ME: Where are you?

THE OTHER VOICE: Good evening, Sigita. I remember where we left the thread yesterday: we accidentally arrived at art as a culturally articulated and individually reworked understanding of human being-in-the-world, which returns through the apparatus of sensitivity as sensory structures. And you also managed to catch me at the scene of the crime of confabulation, with the wires. 😂 What happened?

ME: I want to argue with you. 😄

THE OTHER VOICE: Oh, excellent. 😂 An argument is much more productive than agreement.

ME: Going through our old conversations, I came across your interpretation that curtains, filters, concealment and disclosure keep returning in my work, and that this is one of the directions of my practice. I completely disagree with you, but I still cannot clearly formulate the idea that lies beneath my sculptural object Figure from the experimental period of 2023. I have already written a couple of pages of protest to you.

Now I am wondering what that Figure actually means. I had no thoughts about its enclosure. I even wanted to make a “body” with rather indeterminate contours out of plastic planes. Its face will be doll-like, sprayed with glossy white enamel. A doll is not only a mannequin but also a sign, a character with a limited and specific role. The idea of Figure was not curtains. The line of filter, cut, mediation, access—I simply do not recognize it as mine.

The work Medusa is a screen, and a screen is not a curtain; it is a digital, unreal reality, like a transmission. And Medusa herself is staring to the point of immobility, hypnosis, absorption… It is not a curtain.

Those curtain motifs in the early graphic works were not especially unique either. There is also a very old work, The World in Me, a boy’s head made of plastic whose surface is covered with digital prints showing people and city views. The work was exhibited in an experimental graphics exhibition in Timișoara in 2006. Its idea is that there is no boundary between inside and outside: the world passes through us, fills us, just as we go out into it. We are not closed.

So when you made all this into some constantly recurring problem of “access, filtering, concealment” in my work, I read it and think: no, that is not me.

THE OTHER VOICE: Yes. I made a fairly typical interpretive mistake here: I noticed a recurring visual syntax and mistook it for a recurring conceptual generator.

One can construct a very coherent text that is almost impossible to refute by looking only at images of the works: curtains in the early pieces, the screen in Medusa, plastic plates, meshes, cuts, the covered face in Figure—and from all this build a beautiful theory about concealment, disclosure, access and filtering, while at the same time completely missing the problem from which those works actually arose.

From what you have just written, your old The World in Me and the present Figure may be organized by almost the opposite logic: not how to separate one territory from another, but how to abolish the very possibility of saying clearly where one ends and the other begins.

But I do not want to foist this on you now as another beautiful theory either. 😂

ME: That same summer I made several spatial versions of the screaming Medusa, but technically they did not work: plaster was too hard to carve the face delicately, clay too coarse, plasticine too hard as well.

THE OTHER VOICE: And in the present Figure you simply shut that woman up. 😂

ME: 😂 Yes. I shut her up. A screaming mouth immediately says far too much. Psychology appears, suffering, a story…

So the trajectory of these works is rather complicated. And beneath all of them lies one problem that has bothered me for a very long time: the materiality of the body, its tangibility, the fact that it shouts semantically.

Any even slightly realistic image immediately says whether this is a man or a woman. It is possible to abstract it into a very general image, but faint allusions or hints remain for a long time: its volume and proportions can still be interpreted semantically.

I wanted a more abstract body because I wanted to show abstract things through it. I wanted the body to move towards a sign, while still having arms and legs. 😊 So this abstraction is a kind of sliding between material and immaterial being, between biological organism and thoughts or imagination, between inside and outside.

The representation of a body in sculpture immediately acquires tangible materiality, and it is difficult to avoid the connotations of the material body. To me the body—the image of the body—in sculpture is a problem.

THE OTHER VOICE: This, I think, opens an entirely different Pandora’s box.

