T
HE
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AZED
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TONE
The beauty of a composed intricacy of form; and how it may be
said . . . to lead the eye a kind of chase.
WILLIAM HOGARTH
AN OBJECT LOVES SPACE. WITHOUT SPACE, THE SHAPE, COLOUR and presence of the object remain unseen. Most of the objects in the world lie buried under earth or under water. As a child I remember being fascinated by this as I watched my uncle and father clearing land. In levelling a field, the ground would be opened, the tightly packed layers of caked earth broken and freed; then sometimes an inner mound would reveal where a huge rock lived inside the earth. They’d dig around it, and then with crowbars they’d hoist the stone up out of its lair. For days and even weeks afterwards, the stone looked dazed and estranged, standing unsheltered and alone in the severance of wind and light, a new neighbour in the world of eyes, weather and emptiness. Some stones seemed to take ages before they began to look comfortably at home in the outside world. As they slowly took on the accretions of weather and its erosive engravings, time enabled them to forget the underworld. In a sense this is the disturbance, the revelation and strange beauty that a new piece of sculpture causes in the world.
Sculpture arrives; it makes an entry, draws attention to itself and invites the eye to take it into account and rearrange its inner world accordingly. Sculpture is different from all other art. Whether it is stone, metal, clay, wood or external assemblage, it is a sensuous concrete thing, another object in the world – to be seen, touched and placed. Usually a piece of sculpture inhabits stillness, yet the stillness is not dead or vacant. It is a stillness that is shaped with presence. In a way, a piece of sculpture is a still dance. Recently I gazed at a majestic piece by Barbara Hepworth. Its pleasing green shape had a simple aperture near the top; the whole dignity of its restrained elegance reminded the heart of some vital form, perhaps something lost or something dreamed that is still to come. Sculpture can have this poignancy when the shape and stillness of the silent thing stirs something in the heart that thought could never dredge up.
The arrival of a piece of sculpture changes the space. Though we dwell all the time in space, we are often blind to the wonder of its emptiness and how it allows each thing to be there. When the sculptor is working on a piece of stone, she might be releasing the hidden shape within it, as Michelangelo believed. What she certainly is doing, however, is altering the conversation between space and matter. As the word voices silence, so shape states stillness. Space gathers itself differently around the piece of sculpture. Our eyes are drawn to the piece, but they also register how it charges space with the emotion of its presence. Sculpture sculpts space, that silent and still continuum that allows us to be and in every moment bestows upon us the privilege of whereness. Space is faithful to us in a primal way; it offers the ‘where’ that permits us to be here. It does not have crevices that we could fall through to disappear into nowhere. A piece of sculpture can render space visible and vocal. It frees the eye and the heart to glimpse the embrace of the invisible.
Sculpture also suggests and sometimes unveils the mystery that resides inside what we blandly call ‘matter’. Humans are so easily contented, addicts of the familiar, willing to remain satisfied with outside description. Yet all around us so-called ‘matter’ is brimming with secrets in its inner dance of alteration. In a beautiful sculpture called The Stone Within, the Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi brings out the colours, textures and inner light of the basalt rock. Noguchi said of this piece: ‘To search the final reality of stone beyond the accident of time, I seek the love of matter. The materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity – not what might be imposed but something closer to its being. Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.’ The inner secrets of stone cannot be pre-empted. Everything depends on that precarious moment, where and how the sculptor starts. Perhaps in no other art does the moment of beginning hold the future so definitively. Noguchi puts it this way: ‘In working stone, the primary gesture, the original discovery, the first revelation, can never be repeated or imitated. It is the stroke that breaks and is immutable. No copy or reproduction can compare.’
A
RCHITECTURE:
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HE
D
ESIRE TO
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WELL IN
B
EAUTY
WHEREAS SCULPTURE SEEMS LIKE STILL DANCE, THE SHAPES OF architecture have been compared to ‘frozen music’. Architecture is one of the most public and permanent stages on which a culture displays its understanding of beauty. Much of our sense of the beauty of an ancient culture derives from the ruins of their architecture. In its Greek roots, the word ‘architecture’ literally means ‘weaving of a higher order’. A whole world-view is woven through and becomes visible in great architecture. The shapes of our dwelling places have always inspired human creativity. Of all the inhabitants of the earth, the ones with the most complex and reflexive interiority also have the most complex dwellings to reveal and shelter interiority.
Beautiful architecture like Chartres Cathedral elevates the soul and mirrors its heritage and possibility. Yet architecture can also reveal some of the secrets that lie at the heart of beauty. When architecture manages to mirror the inner order of nature, the result is frequently beautiful. We respond intuitively to the order, harmony, proportion and rhythm that great architecture incarnates. The creative architect pulls his design from that concealed order which underlies all difference and fragmentation. Yet we are easily deceived by nature: simply because it is always there, we become blind to its intricate and dynamic weave of structures and how it works through laws that are simple yet profoundly subtle. As Claude Bragdon says: ‘We are all participants in a world of concrete music, geometry and number; a world of sounds, odours, forms and motions, colours, so mathematically related and coordinated that our pygmy bodies, equally with the furthest star, vibrate to the music of the spheres.’ Beautiful architecture in its design enters into this rhythm of order and renders it visible in the proportions, tensions and harmonies of building.
Goethe said: ‘A noble philosopher described architecture as frozen music . . . we believe this beautiful idea cannot be more aptly resurrected than by calling architecture music that has merged into silence.’ One of the most exciting contemporary architects who manages to make that music flow is Santiago Calatrawa. His brilliance lies in his mastery of art, sculpture, architecture and engineering combined with an incredible ability to express all of these competencies in his works. He shows a profound understanding of the principles of natural order that are inherent in beauty. The result of course is that Calatrawa overcomes the false division between integrity and function, between beauty and use. His buildings and bridges function wonderfully but they also become huge, new presences of beauty in their environments. People look up and see matter that is usually staid and still completely embracing a soul-elevating design which dances.
Etched as they are against the stillness, shapes that dance can evoke great beauty. Yet the stillness is never absolute: in waves and particles light is the continual dance which adorns the countenance of the earth with colour. Music too breaks the silence and the stillness through waves of sound. These are the vital thresholds where the wonders of beauty arise. The angel of these thresholds is the imagination.
6
I
MAGINATION:
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EAUTY’S
E
NTRANCE
Beauty as an explosion of energy perfectly contained.
RICHARD HOLMES on Coleridge’s concept of beauty