Like junkyard parts brought to life by extraterrestrial energy: “Striding Figure II (Ghost),” one of Thomas Houseago’s sculptures at the Storm King Art Center. More Photos »
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: August 1, 2013
MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y. — Poor Masculinity, he’s but a shell of his former self. He’s been in decline for a long time — since as far back as the Industrial Revolution, one might say, when people began turning into cogs. Lately, what with the shifts in gender roles and sex, and the moral undoing of so many male heroes, he finds his prerogatives challenged on every front. Since his loss of authority, he’s been acting out in all kinds of inappropriate ways. He needs therapy.
These thoughts are inspired by Thomas Houseago’s obstreperous monumental sculptures of exaggeratedly masculine figures rendered in early Modernist styles, on view here at the Storm King Art Center in a show called “As I Went Out One Morning.”
Mr. Houseago has been highly visible in recent years. Represented by the major league galleries Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth, he has had more than two dozen solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States since 2000 and was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Born in Leeds, England, in 1972, he studied art in London and Amsterdam and now lives in Los Angeles, having recently become a United States citizen.
His most impressive piece at Storm King is both thrilling and comically outlandish, and it is especially striking to view outdoors against a backdrop of peaceful park grounds and the verdant rolling hills of the Hudson Valley. At 15 and a half feet tall, “Striding Figure II (Ghost)” is a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, blockheaded colossus. One muscular arm is a cutout plate painted black, the other an assemblage of bent rebar with a hand like a pitchfork. Its torso is framed by an open grid of bent rods, and its tree-trunk-like legs and enormous splayed feet are crusty concatenations of boards and metal pieces cast in bronze.
The whole thing resembles a cinematic monster emerging from a junkyard where some extraterrestrial energy brought it to life. Metaphorically, it’s a terrific embodiment of what is repressed in modern masculinity.
Other works are less wildly imaginative and more serious about their art historical ancestry. “Sleeping Boy I” is an oversize youth whose body was fashioned from viscous oozy material like wet clay or plaster before being cast in bronze; it evokes ancient Greek sculpture via Rodin. “Rattlesnake Figure (Aluminum),” a nearly 11-foot-tall monolith carved with a chain saw from a single block of wood and then cast in aluminum, is a Cubist variation on the ancient architectural form of the caryatid. The interplay of old and Modern tropes comes off as academic gamesmanship.
An appealing exception to the humanoid works is “Standing Owl I,” a massive eight-foot-tall bronze sculpture of an owl that has the modeled-by-hand look of a work by Rodin, whose “Monument to Balzac” it calls to mind.
Indoors is a pair of bigger-than-life baseball-inspired figures made of intersecting plaster slabs reinforced by rusty rebar. One crouches like a catcher behind the plate while across the room the other hunches over like an umpire, his head in the form of an oval bowl. The contemporary aspect neatly matches up with a mythic dimension. They’re like the sculptures of archaic warriors made by Picasso during his early Cubist years.
In these and other sculptures by Mr. Houseago, you sense a melancholic anxiety about masculinity. His images appear to memorialize some more or less distant past when manliness was an unquestionable virtue. It seems as if he wants to rekindle that spirit in himself by working as ambitiously with materials, processes and forms as did the artists of old, from the ancient ones of Egypt, Greece and Rome to pioneers of Modernism like Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi.
He is not without a humorous self-awareness. “Vader Mask,” a dark bronze helmet-like object set on a Brancusian pedestal of solid redwood, alludes, of course, to the evil patriarch of the “Star Wars” movie franchise. But Mr. Houseago’s relationship to the dark side of masculinity — and the bright side, too, for that matter — remains fuzzily unresolved. He seems as much beholden to some creaky idea of virility as he is doubtful about it.
In an engaging interview with Nora Lawrence, an associate curator at Storm King, Mr. Houseago talks about “Column I (Light House),” a bronze monolith over 10 feet high resembling a giant bearded head of a Homeric hero. He observes somewhat disconnectedly that “it has this consciously phallic, Freudian sense — as a male sculptor that’s kind of bouncing around — the craziness of that.”
Would that his work were crazier than it is. There are hints of something more extravagantly and surprisingly idiosyncratic in works invoking popular culture like the junkyard giant and the baseball figures. But Mr. Houseago’s eccentric enthusiasms are muffled by his reverence for traditions old and Modernist and by his Postmodernist play with generic formal and stylistic conventions. His art is too much about art and not enough about his inner life. It’s too impersonal.
It’s also a problem that Mr. Houseago is far from alone in his preoccupation with the past. His work would have looked right at home in the Neo-Expressionist 1980s, when artists like Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel were turning out their gassy retrogressive masterpieces. Lately the sculptor Huma Bhabha, too, has been making sculptures of ancient-seeming figures out of disparate, junky materials. Recycling antiquity is the tiresome order of the day.
In his interview with Ms. Lawrence, printed in a museum brochure, Mr. Houseago speaks at some length about how inspiring music has been for him. He mentions the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” and Bob Dylan’s psychedelic period in the ’60s. The title of his exhibition, “As I Went Out One Morning,” is in fact the name of a song from Mr. Dylan’s 1967 album “John Wesley Harding.” Yet those mind-blowing influences are hard to detect in Mr. Houseago’s lugubrious backward-looking sculptures. Now would be a good time to leave the past behind and make way for the art of a new man.