MALVINA HOFFMAN'S HALL OF MAN

Alvina Krause, the legendary Method acting teacher, used as a teaching tool Malvina Hoffman's Hall of Man, sculptures of examples of human groups, life-size.  Our assignment in 1957 was to go look at the bronzes, think about them and research them until we understood each of them as unique, thinking and moving individuals.  It was one of the few times in my undergrad life when it was not assumed that all people were like the campus people, and that didn’t mean the janitor.  But then, acting means accepting the idea that one might need to portray any one of the planet’s humans, including janitors.

This is about Malvina, not Alvina.  Malvina Hoffman was a privileged woman in a high-culture context married to a violinist tuned so tightly that he spent much of his life in hospitals.  She wrote three books: one about traveling around the world creating these portraits, one about how to create and cast bronze sculptures, and one that was a memoir. In 1961, when I came to Browning, MT, to teach high school English on this Blackfeet Reservation, I met Bob Scriver, a major sculptor of Western subjects.  In our first conversation we discovered that Malvina Hoffman was an object of intense admiration from us both.

In the Fifties Bob had earned a Master’s Degree at Vandercook School of Music on the south side of Chicago.  He was just transitioning from teaching music to running a taxidermy business and went to the Field Museum to visit their master taxidermist, who was from Billings, MT.  Of course he explored the rest of the museum and was stunned by the beauty and understanding presented in the Hall of Man. 
   

The Blackfoot Man was Canadian, so we didn't know him.

In the Sixties Bob’s work attracted the attention of Major Eric Harvey at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and we went up to tour their growing collection, still being curated in warehouses.  Staggered by the amount of material for exhibits, we went up and down ramps, through doorways, through hallways.  Bob was ahead of me.  Suddenly he disappeared around a corner and then came back to grab me by the shoulders, thrust me around the corner for a few seconds, then pull me back.  “What did you see?” he demanded.  In that flash I saw the complete collection of Malvina Hoffman’s sculptures — not the Hall of Man, but portraits, maquettes for monuments, and so on.  Hundreds.

Semang Pygmy -- Bob bought a casting of this from Malvina.

We didn’t see them again until 1965 when Bob was on “To Tell the Truth” and we went to New York City.  We had the address to Hoffman’s studio, which was in a mews, a place where horses were once kept in big spaces with strong floors.  Sniffen Court had become famous for its community of prestigious sculptors.  We made an appointment and arrived with our arms full of flowers as tribute.  The entrance was into the studio space, dim and huge, with the small sculptures on tables, but we hardly had time to linger.

Upstairs Hoffman, dying of emphysema from stone dust, was on her “lit de repose,” and Guldie, her companion and guardian, took us to her side.  Bob had brought red roses, the classic, and I brought anemones.  We were dizzy with the reality of a figure that had been with each of us for so long and so intensely.  We visited a little while and Bob showed her photos of his work, which she praised, saying he was particularly good at fetlocks on horses which so many get wrong.  But then she was gasping and we had to leave.

In 1978 when I returned to Chicago to attend the U of Chicago Div School and Meadville/Lombard Theological School, at the first chance I got, I  went to the Hall of Man.  It was gone. I was stunned.  In the cultural revolution of the Seventies it had been dispersed as racist.  The revolutionaries of the time were Levelers, trying to put aside all differences in order to assure equality.  Of course, that’s not what happened.  Like my undergrad profs, they were simply trying to make everyone agree with them.  As Malvina would say, which she DID say to us about some ridiculous edict we complained about,  “Tell it to the Marines!”

Powered by the fear of stigma and the inability to tolerate difference, it is only now that society has recovered enough to reinstate the Hall of Man for its original purpose of celebrating variousness and the unique individual wherever they might be.  Every acting student who did this exercise of empathy for Alvina Krause, still carries the strong memory of that portrayed body and the mind it carried through a space we could only imagine — but DID to the best of our ability.  Of course, by now Alvina and Malvina are dead, so are the models for the bronzes, so is Bob Scriver, and so are many of Alvina’s acting students, even many of my students on the Blackfeet Reservation — not from a holocaust unless you count the truly universal scythe of old age.  

