Passing Fancy
Here in my living room, a likeness of character actor Everett Sloane (1909–1965) wears a complete look from fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto’s 2000 Spring/Summer menswear collection. Printed in pale gray polymer resin, it is a prototype of the one there at SOLDES, which is cast in bronze. It is one facet of Nicolas G. Miller’s Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000 (2021), which the artist sent to me (three others received three similar maquettes) so that this sculpture, which claims multiple materialities, might also occupy multiple spaces: the space of art to which conceptual sculpture belongs today, and the domestic space for which such miniature statues were once destined. In a similar way, Miller’s project also touches multiple times: Sloane is the first in a planned series of miniatures depicting bygone Hollywood stars who succumbed to barbiturate overdoses. Each is attired in a complete runway look from the year 2000, long after his or her death.
Cast bronze and 3D-printed polymer resin might seem like opposing sculptural materials, representing discrepant attitudes, techniques, and philosophies toward art, indeed, even opposite ends of the twentieth century. In Miller’s project, they are united materially as well as conceptually.
Bronze casting is an ancient technique, but its modern heyday is tied to the rise of industrialization. As bronze foundries proliferated, cast bronze became the foremost sculptural material of the West, the stuff not only of new public monuments, but also their miniature counterparts: statuettes designed for private display in bourgeois homes. In both cases, bronze’s durability and patina signalled the continuation of an ancient heritage and its indefinite extension into the future. The perfection of artificial patination in the early twentieth century allowed fresh young bronzes to masquerade as ancient treasures with rich pasts, thus replacing evidence of age with a mere sign of it, like children wearing their grandparents’ clothes.
Today, bronze’s apparent timelessness is tempered by its having fallen out of fashion decades ago. At midcentury, it gave way to the new, antitraditional materiality of art movements like arte povera, nouveau realisme, and Minimalism. In representing continuity with the past, bronze was ripe for rejection by artists who sought to upend the very notion of sculpture. But perhaps, given its history and remarkable endurance, bronze is destined for such anachronism.
Computer-based tools are often assumed to replace craftsmanship, or render it obsolete, but Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000 proves that it has simply been transformed. Miller painstakingly constructed this sculpture’s form from a variety of 3D softwares, each of which has its own historical determinants, range of applications, and approximate material analogue (one manipulates digital “clay” or sketches with a digital “pencil”). The resulting form is a finely-tuned anachronism, seeming to float suspended between eras, styles, and materials—a tastefully decorative jolt to the space-time continuum.
Yet sculptures do not float; they are embedded in space. Printed, cast, and patinated, this data file is more than a sculpture — or even several. Miller’s Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000 (2021) is a program realized via the sculpture’s design, production, circulation, and display. This is the secret power of the statuette. Though small, it automatically transforms its surroundings into its own furniture, not unlike a grand monument in a city square, or the marvelous jewel of an ornate necklace. Living room and gallery alike become its setting. As a digital file, the sculpture is beyond both context and scale; as an intimately-sized statuette, it transforms its setting, and even its viewers, into its own immaterial substance.
—Jules Pelta Feldman
Basel, Switzerland
Basel, Switzerland