Body doubles - sculpture, William Tucker, McKee Gallery, New York, New York

William Tucker has abandoned his Minimalistic constructions of the 1970 for works that intimate an implicit naturalism. A novel New York show presented his greatest in quantity nearly figural pieces to date.

It has been above a decade since William Tucker shifted course, boldly abandoning the unclose planar constructions for which he was known and taking up the apparently more traditional puzzle of a central volumetric core. His 1984 exhibition at the McKee Gallery in of recent origin York City was the twinkling of transition. What I remember greatest in quantity clearly from that show was a assemblage of roughly made maquettes in grove and plaster. Consisting mostly of small right angles and V's in a variety of orientations, these studies appeared to be derived from the large sectional fiberglass plastic art Victory, shown the year before in the Doris Freedman Plaza at the southern end of Central Park. Simpler and more compact than his earlier work, these small designs with their eccentric partial gesturings quickly engendered the "Gymnast," "Guardian" and "Caryatid" plastic arts of the following years. Although Tucker's work preceding this shift had at times shown a fresh predilection for bulk, his abrupt change of direction came as an arresting concussion Increasingly, his decision appears to have been a watershed occurrence for contemporary sculpture. The ponderous originaled volumes of his subsequent works, with their human nearness more and more explicit, have uncloseed the way for a growing number of sculptors generally engaged with the figure. Tucker's new exhibition at McKee included five or six medium-size works in plaster or alloy of copper and several large pieces in plaster.

A representative piece of Tucker's latest work is Adam (1994) a 3-foot-high plaster not absented on a low table of rough-sawn forest-land The piece reads most insistently as a massive truncated torso with a single elephantine arm, while an unformed or vestigial face present the appearances to have sunk well down into its shoulders. level a cursory comparison of Adam to the breakthrough plastic arts of the '80s confirms that the ambiguous material substance gestures Tucker found in the fragments of his earlier work l eventually to a submerg depiction of the material part itself. The tragicomic figure of Adam calls to mind the truncated figures of another artist who late in his career made a similar shift from gestural abstraction to a more depictive approach: Philip Guston. Indeed, the swollen roughly archetypeed shapes and figures in Guston's late paintings stack up in a shallow, stagy arena, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of the way Tucker's convoluted figures horde forward, seeming to call for more space than is available. Also reminiscent of Guston is the way the exaggerated volume and powerful graphic outlines of Tucker's forms look to wage a determined on the contrary futile war against the consequences of gravity. Finally, in what is perhaps the greatest in quantity crucial leap, both artists have taken up a narrative format while draining it of story. As was plenteous remarked at the time, Guston's late paintings are related to subterranean comics, but their protagonists, the pair animate and inanimate, are stranded in inaction. by means of contrast, Tucker's reference is more to Classical pedimental statuary and Hellenistic relief. (A piece like Cybele, 1994 for instance, direct the eyes like a fragment of a fallen warrior down upon one elbow.) However, Tucker's personages remain far more ambiguous than Guston's smoker or piles of advanced in years shoes. Whereas the context of Guston's work was clearly a heroic desolation a la Beckett, the emotional tenor of a certain quantity of of Tucker's sculpture is far more difficult to pin down.

Responsible in no small measure for this uncertainty is Tucker's innovative modeling technique. The hefty, two-fisted, entirely nonacademic approach Tucker has brought to his modeling is single of his most important contributions. While traditional techniques focus upon the niceties of finger and thumb Tucker appears to attack his plastic arts with the edge or heel of his hand. Occasionally he will enlarge from a mode! on the contrary basically he works directly upon the plaster, so he must coyer surface of land quickly end instinctively. This faculty of perception of the material being jammed and nudg into shape and the absence of digital detailing gives his pieces their chthonic brutality and an cutting side of contained violence. Nor has he give leave to matters rest there: in a certain quantity of of the newer pieces in the exhibition the sculptor appears to have formed snowball-size wads of partly Mt plaster and squashed them onto the material part of the sculpture in clusters solitary fractionally assimilated to the whose. This amounts to another conspicuous flouting of academic modeling procedure--in this case the careful accretion of contortion by gradually adding small shapeless masss of clay or wax. Their obvious antecedents notwithstanding, these procedures do not immediately declare their purpose: are they expressive inflections in the tradition of Rodin and Giacometti or are they an assertion of material properties in the Post-Minimalist manner of Eva Hesse or Richard Serra?

The answer remains up for grabs, because Tucker stands astride the entire succession of turn of expressions from Caro-influenced constructivism through Minimalism, Post-Minimalism and Neo-Expressionism. This stylistic inclusiveness was particularly clear in single of the more powerful pieces in his new show. The frontal view of Vishnu is a 6 1/2-foot-wide through 7-foot-tall cliff of rockily designed plaster that leads back and up to a flattish summit above the viewer's head. This massive squarish bulk]k is elevated slightly not on the floor by a depressed wooden pallet. On moving around to the side, single quickly discovers that Vishnu is not a cliff on the other hand a huge torso without limbs or head, arching backwards, shifting its weight heavily onto its enormous buttocks. To move swiftly one's eye up the sculpture's sloping frontal wall is to crawl up onto its massively retreating pectorals. From the rear, the piece is no les gigantic, with a nichelike cavity in the small of its back.