The exhibition title is indeed unfortunate but it raises an important question about the unique posthumous relationship of Rodin to corporate collections and collectors, in which the purposes of the artist became increasingly confused with those of the chairman of the board. Most private and corporate collections contain one or two Rodin casts as a logo, a guarantee not only of quality but of a precise and appropriate corporate sentiment for all art. It is as if Rodin, who agonised at the very heart of his own time, provided convenient, compliant marginal figures to those for whom agony, like death, happened to other people. In the twentieth first century the Gates of Hell would be best relegated to the delivery bay of some high rise. Every other Hollywood blockbuster resells their themes in glorious, guiltless technicolor.

Rodin was able to achieve his reborn status because bronzes, unlike paintings, can be recast, multiplied, after a fashion, to infinity. There are hundreds if not thousands of post mortem Rodin’s out there, some made as late as the 1980’s. The AGWA show is almost entirely composed of such posthumous casts. This, in part, explains the disappointment one feels confronted with so many black patinated bronzes, larger, and smaller, than one remembers and, for the most part, utterly lacking in the presence of the familiar old pieces in the Musee Rodin, aka Hotel Biron, the artist’s former home in Paris.

Torsos, Musee Rodin.

In the european christian tradition there are only three sculptors, Giselbertus of Autun, Michelangelo and Rodin; everyone else is an also ran. The sculptural concerns of all three remain almost identical across eight centuries. They are, the figure as the signifier of human destiny and of narratives of desire and redemption, the horrors of the erotic, embodiment as enslavement, the rhetoric of heaven and hell. In each one the figure of God the creator and arbiter of human affairs is central to the very possibility of sculpture. It was God, after all, who shaped the first human bodies.

As early as 1142, Giselbertus set the scope of Rodin’s sculpture in his tympanum of heaven and hell for the Romanesque church at Autun and in the narrative capitals along the nave. They contain counterparts for almost all Rodin’s imagery, an amazingly erotic Eve, a ghastly figure of lust with snakes attached to her breasts, souls dragged to hell by amazingly energetic devils. It was Giselbertus not the greeks who first conceived the figure as primarily rhetorical. a vehicle to connect eternity and the immediate. God the creator is very much present at the centre of this moment, the birth of European sculpture. Rodin probably never saw Autun but he might just have seen the plaster cast of the tympanum which found its way to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

Giselbertus’ romanesque relief carving is not the dialectic counterpoint to renaissance sculpture but its first, troubled incarnation. It first raises the equivalence of stone to flesh and bone, with all its sacramental, metaphysical and metaphorical implications for the practice of sculpture, that so drove and perplexed Michelangelo. He shares with Giselbertus the issue that most distinguishes his work, the quest for animation, for a dynamic existence beyond the symbolic, narrative or, even, the stylistic requirements of the work. Both sculptors want their figures to possess a terrible presence, to be there in the same eternal moment with the spectator or, rather, to establish that moment for eternity. Michelangelo’s unfinished works testify to this. Fully formed limbs emerge from the marble, peeled back like the layers of an onion, as he described it. It as if time itself has been chipped free from the stone.

Michelangelo’s difficulties with god the creator versus god the father and judge are well known - they can be traced through the Sistine Chapel. They are also inscribed in his understanding of the act of sculpture - from shaping and the discovery of form through the figure to judgement and the potential completion in each of his figures of a microcosm of the entire cycle of creation. Hence his addiction to the incomplete. Who could rival the creator ?

Rodin shares this sense of sculpture as a once and for all creation made under the eye, if not in the direct presence, of god. He was fascinated by Michelangelo and borrows much from his grammar of the figure, from the well known contrapposto and other poses to his extraordinary emphasis on musculature as a means to presence, the ultimate sign of potential energy. Occasionally, as in the relationship of the Pieta to his Lovers, Rodin disinters a specific, highly disturbing significance from his source. Must the impiety of passion always lead to hell?

By the late nineteenth century, however, god had taken a sabbatical and was not expected back any time soon. This left Rodin all dressed up with nowhere to go. His extraordinary facility was premised on the christian manual metaphysics of hand, eye, brain and soul. The implosion that god’s departure produced is most quickly grasped in the disturbing figure of a crucified female nude, an image shared by Rodin, Rops and others of his era. Rodin’s small version, which can seen in Paris, is about as tormented and contradictory a piece of modelling as one could find. It is as if the artist averted his eyes from his handiwork as it was made. The small, tragically over blackened, bronze maquette of the Gates of Hell in this exhibition shares the same despairing irresolution. Rodin gropes blindly through the clay swirls, the light and shade congealed in bronze, for a centre to his composition.

