Mark Roskill

A retrospective of the present kind, of twenty years of Robert Mallary’s sculpture, is an occasion for stocktaking. It provides an opportunity to look for the main lines of continuity and development in an artist’s work, and particularly so in the present case where two decades of work involve not only a considerable range, but also highly distinctive and marked shifts from phase to phase (as for example in the last part of the exhibition).

Two basic commitments, or polarities,  clearly underlie the development surveyed here. The first is to what may broadly be called technology. Mallary has constantly been involved with the use of new materials and techniques, and with exploring in the most engaged sense the creative possibilities that these materials and techniques hold for himself, and potentially for other sculptors (the latter aspect being a very important part of Mallary’s feeling on the subject). And side-by-side with this there runs a thematic commitment of a basically ‘existential” kind. That is to say, Mallary deals metaphorically in his work with extreme states, which are felt to be essentially there as threats, exposures of the sensibility and situational pressures in modern man’s consciousness of himself and the world about him. This existential concern threads its way through his development, now relatively submerged, now coming to the fore, and comes to a climax in the tuxedo sculptures of the early 1960’s, Mallary’s best-known series. But it is always there — and recurringly meets up with the technological commitment which rests on the implication that scientific advance and discovery are factors fundamentally affecting the modern consciousness.

These commitments may be there, and crucial, but what kind of continuum do they imply from phase to phase? This question answers itself less easily. Some continuities of handling and technique are there overlapping different series; the use of thrown sand and gravel for texturing, impregnation of rags and sheets so that they become stiff and can be shaped into gestural formations, and splintering and fracturing of various kinds. But these are devices brought in for special effects and purposes. There are continuities too in imagery — in the sense of certain parallel kinds of suggestion being brought in at different times. Suggestions of topology (aerial views) come into the 1953 series, and again into the series of 1957-58 (especially Chinese Landscape. The figure series of 1955-56 (represented here by Gesticulating Man) is a strong anticipation of the gestural concerns that will reappear in 1962.

However, there is also great variety on this front from the galactic imagery, suggestive of cataclysm, in Descent, 1956, to the slab-like forms and plaques of 1958-59 which reflect a response to indigenous New Mexican statuary; and from the works of 1960-61 suggesting the debris of city life-- torn billboards, broken-down buildings --to the explicitly human imagery of crucifixion and, later, anxious balance that will crystallize in the following few years and culminate in The Cliffhangers, of 1963-64. Finally, the diversity of sheer ideas is most striking of all. From the use of plastic early on, through his intermedia concerns, to his most recent computer-aided sculpture, Mallary has been a pathfinder at a great number of different points in his career and on an equal number of fronts.

Nevertheless, a continuity of a more overarching kind can, I think, be found if the issue is rephrased at a deeper level involving simultaneously all of the aspects which have been brought up. It could be put this way:  a peculiarly integral sense of the interrelationship between idea and image and technique underlies each of Mallary’s series, so that what is possible with a particular material and the kind of image or form that will evolve, and the way in which it will be built up, are concerns tracking in towards the center of his thinking rather than concerns spun out from there. It might seem that this could perhaps be said of all sculptors of distinction, but what appears rather special to Mallary, and is surely one of his great strengths, is his openness here. The idea-image-technique integration I am speaking of comes to him as a recurring challenge and vehicle of self-renewal, without prejudice-- except in terms of quality --from the kind of integration he has achieved in preceding works. The commitments of a period --and here the existential and technological commitments come together-- outweigh the commitments that other sculptors may have, working within a more closed, career-oriented, and strictly linear frame of reference.

From the fact that Mallary’s thinking is constantly projecting itself forward to the achievement of an integral imaginative and expressive fusion, there follows, almost axiomatically, the kind of transitions that one gets in his work; from wall sculpture, to leaning sculpture, and then sculpture in the round in 1959-61 where forms jutting out from the mass now become limbs tuning the whole surrounding environment to the sag of their central ballast (Little Hans), and from the bronze castings of 1963-66 with their compressed frontality and suspended, wrapped-in quality (Iago), to the single monolithic form of Pythia, 1966-67, held up by a comparatively graceful, even playful welded substructure. The earlier abandonment of the frame (1958) and the final break with painting appear equally logically impelled.

Beyond a certain point it seems difficult to verbalize about such sculpture as this. Details of vocabulary and the means by which they are achieved are better described in the catalog notes for each piece. But one thing which the exhibition should bring out, and which is connected to my account, is that each work has a decisive and powerful gestalt of its own (roughly, a total form-shape), which is a combination of presence and thought-through execution. If one feels this emphatically through the exhibition, the judgment of quality need not be forced to fit any necessary pattern. It can begin with this kind of apprehension, and come back non-verbally, to rest there.

Finally, Robert Mallary’s work threads itself in a remarkably strong and unfolding sense into the patterns of development of sculpture and painting since World War II. The years in which he was most closely—though never derivatively— “in” with single strands in the larger pattern would appear now to be the New Mexican years, 1955-59, where his work carries successively analogies or parallels to Burri (in the use of burlap), Dubuffet, Tàpies, the all-over patterning of Pollock and de Kooning’s kind of brushwork; and the early New York years, 1959-62, in which there are analogies to Stanckiewicz, Rauschenberg, and, more generally, with found-object sculpture, and then with Kline in the tuxedo series. But what broadly happened in sculpture during those years has not been examined, as yet, any too clearly—not nearly so clearly as has been the case with painting. When the adding up that is desirable here does get under way, Mallarv’s works look likely to play an important part in the interpretive perspective, both as sensitive achievements and as pointers to where exactly the essential lead-throughs from one to another kind of sculpturing lie.

Mark Roskill

Mark Roskill taught art history at Harvard University and is presently engaged in the same capacity at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has authored many articles on XIX and XX Century art appearing in Art International, Bulletin of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Art News, The Listener (London), Oud Holland, and many others.

He has published many books, including: