Is monumental sculpture the vessel for a pronounced masculine self-understanding? Is this self-perception more evident and accentuated here than in the male perspective which characterizes most of our culture's modes of communication and where the male order has become synonymous with the human order in an invisible and "natural" way? Is this a hidden, basic condition of our way of thinking, what the French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray has appropriately called our "radically blind spot?" How is masculinity played out in the monumental works of Swedish artists Carl Milles and Ulf Rollof? by HANS HEDBERG, Index nr 3-4/97 Translation: Sina Najafi and Nina Katchadourian

"The sublime heavens, which with your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, and fix you the deserver of the desert that is deserved by your grandeur." Cervantes, Don Quixote "The urge to destroy is a creative urge". Bakunin It may seem that monumental sculpture satisfies, expresses and signals to an excessive degree a self-assured masculine perspective. But despite its heroic history, monumental sculpture, as our culture defines it, has its roots in the expanding modern city whose streets and squares the bourgeoisie adorns with its models of virtue, its dreams, its ideals, and its narcissism. There was hardly a public place left in Paris by the turn of this century that had not been monumentalized . At the same time "marble pornography" was being produced, a torrent of statues—often sentimental representations of workers and peasants—made to adorn salons.    It may seem paradoxical that this torrent came at a time when trade unions were being formed by the living originals of the statues and when workers were organizing themselves politically in ever-increasing numbers. Under the taut muscles, however, the popularity of this army of statues raises some elusive and disturbing questions. They could be read as a kind of cave painting for the contemporary salon, where the cult of hunting scenes had been replaced by the desire to objectify and neutralize the worker. They could be seen as an example of a claim about and a nostalgic reminder of a developmental stage supposedly surpassed by the statue's owner, as an example of a then-current developmental theory applied to the human race. They could be taken to be an example of realism as a trend. Another possibility would be to see them as a mirror image of the marble eroticism of the period, a kind of stealthy, so to speak incidental, adoration of the muscular body in indirect and not-so-obvious ways. There is also an interesting connection between this bourgeois Von Nose-in-the-air iconography and what will later become the official, socialist realist trademark of the proletarian dictatorship. But no matter which reading we take, each points to the weight of a pronounced masculine visual culture, a culture filled with male fantasies and beauty. "Pray, look better, sir," said Sancho; "those things yonder are no giants, but windmills, and the arms you fancy, are their sails, which, being whirled about by the wind, make the mill go." "It is a sign," cried Don Quixote, "thou art but little acquainted with adventures. I tell thee they are giants; and therefore, if thou art afraid, go aside and say thy prayers, for I am resolved to engage in a dreadful, unequal combat against them all." As a young man at the turn of the century, Swedish sculptor Carl Milles (1875-1955) was sporadically Rodin's assistant. Stylistic commonalities between the two sculptors are not very evident . Rodin's hyper-sensitive realism is very different from Milles's two main parallel, schizophrenic lines of exploration: on the one hand, the Teutonically violent, heavy, and bombastic sculptures in massive granite, such as Sjöguden ('The Sea God') from 1913 (at Slussen in Stockholm), or in sharply-carved wood, such as the 1940 Människan och Naturen ('Man and Nature') for the Time-Life Building at New York's Rockefeller Center; on the other hand, the light, flowing, idealizing and archaic style we associate with the Milles Garden in Stockholm, an example being the late Musicerande änglar ('Musician Angels').    We can, however, see a shared set of ideological values in the choice of subject matter. A clear example is Guds hand ('God's Hand'). Rodin made his version at the beginning of the century (the exact date keeps getting revised) but Milles was probably intimately familiar with how it came into being. Rodin's sculpture shows a hand holding a lump of clay from which two human figures—Adam and Eve caught in an embrace, in line with tradition—are beginning to emerge. Even if the religious dimension is highly conspicuous, Rodin was, like many male artists of his generation and after, not loathe to comparing God's creative act with the artistic process and was very taken by the idea of divine inspiration. Rodin's God's Hand could equally well be about the sculptor's own which also brings life to an unformed mass. The conception and cult of the artist as God's alter genius was not unusual in the nineteenth century—traces of this conception still endure—and also led to a deep interest in the artist-genius's hands. Making casts of artists' or writers' hands was a common practice. According to his thorough and captivating biographer Eric Näslund, Carl Milles (whose interest in mysticism and astronomy increased as he grew older) also had a view of hands fully in line with the one described above. Milles thought that they truly expressed a person's inner self, and that they could often give form to a person's genuine feelings in an immediate and obvious way. In a 1914 letter to Emy Fischer, cited by Näslund, Milles writes that the artist is a god at the moment of creation. It is therefore not surprising that when Milles at the end of the 40s makes his Guds hand—one of the last sculptures he finished—he chose his own left hand as the starting point. The views which imbue both artists' self-perception will undoubtedly appear to us as ridiculous and bring an ironic smile to our lips. But in this context, it can be important to remind ourselves that the perhaps over-compensatory attitude which these artists seem to express comes out of a context where artistic creation is often a risky process for the ego until the work and the ego are validated; this is perhaps extra clear in the case of the controversial and at times persecuted Rodin. This is probably still the case, even if the misunderstood artist has by now become a social archetype.     The very object of identification—God—also tells us a great deal in reverse about the outsider artist. For the outsider position has been redirected to include that which bears and shapes culture most in our society, the personification of the existing (patriarchal) order. The long, masculine, monumental shadow that Milles's and Rodin's God's Hands throw on their surroundings can leave the viewer in no doubt. In the case of Milles, the adoration of the male body is even synchronous with contemporary Nazi aesthetics, an aesthetics and ideology which, significantly, Milles supported enough even after the War. Milles was interested in his dreams and saw them as problem solvers. In his late notebooks there is a drawing from the 22nd of September, 1953, two years before his death almost to the day. The drawing shows a man standing under a column which is leaning uncomfortably towards him. The root of a fir tree is growing out of the column's capital way up, and the nearly hovering tree is about to go fully up into the air above the man's head. The text on the drawing says: "A fir tree. A real dream. 22/9/1953. Wonderful clear blue sky morning sun green ground a beautiful new fir tree high up in the air."     This is an inversion, as Ulf Abel has pointed out in his book Carl Milles, Form, Ide, Medaljkonst, of the Vitruvian theory of the tree as the forerunner of the column. But was this really what made Milles so excited two years before he "put on his wings," as he himself put it?     Milles wrote to his bronze caster in Copenhagen and asked if he can cast a fir tree. And to his friend Palmstierna he explained "I have started a new chapter of my artistic life where I want to celebrate the spirit of Life." "Blessed be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor I am satisfied is now in Hell, receiving the reward of his cursed invention, which is the cause that very often a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman..." It is obviously a coincidence that the monumental sculptor Milles drew a fir tree and that the monumental installation artist Ulf Rollof is also interested in fir trees as subject matter. Angels and mysticism are other subjects both artists also take up, but from different perspectives. When Milles describes the angels he made during his final years, he wants them to provide universal solace and comfort: "They are all boy-angels, playing music, all of them bringing joy and hope to people, whether sick or not . . . All these angels come down from Heaven or if you don't believe in Heaven, then from the great mystical world we call the Universe which is all around us." Rollof, our contemporary, is not as convinced that there are angels to be found, but instead constructs something which at first glance resembles a landing strip, as if to facilitate their navigation. But the work which was presented on New Year's Day in 1985 in an old sardine factory in Norway reflects an even greater pessimism. It is in fact an angel trap.    If Rodin and Milles can be thought of as guardians of a masculine, monumental self-perception where large claims and size are among its predominant features, then Rollof can certainly be included in this lineage. But Rollof has replaced the heavy granite and bronze with a muscular, frightening as well as fascinating, technical apparatus which seems to actualize itself independently like some giant Mecano toy and to satisfy one's wildest dreams about dismantled moped motors. But there is often a redeeming feature in this technique which makes it more self-ironic than simply an end in itself, more about short-comings than about celebration, and this means that the technique rarely succeeds in its intentions, despite violent exertions. This is the case, for example, with the seven-meter high giant fly catcher, Bälg IX ('Bellows IX'), which Rollof presented at the 1992 Documenta. It represents an assault which in no way corresponds with what need dictates. At the same time, this assault demonstrates both the nature (an imperfect one as it turns out) of the inherent claims of the monument (as concept) and a resistance to them. Rollof's monumentality holds no promise of social or historical continuity and in fact its message gives exactly the opposite impression. The domination of and assault on nature is a theme which has become increasingly acute in Rollof's work since Bälg IX. It is interesting to note that the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the after-effects of which he photographed, is one of the events that Rollof cites as a catalyst for his work. On that occasion, nature showed its sublime side and its ability to teach us a life-threatening lesson in relativism. But in the many works following Bälg IX where Rollof has used the fir tree as a theme, the relationship has been inverted. It is now Rollof who is the master and wreaks havoc with the firs and with nature as if they were his. This is the case, for example, in the brutal installation at Ars 95 in Helsinki where a machine bends a row of firs down towards the floor, only to have them spring back to attention again. The same rough mode of address was also used at an exhibition at the Hague in May 1994 where several firs were hung upside down on metal bars which formed a highly cynical pair of scales, with the sawn-off root on one end and the rest of the tree on the other.    What Rollof stages is certainly nothing more than a little breeze when compared with what takes place on a daily basis in our dealings with nature, but art and the white cube's aura almost always manage to calibrate all statements so that they become ideal or important. In this context Rollof is a quite odd figure. There is obviously no shortage of attempts to shock or flirt with even more brutal means than Rollof's, but these often fire too much ammunition so that the viewer's defense mechanisms kick in. Most provocations fall short because they have been arranged and calculated beforehand. The relative effectiveness of Rollof's art is very much dependent on a choice of tone; the sense of cynicism or meanness it gives at times seems to be unconscious and it therefore becomes all the more shocking and terrifying. This is what distinguishes Rollof from most other artists who like him stage our ignorance of the consequences of what we do to nature and to ourselves; he materializes and reveals the anthropocentric evil-which-knows-not-itself. But just as the execution needs an executioner, so Rollof disguises himself in the thankless role of the vandal, the evil-doer, and the criminal and, unlike those who can always hide behind their provocations, he also bears this guilt for us, not unlike a closer relative of God's. In an installation in September 1994 Rollof points to our inability to let another perspective other than our own into our perceptual and interpretive framework. The installation was in Tijuana, Mexico, near the border to the United States and the place where many Mexicans try to cross illegally into the U.S. A chair stood at the center of a circle formed by a set of tracks. The chair was connected to several oil barrels standing on a cart which ran along the tracks, each barrel containing a fir tree. As the contraption moved around, the view for the viewer sitting on the chair was permanently obscured by these Nordic (or apparently Canadian) fir trees. In one his later works, Rollof increased the intensity of his thematic even more by taking up one of the most conventional symbols for life: the egg. A machine which can be started with a special key has the task of randomly throwing eggs on a photograph of a dog. The broken egg parts pour through a kind of drainpipe under the image into a plastic bucket which the gallerist has to empty of its goo every so often. The installation breaks several taboos; it shows an inconsiderate, both spoiled and contemptuous, attitude towards life and food by turning consumption into a kind of game possible to play for whoever has the special key. In our daily practice, we all have this cynical attitude but prefer not to be reminded of it. In contrast to Rodin's and Milles's pompous, self-sufficient but ideal, human, and consoling image of God, the one Rollof serves is more furious and destructive. Perhaps a loser who wants every one else to feel his bad mood and share his losses. A surly vandalizing God who limps on goat feet and who wants to make what's bad worse. Will such a God act as the guardian of masculinity in our time?     "Soft and fair gentlemen," replied Don Quixote, "never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last: I was mad, but I am now in my senses; I was once Don Quixote de la Mancha but am now, as I said before, the plain Alonso Quixano, and I hope the sincerity of my words, and my repentance, may restore me to the same esteem you have had for me before." ~