Jaume Plensa: Genus and Species Jed Morse It is interesting to

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with
birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through
the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other,
and so dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting
around us.… [F]rom the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a
few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and
are being evolved.
– Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
Jaume Plensa: Genus and Species
Jed Morse
In the last paragraph of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin puts his revolutionary treatise
on evolution into perspective. After several hundred pages documenting decades of his observations and investigations into the origin of species – “that mystery of mysteries,” as he called it in his
introduction – Darwin leaves his reader not with certitude or dogma, but with a humble sense of
wonder. His sensorial description of nature (birds singing, insects flitting, worms wriggling through
damp earth) imagines its “elaborately constructed forms” still intimately connected with those first
few organisms from which they are descended and the divine power at their origin: “from so simple
a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
The physical world links to an ephemeral past and intangible spirit.
The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa sees his work in much the same way Darwin thought about
that tangled bank. For the past three decades, Plensa has also investigated, through the medium
of sculpture, what he calls “the big questions” with similar awe and wonder.1 In one of his earliest
works, Itinerari (Figure 1), a system of weights, lines, and pulleys is strung together in two open
metal frames creating complex interrelated networks. Like Darwin’s tangled bank, each element
depends on the others. Although the sculpture is entirely abstract, its physical presence recalls the
human body: the metal frames are over seven feet tall, large enough to contain the viewer, and are
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placed just inches apart. This work can be seen as the origin of a particular species of Plensa’s
work: elaborate forms constructed of individual elements whose materiality and physical presence
evoke the intangible, yet ever-present connection between human beings and the universe
around them. Since that early work, Plensa has achieved international renown for his large-scale
sculptures and public installations, which frequently incorporate light, sound, and text in transparent, often interactive structures that offer a visceral experience of the nexus between art,
language, biology, and metaphysics.
The title of the exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Jaume Plensa: Genus and
Species, underscores the notions of biological diversity and genetic development in Plensa’s work.
Although the sculptures presented are primarily new or recent creations, many of them maintain
physical and conceptual links to even their most distant sculptural ancestors in Plensa’s oeuvre.
Moreover, in the last fifteen years, the genealogical relations among the works have become
more explicit. Experimenting with various methods of sculptural reproduction, Plensa has created
groups of related works derived from a few essential elements – glass blocks, letters, the
human body, and light. The artist refers to these groups as “families,” preferring the biological
reference over the more clinical term, series. The families generally develop as follows: elements
are combined in several basic, evocative forms, or templates, such as enclosures, curtains, or
figures. The elements can then be recombined in a variety of ways to create several variations on
the forms, each one a unique, distinguishable entity. Of course Plensa uses these elements and
ideas freely, and they frequently cross-pollinate. Recently he has said that his work “follows this
rule: the development of independent cells that slowly continue to associate with one another
to eventually arrive at the construction of one unique, single body.”2 Here, the idea of reproduction,
either sculptural or biological, is key. Repetition and seriality are elements of art making that
have been explored and exploited by artists for millennia and can even be seen as a natural consequence of sculpture. The techniques of molding and casting, as well as more recent industrial
fabrication processes used in sculptural production, lend themselves to making multiples,
either identical or fraternal. Plensa expands this process of association using installations and
exhibitions as opportunities to experiment with pairing or grouping several individuals from
20
Figure 1
Jaume Plensa, Itinerari, 1981
Cast iron, nylon, and mahogany
94 1/2 x 51 3/4 x 23 5/8 in.
(240 x 130 x 60 cm.)
Collection of the artist
21
the same family to expand the symbolic impact of the encounter and explore aspects of duality
and multiplicity.
