Torso of a Young Man [I]

An epiphany for this project, which helped me envision its shape, occurred when I was leaving the David Smith retrospective at Tate Modern a number of years ago. One of the final rooms was the media room, and the 1964 televised interview between Smith and Frank O’Hara I discuss in Chapter 1 was being projected on a large wall. I had not intended to watch this...

Some time in the late 1950s or early 1960s, in the heyday of high modernist formalism, the painter Ad Reinhardt came up with a statement that enjoyed a remarkable resonance because it was so in tune with long-standing attitudes to sculpture: ‘A definition of sculpture: something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.’ In more traditional gallery installations, the sculptures often do feel a little out of place, either unframed and somewhat awkward intrusions on the viewer’s space …