Now that the sculptures have been brought up out of the Field Museum warehouse (where they might have been in danger of de-accessioning like so many fine artworks), people can again take into themselves the lives of people unlike themselves

The first book of Malvina Hoffman’s that both Bob and I had in our libraries when we met was “Sculpture Inside and Out.”  It was one of our guides when we created the Bighorn Foundry in the backyard and learned to cast bronzes by using the classic Roman block investment method, not the modern chicken-fried bronze (dipped in glass batter) created from a kit.  Those who know about my biography of Bob Scriver will understand the title:  “Bronze Inside and Out.”

The second book we had acquired separately was “Heads and Tales,” the story of the making of the Hall of Man (that word “man” probably needs to be modernized to Human), named since most of the portraits are busts.

The third book is entitled “Yesterday is Tomorrow: A Personal History”.  Besides carrying flowers to her “lit de repose,” we each carried a copy of this book and she signed both copies.  Nothing fancy:  “with cordial good wishes.”  When she died, Guldie let us know, but we never sent any acknowledgment.  There was no way writing could say what she meant to us.  Time has helped.

My seminary in Chicago sold its building which his now occupied by the Neubauer Collegium, a center for reflection — a place where indeed “Yesterday is Tomorrow.”  The following is quoted from their website.

Alaka Wali is curator and applied cultural research director at The Field Museum. She was the founding director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change from 1995-2010 and currently curates the sizeable North American collection which includes a contemporary urban collection. Her work concerns the relationship between art-making and the capacity for social resilience. She has curated over 10 exhibits for The Field Museum, with the most recent being  “Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman.” 

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Recent shifts in legal, political, and ethical demands on natural history museums have compelled them to open their institutional logics to interventions informed by indigenous peoples’ self-understanding—an understanding that makes specific interpretive claims about the meaning of given cultural phenomena, ontological claims expressed by their religious commitments, and even aesthetic and epistemological claims about the contributions contemporary Native American artists might make to the articulation of a long-standing historical tradition. Our interest, in short, is to understand how these interventions are playing out in the everyday work of the Field Museum and its efforts to engage, educate, and encourage the interest of an increasingly diverse public, Native and otherwise.

We endeavor to undertake this project in collaboration with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the Field Museum, and a growing pool of indigenous leaders, museum specialists, advocates, and artists in two ways. First, through on-the-ground participant observation of Field Museum staff as they plan, produce, and execute a major exhibition already under way in Hall 8, the North America Collection. And second, by staging conversations among invited Native American artists and advocates, Field staff, and scholars with a view to exploring how the future possibilities of ethnographic museums can be addressed through the specific efforts being undertaken by the Field in its renovation project. From questions concerning the status of indigenous cultural property rights, material and intellectual, to the enduring problems of reification and the marginalization of Native Americans, ethnographic collections like those at the Field have long been the focal point of debates about the relationship between scientific ethics, religious commitments, and aesthetics.

With its plans for renovation and its willingness to be the site and subject of this inquiry, the Field Museum stands at the forward edge of these questions and how their answers might offer lessons for the future of natural history. 

http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/faculty/open_fields/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Open%20Fields%3A%20Ethics%2C%20Aesthetics%20and%20the%20Very%20Idea%20of%20a%20Natural%20History&utm_campaign=Lincoln%20and%20Alaka

I want to add that Malvina Hoffman would have loved to have portrayed Alaka Walli and her strong face.

SCULPTURE: NONVERBAL INTIMACY

This bust is a portrait of Margaret, daughter of Bob Scriver, a sculptor.  She was born in June, 1938, and died in 1968.  The portrait was made in her hospital room in Anacortes, WA, as she grew close to death from cancer.  The early years of her first marriage were in Valier and her four children were born here. 

