Dunhill and O'Brien

EXCERPTS FROM LECTURE NOTES ON HOLES IN SCULPTURE BY DUNHILL AND O’BRIEN, 2007

Kurt Tucholsky (journalist, satirist and song text writer) once wrote ‘a HOLE is always a good thing’ and, ‘the strangest thing about a HOLE is its edge. It’s still part of the Something, but constantly overlooks the Nothing- a border guard of matter’.

The basic proposition of sculpture – that it seeks to be something with a special status in the world, competing for attention with other things in the world, has always struck us as an awkward business. It can sometimes seem fairly preposterous. That awkwardness has a certain poignancy that the best sculpture acknowledges and utilises.

In our (ongoing) collection of images of sculptures with HOLES in we have found many instances of sculptures that have achieved this poignancy. Cut out and removed from their context, pinned close together, the images form a curious cross section of the history of sculpture. Artworks that would not otherwise appear to have any connections, being made at different times, with totally different intentions, have found links within categories like, ‘HOLES going in to but not through an object’, ‘HOLES derived from previous non art purposes’ or ‘HOLES that have been deliberately made through a destructive process’.
The following notes are from our illustrated lecture on Holes in Sculpture.

i.) It is in the nature of HOLES to undermine the things they are in, to be a disruption and a flaw.

ii.a) HOLES in sculpture can be seen as an antidote to the sculptural urge to be a ‘special’ thing. A HOLE in a sculpture may puncture and deflate its status and could even be an acknowledgement of a certain difficulty in the art making enterprise.

iv.) Usually sculpture seems to be about stuff rather than about non-stuff and perhaps this is why HOLES in sculpture are important, but also why they seem to have been so overlooked.

v) What happens when you look at artworks principally in terms of the HOLE and consider questions like, How does this HOLE function? Is this a good HOLE? How would one categorise this HOLE? Behind these questions lurk the more complicated questions of what a HOLE is and of what a HOLE might actually be made of.

v.a) The more you look the more difficult it is to know what a genuine HOLE might be. You have to consider the ontological problems with HOLES and the tricky question of what HOLES are in or through.

v.b) Think for a moment about a bucket, does it have a HOLE in it? It has a cavity, which is surely a HOLE, so are all vessels therefore objects with HOLES in?
Then again what does it mean when there is more HOLE than object? In the case of a ring for example.

vi.) When contemplating HOLES in sculpture one is relieved of much of the baggage of content and context. In this way HOLES may provide an alternative and less encumbered way of viewing artworks.

vii.) Images made using electron microscopy usually reveal lots of HOLES in the surfaces of materials. The sense that the world is intact and made up of stable surfaces is revealed as an illusion. It appears that there are a bewildering number of HOLES in us and around us. This raises the question ‘what isn’t a HOLE?’ One could say that the HOLES in sculpture reveal something of the troubling multi perforated nature of surfaces.

viii) There is a text by the philosophers David and Stephanie Lewis in their book Philosophical Papers where one of their fictional characters argues that HOLES themselves could not be said to exist and one could only ever talk about ‘HOLE linings’. That is, that as a HOLE is a non-thing, a lack of something, how could it be referred to as a thing? Surely, the character argues, we could not then speak of a HOLE as a thing but instead could only talk about the HOLE as that part of the thing that meets the nothingness, a ‘HOLE lining’.

viii.a) There is the interesting status of ‘the HOLE with something in it’. If a HOLE is merely a ‘HOLE lining’, then what occurs when things are inside a HOLE but not touching the lining of the HOLE?

viii.c) An intriguing example of a hole with something in it is the mouth of the Bocca de Veritas in Rome. People queue to be able to put their hand in its mouth. It is in all of the guidebooks as a ‘must see and do’ on a first visit to Rome. Evidently the possibility of penetrating the sculpture in this way is quite irresistible.

ix.) The earliest HOLES in sculpture are probably ‘eye HOLES’. Poking two HOLES in a material is the most basic way of representing eyes and we appear to be prepared to accept this illusion from a very early age. Developmental psychologists have found that infants can perceive, count, and track HOLES as easily as they can actual objects. This raises the question of whether our perception of HOLES might become compromised, as we get older.

x.) The Ancient Greek ‘Kouros’ sculptures were similar to Egyptian sculptures aside from one very important distinction. The Greeks chose to remove the ‘dead material’ between the arms and torso and between the legs leaving gaps in the material. This was a radical departure from the Egyptian tradition that had lasted intact for 1000 of years. Gaps in sculpture should not therefore be taken for granted.

xi.) There are artists who use the HOLE deliberately and meaningfully in their work, such as Lucio Fontana with his spatial HOLES. He believed in the need for his HOLES. In his manifesto, Fontana proclaimed that, ‘painted canvas and sculpture no longer make sense’. He saw HOLE making as a way of upsetting and questioning the status given to art objects.

xii.) An important category of HOLES in Sculpture is HOLES that are deliberately made – where the process of making the HOLE, the story of how the HOLE was made is essential to an understanding of the sculpture. In this case the HOLE making itself inevitably acts as a reminder of impermanence, of vulnerability and atrophy. A good example of this kind of HOLE is Gordon Matta Clark’s work Conical Intersect 1975, this HOLE was a physical, social and political event.

xiii.) In Marcel Duchamp’s artwork, Fountain, 1917, 1964, the HOLES bring the viewer back to the previous non-art function of the object, a function that relates to bodily waste. The HOLES pollute the art space. A more contemporary example of this pollution occurs in the works Drain, 1990 and Untitled, 1989-92 by Robert Gober, these works suggest an alarming 2-way pollution.

xiv.) It could be said that the pioneers of HOLES in contemporary sculpture are Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. They introduced an uncomfortable relationship between the sculpture and the viewer with the invasion of art by space and the invasion of space by art (see xii.).

xiv.b) HOLE making may not seem intellectual, in fact quite the opposite is usually the case, however its difficult to make a convincing HOLE, it is not as straightforward as it may at first appear.

xv.c) In works with shallow HOLES something interesting happens to the physicality of the object. Shallow HOLES (depressions, indents) serve to increase the surface area of a sculpture. So by removing material you actually create more of something.

xvii.) Within a sculptural HOLE there is a coexistence of two fundamental tendencies of art, namely – to act as a memento mori and to demystify and critique the process of art making. HOLES in sculpture can lead to artworks that are simultaneously irreverent, witty, melancholic and serious.