Hans Belting
"Das Paar" ("The Couple") In the Paris Opera.
A piece by Alexander Polzin
It was Alexander Polzin who first suggested that I see a sculpture within a tree. Usually I look at
treetops, ignoring the trunks. Maybe that was why I was surprised
when the artist spoke of his intent to create a sculpture out of a
tree trunk. This was on a sunny day in front of the New National
Gallery in Berlin, where famous sculptures surrounded us on the
terrace. My scepticism increased as he added that he wanted to create
a human couple from the tree trunk. How, out of a tree trunk –
the embodiment of a single being – could you possibly wish to
make a double being? I spontaneously advised the artist to abandon
this idea. Polzin understood my reservations but wasn't deterred from
pursuing his project.
There was no way I could have known
that one day I'd be standing in the Paris Opera in front of a piece
of art whose sense I had then questioned. Polzin had retrieved from
the wood of a tree trunk the form of a double figure. This unusual
idea made me reconsider the nature of sculpture. It is concealed in
the handling of the material and in the method of work. This is why,
before I come to the subject matter, I would like to talk first of
this, although some of you might be more interested in questions of
subject matter rather than questions of form. The process began in
the forests on Mecklenburg, where Polzin looked for an oak tree whose
hard wood would offer any sculptor the greatest resistance. After
finding a suitable four-meter-high and one-meter-thick tree trunk he
still had to persuade a forester to permit cutting the tree down. In
his studio in Pankow, a district of Berlin where he spent his youth
in the GDR, Polzin sat for many weeks in front of this tree trunk,
which had grown for one hundred years, before he set off to wrench an
artistic shape out of this natural form.
Each strike with which he
manipulated the substance of the tree was non repeatable and non
correctable. The tree trunk exceeded the artist's height and thus
demanded an experiencing of one's own body in the rhythm of the work.
Physical energy was transmitted into mental concentration and vice
versa. Researching the wood produced many surprises, and each
unexpected knot forced Polzin into changes of plan and adapting the
idea to the unwieldy material. Here again a battle for form and with
matter took place, which in this digital age has grown foreign to us.
The result however isn't a wooden
sculpture at all, but rather the reproduction of one. As a bronze
cast, the wooden figure is a paradoxical finding. Its purpose is to
fixate in the metal cast a form that won't last in the wood. Fresh
wood, in which water is deposited, constitutes a living organism
resembling an onion, whose layers burst open when cracks and fissures
occur in the wood. Only in the form of a cast can the state of being
be preserved, which in the wood would even by then already have been
lost. Thus the working process led to a race with time, to create a
constant form out of the living material. The wooden sculpture is for
all intents and purposes the original, the bronze cast – its
copy. The idea of the piece could only survive in the copy, while in
the original it already dissipates. In the conflict between the
process of life and the process of art, Polzin wrested out of the
natural form in the wood an art form in metal, in which the idea of
his art remains visible.
We are familiar
with modern sculptures where the mould is created from bark. But
Polzin formed from the tree trunk's substance a human couple, whose
bodies survive only in the bronze cast. However, the translation of
wood to bronze posed new problems to the artist. Because of its size
he had to saw the wooden model apart into three before casting. He
had to flesh out the grain in a relief-like fashion for the casting
to preserve the character of the wood. The patina, which was applied
with acids and bases as a colourful holder,
was the last act of transmitting the lost wooden model into the
bronze cast by depicting the medium wood in the medium bronze. We see
human bodies, which we can only see in the wood: the cracks on the
figures' heads came into being in the wood, before the art piece. But
even the wood itself we see only in the bronze. The piece, in front
of which we stand, carries a double image within itself, the image of
two human figures and the image of wooden nature in the bronze of the
art piece. Polzin has worked here with a living substance. The life
of the couple has found a metaphor in the surface of the wood.
All considerations of the couple
must begin with the tree trunk. It already constitutes an impossible
balancing feat that the figures must remain in the hollow form of
what used to be the block of wood, whose outline is still implied in
the base. The couple is embedded in the invisible borders of the
former tree trunk, which marks its inner space. Here the interval
between the two bodies shrinks, who mutually attract each other and
yet nowhere touch each other. I am most impressed by the heads,
which, with empty eye sockets seem like skull-face hybrids. Our
skulls are in essence more sculpturesque than our faces, since bones
have a different form from that of the flesh they wear. The
skull-faces look ageless and seem to be listening to each other or
trying to find a rhythm for their dance. The intimacy is greater than
if it were directly observable.
Dance supplies the keyword for
understanding the couple balancing on the tips of their toes. The
dancers seem to be suspended in a slow motion dance with each other,
whose movements are utopian and seem artificial. Since Polzin
commands an understanding of concert dance, the motive has its
meaning. We see a couple performing together an imaginary dance. Thus
we arrive at last at the sculpture's subject matter. With this
lovers' pair a panorama of interpretational possibilities opens, in
which literates and psychoanalysts skirmished. Without the lovers'
joy and failure there would be no opera. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan
and Isolde, Ariadne on Naxos, Orpheus and Eurydice, Dido and Æneas
or Peleas and Melisande belong to the solid repertoire of the opera.
If one would endow this couple with masks and clothes it would fit
several operas in which the couple plays the main role. Also the
couple's posture contributes to this, since the couple's excluding
the world around it in order to be alone also belongs to this theme.
In the history of sculpture,
however, the couple is a rare subject matter, the reason of which
being that in the history of art two figures were considered to
constitute a bad or impossible sculpture. There exist famous
exceptions, of which two should be mentioned. Lorenzo Bernini's
marble sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, which is displayed in the
Galleria Borghese in Rome, captures the instant in which Daphne,
escaping Apollo, transforms into a tree, whose branches are already
growing out of her body as it itself grows rigid. And there is
Auguste Rodin's Kiss, in which the two lovers melt into a single
figure, in which the sculptor attempted to solve the theme of
"doubleness".
But Polzin's work raises another
question: the question of the fate of the sculpture in public space.
Its history of serving as monuments in the civil era compromised it
so much in the modern age, that it, as in Henry Moore's work, wiped
away all subjects and withdrew discretely into a timeless form.
Stephan Balkenhol produced a new critical type of wooden figures,
which he takes into the exhibition room to thwart the commonplace
sculpture. He was convinced that "the tradition of the
figurative sculpture in the modern age has been demolished".
Alexander Polzin, on the other hand, took the risk of once again
offering subjects through the figurative sculpture and with it to
occupy public space. The Giordano Bruno in Berlin or the Paul Celan
Project for Paris prove how important this form of art remains to him
also in today's media-society. "The Couple", which has been
installed at the Paris Opera, offers an occasion to once again
conduct the discussion about art's lingering task in public space.