Statues and utopias : sculpture as a metaphor of modernist art form, subjectivity, and political community

Posągi i utopie. Rzeźba jako metafora nowoczesnej formy artystycznej, podmiotowości i politycznej wspólnoty to opowieść o literaturze europejskiego modernizmu poprzez interpretację obecnych w niej rzeźbiarskich metafor, służących konceptualizacji problemów istotnych dla jej twórców: formy artystycznej, podmiotowości i wspólnoty. Rzeźbiarska materialność posągów i ich właściwości wywołują wiele możliwych skojarzeń - od stałości i zamknięcia materii w harmonijnym kształcie klasycystycznego artefaktu po ulotność i kruchość form Alberta Giacomettiego. Nowoczesna literatura rejestruje to zróżnicowanie i szuka w nim utopijnych projektów estetycznych, antropologicznych i politycznych, ocalających przed chaosem modernizującego się świata. Rzeźba daje bowiem poczucie niezmienności świata wobec przepływu zdarzeń, jest jego nieporuszonym punktem. Ale literacka rzeźbiarskość równie skutecznie rozbija iluzję trwałości ideału, ujawniając jego rewers - pozbawiony życia bezruch posągowego ciała. Nowoczesność jest formacją sprzecznych tendencji - pragnienie formalnej dyscypliny i porządku świata współistnieje tu z demaskacją jego sztuczności i poszukiwaniem pęknięć dyscyplinującej formy. To napięcie kumuluje się w literackich sposobach wykorzystania rzeźby. Ich różnorodność rozpina się choćby między parnasistowskim cyzelowaniem formy poetyckiej a jego nieoczekiwanym powtórzeniem w monumentalności realizmu socjalistycznego. Literackie reprezentacje rzeźb i ich właściwości nie tylko materializują idee nowoczesności, ale ponadto służą ich weryfikacji. Techniczna precyzja formowania kształtu rzeźbiarskiego i tekstowego podszyta jest bowiem przemocą narzucania scalającej formy na nieukształtowane słowa i materiały. Książka ta jest próbą ujęcia rzeźby nie tylko jako figury opisowej, ale przede wszystkim krytycznej wobec nowoczesnych utopii sztuki i życia.

Statues and utopias are the central figures in this book. They allow to emerge the main thesis that in modern literature sculpture can be seen as an "internal code" of an artwork, tracing crucial issues of artistic and intellectual modernity, such as transformations of an ideal form, status and shape of the subject, and various constructions of political community. In Polish comparative studies the relation between sculpture and literature has not gained enough attention. It appears occasionally in the context of ekphrastic writings, and representations of a concrete sculptural artworks, especially in twentieth-century poetry. Therefore, this book starts from a very different point - form the work of Hugo Ball, who claimed that the crisis of modern epoch appears as a collapse of all "pillars and supports". Pillars and supports have metaphorical meanings, they stand for certain, abstract values acclaimed by Western world. But they are also concrete, material entities, and as such, they embody the lost integrity and stability of the world. Material objects, closed and isolated from the flux of time, guarantee the harmony of reality. Thus, they can represent the experience of modernity only by negation - as a broken totality. Sculpture is exactly such type of enclosed materiality. It evokes mainly classic statue with a harmony of matter, form and idea, described by Lessing, Winckelmann and Hegel with a great impact on Schelling, and Parnassian poetry. But this image of sculpture as a figure of an ideal order, placed above chaotic materiality, is not the only one mentioned in this book. Because in parallel statue becomes a symbol of spectrality, of an odd zombie-like state of some additional life of a matter. Therefore, because of such ambiguity of meanings, sculpture, together with complex qualities of sculptural matter (hardness, durability, fragility etc.), is a very operating figure for presenting the heterogeneity of modernism. A statue can be both - a classic, utopian form which saves subjectivity from the collapsing world, and a fragile matter that reveals an illusion of utopian wholeness. Each chapter of the book is devoted to a different image of sculpture, but all of them are based on the fundamental assumption that sculptural artwork allow us to see in modern literature the dialectics of materiality and dematerialization. To describe full potential of this dialectics, I use a range of various sculptural realizations: from an Ancient, anthropomorphic statue, through vanguard, non-figurative sculpture, up to reconfiguration of sculptural form from late modernity. Each chapter has some interpretative and textual autonomy, but the whole composition shows something, what can be named after Jean-Luc Nancy as an “oscillation” of sculptural motives. Sculptures presented in literary texts help us to notice mutual distortions and configurations of both - the three-dimensional artwork and literary writing. In the whole book sculpture stands as a keystone for constructing and breaking modernist utopias of an ideal artistic form, coherent subjectivity, and monolithic community. It is a figure of transgression of binary opposition that structured Western cultural imagery: subject and object (anthropological utopia), art and nature (aesthetic utopia), aesthetics and politics (political utopia). Those transgressions are exemplified in different literary texts form European modernity. Therefore, in one book the reader can meet Parnassian poetry, Walter Pater’s imaginary portraits, Michel Leiris’s surreal novel "Aurora", Rilkean prose "Malte", Apollinaire’s ironic visions of monument, writings of Polish mid-war aestheticians, Heideggerian treatise on sculpture and space, and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s meditation on Giacometti’s statues - to mentioned only a few of the characters presented in the "Statues and utopias". Such a wide range of both, time and cultural contexts, cause a great risk of constant incompleteness. So the book cannot be read as an entire catalogue of sculptural motifs in European literature. It is rather an attempt of showing how sculptural representations can operate as a mode of reading and interpretation of the crucial problems in modern intellectual and artistic formation. By linking many references to various vocabularies - theoretical languages of literary studies, philosophical concepts for describing art, and historical assumptions from the field of art history, I would like to gain a twofold goal: first - to trace an evolution of modernist utopias of ideal artwork, subject and community, and second - to propose some kind of immanent poetics of modern literary texts, for which sculpture can be a central figure, as a metaphor gathering the most important dilemmas in modernity.