By April Gornik
Guest Columnist
North Haven, Long Island, NY, USA
Elizabeth King combines precisely
movable figurative sculptures with stop-frame animation in works that blur the
boundary between actual and virtual object. Her work is in permanent
collections nationwide including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Dartmouth, the Museum of Fine Arts in
Houston, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York. Awards for her work include a 2014 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a
2006 Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a
2002-03 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1996-97 Fellowship in the Visual Arts at
the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study at Harvard University.
She is
Professor Emeritus in the Sculpture Department at Virginia Commonwealth
University, where she taught for 30 years and is the subject of a new documentary entitled Double Take - The Art of Elizabeth King. I had the opportunity to visit with
her when she was in New York for this Conversation.
APRIL GORNIK: I recently saw a show at the Met Breuer (that you should
have been in!) called “Like Life.” Of the contemporary sculpture included,
quite a bit of it was hyper-realistic (Duane Eddy, John De Andrea, Ron Mueck).
Oddly, that is not represented much in contemporary painting exhibits. Do you
think of your work in terms of “realism?”
ELIZABETH KING: Did you see a show a few years ago that traveled to the
National Gallery in Washington, titled “The Sacred Made Real?” Curated by
Xavier Bray, then of the National Gallery in London, it borrowed a number of
extraordinary 17th century Spanish polychrome sculptures from
cathedrals in Europe, and exhibited them in a state-of-the-art museum setting,
lit with superb theater. It was one of the most sublime shows of sculpture I've
ever seen (I wrote about it in a short essay for The Art Bulletin). I think that show helped
break all remaining early modern prejudice against painted sculpture, long
labeled church illustration for the illiterate. The current Met Breuer show
extends the challenge both backwards and forwards in time, spanning centuries,
and it welcomes onstage not just paint, but wax, hair, fabric, glass eyes,
jointed limbs, and the anatomical representation of viscera. I've not seen the
show yet, but it surely combines art, science, and spectacle in a way that has
long been wanting…rolling in ecstasy at our feet. “Realism” itself demands
three dimensions.
But
realism is such an old-fashioned term now!
APRIL GORNIK: More profoundly, at the same show at the Met Breuer I was
impressed that most artists were represented by a single figure confronting the
viewer, allowing for, and inviting, a high degree of intimacy in the experience
of each piece. Your work absolutely has a laser-like effect of one-on-one
involvement for the viewer. Is this something you think about?
ELIZABETH KING: Many of the historical works will have been extracted from
context for this show; and contemporaries, like Segal, De Andrea, Hanson,
Ahearn, and sometimes Mueck, deliver explicit or implicit narratives. The
sculptures are actors on a stage, the figures are all busy doing things.
Perhaps the curators designed the show to orient solo figures towards direct
contact with viewers. But your question is so essential and interesting for any
figurative sculptor. Even if a figure is doing nothing, and baldly faces you:
it is close to impossible to make a sculpture convincingly look at the
viewer. Painters can do this, especially with self-portraits, and it is
thrilling, but sculpture can't choose the angle from which it is seen. I used
to spend all kinds of time trying to step into the line of sight of a portrait
sculpture, especially Jean Antione Houdon's portraits, with their astonishingly
carved gazes and eyeballs, catchlight and cornea rendered in stone. Nothing
stony about those stares! But you are right, I want this confrontation in my
own works, or at least the promise of it. The figure waits for you. The great
Egyptian Old Kingdom tomb portraits are famous for their eye-following
illusion. But one of the frontiers even today's robotics has yet to master is
sustained line of sight. Even when you look at another person, is she really
looking back at you, or is she lost in thought, eyes only turned your way? If
we sculptors can't make a piece that looks back, we can try and make one that
has a strong enough illusion of an inner life that you think it might look
back, and you want it to.
More
simply, my works are small, and you step in close to see them. I think right
there, in intimate space, springs a theater for an audience of one.
