Form Follows Form

Saskatoon’s Douglas Bentham has kept the formalist faith for more than three decades. While the art world has been contorted by dozens of styles and theories, Bentham has stuck to his (welding) guns. Morandi-like, he has transcended fashion in favour of dedication to practice. This is not to suggest that Bentham’s practice has been static. While still within the formalist box, his recent sculpture shows a surprising departure from the work that established his career. The sprawling, rusting, intrusive steel machines of the ’70s and ’80s have been sent to pasture. His recent works are intimate, introverted, even homey.

Stretched out in a long, narrow, hallway-like gallery at Regina’s Mackenzie Art Gallery, as part of their Studio Series, Bentham’s 20 abstract, tabletop bronze and brass sculptures rest on white pedestals. The setting is formal, even solemn. As a whole, the collection looks like fragments from an abandoned and decimated miniature city or an industrial graveyard. Up close, the individual pieces are more playful. In most, there is a restrained dance moving between undulant curves and hard edges, between protective exteriors and mysterious interiors. Always evident is the process. You can identify the borders of each shape, trace the welded seams. Nothing is concealed.

Bentham’s sculptures are constructed by welding pieces of metal abandoned during industrial processes. But unlike other sculptors who recycle scrap, he does not, for the most part, make assemblages—where the previous lives of the refugee pieces are free to speak of their origins. In Bentham’s earlier method, the fragments were simply shapes gathered together and re-formed to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts. However, in some of the new works, a few accents—especially decorative elements—are included. There are, for example, strips of patterned trim that look like book spines, or architectural and furniture moulding. The effect is to suggest that the parts are struggling to retain their individuality while being subsumed by a greater design. This creates a more interesting formal tension than in previous sculptures, but also hints at possible non-formal narratives.

Quoting Frank Stella, Bentham titled his 1994 show at the Saskatoon Public Library “What you see…is what you see.” Stella has written: “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object…if the painting were lean enough, accurate enough or right enough, you would just be able to look at it. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. What you see is what you see.” There is a similar, obvious, physicality in Bentham’s work. And you have the sense, especially in his large early sculptures, that to perceive them outside purely non-objective terms, to read into them, however tempting, would be as ridiculous as looking for messages in sunsets. While the new work still embraces this resolute objectness and has a what-you-see-is-what-you-get materiality, they are not (early) Stella—lean. They really are objects! As such, you can’t “see the whole idea” at once “without any confusion.” As you circle these architecture-like, quirky divisions of space, you cannot help but find analogies to buildings, books, boxes, sacred containers and perhaps even narrative lines.

Particularly evocative are the titles. Palisade suggests a fortified enclosure and finds resonance in the actual sculpture’s containment of space. Ancestral Light and Ancestral March may tempt us to read these sculptures as reliquaries or even altarpieces. But curator Timothy Long warns me that some of the exotic-sounding titles—Maine-Anjou and Catadin—are actually the names of breeds of cattle and sheep, and were selected by the artist because they sounded good. Like the titles to some jazz tunes, there is a formal, rather than a semiotic, relationship between words and sculpture. While most titles offer a hint of the artists intent, these are teases that frustrate anyone on the lookout for meaning.

Bentham’s earlier sculptures depend on size and gravity for their success. He wanted to make smaller pieces; he didn’t want merely to construct miniatures of his previous work—sculptures that would have inevitably traded authority for cuteness. Instead, he moved from expansive, almost figurative shapes to retreating forms that fold into themselves. These objects are less aggressive and more home-friendly. They are what Matisse asked of his art, that it be a comfortable chair for the tired businessman to sink into.

The power of large, welded metal sculptures has less to do with aesthetic ‘rightness’ or conjuring up ‘significant form’ (though these are important), and more to do with sheer size and the raw, masculine, often threatening abruptness with which they occupy space. This was perhaps best seen in the steel monolith that signalled the death of such work, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. The public hated the rusty, plaza-splitting barrier and eventually had it removed. By scaling down his work, Bentham seems to be abandoning the He-Man School of Art. The success of his sculptures is all in the subtleties; they are closer to Erik Satie than Wagner.

Even so, while these sculptures are contemporary—by virtue of the fact that they were made recently—they belong to an older aesthetic ideology, one long abandoned by all except those true believers who touched the hem of Anthony Caro’s work shirt, or received an imprimatur from Clement Greenberg (or one of his Emma Lake apostles). Practitioners of this mode continue to make fine things, but they are more works of craft than art. That is, the innovations have been made, the art history recorded; what remains is making attractive things according to the rules of the genre. I am personally divided when I look at these sculptures. I appreciate their playful, yet restrained, beauty, but even within restrictive formalist standards, they risk little and ask less of the viewer.

There is a return to abstraction among many younger artists, in part, I think, as a means of avoiding the domination of theory. But it is abstraction with a twist. Almost all of it relates to more aspects of the world than the formal. They are abstractions of the world, rather than from it. And even within the formalist camp there are ‘reformers’, thoughtful artists such as Edmontonians Isla Burns and Catherine Burgess (and the later Caro himself), who have abandoned the quest for purity and have managed to invest welded metal with rich meanings. In a quiet, subtle way, Douglas Bentham may be renewing formalism from within. ■

“Studio Series: Douglas Bentham” was on exhibit at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, from November 12, 1999, to April 2, 2000.

David Garneau contributes regularly to Border Crossings from Regina.