#37

Notes on Brancusi



















Let's see if I can't get at the crux of Brancusi's work. What is distinctive about his practice? Here is a list of motifs, most of which I've culled from Anna Chave's book: Brancusi's aversion to "beefsteak," his term for the cadaverousness of the male body when re-presented sculpturally (rather than presenced in and as sculpted matter); his mania for photography; his orbs and phalluses, and the extremes to which he took Rodin's mantra that "a monument should be able to roll down a mountain and still remain intact, an organic block"; his obsessive working-over of the studio, hiding his phonograph speakers in stone casings, hiding his power tools, touring guests from room to room in accordance with a self-mythologizing script; his use of interchangeable bases, which (according to Chave) simultaneously debase and re-base the sculptural object (in the same way the automobile debases and re-bases the pedestrian subject); his monumental Birds and Cocks, which he hoped would "fill the vault of the sky" and "pervade the whole universe"; his interchangeable, de-gendered lovers (The Kiss), modern day sorb-apple creatures (Plato's Symposium by way of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents); his Endless Column, which he referred to as "time's reverse pendulum," and which could be installed (anti-monumentally) indoors or outdoors.

commodity-object --> commodity-image

Baudrillard in Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign: "What fascinates us is always that which radically excludes us in the name of its internal logic and perfection. ... a mathematical formula ... a useless object, or, again, a smooth body, without orifices, doubled and redoubled by a mirror, devoted to perverse autosatisfaction."

If Cubism is one response to the photographic penetration of "room-space," Brancusi's sculpture is another. His objects give the camera something a surface that is -- simultaneously and absolutely -- a body, and an architecture that is also sculpture. But only, or primarily, according to the eye of the camera, from which the actual matter of the sculpture shrinks, becoming a sort of black hole, or a cloaking device -- one whose atmospheric shimmer intimates something of the shape of the body beneath, though nothing of its identity or purpose.

Return to primordial space/objectivity -- but by way of the latest involution in the development of the commodity, which now splits itself between its invisible, absolute interiority and the photographic image of its surface, an absolute exteriority. Of course, this is the contradiction that Brancusi's art attempts to sustain, even to exaccerbate. The studio tour and the public monument are both weak points in Brancusi's oeuvre; they are his attempt at a resolution of his work's antinomies -- resolution in the form of praxis, in other words. With the Endless Column and the Tirgu Jiu project thought together with the studio tour and the quotations from Milarepa, we see what the terms of dialectical reconciliation must necessarily be for Brancusi: instead of the fetishism of the commodity, its worship -- the commodity as annihilating Absolute.