FREE ESSAY ON CONSTANTINE BRANCUSI

CONSTANTINE BRANCUSI

Constantine Brancusi 
I found it very difficult to find information on Constantine Brancusi in hard copy,
therefore, you will see at the end of my paper that all of my sources are websites. The
little information I did locate on the artist was very, very little. Therefore, I
combined the small amount of information with some research I found on artists that were
strongly influenced by Brancusi. 
Brancusi's imprint on contemporary sculptural practice ranges from the dissemination of
furniture-oriented sculpture and the emerging topos of architectural folly to new
paradigms for public art. At the same time many postwar artists engaging in a dialogue
with his legacy have read and productively misread Brancusi's work. Through the violent
but fecund gesture of subjective intervention, these artists have extracted from it new
practices of far greater critical and historical significance than might have resulted
from an objective, historicist approach.
After his death in 1957, renewed interest in Brancusi occurred first and foremost in the
United States. The Endless Column and many of the artist's bases and furniture pieces,
such as his working tables and stools, proved to be relevant to the concerns of U.S.
sculptors who came to prominence in the 1960s. In particular, Carl Andre, Donald Judd,
Robert Morris, and Richard Serra grew specifically interested in the structural makeup of
the column based on the cloning of a single, identical unit. Its repetitive, modular, and
nonhierarchical morphology provided them with an economical way of circumventing the
relational orders of mainstream European art. 
The public works of Scott Burton and Martin Puryear have contributed not only to the
ongoing debate between high art and utilitarian design, but also to a heightened
awareness of art's social function. Like the Russian Constructivist, Bauhaus, and De
Stijl practitioners before them, or the generation of furniture sculptors succeeding
them, Burton and Puryear both considered that art should serve society as design and
architecture do. Burton's and Puryear's mutual interest in Brancusi's art-cum-craft
background is also shared by Richard Pettibone, who has signaled a connection between
Brancusi's aesthetic and that of the Shaker community.
Pettibone is a pioneer of appropriation art, yet, unlike other artists of his generation
who have denounced the pursuit of ideal form, he has unapologetically extolled it. He
argues that Brancusi's series of Endless Columns aspire to a perfection similar to a
Shaker chair or a candle stand. This statement can be read as the antinomy within
Brancusi's project: that the most significant of his sculptures come close to the economy
and integrity of the pedestal. Brancusi's revolutionary reversal of the base from passive
podium to generative element has likewise informed Didier Vermeiren, who is best known
for his large corpus of works based on the assemblage of two identical pedestals. In
Vermeiren's so-called pedestal on top of a pedestal, pedestal and sculpture form replicas
of one another. Elevating the element that is ordinarily used for the display of works
gauged more valuable, all these artists have cunningly received, aesthetic orders. In the
process, they have problematized and restructured the power relations between high and
low, aesthetic and functional. Similarly, in different versions of the Endless Column,
Brancusi played categories of pedestal against sculpture, and sculpture against
architectural unit, until formal and functional elements performed an intricate
self-cancellation. Unquestionably, next to the producer of the readymade, Brancusi was a
legitimate transformateur Du Champ.
The reversals exercised by Burton, Pettibone, Puryear, and Vermeiren with their point of
departure in Brancusi's works have subsequently been extended by younger artists
interested not only in subverting prevailing cultural codes, but also in enhancing the
social function of art. Among them, Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado) has returned to the
social agenda inaugurated by the historic avant-garde to address issues pertinent to the
last quarter of the twentieth century, including problems of forced migration and
cultural dislocation. In a series of two- and three-dimensional works, Kcho has taken
Brancusi's Endless Column as the motif of his Infinite Columns. These sculptural works
are made of superimposed bentwood floatable frames: canoes, surfboards, kayaks, and
rowboats fully equipped with oars. Drawing on the imagery and construction methods of the
balsas, the homemade rafts that Cubans use to flee the island illegally, Kcho makes a
case for Brancusi's column as an image of transcendence. In island life, he says, one
always thinks to evade the limit of the enclave, and the boat is precisely a trope for
escape, freedom, and the mentality of migration.
Brancusi often spoke of his hope to construct the Endless Column in different cities all
around the world. At times, he fantasized about various skyscraper versions, whether a
residential building in New York's Central Park, or a Chicago sculpture rising to a
projected height of some 329 feet. This was part of his nomadic methodology: to produce
work that would have specific transferability, work that included acknowledgments of its
movement to different sites and its changes in typology. 