APRIL GORNIK: One of your sculptures is just an eye. Do you think this
metonym has the same power as a single figure, or bust, or do you think of it
as a metonym? What do you think is the difference?
 |
| Eye Sculpture |
ELIZABETH KING: That eye is movable, around an internal brass ball-and-socket joint,
so it can be posed on its stand to look in any direction. I made it in
collaboration with an ocularist, Earle Schrieber: he created the eyeball in
cast acrylic, and I made the mechanism. Then I added eyelids, two thin shells I
carved in wood, attached at each side of the eyeball with tiny springs. Could I
have a movable eye with separately movable lids? It was a study piece, a design
I thought I could scale down and incorporate in a small posable head. But the
mechanics interfered with the sculpture in too overt a way (my best problem -
not losing the coherence of the form to the machine). Instead, I discovered my
test eye made a perfect model for stop-frame animation, and I got carried away
with capturing its blink and its gaze on film. Only later did I appreciate that
the eye alone could conjure a presence. Such a tiny motion, and only a fragment
of the body, and we still grant it agency. The metonym came of its own
accord.
APRIL GORNIK: The contemporary history of figurative sculpture is full of
perversity. How do you feel about this? Does it go with the territory? Could
people interpret your work in that fashion, or would that be a
misinterpretation? I’m thinking of work that collages bones or bone-like
armatures with more realistic heads, e.g.
Following
up, are you familiar with the concept of the uncanny valley? Is this something
you find compelling? It may not work for broad audiences in popular animation,
but it certainly activates a powerful response.
ELIZABETH KING: As infuriating as Freud's essay “The Uncanny” is, it
contains the best close analysis of “classes of frightening things” of any text
I know. The field of Artificial Life, working to close the gap between human
and machine, calls the uncanny valley that sudden drop in certainty about whether
a thing is alive or not. The human-machine interface breaks down when the
uncanny valley appears, but literature and film revel in it, don't they. We
fans have come to savor it, for the ways it lets us dissect our fears in the
guise of theater and fiction. But I don't see my own works operating in the uncanny
valley, for their pretense to life is overt and this is the subject of the
work. There is another writer who has articulated something that has meant
everything to me. Donald Keene, the great scholar of Japanese art, and honorary
Japanese citizen, wrote about the evolution of the Bunraku puppets. He said: “Each
step in the direction of further realism [was] accompanied by a simultaneous
step in the direction of non-realism, as if those responsible for the fate of Bunraku
knew of the dangers of surfeiting the public appetite for verisimilitude.” The
contradiction hypnotizes us.
APRIL GORNIK: How did you come to be fascinated by articulation and
movement as a sculptor?
ELIZABETH KING: As a kid I made puppets, and in art school I got interested
in making puppets that could move in more subtle ways. Could I make a puppet
shrug, or look askance, or be embarrassed? It wasn't the puppet show I was
after, but the puppet as a thing in itself, a movable sculpture. Inventing
movable joints, I studied the puppet traditions, and all kinds of anatomical
manuals and orthopedic textbooks. One day, back in 1974, walking down the
street in San Francisco, I saw a small jointed horse in a shop window, an antique
wooden artist's mannequin. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I went in and asked
the price. One thousand five hundred dollars, a sum beyond dream. It was
awkwardly and badly posed in the window; only I could rescue it. I raced home
and gathered all the family silver and jewelry that had been entrusted to me
from childhood – my estate. Arms full and heart pounding I took the bus
downtown to a high-end auction house for assessment. $200 max for the lot, the
man yawned. In shock, I tried to take out a loan at a bank, my first lesson in
failed collateral. No credit cards in those days. Finally I begged the shop
owner for a one-year monthly payment plan, and walked out with the horse.
 |
| French Horse Mannequin (19th Century) |
What
it could do! Four sliding wood pieces for the withers, you could change its
pose without losing its form. The neck a stack of slats around a flexible lead
rod. Even the ears could be rotated. Wood-on-wood friction, part to part, held
each pose without effort. No strings, no set screws to tighten. You could tilt
the head just a quarter inch, and it would stay there. I posed and reposed it
for hours. The smallest adjustment, and I would stand back and marvel at how
the force and meaning of body's language could shift.