The continuing association and interrelation of independent parts is not only a method
of artistic investigation for Plensa, it has become the primary metaphor in his work. Plensa elaborated on this idea in a recent interview:
You are familiar with my fascination with texts and the importance I give to the written word, in
its most organic sense, due to its similarity with the body, with the way the human being grows and
expands. One simple letter is like a cell charged with memory. It may seem, a priori, that they
can have nothing in common with each other in view of the human personality and a notable differentiation in shape, but this tiny letter in association with others starts to form words, and these
in association with others give rise to texts, which in association with others proffer ideas, and
these in further associations give shape to the thought that nourishes cultures and religions, traditions and so on.… In short, the whole world! This is the idea of the Even Shetia, or foundational
stone, around which the temple was built, around the temple the city, around the city the country,
from the country to the world, the world to the universe, and so on and on.… It’s the idea of expansion from the smallest of things, from the association of diverse elements for the purpose of
constructing a more complex body. A complex body like ours formed of eyes, fingers, ears, hair,
feet, arms, lungs, heart, and so on and so forth.… Elements that when compared to each other
do not appear to have any relationship to one another, but in association do in fact perfectly articulate one single organization: the body.3
The idea of language as a creative force and physical, tangible presence that offers a direct link
to the intangible and the spiritual has been a fixture in human thought at least since the Gospel
According to John (circa 70–90 CE): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.… And the word became flesh and lived among us.”4 Many of Plensa’s
recent sculptures make explicit this ever-expanding link between the body and language (letters,
words, poetry), nature and culture, the tangible and the intangible. In the cosmos of Plensa’s
body of work, this principle of expanding relations applies. The artist’s method of expansion by association is not limited to the production of individual objects or families of works. It also unites
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Plensa’s entire oeuvre and connects it to a rich and heterogeneous network of poetic, scientific,
and historic sources. From the single element to the individual sculpture, to the series or family of
related works, to the entirety of his production as a whole, to the universe beyond, each everwidening circle contains within it the imprint of the elements that precede it and the suggestion
of the larger realm of ideas.
The term “genus and species” also acknowledges the taxonomic function of the museum,
which is charged with categorizing works of art and placing them within specific art historical contexts in order to better illuminate them and their impact. After studying at the Facultat de Belles
Arts, Universitat de Barcelona and at the Escola Superior de Disseny i d'Art Llotja, also in Barcelona,
Plensa began his career as an artist just after the fall of the Franco dictatorship. Although largely
isolated during the Franco years, Spanish art stayed connected to broader international developments through the abstract work of artists like Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tápies. After Franco,
Spain began making up for lost time, establishing ARCO, an international art fair in Madrid, and reengaging with the vibrant international art scene. Like many of his compatriots, Plensa left Spain in
the early 1980s to work and teach abroad. Over the next two decades, he lived in Berlin, Brussels,
Paris, and Halifax, and now lives and works in both Barcelona and Paris. Plensa’s work reflects some
of the broader concerns of art after the 1960s and ’70s. Like many artists in the 1980s and ’90s,
Plensa adopted the serial investigations of minimalism and also benefited from the vast expansion
of artistic methods in the previous decades that reconsidered traditional media like painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, and pioneered nontraditional modes such as installation, earthworks, performance, and documentation.5 Artists like Plensa embraced the freedom to use virtually
any material or engage any space that this newly expanded field offered. They rejected, however,
the strict formalism typical of the work of the 1960s and ’70s and reengaged with specific content,
returning to the human figure as a primary carrier of meaning and site for the investigation of the
universal themes that characterize our human experience: life, death, nature, culture, the body, and
the spirit. In this way, his work shares a kinship with that of artists like Jonathan Borofsky and
Antony Gormley, as well as his compatriot Juan Muñoz, who have also used the human body, often
their own bodies, as generic templates for reproduction and variation to explore the transcendent
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aspects of human experience. Although Plensa explores these subjects from the perspective of his
personal experiences and intellectual interests, his touchstones of artistic, literary, scientific, and
historic sources from prehistory to the present align his work with the grand tradition of European arts
and letters, as well as with contemporary critical thought. The paragraphs that follow investigate
Plensa’s recent production within the overlapping gene pools of his contemporaries and his historical predecessors.