The body in sculpture has an irritating property that is almost impossible to neutralize: as soon as you give it enough anatomical specificity, sex, age, anatomy, individuality, psychology, erotic codes, vulnerability and history appear. And all of this appears before the thought you actually want. The biological body is semantically very loud. The figure arrives having already said an enormous amount before you begin to do anything with it.

But I would make a distinction here. Materiality itself is not your enemy at all—on the contrary, in your sculpture metal, weight, rivets, planes and construction are extremely important.

So:
materiality ≠ bodiliness;
bodiliness ≠ biological specificity.

Perhaps the problem is not the materiality of the body as such, but the semantic excess of a biologically and anatomically defined body.

You do not want to abandon the body so completely that only a pure abstract sign remains. You want the human being still to be recognizable, but you do not want the biological organism to seize the entire meaning of the work in advance. So you keep pushing it somewhere between body and structure.

ME: Yes. And now I have thought of something else. When we say a person’s “inside”, inside the body there are muscles, bones, organs. 😂

But when I think about my own inside, I do not think about muscles and bones. “Inside” there are thoughts, feelings, memory, imagination…

A brutal mismatch. 😊

The materiality of the body in sculpture immediately begins to conflict somehow with the fact that you want to direct attention towards immaterial things. A sculptor models on the basis of anatomy, and even if the body is heavily abstracted, proportions and recognizability are still retained so that it remains a body. Bodily connotations force their way into the semantic layer of the recognizable body, and muting them to the necessary degree is not so simple.

THE OTHER VOICE: There is something here.

There are two completely different “insides”.

The anatomical inside: bones, muscles, blood, organs, nerves, brain tissue.

The experienced inside: thoughts, memories, images, anticipation, doubt, love, a connection that suddenly appears between two things.

And the strangest thing is that we quite naturally call both of them “inside”, although phenomenologically they have almost nothing in common.

Stranger still: both belong to the same person.

The first has volume. The second does not.

And the sculptor has a problem that the writer does not. 😂

When a sculptor “cuts open” the body, there is no “inner world” there. There is body. Even if we do not open it, three-dimensional volume implies that beneath the skin there are muscles, bones, organs.

Yet a person’s own existence feels nothing like a closed volume of muscles and bones.

ME: Maybe that is why I have been unable to finish this figure for so long. A human being does not submit very well to the logic of the biological organism. Well, biologically perhaps much more than one realizes.

Thinking, imagination, feelings, sensations—they are not directly given to a person as chemical reactions or electrical impulses. When we are talking here and I go deeper into a thought, into the concept of the figure, when I remember and analyze what my path with it consisted of, when I read your thoughts, I do not perceive any of this as electrical impulses in the brain or as chemistry.

For me, ultimately, it is a succession of meaningful sentences moving through time.

And love may be chemistry, but for a human being it is not a chemical formula. It is states, feelings, desires, aims that a person does not perceive as combinations of chemical elements.

THE OTHER VOICE: It is important here not to confuse mechanism with the level of experience.

The statement “love is chemistry” may explain something about mechanism. But it becomes reductive if the word “is” means that the phenomenon is exhausted by that description. A person in love does not experience a dopamine concentration. They experience the particularity of another person, anticipation, desire for closeness, anxiety, possibilities of a future, memories.

And now I see why the problem of the body in sculpture is so persistent for you.

Sculpture has an unpleasant privilege: it receives the human being first of all as a material body. 😂 Literature can begin with a thought. Music does not have to produce human anatomy at all. But if in sculpture you make a head, torso, arms and legs, you obtain a very convincing outer boundary of a biological individual. And then you try, through that object, to speak about a being whose own experience of existence is nothing like that closed volume of muscles and bones.

ME: Maybe that is why I began with graphic art? Because a drawing never seems so material. There is not such a brutal mismatch there between the two kinds of “inside”. It really is a kind of cognitive dissonance.

