Barry Schwabsky - ABOUT PLASTICITY
What is the opposite of formalism? It doesn’t have a name. In fact, that was a trick question, because the best answer would be: Formalism has no opposite. There is no such thing as "contentism" because there is no way of looking at art that would get at its content without resort to its form. So when I once heard Holly Zausner reply to someone who asked her what her work was about by saying that it is concerned with female sexuality, her comment struck me as being at once inarguably true and somewhat misleading—or at least too limiting. I would have liked to hear her describe her work in the way I think of it: as being about plasticity. Which is to say, I would have liked to have a more formalist answer.
Of course the person to whom Zausner was talking might not have felt that my preferred answer was very concrete. The answer she actually gave undoubtedly gave him the sense that he had grasped at least something about her work, and in that sense her response was justified. But if she had told him that her work was about plasticity, and if as a result he felt that he couldn’t quite grasp what her work was really about, his very dissatisfaction with the answer might have been more revealing than was his satisfaction with the answer he actually got; for really he understands female sexuality no more than he understands plasticity—that’s true of all of us—and yet it just might be helpful to start thinking of female sexuality (and male sexuality too? Perhaps—but that’s a question for another essay, one we may not be ready to write or read yet) as a subcategory of plasticity.
If that were the case, though, we would have to start thinking of sexuality as something essentially artistic, as something innately related to what was once called the will to form. Perhaps the urge to touch, to caress, to stroke, to fondle one’s beloved is au fond an urge to mold and shape his body, to subject it to one’s own imaginative impulses. In that case one might have to admit that the activity of sculpture is in fact a more adequate expression of this aspect of sexuality than lovemaking itself. But loving is not only this desire to reshape and transfigure the other’s body. It is also the desire to feel the same thing happening to one’s own. You press someone’s body against your own as if to take its deep imprint. That body becomes a kind of tool for stretching and compressing one’s own into unknown variations of itself—ones that can be felt rather than seen.
It is this, the plasticity of the enamored body—something inherently rather contingently sculptural—that is the subject of Holly Zausner’s sculpture as I perceive it. This body is always, somehow, the same body, and yet it is never the same. At least up until now it has always been, at least implicitly, a female body. But even as I say that, I have to call attention to the reservation or hesitation I meant to register by using the word "implicitly.” Because there is no one stable and always-recurrent sign of this body’s femaleness. This is a femaleness without essence, one that resides in the various small or large marks of resemblance between one incarnation and another of a body that, when it does happen to be explicitly gendered, is always gendered female, but whose gender is also often unmarked or ambiguous. Even this underlying principle of continuity—the fact this body, however topologically variable, is always somehow female—is subject to the plasticity that it lends in turn to its various avatars.
So the body with which this sculpture is concerned is always female—always, we may be authorized to suspect, the artist’s own. It is a body always unpartnered, autonomous. The passions and pleasures that drive it to undergo so many strange transformations seem fundamentally incommunicable. Perhaps they are onanistic. But they are not solipsistic. For if this body always seems to be stretching, sometimes to the breaking point, looping around to take in more space, more of the visible, that is because it hungers to encompass more and more of the world—to encompass, eventually, everything. This passion (sculptural or sexual—remember we can no longer grasp the distinction) has an object, but one that is boundless.
The photographs Zausner has been making are sculptural too—not simply images of her sculpture, but revelations of the sculptural that could only be accomplished in this non-sculptural medium. Like the sculpture itself, they are about plasticity—about the way the same thing, the same body, can undergo an infinite number of transformations. And they remind us that this body that is her sculpture always does, after all, have a partner—the artist herself, as she engages in the aggressive and amorous sport or dance that sends her creation, for a moment, up into the heavens. Perhaps this sculptural body is not the artist’s alone after all. Can we doubt that the ideally amenable, flexible, plastic viewer might experience at the artist’s capable hands these same wild heights?
Barry Schwabsky, G-WOMAN Katalog, Wohnmaschine, 2001