THE BEAUTY OF THINGNESS

Sculptures by John Udvardy at Nancy Devine Gallery

Over the past three decades, I have spent (and possibly wasted) a great deal of both real and virtual ink critiquing the conceptualism that suffused American art between my teens in the 1970s and my middle age in the 2010s. Despite the outsider status I created for myself in this way, it was a natural enough response for a painter whose whole creative reason for being has always resided in the making of physical things. My writings on this topic have been launched across many different angles of attack through the years, but they were always aimed at the same conclusion — i.e., that we lost sight of something artistically vital in that turn towards pure thought. 

John Udvardy, a sculptor now in his late eighties, has been cranking out a cornucopia of determinedly material works throughout that same span of time in which I have been resisting and complaining about conceptualism. A sharp intellect and deep art historical knowledge are clearly two of the driving forces in his work, but the objects he makes are ultimately, and mainly, about their own physical reality as things. 

This is an actual, rather than a philosophical or notional reality. It is a truth of objects, rather than of ideas. Udvardy’s sculpture is made of real things that did real jobs in an earlier life, and whose original meaning is not eclipsed by their new purpose, but subsumed into it. Part of what gives weight, motion or purpose to his pieces are the former movements and purposes of the things from which they are made.

Working with found materials such as old hand tools and other bits of mechanical hardware and equipment, Udvardy builds a three-dimensional language which cycles back and forth between the beauty residing in the prior utility of its components and that of the newly abstracted whole into which he has fit them. This visual two-step repeats again and again as we look. Here we see the overarching form of the piece, there we come back to recognizing that its color, shape, weight and character are all inseparable from what it once was, and what it once did, only to find that now it is doing that job no more; now it is doing this job — and so on. It seems that there are no periods on his sentences, only ellipses. 

Found art and Readymades have been with us ever since Duchamp scrawled a signature on a urinal and put that famous bicycle wheel on the stool — or when Picasso mated that same conveyance’s seat to its handlebars to create a bull’s head. But where Duchamp’s urinal and wheel are conceptually ironic, and Picasso’s bull is perhaps a bit tragically heroic, Udvardy offers us no such directing narrative on which to chew. There are no instructive captions, either literal or implied, affixed to, or embedded in his art as guideposts to its meaning. He puts the pieces together and leaves us to sort out for ourselves what to make of them; a journey of discovery which presumably already took place in the artist's studio.

Much of the art of our time has cleaved to a sharply proscribed program of illustration and explanation — of “contextualizing”, “unpacking” and creating elaborate, sometimes hectoring philosophical, political or personal stories for the works that artists create. This has always felt to me like a project of instruction — of being told by an artist what I ought to know. But as I have aged, it has become increasingly clear to me that, while there are many things about which I have strong, even sometimes passionate opinions, I don’t actually know anything certain about this universe in which we live. I don't even know much about myself for that matter. What’s more, this not-knowing might even be a good thing. I tend, therefore, to be pretty suspicious of anyone else’s efforts to tell me that they know something I don’t.

All we artists can ever really know for sure is what we feel in the moment of creation. The same holds true for the viewer in the moment of seeing what we have created. Narratives and concepts can certainly be interesting, and even provocative, but a work of art doesn’t have to be ABOUT anything in order to be meaningful or moving. Or, to put it another way, perhaps the most affecting meanings are in us. When art is doing its job, it can open a window into what we actually are — but maybe didn’t realize — in all the multilayered fabric of purposes, contradictions and sensations that define our lives. We are all of us assemblages of tools and materials whose functions are forever being challenged, altered and repurposed. For this viewer at least, an art that is beautiful or evocative entirely in and of itself, with no accompanying explanation, can be a pleasurable relief, a place of respite from which my own, too often obscured meanings can be plumbed. 

Nancy Devine Gallery is located at 57 Water Street in Warren, RI

Hours – Thursday to Sunday, 1 to 4pm. Or by appointment

Contact: nancydevinegallery@gmail.com / or by calling (917) 697-6383

John Udvardy’s work is on view until November 10th, 2024