Robert Lazzarini
I’ve been trying to write about Robert Lazzarini for weeks now and it has been difficult. His sculptures of guns, knives, and brass knuckles (the least strong of the bunch) are a disruptive perceptual experience. They are fuzzy in the gallery space, suspended before the eye as something not quite seen, not quite graspable. So busy spinning in a familiar world suddenly made strange, my sentences and words found no traction. Words do exactly the opposite of what Lazzarini’s sculptures do -- they anchor things, they take experience and settle it down. Lazzarini’s sculptures are unsettling.
I came up with many clever fixes for Lazzarini: phenomenology (many writers have done this well so no need for me to rehash it), how Lazzarini shouldn’t avoid talking about Hans Holbein’s skull distortion in The Ambassadors, 1533 because it is important that his work not be seen as an anamorphism(you’ve got to always save an article to write for the future), how Lazzarini could be positioned as a sculptor somewhere between Robert Irwin and Charles Ray (I’d end up just talking about Ray). Thinking through these topics, however, could not get at what I wanted -- the work’s quiet nature, the paradox of how these apparently humble objects could have such large philosophical ambitions yet not find much reason to fret about it. They are not flashy though guns and knives are supposed to be -- they are some of the most matter of fact objects I’ve ever seen.
Which brings me to Robert Frost’s poem Mowing, written in 1913. Please bear with me. I may have lost you at the mention of Frost. If so, I can’t help you and that's a shame. You can read the poem here if you wish.
Mowing is about tools, specifically the scythe, a long blade swung aerobically in a half circle, which cuts long stems of wheat or other grains with a muffled rasp of noise comparable to someone dragging their feet through gravel. The sound, Frost mentions, is the only sound – “there was never a sound beside the wood but one” – and what I think he is getting at is a very common Frost theme, the cold disregard of nature for our activities, the chilling thought that the sounds we make are ours alone, sounds mean nothing to the wood.
There is no romance, nothing supernatural, no need for dreams or “easy gold.” The simple American images offer their power without fanfair, a technique that was mastered by William Carlos Williams and, I would argue, by
With the interaction found in Mowing, that strange mix of man and earth from which the scythe functions, comes paradoxically the full weight of mystery. The circuit made by us and objects is that from which our strange purpose on the earth sparks. Our tools split, organize, and adjust things and this is foreign to the wood. The sound of the scythe scares “a bright green snake,” it is inherently violent, yet it whispers to the ground. It doesn’t speak. It whispers. Frost makes this very clear -- there is a difference between speaking and whispering.
Lazzarini’s sculptures are also tight-lipped tools, they whisper, they do not speak. I am convinced their quiet nature, their embeddedness as things and in things, speak to the same issues of which Frost speaks. What is the difference, I wonder, between the scythe, slicing wheat with a sound foreign to the wood, and Lazzarini’s sculptures, which slice our normal perceptual space, piercing the skin of our lives with a pinprick of silent oddity? Like the green snake (isn't it wonderful that the snake is green in the poem!), I was a bit spooked by my encounter with Lazzarini’s work, and I feel the quiet violence of distinctions that mean everything in life, a feeling promoted by the use of guns and knives.
It is almost diabolical how man’s odd gift of consciousness tempts him to rule himself an oddity of nature, tempts him to see himself apart from things. For Frost, he is apart and nature doesn’t care (see poem Design for perhaps the most horrifying example). However, for Lazzarini, man co-creates what he and nature is, the connection is deep and not as separate as Frost’s world view. The quiet intimacy of Lazzarini’s sculptures cut things open a bit, even retain the simple violence of our existence, yet the shift we encounter, that fuzzy bit of math and optics in front of us at the gallery, subtle though it is, finds both nature (space, time, found reality) and man bleeding, but bleeding slowly, learning a bit about their existence through their sluggish but ancient fight.