IN HIS FILMS, CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI GAVE AGENCY TO HIS OBJECTS – A CENTURY BEFORE ‘OBJECT AGENCY’ CAUGHT ON IN ART HISTORY
THE WEEKLY PIC: One of the latest preoccupations of art historians is the idea of “object agency,” a chewy concept that is related to the equally chewy philosophical theory of “object-oriented ontology.” I can’t pretend to have wrestled these complex ideas to the ground, yet. (Mostly, they still have me in a half nelson.) But I have figured out that they have to do – surprise, surprise – with imagining that objects, and especially in my case art objects, have an existence and meaning and, yes, agency that can be independent of what humans think about them and want to do with them. As I said, I’m not sure I understand the details, or even all the implications, of such a view … but I recently came to the conclusion that the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi might have been sympathetic to it, as far back as the 1910s and ’20s.
Last week, I published a story in the New York Times about the little show now on at MoMA that presents the Brancusi gems that would normally be on view in the museum anyway plus – more importantly – an anthology of some of the wonderful footage that Brancusi shot of his sculptures, installed both inside his studio and outside. That footage made me realize that Brancusi really wanted to imagine a life for his creations that was somehow independent of the art world’s normal emphasis on audience. He wanted to imagine, I think, that his sculptures were more like wild animals, busy with their own agendas and interests that humans could, at best, witness from afar, without ever really understanding them. Hence Brancusi’s footage of a bird of prey, which he must have conceived as some kind of analogue to the many Birds he produced as art.
Or how about his several films of female dancers perched on one of his vast carved pedestals, replacing the carvings that might normally be there? (For a clip, go to my Times article and view the second of the video anthologies embedded there.) I feel that Brancusi thought of those dancers as perfect stand-ins for the sculptures they’ve replaced – not because he thought that every woman is a sculpture, or because he wanted to capture the “feminine spirit” in his art or for any similarly tiresome reason. Rather, the moving women simply act as illustrations of the independent agency he wants his art to have but that most of us are too dull to recognize in it. The sculptures aren’t about the dancers, that is. The dancers are about the sculpture. (Image © 2018 All rights reserved, Succession Brancusi/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre de création industrielle)
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