The concept of the mobile group, quintessential to Brancusi in both the development of
his memorial in Tirgu Jiu and in the setup of his Parisian studio, has played a role in
installations by other contemporary artists such as Jason Rhoades and Tom Sachs. For the
1995 Whitney Biennial Rhoades concocted a tongue-in-cheek installation titled My
Brother/Broncuzi. Apparently, the idea for this piece occurred while visiting his younger
brother's room in suburban California. The room is a prosaic, converted garage whose only
mark of distinction is the excessive accumulation of consumer objects and family mementos
assembled in groupings which involuntarily reminded Rhoades of Brancusi's studio. Rhoades
transformed one room of the museum into an environment that was as much an artist's
studio as it was a mechanic's workshop. The installation, made entirely of mobile groups,
included hardware-store items, small gasoline engines, a modernist minibike, various
tools, and a doughnut machine. The freshly made mini-doughnuts were stacked on tall poles
that parodically recalled the Endless Column. On the walls surrounding the room, Rhoades
displayed photographs of Brancusi's studio. Given the way these were lit, the viewer
could see not only the photographs, but also reflections of the installation mirrored in
their framing glass. According to the artist, the intended effect was to position the
viewer between trying to look at something and being inside it. From that standpoint
visitors had no choice but to address the dialectic of the two environments.
Trained in the welding tradition at Bennington College in Vermont, Tom Sachs first
learned about Brancusi from Lee Tribe and William Tucker. After studying at the
Architectural Association in London, Sachs freelanced as a window dresser at Barney's New
York. He also worked with Frank Gehry on prototypes of bent-plywood chairs, and with
furniture designer Tom Dixon, whose unorthodox practices have been thoroughly informed by
Brancusi's production. Presently, Sachs has his own studio, known as Allied Cultural
Prosthetics, where he produces painstakingly crafted furniture, firearms, and sculptural
installations out of base materials such as duct tape, industrial scraps, and brand-name
packaging. Given Sachs's long-term engagement with commercial display procedures, the
Endless Column has become a recurrent pedestal motif in many of his mobile groups. For
instance, in Shredded Wheat for Oklahoma City (1995), it supports a model of the Ryder
truck Timothy McVeigh used in the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. With
a truck made out of a Nabisco Shredded Wheat cereal box and a column assembled from FedEx
cardboard, the piece has, in spite of its charged content, a toylike quality. Sachs
asserts that fantasy and games play key roles in his work, and that it is precisely this
youthful aspect of U.S. culture that is kindred to Brancusi's antibourgeois, folksy
philosophy. Unlike his refined Parisian contemporaries, Brancusi was regarded as an
exotic outsider whose work pointed not so much to the European tradition as to the new
culture of U.S. skyscrapers, railroads, and jazz.
In a sign of homage, Sachs has even scribbled on the entrance door of his studio
Brancusi's name in white and underlined it with an arrow to replicate the unassuming mark
found outside of Brancusi's atelier in Impasse Ronsin. Before Brancusi's studio was
reconstructed by the architect Renzo Piano and opened once again to the public in 1997,
Sachs suggested that it should be re-created with the most advanced technology available
and be made as virtual as possible in order to maintain its tenor even in the absence of
the artist's performative acts. Although "Disneyesque" in spirit, Sachs's version might
in the end have pleased his predecessor more than one thinks. If Brancusi's perennial
experimentation with mobile groups and with the concept of social environment functioned
as a source of inspiration for the contemporary situation, then one function of art today
is to keep his legacy going. When I say, "keep it going," I mean by continuously
reframing it in relation to the changed conditions of the world and in ways congenial to
art's reflexive strategies, ranging from playful allusion to demystificatory critique.
In conclusion, I was very happy to learn about the strong influences that Constantine
Brancusi has had on modern sculptors and their work. I feel that as a result of doing
this research paper I have become very knowledgeable on Brancusi's style. I feel
confident enough to say that I may very well be able to recognize Brancusi's influences
on modern sculpture in future visits to museum and galleries. Thanks!
Bibliography
www.artic.edu
www.infoplease.lycos.com
www.artthought.com/sculpture
www.fortunecity.com