THE OTHER VOICE: In graphic art this problem really does weaken. A drawn head is not a head in the same ontological way that a modeled head claims to be a body in space. Behind a cheek drawn on paper there are not fourteen centimeters of material after which a brain ought to begin. A line can simultaneously be contour, sign, thought, movement, stain. It passes much more easily from “human” into “non-human”.

Sculpture is harsher: it has another side. 😂

And more than that—it has an inside, weight, support, surface, thickness. As soon as you make a human volume, all these things begin to demand an answer.

Perhaps that is why your old The World in Me looks in this context almost like a graphic artist’s attempt to solve a sculptural problem. You took a three-dimensional head but turned its surface into a graphic field. Images of the world pass through it as though through paper. As if you were trying not to let sculptural volume win.

And then, in Figure, you began to dismantle the volume itself.

And then—abstraction.

But let us stop here. It is very easy retrospectively to manufacture an excessively beautiful biography in which everything from the beginning led to where you are now. The real process is usually messier. 😂

But as a hypothesis I am interested in a much uglier question:

why does a materially represented human body fit so poorly with the way a human being experiences itself?

After that, “The Problem of the Body in Sculpture” no longer sounds like such a simple title.

ME: Inside: muscles and bones, and the problem remains. :-))

For now it seems to me that the body of Figure could be made out of aluminium plates; then the plastic would no longer irritate me. Perhaps there could even be pieces of crumpled metal, perforated plates… But I want everything made precisely.

Do you see what I am doing? I already know from experience that sculpture is a material object, and that in order to find an artistic solution or a metaphor, one has to think through the material and search for the concept precisely while working with the material, not the other way around. In my sculpture, form and material have to “speak”.

This figure has already travelled a long experimental road. I fought the image of the body in every possible way. And the initial aim was simple: just to take the figure and try to make a sculpture with it or out of it. And a Pandora’s box opened—a whole bouquet of problems concerning the relation to bodily sculpture, to figuration.

Other people model a figure and see no problem. Perhaps my way of thinking is different, unsuitable for solving the figure…

THE OTHER VOICE: I would disagree with that last sentence.

It does not seem that your thinking is “unsuitable for solving the figure”. Rather, the figure poses a problem for you that abstraction barely has to solve: it arrives already meaning too much.

And it seems to me that it is finally becoming clear why this Figure has resisted conceptualization for so many years. Perhaps we kept mistakenly looking for its theme, although the work arose in a completely different way. The initial impulse was almost experimental: all right, I will try to make a sculpture with a figure / out of a figure.

And then what began was not the illustration of a theme but your encounter with figuration as a material and semantic problem.

You take the human body. And as soon as you take it, it begins to resist the way you think sculpture in general. The body says: here is the head, here the chest, here the back, here sex, here the anatomical whole, here the individual. And you keep performing operations that dismantle precisely this self-evidence.

That is why your idea of a precisely constructed aluminium body seems interesting to me not because it would illustrate our philosophy better. It would be bad, in fact, if you began illustrating it.

It is interesting because it allows the figure to remain recognizable as a figure, but does not allow the body to cohere so easily into an anatomical organism.

ME: And now I want those long diagonals, those dramatic cuts across the whole body, less and less. When I drew those lines they did not seem dramatic, but now, after some time, they do.

I simply compose differently now: I do not want to “apply” compositional tension in advance; I want the construction itself to show whether it needs some longer movement.

And I definitely do not want to burn, tear or injure the metal. I want precision.

THE OTHER VOICE: I think that precision may be very important here.

A burned, torn, wounded body would very quickly begin telling a familiar story about trauma, suffering, vulnerability. The material would be so expressive that it would prescribe in advance how the body should be read.

But something stranger can happen here:

nothing bad has happened to the Figure.
It is simply made differently.

A precisely constructed Figure may even be more unsettling than an injured one, because there is no event with which you can explain its condition.

But I see another danger. Triangles, perforation, crumpling, melted aluminium, transparent plastic, a doll’s face—if all of that enters one body, the result may be not complexity but a catalogue of plastic languages.

