What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

WHAT PAINTING IS 97
tunnel view through the viewfinder. A photograph that has been
heavily manipulated in the darkroom, such as one by Ansel
Adams or Edward Weston, brings with it the long hours bending
over the enlarger. The clean snow and cold air of Adams’s
photographs of Yellowstone in the winter are mixed with the
acrid odor of the stop bath; their pure whiteness mingles with the
red darkroom light; and their open distances are closed again by
the memory of peering into a magnifier, focusing the grain of the
negative onto the test paper. Many photographs are made as if it
were possible to ignore those physical meanings, but they cannot
be erased and any full reaction to a photograph has to admit
them.
By the same logic, marble sculpture often seems to be about
marble: that is, the sculptors try to work up to the limits of what
the marble will allow. Long thin objects are the most difficult:
Gianlorenzo Bernini, one of the most skillful sculptors, managed
to shape marble into branching twigs and leaves. Michelangelo
carved five perfectly curled fingers on the Rome Pietà that have
long been famous among sculptors. It is probably not coincidental
that they are the fingers that were the target of the attack by an
angry spectator in the 1970s. (He broke them off, and ever since
the sculpture has been kept behind a Plexiglas screen.) There are
techniques for deceiving the stone into those unstonelike shapes:
Michelangelo would have left small marble bridges between the
Madonna’s fingers, and cut them away at the last moment. Such
tricks are common knowledge, but they are superficial, because
they tell us very little about what compels sculptors to work so
with such devotion on marble—instead of wood, for instance,
which is easier to carve, or clay, which is easier to mold. To sense
the meanings that marble gives to any sculpture, a viewer needs
to know how the work of pushing, chipping, dusting, and
gouging can occupy the mind. Marble is something that sculptors
work on, but it is also something they think about. Marble has a
specific kind of hardness. It is woody, meaning it can sometimes
be pushed back or “peeled” in slivers. A chisel can dig down,
curve, and come back out like a sharp knife in wood. But marble
is also dry and friable, and it powders like chalk. Sculptors are
constantly preoccupied with the feeling that marble is like wood,
perhaps because it is seldom true: it is more like a dream, a kind
of half-way version of the Pygmalion story where the artist
dreams that the marble turns into wood instead of flesh. People