I
learned to carve wood, and copy some of these joints, and I got rid of the
strings on my puppets. Years later, I repaired antique wooden mannequins for
dealers around New York, and learned even more. I couldn't afford to buy them,
so I fixed them instead, rebuilding arms and fingers and joints, and I made drawings to
possess them in my mind. My own works developed apace. Each show, I would pose
a figure differently. I thought of this as a performance of sorts, just a very
slow one. In 1991, through my friend Richard Kizu-Blair, a first chance to make
a stop-motion animation with a sculpture….
 |
| What Happened (Silent Stop-Frame Animation - 1991) |
 |
| Eidolon (Silent Live-Action Animation - 1998-1999) |
In a
show last year at MASS MoCA, I worked with stop-motion animator Mike Belzer. For
seven days in front of viewers, on a vibration-proof stage the museum built, we
set in motion a pair of jointed boxwood hands I made, and people could see a bit of the painstaking
film process. Twenty-four poses, and you get one second of animation. This time
in front of our eyes, those same tiny but momentous changes, now on view for
visitors. Putting a film studio in a gallery, crazy as it was, allowed the
sculpture's motions to be seen in real time, too. This is my passion, to do
this again with a new sculpture.
APRIL GORNIK: I feel a profound sense of time in your work that’s both
disturbing and calming. Do you think of your automaton’s movements as being
rhythmic (almost musical)? I’m thinking specifically of “What Happened”, e.g.,
the first of your works I saw that flabbergasted me. And how did you like
working collaboratively in that case?
ELIZABETH KING: Peter Schjeldahl, reviewing the current Cézanne show in
Washington, wrote the most exquisite definition of Cubism, conjuring the mind
and the body in time: “Each daub can seem to record a discrete look, at a
moment isolated in time. Sometimes the eyes in a portrait peer in different
directions, evidence of the discontinuous process. Picasso and Braque adapted
the effect to create Cubism: visual reality fragmented in fealty to how our
eyes take it in before our brains compose the illusion of having seen it
whole.” (I swoon over the word “fealty.”) He reminds us, in this lovely phrase,
of the paradigm shift in our very definition of “realism” that Cubism brought,
dissecting the act of looking into its temporal leaps and reverse-engineered
summations. Maybe this is why I loved shooting an animation in the gallery. On
a nearby monitor we showed Mike's computer screen, where he was viewing the
animation up to that moment over and over again, to compose the hands for the
next frame. So you could see the film in progress, back up and forward, back up
and forward. And then you could turn your head and see the sculpture in real
time and real space, and see Mike manipulating it in micro-fine increments, the
pose changing every few minutes. Film time, real time. Two kinds of time, two kinds
of advance, and two kinds of looking.
I
choreograph the motion to be very slow and to appear involuntary. I am a
minimalist of gesture, but a maximalist of time. This is extremely difficult in
stop-motion, for it requires each incremental pose change to be extremely tiny,
almost imperceptible. Twenty-four frames, twenty-four poses, to seamlessly
raise a tiny finger one inch. I'm pushing the real-world limits of the skill. I
can't do this without a master animator. I've collaborated with Mike twice, and
it has been the great privilege of my artist's life. That he was willing to
animate in front of an audience blew me away. His concentration and physical
control over an eight- or ten-hour day was staggering. Imagine what it is to
see this! He is a surgeon of time.
APRIL GORNIK: Your website is called thesizesofthings.com. We’ve spoken before about miniaturization and its potency.
Can you speak to this, especially in your most recent work?
 |
| Elizabeth King's Studio - Works in Progress |
ELIZABETH KING: I think when you change the size of something in art,
metaphor rushes in. Plus, with a figure, if it is not life-size, you know it hasn't
been just cast from life. It has to be made from scratch, with all the hazard
and luck and strategy we want to see in art. (3D printing is changing this, but
that's another subject.)