There's much to be said, but I want to address the immediacy of contact when a person looks at this sculpture.  In some ways it is more intense than meeting the actual person was.  What Scriver told Margaret was that he was portraying her as a woman on the prairie with the wind in her hair.  Privately he admitted he was talking about the cold wind of death, a metaphor.  He did not tell her he had named the piece "To See Eternity."  For a long time he didn't make a mold, though it was a simple job, because of the sense memory embedded in the plastilene by his fingers.  Oil-based clay feels almost like human skin, but is vulnerable to distortion from any impact or even too much heat.  Still, being able to put his hands on the plastilene was like feeling her alive.

"Who Gives All Gifts" is Tim Holmes' memorial to his parents, the Reverend Bob Holmes and his wife, Polly.  This statue is an eight-foot (heroic-sized) bronze at St. Paul's Methodist Church in Helena, MT.  Rev. Bob, a retired Methodist minister, served St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Helena for many years and was the author of the popular radio and TV series of one-minute "Lifelifters." He was a chaplain of the Helena Police Department for 22 years and Harley-riding chaplain of Rocky Mountain College from 1965-1981.  Polly was equally distinguished and dedicated.  She died weeks after her husband in 2005.

Here is the sculptor, Tim Holmes:  Erotic crisis: Tim Holmes at TEDxWhitefish   He will be presenting this talk again as a keynote at the Earl Lectures in Berkeley next month.  It convinces us of the joyful eros of the human body.  The short film included is entitled "Fear to Wonder," an apt phrase for Christmas or Solstice, either one -- both.  

His website is: http://www.timholmesstudio.com/artistsinfo/theartist.html

The dynamic work seems to move as you look at it and, in fact, he has moved to working with dance on video, integrating poetry by writing it directly on the dancers.  I'll come back to Tim for another post because there is so much to say about this family.

Recently I discovered a tumblr website:  http://statue-porn.tumblr.com  It's "porn" in the sense that it's intensely appealing and selected for human beings.  But also, of course, you know that some consider any body that isn't clothed to be porn.

Some of this sculpture is classical, some mythical, some (since the blog owner is young) Goth, some obscured, all human figures.

Veiled Vestal Virgin by Raffaelle Monti. 1846-1847, Marble.

Untitled by Kara Skrakowski. 2011, Oil-based clay.

Terra secco study of old man. Unaired clay has a quality that is lost in firing. 

It does not preserve the look of freshly modeled clay, but it’s better.

 Bacchanale Russe, Malvina Cornell Hoffman, 1912.

Located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(Malvina Hoffman was Bob Scriver's heroine.)

Atomtoadamtoatom

Cameron Stalheim

Divininer (Reverse Side) 

Kyle Allon Bond 2013

That's enough images for one post.  Do a bit of exploring for yourself.  These sculptures do not really need titles and attribution -- they speak for themselves, either in their earnest attempt at accurate depiction of an entity moving through a stop-time second, or in their distortion of what is actual in order to entice us in more deeply.  For the truest intimacy is insight.  You could call it spiritual if you wanted to.  Be careful about saying "religious,"i.e. institutional.

It's unclear whether this is a broken maquette or a preparation,

but it is Bernini's "Saint Therese".  When I sent a preview to Tim Holmes, 

he said he was actually allowed to hold this when he was at the Hermitage.

http://statue-porn.tumblr.com has near the top of the sequence a beguiling and "moving" (in both senses) presentation of Bernini's Saint Therese at the height of her orgasmic experience of union with God.  I don't know how to move the video over here and I'm not sure Blogspot would support it, but the comment is relevant so here it is:

"No one before Bernini had managed to make marble so carnal. In his nimble hands it would flatter and stream, quiver and sweat. His figures weep and shout, their torses twist and run, and arch themselves in spasms of intense sensation. He could, like an alchemist, change one material into another - marble into trees, leaves, hair, and, of course, flesh."  

