viewer, as a slightly taller, rougher, and more damaged friend. It is also one of just eleven sculptures from the collection, none anywhere close to Brancusi's death in 1957, in a room to themselves at MoMA. Along with photos, a single drawing, and that short but stately film, they make for a point of respite in a busy museum.

The museum has trotted out its holdings before, in a somewhat larger show in 1996, but these will serve quite well. The repetition adds another paradox to his endless but not unending column: is it excess or spareness, and which is more characteristic of a pioneering modern artist? Rather than add to the redundancy, I leave you to my thoughts at the time, followed by a more conventional report on the works on view now.

A dialogue for n + 1 voices

— Awesome.

— You mean Brancusi at the Modern? Right, tell me about it. I am starting to pray already.

— You think this is a joke? Pieces from Paris have been resting in New York for a bit on their way home. I mean crucial pieces, the ones that were on loan to a Philadelphia retrospective. In an installation together with MoMA's own very sizable holdings, they make quite a core retrospective in itself . . . .

— . . . But awesome? It is only three rooms' worth.

— You are both moving too fast. Why so worried about ensuring that Brancusi is suitably venerated? The two of you are putting him up on a pedestal, same as a museum.

— Well, he invites that. The appropriation of primitive art, the titles that draw on myths about the creation of the world, the fantasies of purified images of one sex or the other . . . .

— Nothing of the sort. Brancusi never settles for those stereotypes.

— Oh, sure. Just as the show slightly exceeds three rooms?

— Maybe. As you enter, in all but an anteroom to itself, a slab of brutally hacked wood, like a fallen totem, lies on a fine polished base. But then another seeming pedestal sits on top of that, before your eye precariously rests on the abstract form at the very top.

— He could be saying that the primitive really is primal, Africa as a dark unconscious on which modernity, no, the whole of Europe rests . . . .

— Is that such a fine acknowledgment, this dark foreigner within the modern? Or is it plain condescending, an imperialist art history?

— . . . or he could be parodying the whole idea of some supposedly pure formal or psychological base. After all, the pedestal rests on top. He could be replacing an imperialist art history with an inverted history of the primitive.

— His images of gender, then, nurture much the same ambivalence, the same intensity of reversals. There is one I cannot get out of my head. A brass ellipse lies on the ground, without any sculptural base, polished but asymmetric, with only the slightest, most awkward incised design. It could be a female head, a sperm, or a seed. It could be a whole world. Who am I to say which is meant by The Origin of the World?

— Not bad, but take it one step further. Is it truly a work about origins? Or is it a work that knows there is no formal completion, whether in art or life? Brancusi, I hear you saying, promises no payoff. I leave that for mere human narratives.

— The museum, I am more than half afraid, does its best to hide the ambivalence—or at least to elevate ambiguity. The works never sit lost on the floor, waiting for you to circulate among them. The curators have built maybe foot-high platforms, hugging the walls, ample enough to accommodate half a dozen pieces. Brancusi would have wanted you to experience his forms in three dimensions, but you cannot walk there. You cannot even squeeze around all sides of the platforms.

— Brancusi becomes just another part of the grand museum architecture, elegant foregrounds for those famous trapezoidal windows. They leave no ground for the "unmonumental."

— So where Brancusi took fine sculpture down off its pedestal, MoMA has bent over backward to put it back up? Sounds like the modern museum or museum empire, its expansion, its demand to be looked at, its millennial aspirations, the sculpture garden as mall, or grand sculptural plaza, sure enough.

— Part of the fault, I have to insist, is Brancusi's after all. You spoke, almost despite yourself, of his transcending human understanding. Go back to your ideal view, circulating among fallen objects. You still feel lost in a wilder land, catching privileged glimpses of a truer, more natural culture on the forest floor. Brancusi wants you never to lose that sense of awe.

— What is so tricky, what makes it so hard to decide, is the play with the primitive and the modern, the male and the female. He rests each on the other, and neither has the last word. The two pairs never line up either. The primitive, like the vertical form, is not simply the male or female impulse.

— What is really so tricky is that Brancusi retains all the old terms, even while he destroys the values associated with them. What sometimes seems so old-fashioned in modern art is the very set of oppositions that it accepts as defining. In that sense, Modernism never was a revolution.

— But only an overturning? Hold your breath. I hear some heavy theoretical machinery coming up.

— And anyway, who is doing the accepting? We have been tossing around supposedly tired sculptural conventions, the museum in this age of inflated markets, modernist gamesmanship in between, the artist's prejudices, our own . . . .

— Maybe I am a little slow, but awe that comes from work that exceeds expectations is pretty darn well earned, no? The High Renaissance was a precarious balance. Brancusi's Modernism is a precarious imbalance. It is a glory to behold, and it could not last. I was surprised at how few are the years represented in those three . . . okay, three and a fraction rooms.