I
read somewhere that your image in a mirror is always exactly half life-size, no
matter how far from the mirror you stand. I couldn't believe this and put
pieces of tape on a mirror for reference while I stood at different distances
from it. About the small scale of my work, I've always told myself it is
because there is a biological limit to how large a spot you can focus on at any
one time. It's called accommodation. At arm's length, it's an area only about
the size of a dime. Closer up, a little larger. Because I am looking closely,
as close as I can, fate and anatomy seem to deliver a specific size in my
hands. And your hands have their own fate, too. I've tried to work larger, and
it sometimes freaks me out that this scale forces itself on me. Have I really
so little say in it? Giacometti said that sculpture produced by early civilizations
is commonly small, “… and,” he goes on, “I think this actually was the size
that instinctively seemed right, the size one really sees things. And in the
course of history, perception has been mentally transposed into concept. I can
do your head life-size because I know it's life-size. I don't see directly
anymore, I see you through my knowledge.”
The
size one really sees things… what does this mean? That it literally could fit
inside our head?
APRIL GORNIK: With few exceptions, I think of your work as autobiographical and usually self-portraits. Of course there’s the argument that all art is autobiographical…but do you in fact think of it this way?
 |
| Double Take (Silent Live-Action Animation - 2017) |
ELIZABETH KING: There was a wonderful article in the Times years ago titled “What Really Goes On In There?” – it was a
review by George Johnson of Daniel Dennett's 1991 book Consciousness
Explained. I like the review title better than the book title, but the book
is terrific and Dennett is famous for it. It is all about the “Cartesian
theater” of our mind, and the illusion that we are in charge in this theater,
that there is a tiny homunculus in there projecting the world on a screen and
telling us what we think. Dennett debunks this intuition in a riveting way. Yet
we persist in believing. We can't help it. Our very language produces the
roominess of the mind. We profoundly feel we move the furniture around “in
here” every day, ears to the door, eyes to the keyhole. In graduate school I
made a theater that
fit around my actual head, with a homunculus (a tiny puppet of a wizened old
woman) inside on a stage. I think of it, now that I've read Dennett, as putting
my head inside a model of my head. Later, when the puppets turned into a more
complicated kind of sculpture, I modeled their heads in clay, and cast these in
porcelain slip in multi-part plaster molds. You pour the liquid slip in the
mold, let it sit for an hour, then pour it out, take the mold apart, and you
have a hollow casting. I noticed how much time I spent inside those hollow
heads after each of four firing stages, refining the orifices (nostrils go all
the way in), cutting a hatch in the back so I can take it off like a cap, but
perfecting the cap so it will fit back on and latch in place, installing
springs and mechanics for movable eyes, and building the ball-and-socket joint
at the top of the neck, just behind the jaw. I work from the inside out, as
much as the outside in. The heads are real containers. For reference, I make
life casts of my own face, the inside of my nostrils and ears, shave my head to
find out its shape. The sculptures are small, so I wear 3X surgeon's loupes and
look into the head through the empty eye sockets to guide what my fingers and
tools are doing through the hatch or the open neck. The whole process is
invasive. I can't ask someone else to let me do this! I would feel
uncomfortable even with the sculpture, slicing off this and drilling through
that. I look at the darkness inside another person's ear, and the mystery of
our individual existence howls in my own ear. We are fearfully and wonderfully
made (Psalm 139). Indeed I am terrified.
Moreover, what am I thinking all this time? The process of making
a head becomes a practice for contemplating the riddle of our conviction of an
inner life. It really isn’t about me. I hope viewers see the specificity and
particularity of a given face, and understand that this is an individual,
though one without a name. Can I make a figure that itself projects the
illusion of an inner life? I don't know how to put it there from the
outside.
Links:
_______________________________
April Gornik is best known for
her landscape paintings. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern
Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and many
significant private collections. She has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement
in the Arts Award from Guild Hall Academy of the Arts and the Award of
Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS from amfAR.