     -   Simon Schama’s Power of Art. Bernini

http://cressus.tumblr.com/post/66810786202/no-one-before-bernini-had-managed-to-make

This link should take you there.

When Margaret died, this Pieta was Scriver's response.

He was not religious but he was spiritual.

REFRAMING FRAGMENTATION

Giancarlo Biagi is the editor of “Sculpture Review” which is the official magazine of the National Sculpture Society.  In the Spring of 2013 issue his editorial was about this sculpture, which is called “Crouching Aphrodite.”  It’s in the Louvre, is a little bit over a yard high and was probably created about 250 BC.  Obviously, it is broken, but the particular way it is broken -- the woman losing arms and head and the child losing all but the little hand in the middle of her back -- is extremely evocative.

What it called up in me was a memory of several years ago when a friend was going through a very hard time.  I wanted to offer support, I was thousands of miles away, I knew this friend only via books and email, and I didn’t want to say anything sexual.  So I said, “Imagine that my hand is resting on your back.”  It became a sign-off: “my hand on your back.”  Sometimes “my hand on your shoulder.”  To me it was very real.

When we talk about paintings, we talk about “frames,” and we notice that a change of frame can make an image look different, so the phrase “re-framing” has been claimed by the counseling community to mean looking at the same thing in a new way, to see if this will give new insight.  Sculptures don’t have frames, but they do have points of view, and I once read a wonderfully insightful analysis of Rodin sculptures in terms of how they seem to move when you circle them, the sequence of points of view revealing potential shifts over time.  But I never read anything much about the effect on people of so many ancient sculptures being broken.  Maybe the Venus de Milo, the woman who is missing only her arms, is the most famous.  Biago continued to think about fragments and truncations and so the Summer, 2013, is also about partial sculptures of bodies.  Also, sculptures of partial bodies.

There are no headless people wandering around, but as wars and drunk driving take their toll -- particularly UED’s -- we become more used to people with limbs missing. In addition there is a whole category of people who were born without limbs, because their mothers took thalidomide during their pregnancy.  I recently saw a TED talk by Nick Vujicic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P2nPI6CTlc.  He’s a motivational speaker, but he doesn’t “tag” as thalidomide victim.  Because he doesn’t see himself as a victim now.  It was tough as a kid, because other kids bullied him.  But now he’s handsome, smart, married, and has a career as a speaker and resource. 

Alison Lapper and son

On the cover of the Summer, 2013, issue of “Sculpture Review” is Marc Quinn’s statue of “Alison Lapper Pregnant” and there is a major story inside about this series of works that are portraits of people with “phocomelia” which is the technical name for people whose limbs failed to develop.   They are white, in marble, to echo found partial sculptures from antiquity.  To some they are shocking and shameful; to others they are beautiful, full of hope and love.  Though many of the sculptures from antiquity had lost their sexual organs (in some cases it looks like penises were add-ons anyway), these statues of Quinn’s are intact.  These people have head, heart, guts and genitalia.  If you are the sort of person who becomes interested in the model as much or more than the portrait, Lapper is an artist herself, has written a book, successfully gave birth to the boy-child she was carrying and is proud of him as a normal teenager.  (If there is such a thing.)

Biagi asks us to consider the tradition of bust portraits -- just the heads.  He also reminds us of Rodin, who said,  “Recently I have taken to isolating limbs, the torso.  Why am I blamed for this?  Why is it allowed the head and not portions of the body?  Every part of the human figure is expressive.  And is not an artist always isolating, since in Nature nothing is isolated?  When my works do not consist of the complete body, people call it unfinished.  What do they mean?  Michelangelo’s finest works are precisely those which are called ‘unfinished.’ ”

Michelangelo: Slave

We might reframe “fragmentation” as a metonymy. (The formal name of using a figure of speech that is a part that stands for a whole -- Ogi Ogas says one of the problems with categorizing their porn-viewing data was that “pussy” stands for both a person and a part of a person -- evidently not many actual cats in the study.)  Then fragments could be sorted according to whether the part was once included in something bigger, whether it is part of something that is as yet incomplete, what it implies in terms of what it would be if it were completed, and so on.  Fragmentation is a real thing that points to a potential whole thing.

