Working on the Rock Pile

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the past dozen years, American sculpture has become more and more ephemeral and mass-denying. It turned into a matter of open steel constructions, more air than metal; painted surfaces that repress one's sense of material; cool machine-made boxes, metal tiles or bricks laid flat on the floor, anodized glass cubes and characterless Formica skins. To the extent that sculpture can get away from its primordial conditions of weight, thickness, opacity and immobility, it did so in the '60s, and often with an annoyingly academic self-righteousness. Nevertheless, a few of the best sculptors of the time, like Mark di Suvero and Richard Serra, obdurately resisted this trend, and we now seem to have got back to the point where we can look at a massive heavy shape without thinking it backward and funky, or parroting the once obligatory cliches about Stonehenge. An exhibition very much to the point opened this month at the Sculpture Now Gallery in Manhattan's Soho: some 30 tons of granite and steel by James Buchman, 26, a Memphis-born sculptor who lives on a farm in Vermont. It is the most promising first one-man show in Manhattan this season.

Buchman, a mild, prognathous giant with a Jeremiah Johnson beard, has been working at sculpture for six years. He studied painting and sculpture at the Skowhegan School in 1969, and for a time made constructions of logs held together with cut-up truck inner tubes. Buchman first noticed the stuff for his monoliths as he was driving north to Vermont one day in 1972, after one of his infrequent trips to New York: the highway went through a cutting, and ragged chunks of stone were littered all along the roadside. Realizing that "granite has to be the cheapest thing in Vermont -- the damn state is all granite," he struck a bargain with a stone quarry near his cabin in Winooski, Vt. They sold him waste granite for $6 per ton. "There's a mountain of it -- some chunks the size of pebbles, some as big as boxcars." Then he got hold of a surplus U.S. Army ten-wheeler, bolted a gantry on top of it and went to work.

The result must be among the most imposing "homemade" sculpture produced by a young American since the early '60s, when Di Suvero was making his big constructions of railway ties, dock piles, chains and tires. Instead of effacing their weight, Buchman's sculptures proclaim it: heaviness, the state of being dug from and bound to the earth, is part of their meaning. The stone is not carved. The lumps stand as they came from the rock pile, craggy and rhino-gray: one thinks of them as things, not as material, and each sculpture becomes a kind of frozen juggling act with five-ton skittles.

Eyeball Stuff. Buchman ties the stone together with massive, clumsy steel connectors, hammered in sheets around the granite (like unwieldy Band-Aids) and then either tied on with steel cables or fixed through the rock with heavy bolts. The engineering, he frankly admits, is "just eyeball stuff" but, though it is crude (probably, if anything, too strong for its tonnage), it works visually. Sometimes the connectors are too busy, with all those nuts and bolts. But in works like Levi, 1975, the jacket of forged and cold-beaten metal encloses its granite haunch with an astonishing delicacy. Because they are structures and would wreak havoc if they slipped, one becomes aware of their properties as substance: the weight and crushing resistance of stone as against its brittleness in tension; the malleability and tensile strength of steel. Their articulateness goes beyond mere bulk. In the generally cooled-down, entropic context of most U.S. sculpture, this vitality is overwhelming.

-- Robert Hughes

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