The same productive forces which were expelling god from the community at large were also at work on sculpture. By mid nineteenth century, poet and critic Charles Baudelaire was complaining that contemporary sculpture was almost all “tiresome”. In his criticism and poetry he drew attention to the absence of the struggle between good and evil that had previously been central to the act of creation. Rodin was more than familiar with Baudelaire’s work and indeed illustrated some of it.

Sculpture grew tiresome as it became ever more a part of the late nineteenth century version of the art industry. Industrial methods of reproducing sculpture, scaling up from small clay models, using the pointing machine - a 3D grid of drills (for marble) or rods (for clay) several metres long or more, artisanal carving and modelling, casting techniques perfected in the production of weapons and heavy machinery, transformed it from a spiritual adventure to a piece of semi erotic social drudgery as tedious for the viewer as the artist. In the 1900 Exposition the Grand Palais contained an acre of more of efficiently mechanised bleached white marbles, made in this manner. What a triumph! No wonder Brancusi, the resident Rumanian modernist exile with his roots elsewhere, constantly referred to the whole tradition - Michelangelo and Rodin included, as beef steak.

Rodin used the industrial system for his sculpture. It is wilful, deceptive nonsense to compare his production process to a renaissance studio. He began in the system as an artisan. It eventually made him a modeller of clay, not a carver of stone like his two great predecessors. In his later career he was able to construct figures from a premodelled/precast vocabulary of spare parts, (a good number, such as an utterly incongruous flabbily cast head of Balzac (sans dressing gown) can be seen at AGWA). This turned out to be a crucial distinction, not only in terms of his relationship to the european sculptural tradition but also for his industrialised artistic after life.

It is equally wilful to see Rodin as the greatest of nineteenth century sculptors and ignore his unique historical concerns. Apart from the eccentricities of Daumier and Degas the greatest nineteenth century sculptors were the animaliers, exquisite animators of bronze horses, lions, tigers, rabbits and on at least one occasion kangaroos. They took a new vitality from the novelty of their subject. Rodin had nothing in common with any of them.

Rodin was able to dominate the industrial process by working intensely with the final casts of each piece to achieve the presence he sought. Control of the precise quality of each joint, edge and surface - sharp or blunt, shiny or dull and a sensitive and highly varied patination took the place of the direct tension of chisel in stone. It restored the relation of hand and eye to the cycle of creation as incarnate in John the Baptist, the Lovers, the Burghers of Calais and the Three Shades or the Thinker from the Gates of Hell.

Unfortunately, as can be seen at AGWA, these same works can still be reproduced, industrially, and left lifeless, bereft of the conflict between heaven and hell which alone could give their overblown posturing some urgency. The gallery is reminiscent of those vast halls filled with marine engines and the like, that were the central feature of all international exhibitions in the nineteenth century. Fritz Lang, whose sensibility has more in common with Rodin than one might suspect, telegrams the same vision in the scene from his film Metropolis in which the city’s vast underground machinery is transformed into Moloch the god of human sacrifice. At AGWA the blackened bulk of the Thinker hovers above one’s head, half seen, like a ship about to run aground, a Titan whose pitted, corroded limbs speak only of endless defeat and humiliation. This is not a humanist alternative to god but Sisyphus, the neurotic assembly line intellectual, condemned to re-assembling the same pathetic idea for eternity.

William Burroughs once wrote about a businessman who mistook death for a company car. Such is the appeal of post-mortem Rodin to corporate sensibilities. Like all systems of power and exploitation, corporations over-valorise, fetishise and privilege the moment of their emergence in history as the great exception, the light that must shine for ever. Rodin is the artist who most effectively occupies that moment for them. It is more than convenient that his posthumous work lacks even a hint of the great struggle of creation, between good and evil, which powered its origins.

It remains to be seen whether it might be possible to re-engage with Rodin the living artist in such a chaotic, badly displayed exhibition. I have tried and I doubt it. More to the point, perhaps, is the possibility that we might learn something about what happens to art when it is, so to speak, industrialised and when the public display of art becomes a corporate rather than a civic, communal activity. The strange after life of Andy Warhol should serve as a reminder that Rodin was only the first of many. The horrors of the new digital industrialisation of creativity, already manifest, suggest that all art destined for public view is about to enter a permanent night of the living dead. The grotesque (digitalised) banners for the Rodin show lend the Art Gallery of WA more than a slight resemblance to Lang’s Metropolis.

© David Bromfield 2001