Is a person whose legs were amputated a fragment?   Is a person born without any legs a fragment?  What makes a person whole anyway -- most of us would be pleased to think that the wholeness of a person is a matter of mental and emotional development and not the state of a body.  Was the poet in “The Sessions” more whole after he had been initiated into sex?  He said so.  What are other markers of completeness?

Or is “whole” the same thing as “complete”?  We are happy these days to say that a person is a process.  If so we will never be finished until death: that’s as whole or complete as a person could get, and yet people don’t usually say they aspire to be dead.  They don’t generally even say they’re as good at whatever they do now as they could possibly be.  One is always a part striving to be whole.  But then age or illness or trauma CAN make you feel like a fragment.

How to hold your baby if you have no arms.

And yet there is something beguiling about a fragment: it is a puzzle piece.  Even the people born with no limbs can have an integrity and wholeness of purpose that we admire.  Nick Vujicic presented from a raised table or dais that he rocked back and forth on; he leaned, pointed with his shoulders, nearly danced with his torso.  He told about how something spontaneous happened with children who approached him.  They would put their hands behind their backs to imitate him, and then “hug” him with their necks, tucking their throats under his ear.  They “re-framed” themselves into being the same so they could relate to him on his terms.

Michelangelo’s unfinished works, formally called “non finito,” are usually slaves shown emerging from blocks of stone.  They may have been left that way on purpose.  Usually it is the front that is carved and the back is still in rough stone, so it’s impossible to rest a hand on their backs.  That’s a shame, because it was my experience that as much as I had intended to lend support, in the end a powerful current of life was coming back through my baby hand.  In the case of the Rodin torsos, a museum guard would have to watch carefully to keep me from putting my hand or even my head against those bronze chests, expecting to hear heartbeats.

Rodin torso

JESUS THE HOMELESS STATUE

Jesus the Homeless

Timothy Schmalz specializes in “religious sculpture,” however you define that -- I mean, is it a mother nursing a child or a dying naked man on a cross or is it Buddha or a totem pole, or something else?  He decided he would create a contemporary image of an all all-too-common human condition and link it to “christianity” -- reputed to be the main religion of the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, its name taken from the title of Jesus the Christ who theoretically came to change the world two millennia ago.  Well . . .  we have park benches now.  Much better for the homeless people than sleeping directly on the ground.  The two main religious institutions located for possible placement would not accept the statue.  They were Catholic and their new Pope had just chosen the name of Francis who was deliberately homeless.  That’s “Saint” Francis.

The Toronto Star newspaper says:

“Despite the message of the sculpture — Jesus identifying with the poorest among us — it was rejected by two prominent Catholic churches, St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

“Homeless Jesus had no home,” says the artist, Timothy Schmalz. “How ironic.”

“Rectors of both cathedrals were enthusiastic about the bronze piece and showed Schmalz possible locations, but higher-ups in the New York and Toronto archdiocese turned it down, he says.

“‘It was very upsetting because the rectors liked it, but when it got to the administration, people thought it might be too controversial or vague,’ he says. He was told ‘it was not an appropriate image.’”

“The Toronto archdiocese tried to help him find an alternative location, including St. Augustine’s Seminary in Scarborough. But Schmalz, who describes his work as a visual prayer, wanted to reach a wider, secular audience. “I wanted not only the converted to see it, but also the marginalized. I almost gave up trying to find a place.”

“Now the sculpture stands near Wellesley St. W., outside Regis College at the University of Toronto. It’s a Jesuit school of theology, where priests and lay people are trained, with an emphasis on social justice.”

