Of all the reasons to make sculpture, one of the very oldest is to represent the human figure. Think of the plump Ice Age fertility figurine known as the Venus of Willendorf, or the sleek marble idols of early Bronze Age Cycladic art. Perhaps they were meant to be gods, but if so, they were still deities conceived within a human frame. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all made the human form central to their artistic traditions. In fact, creating three-dimensional approximations of people has been a common preoccupation of sculptors for thousands of years.
Except, that is, for a few brief decades during the 20th century. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, when abstraction and then conceptual art were all the rage, any artist who pitched up in a gallery with a sculpture of a person was persona non grata. In the wake of the elegant and poetic propositions of Anthony Caro, as well as Minimalism’s geometric repetitions in America, artists who wished to be considered cutting-edge had to go abstract. The human figure was seen as naff, outdated, and too close for comfort to the sort of idealised public art that totalitarian dictators had favoured just a generation before.
But trends in art, as in fashion, can be inexplicably fickle – and according to The Human Factor, a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, the pendulum swung back in the direction of figurative art during the Eighties. One of the earliest works in this survey of 25 artists who have engaged with the human figure over the past quarter century is Bear and Policeman by the controversial American Jeff Koons, who is about to be the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York.
First shown at Koons’s landmark Banality exhibition, staged simultaneously across three international galleries in 1988, this polychromed wood sculpture presents a gigantic bear with deranged eyes, fluffy pelt and a rainbow-stripy T-shirt grabbing at the whistle of a clean-shaven English bobby. Initially, it looks like some sort of memorial for the creator of a sweet children’s television series. Quickly, though, you begin to detect unsettling signals. The bear is enormous and grotesque: it would be nightmarish to come face to face with such an overpowering, shaggy monster in reality. The beast clutches forcefully at the startled bobby’s phallic whistle, so that the sculpture also offers a metaphor for sexual humiliation.
Moreover, the style of the piece is so cloyingly saccharine – like swollen, rotten fruit sweet to the point of putrefaction – that the whole thing becomes an abomination of kitsch. It is as if Koons wanted to save figurative sculpture from being unfashionable via abasement, by producing the most awkward object he could imagine. You could never accuse Bear and Policeman of being naff, because naff is what it so determinedly sets out to be.
Koons may have helped to rehabilitate the idea of sculpting the human figure, but his kitsch way of going about it remained peculiar to him. The other artists in this exhibition have approached the subject in all manner of different ways. The German Isa Genzken presents shop-window mannequins dressed in bizarre retro-futuristic costumes – part Eighties raver, part sci-fi android. (Mannequins also appear in the work of Thomas Hirschhorn and John Miller.)
The Frenchman Pierre Huyghe offers a memorable concrete cast of a reclining nude by a 20th-century Swiss sculptor, but with a huge misshapen beehive, abuzz with busy, swarming insects, in place of a head. It is the sort of thing that Max Ernst and the Surrealists would have loved. Rebecca Warren’s clay and bronze women are so bulging and distorted that they are almost unrecognisable, whereas Paul McCarthy’s That Girl (T.G. Awake) consists of three casts of the actress Elyse Poppers sitting, entirely naked, her body depilated and exposed, like a patient awaiting a medical examination upon glass-topped trestle tables. The casts are so extraordinarily lifelike that they replicate every last crease, fold, mottle and blemish. Her eyes glisten; moisture is visible above her upper lip. Coming this close in public to a woman offering herself up so unashamedly produces a confusingly visceral response. It is the tantalising letdown of voyeurism to be attracted to a simulacrum, and not the real thing.
Swiss-born Urs Fischer provides yet another take on the female form and sexual desire: his Untitled (2001) is a wax cast of a deliberately crude, totem-like image carved out of Styrofoam, representing a naked siren-cum-sex doll with gaping mouth and scarlet nipples. Protruding from the top of her head is a wick. Once lit, the sculpture becomes a gigantic candle, gradually dissolving into a formless pool of melted wax over the course of the exhibition.
Meanwhile, the British artists Yinka Shonibare MBE and Ryan Ganderboth re-imagine Edgar Degas’s famous Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, the wax original of which the 19th-century Frenchman kept, almost like a fetish, in his studio until his death. In Shonibare’s version, the dancer, now headless, clutches a pistol behind her back – a surprise, perhaps, for frisky old men with dishonourable intentions. Gander is even more of a mischief-maker: his two bronze casts show Degas’s dancer “off-duty”: sitting by the side of her plinth enjoying a fag, and standing on tiptoes and peering through a window. That said, if mischief is your thing, then head straight for the chapel-like gallery enclosing Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001), a kneeling, pint-sized, possibly penitent Adolf Hitler.
There are lots of strong and engaging works in this exhibition, not least the impressive tableaux of the German artist Katharina Fritsch (she’s also the lady behind the enormous ultramarine cockerel currently roosting on top of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square). In her three sculptures, Fritsch presents casts of solitary standing figures tinted a single colour against two-dimensional backgrounds in shades of a contrasting hue. The colours of the figures are so dense and matt that they seem to suck in light, imbuing each sculpture with a sort of charismatic gravitational force, compelling our attention. Since they are just one colour, the figures also have an otherworldly, uncanny quality – like apparitions. In Giant and 4th Postcard (Franconia) (2008), for instance, a potbellied caveman, coloured a ghostly grey and modelled upon a real-life acromegalic taxi driver, leans on a club in front of a wild and primeval vista.
A sense of the uncanny is an important characteristic of this exhibition: often, walking through it, you find yourself startled by some powerful, possibly menacing, presence suddenly visible out of the corner of your eye.
Ideas of disjointedness, fragmentation, and decay are also common. How far we have come since the 19th century, when noble, classical ideals still felt relevant. We find a memory of this tradition in Ugo Rondinone’s four life-size nude dancers. Reminiscent of the sylphlike figures of Alfred Gilbert, these graceful wax effigies sit slumped, as though defeated, and appear to be coming apart, literally, at the seams visible on their surfaces.
But a show like this does come with caveats. The theme of the human figure is so broad that it can be hard to draw meaningful connections between the works on display. Ultimately, what do we really learn from considering Koons’s kitsch statuary, executed on his behalf by master craftsmen, alongside, say, the feminist sculptures of Rebecca Warren, in which traces of the artist’s hand are deliberately left visible?
Moreover, there are one or two perversities about the selection of the exhibition. Obvious and popular artists have been omitted: the likes ofAntony Gormley,Ron Mueck, Juan Munoz and Charles Ray. It would have been nice to provide some historical context, with the work of George Segal and Duane Hanson (both of whom were still producing sculptures in the Eighties and Nineties). And, frankly, much of the art feels familiar: Rebecca Warren’s SHE (2003), Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (1999), the work of Fritsch, Genzken and Georg Herold – all have been shown prominently in London in recent years.
In truth, there is something modish about this exhibition: many of the artists are well known on the international biennale and art-fair circuit. This is fine – the curators can congratulate themselves that they have picked the “right” sculptors, who wouldn’t look out of place in galleries from Sydney to Sao Paulo – but it isn’t particularly original or surprising. It also means that occasionally, as in the cases of Hirschhorn and Rachel Harrison, there are some forgettable lapses in quality.