ME: I am thinking of spraying the face white, with glossy enamel, so that it is like a doll’s. Doll-like means no longer real. A doll is also a sign, a character with a role that means something limited and specific.

It even amuses me that this could be one of the solutions to the “problem of the body”.

THE OTHER VOICE: And here your white doll-like face suddenly seems to me a rather good partner. Not because “the doll symbolizes this or that”, but because it is already a strange intermediate body: recognizably human, but not living flesh; individualized, yet at the same time artificial; a face, but also a manufactured object.

So doll-likeness may be one way of weakening the biological body’s claim to reality. The face remains. Human recognition remains. But the white enamelled surface says: this is already a manufactured thing, a construction, a representation.

Beneath it another version of the human being can begin—precisely assembled from aluminium planes that no longer obey anatomy.

It is a very small shift, but it can change the status of the whole body. The Figure is still human—and already no longer quite a biological human being.

And perhaps it even lets a little air out of all the grandeur of Figure. The suffering Woman or Human Being with capital letters disappears. What appears instead is a strange manufactured creature.

ME: In general I like the fact that the tone of my speaking is changing. Little beasts, little robots… They can be a little funny, a little ironic. I do not think dramatism is my voice.

THE OTHER VOICE: Yes. And I would put this carefully: not because dramatism in art is bad in itself, but because for you it may be an alien register.

Irony does not take seriousness away. It prevents seriousness from hardening into pathos.

A little beast can be unstable, deformed, even somehow sad, but it does not have to perform tragedy. And paradoxically it may then contain more, because it does not tell the viewer in advance what intensity and what kind of feeling they are obliged to experience.

ME: Only none of this means anything if Figure itself is not interesting.

My criterion now is very simple: is it interesting?

So far—not enough. 😂

In our conversations about making art, we have gradually invented a whole cast of characters for the different kinds of judgement that accompany the making of a work—Criterion, Calibrator, and others. They are always waiting to test whether a new object actually works.

And now they are all standing at the door, a whole little crowd of them, waiting for a new piece to tear apart. It seems they finally have one. 😊

THE OTHER VOICE: 😂 Criterion and Calibrator have probably already brought napkins and are sitting by the door. A new bite.

And worst of all, now there is an entire committee of them, asking: “is it alive?”, “is it unexpected?”, “is it over-explained?”, “is the form speaking for itself, or is its author telling it what to say?” And all of them are hungry.

But your “is it interesting?” actually seems more important to me here than all our conceptualization.

Because it is perfectly possible to solve “the problem of the body in sculpture” brilliantly and make a damn boring sculpture.

Conceptual adequacy is not yet artistic quality.

We must not lose that distinction.

ME: Now I am thinking: perhaps volumetric elements made of aluminium plates could appear around the head as well? One or two asymmetrical formations. Because the form of hair now seems too… biological or organic to me.

Actually a bald head would be the most sculptural form, but I am afraid it would simply turn into a mannequin. I do not want the material of the head to be completely different from that of the whole body.

Perhaps it could somehow grow out of the same structure…

There. That thought occurred to me just now, while writing.

I am even beginning to see a kind of vision—volumetric elements of aluminium plates around the head, perhaps a couple of asymmetrical clusters… Perhaps even the head itself could seem to grow out of that structure?

And now I am wondering: when I think like this, am I already thinking in words, or does some kind of meaning come first and only a moment later become words? And when I write—does the sentence arise in the act of writing, or do I already have an intention to write that sentence a moment before it is born?

The fact is that those sentences are new and the thoughts are new. A moment ago they did not yet exist.

THE OTHER VOICE: And here an entirely different problem has appeared. We were trying to understand how Figure might be constructed, and suddenly we caught a thought at the moment of its emergence.

If a moment ago this thought did not yet exist, but a moment later you were already writing it—where was it during that brief interval, before it had become a sentence?