— Take that idea of imbalance and return to the problem of the base and superstructure. This sculpture is impressive. So many modern theories pay homage to exactly those ideas. Freud wonders how much of the base any conscious superstructure, even art, can bring to light. Marx asks how high the capitalist superstructure can grow before the base, the workers, recover their share.

— Theory, nothing. What about art? Artists are the ones who made those ideas work. All along, they were diving into the formal underpinnings of their art. All along, they knew about broader social conventions, gender restrictions, and political connections. It is all there.

— Or ask what happens when Brancusi, like Alberto Giacometti or Gonzalo Fonseca, either incorporates the base explicitly into the art, as in those pedestals, or cuts it away and excludes it, as in the polished metal Origins. It is like bringing the frame of a painting into the work. At first it seems to solve the problem of the frame's being neither simply part of the work nor simply part of the outside world. But as you look, it makes the whole point of a frame unspeakable. It forces you to ask where the work stops.

— Soon everything in and around Brancusi's art becomes a frame. Think of the influence on Isamu Noguchi, a student of his and, later, Buckminster Fuller before his buckyballs. It is what Jacques Derrida calls a parergon, meaning neither inside nor outside. The greatest formalism, the purest art, is to make purity impossible.

— In the same way, no art can claim to be a primitive truth, so long as it necessarily falls within our own history. No more can it claim to be simply the modern, for the same reason.

— I let it enter my history. I cheated a little and squeezed behind the platform, down near the wall and windows. The art does look away, out to the origins of the world . . . so that it will not catch you cheating. Try it!

— So what if I get caught?

— Caught up in the mystique of the work of art?

— You were framed.

The end is near

As I noted back then, Brancusi thrives on contradictions. Endless Column is a totem pole without a totem, abstract but not without associations. Born in 1876 in Romania, he agreed to treat the outdoor version, in his native country, as a monument to the fallen in World War I. Yet he settled easily into Paris and the leading edge, as an assistant to Auguste Rodin. On his own, he exchanged Rodin's additive methods, with clay and cast bronze, for carving away. He could be taking a step ahead, into the new century, or returning to tradition, just as Michelangelo carved in marble.

He also removed the possibility of endless castings for Rodin, which a critic has used to debunk the "originality of the avant-garde." And then he turned out multiple versions anyway. He is cutting away, but he also thrives on the opposition of object and void. Socrates from 1922 is a ladle, like Spoon Woman for Giacometti, with its handle for a body and too large a hole in its head. A photograph of Young Bird, from 1928, seems to show another dark void, in the polished metal egg on a two-part pedestal—but it is only a shadow or reflection of museum lights. A bird might yet hatch from the space within, or the object might represent the bird finding its wings.

Brancusi is caught up in Modernism's veneration of the "primitive," but never less than sophisticated. He also takes primitivism or abstraction down to earth. He has his Blond Negress from 1933, but also a portrait of high society from 1913. While Origins, in the past show, seems to cut to the heart of a mystery, First Cry from 1917 identifies its origins as plain old childbirth—and both heads lie unmoving and alone on the floor. Then again, an infant could express something universal, too. And its gashes in place of features turn a baby's cry into an existential scream.

A coarse early work, Maiastra, takes its title from a bird in Romanian myth. Yet his most polished and beautiful bird of all, Bird in Space of 1928, shocked Paris far more. The slim, golden bird rises, thickens, and comes to a point like a spear, before an imagined stride into a very real space. Each is set on a pedestal of the artist's devising. Brancusi's pedestals may consist of up to three parts, of contrasting materials, and another block turns up right in the middle of Maiastra, between its smooth head and messier legs. Are they part of the work or, as its support, the room—the materials or the void?

Either way, they are part of Brancusi's continuing effort to frame and then to reframe sculpture. Each time one wants to deride his condescension to the "dark continent," and each time he is one step ahead of the game. The pedestal could signal no more than a control freak, leaving not even museum presentations a century later to chance. He is in control with that film and its low vantage point, the better to question the finite. He is in control, too, with his often overlooked photographs, which take equal care for his sculpture and studio lighting. A double exposure turns a self-portrait into a shrouded block awaiting further carving.

The museum leaves nothing to chance, too. It adds pedestals that Brancusi cannot have admired or foreseen. Additional works at the Guggenheim, from its own collection, look more totemic and cluttered. MoMA makes the artist, like his blue-gray marble Fish from 1930, into its classic image of Modernism—bare, silent, and abstract. Which is the real Brancusi? As I concluded twenty-odd years ago, if you were caught up in the mystique of the work, you were framed.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Constantin Brancusi ran at The Museum of Modern Art through April 23, 1996, the smaller show through February 18, 2019. My improvisation for voices offers apologies to Derrida and his essay "Restitutions."