Robert Mallary’s dramas of vulnerability emphasize tensions in a time of complacency; on show this month at Stone
Robert Mallary’s new work is a group of welded assemblages of unique bronze castings, mostly mounted on panels to become hanging wall sculpture. The castings, made at the University of California at Davis in 1963 and at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1965, are from sections of his “tuxedo” figures, which he began in 1961, and are made of ripped and shredded old tuxes and tails impregnated and hardened with plastic. Other castings were made from paper-towels and bags and even pieces of transparent food wrapping; these are crumpled, pulled and shaped to capture the violence of handling, but kept within an esthetic akin to Baroque drapery, before molten wax is poured into them, a bit at a time to preserve the shape. From his accumulation of such castings, Mallary selects those that fit his idea for a particular piece, which is formed by building up with brazing and cutting away with an electric arc. The fluidity of the molten bronze under the arc is a counterpart to that of the molten wax used to fix the originals of the castings, so that the transitions from one fragment to another seem quite natural. Beyond this are the exacting problems of finishing the surfaces, involving judicious sanding interspersed with use of the torch, and endless experiments with chemicals to produce exactly the patina he is after. In casual talk, Mallary has an oddly superfluous intensity; at work, poring over an intricate surface, you see that same quality aroused to the great, critical watchfulness that has developed tile extraordinary power of the work as its counterforce.
The term “Abstract-Realist” has been used by T. Hess to characterize Mallary and several other U.S. sculptors as artists who “. . . intervene between raw data given the appearance of Reality by style and insist on connecting themselves with things as they really are, that is with things without style.” This characterization seems correctly to identify an important aspect of Mallary, and so it serves as a useful starting point.
Hess goes on to say that an Abstract-Realist may state his insight, i.e. say “This is how things Are” by avoiding the “art-look” because he feels that the “art-look distracts from insight.” But it is the case with Mallary that the “art-look” has always been a fundamental interest and functioned as an essential polarity in his dialectic. It is in the other polarity, his evaluation of “How things Are,” the extent to which the basic pattern of his temperament swells with the reinforcement of ideology to extend the distance and heighten the tension, that accounts for an important aspect of change in his work.
In development of this idea, it may be said about a Schwitters collage that it is incomparably better than the raw materials that are used, and yet there is no sense of traumatic “distance” between the materials themselves and the finished work. In essence Schwitters’ junk is used neither in the service of demonstrating some external principle which would create a gap between seeing the work and completely determining what it is, nor to construct an expression aimed contradictorily to the materials which
creates a “distance” proportional to the expressive strain. However, Schwitters’ writing, “It now seems that even striving for expression in art is harmful to art,” does not belong to the annals of advice, because advice presumes that the one advised can perform as prescribed. It was his great-ness to be able to play around with materials so that when he was ready to leave them alone their being was completely subsumed by another existence, Schwitter’s art, but there was no hint of having made them serve in some way alien to their own existence. Schwitters was merely giving us a hint of what made him feel good about his own work.
In Mallary’s new bronze assemblages there is certainly a marked “separation” between the materials that lie at their inception and the intended “art-look” of the completed works that is concomitant with the strain for a multilayered expressive irony. Nevertheless the “distance” comes nowhere near the perilous extension of the earlier “tuxedo” figures where the swelling and domination of the “How things Are” polarity is still pitted against the “art-look.”
The importance of the “art-look” to Mallary, I feel, lies in its prerequisite presence as the sign of overcoming in the irony of implacable masochistic recovery. The trampled corrugated board box, the twisted, cast-off tuxedoes, the crumpled paper towels that carry the imprint of clenched fists, are all parts of a detritus of violence, to each of which Mallary is as sensitive as if it were a personal threat-note, and which through his art is made to boomerang.
Mallary, growing up in the depression ‘30s in California, of a professor’s family (he had an art teacher at the age of eight), was bound for a strong orientation to humanist