Here’s a video of the sculptor himself discussing why he made this life-sized bronze.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rAys_ON8rg

These archdiocesan “higher-ups” should fire their public relations advisors, since they have now managed through their rejection to make Timothy Schmalz famous, far more than if they had just quietly accepted the monument.   They look like fools.  They should hire some new theologians while they’re at it.  And maybe the Pope, instead of harassing nuns, should turn his attention to men in red skullcaps with empty heads and hearts.

It’s always true that the people who are on the ground, on the street, doing front line work in engagement with the people who need help, are open to the Jesus of the Gospels.  It is the people at the top who become invested in covering up, whitewashing, etc.  They don’t mean it’s too controversial or vague.  They mean it’s not good marketing strategy for the institutional corporation that makes their lives prosperous.  They have been selling the idea that being virtuous will make you rich.  (It’s hard to sell Heaven these days, when a McMansion seems so much more accessible.)  Churches get people to give them money with the argument that the giver will look generous and thoughtful, which will help them make better (sharper) business deals.

by Saint-Gaudens

Statues with drapery always intrigue me and this one is no exception.  They suggest the human form in an ambiguous way, quite unlike the opposite practice of portraying the nude body.  And yet what this draped homeless person (genderless to appearances) reveals is the wounded vulnerability of the feet.  There is room on this park bench for a person to sit alongside the feet and it must be natural to caress those bare feet.  The Pope has washed a lot of feet, and not just in Rome, though they were all no doubt carefully pre-selected for him.  Can he get through the layers of snobbery, collusion, and gate-keeping around him?  We’re all wondering.  He has hired a Franciscan to help him.

By now I’ve watched maybe a half-dozen film versions of the story of Francis of Assissi and his progression from wealthy son to homeless monk.  I began because of the new Pope to see why he chose that name and I’m not finished.  Some of these movies are on YouTube, both the pious ones and the inscrutable ones.   The entire sumptuously seductive Zefferelli version, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” is at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVG2r7TgMMw  There are others.  I’ll post more reviews tomorrow.

As it turns out, being a Franciscan is not at all like being a priest.  It is a self-identification that only means living in the way the Francis did.  One can be male or female, not even Catholic, cloistered or not, recognized by a community or not.  Francis wrote out some rules -- which are basically from the Gospels, principles of living -- and unlike the Boy Scouts, that’s the whole thing -- whether or not a person is gay or believes in God or not.  It’s a Tao, a Way, a bare footprint.

The Catholic church in the 12^th century had a problem:  their organization and protocols weren’t matching the experienced world very well.  Soon the Protestants would break away entirely, but in the meantime there were groups who diverged without the intention of being challengers.  Not quite heretical.  They were penitentes, humiliati, impoverati, mendicants, eremetical -- Franciscans.  Three hundred years later, they had their own internal schism in which Mateo de Bascio founded the Capuchins, the “hooded ones.”  (Mateo was not made a saint.) There were others, always trying to get back to origins and always challenging the formal Roman bureaucracy to think how to assign them to the realm of regulation and responsibility.   They must’ve had a helluva flow chart.   Some popes fought these groups and some popes engaged and certified them.  As the shrewd cardinal towards the end of “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” confides to his colleague, “This man will bring the poor back to us.”  But since penitent, self-humiliating, begging, poor hermits are hard to bribe or punish,  they always elude the system, butterflies that can’t be netted.  They exist in every religious context on the planet as well as the secular, because they are not institutionally-based but anchored in the mystical context of the Sacred.

It looks to me as though Timothy the Sculptor is also defining “religious sculpture” as art that inspires the same behavior and compassion as that of Saint Francis.  The only problem is that a life-sized bronze is an enduring but expensive undertaking.  Possibly it might better have been made of bread, so that the homeless could eat it.  Maybe someone will decide to bake bread in the shape of a homeless person under a blanket and hand it out to the poor.  Maybe I should try it myself.  I could make some little feet out of Sculpy polymer clay that could be re-used for the next baking . . .  What a communion!