Spillover (pages 83–85) is part of an extended family of works consisting of open form
figures constructed of steel letters that had its beginning in 2003 with works such as Tel Aviv Man I
(Figure 2) and also includes Twins I and II (pages 57–61) in this exhibition. These lettered figures
are also more distantly related to other groups of cast works that incorporate text with the body, including The Heart of Trees (pages 87–91) and Where Are You? I, II, and III (pages 71–75), also in
the current exhibition. The open form sculptures analogize most explicitly the organic development
of language with the growth of the body. Letters are joined together randomly to compose and
encapsulate the form of the body. As mentioned earlier, Plensa’s method is central to the meaning
of the works. The letters are not assembled, free-form, into the shapes of the bodies, but welded over a fiberglass template of the figure (page 84). This allows for virtually endless variations on
the same greatly symbolic form. In the case of Spillover, the letters spread out from the figure
into the surrounding area, mirroring the dissemination of language and culture and connecting the
figure to the broader world. The sculptures are slightly over life-size, enhancing our sense of
their physicality.
Procedurally, Plensa’s variations on a basic structure in the open-form sculptures recall minimalist investigations with elemental forms such as Sol LeWitt’s cube sculptures (Figure 3). Taking
an open cube as his basic unit of composition, LeWitt created a diverse array of constructions
exploring various spatial and visual effects of the relationships of the cubes. Whereas LeWitt used
the cube specifically for its neutrality (it does not refer to anything outside of itself and has no
associated biographical, historical, or narrative content), Plensa uses letters as his basic units to
explore evermore evocative variations of the relationship between language and the body.
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Figure 2 (left)
Jaume Plensa,Tel Aviv Man I, 2003
Iron
72 1/2 x 37 x 38 in. (184 x 94 x 96 cm.)
Roberto Bachman Collection, Lisbon
Figure 3 (right)
Sol Lewitt, Modular Cube/Base, 1968
Painted steel
20 1/8 x 58 1/2 x 58 1/2 in.
(51.1 x 148.6 x 148.6 cm.)
Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection
25
The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso is also an instructive touchstone for considering
Plensa’s methods. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rosso performed radical
experiments with the casting process. At the time, most artists used the casting process to recreate
a hand-modeled clay sculpture in a more durable material such as bronze. Rather than cast an
identical copy of a composition, Rosso essentially used his compositions as templates, casting them
over and over again, changing the composition slightly each time so that each cast was unique.6
Because of his sculptural treatment of text and prolonged investigation of language
and communication, several scholars have likened Plensa’s enterprise with that of Bruce Nauman.
This has always struck me as not quite right. Yes, like Nauman, Plensa uses texts to explore
the concept of communication, and his work evinces a similar freedom with materials and variety
of forms, but Plensa’s position seems to me to be completely opposite to Nauman’s. Whereas
Nauman’s work investigates the limits of communication and the displacement of experience,
Plensa’s work highlights the power of the written word and its direct, physical impact, even at its
most abstract. Although procedurally both artists take an analytic approach to language, Nauman’s
work suggests the deconstructivist paradigm of Jacques Derrida, while Plensa’s reaches for
the sensorial cosmos of William Blake. When Nauman posits a poetic statement, like The True Artist
Is an Amazing Luminous Fountain (Figure 4), he does so to test its veracity. When Plensa presents
the words of Blake, like in One Thought Fills Immensity (Figure 5), he does not doubt them.
Twins I and II represent a new variant of the open work form of Spillover and stem directly
from the monumental Nomade (Figure 12). The figures sit squarely on the ground, and the letters
do not spread from the base of the figure. Also, the front portions of the sculptures have been left
open and the scale is slightly enlarged so that viewers may walk into their interiors, experiencing
the works more directly as architectural enclosure. The figures are composed of letters from seven
distinct alphabets: Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, and Latin. Randomly juxtaposed, the letters simply become lyrical gestures and dynamic structural elements, highlighting the
abstract origins of language. For those unfamiliar with many of the alphabets, the letters do not
even suggest the specific sounds they represent. Plensa’s use of seven languages is also signifi-
26
Figure 4 (left)
Bruce Nauman, Untitled
(The True Artist Is an Amazing
Luminous Fountain), 1968
Cast aluminum, letters
8 in. (20.3 cm.) in height, variable widths
Collection of the artist
Figure 5 (right)
Jaume Plensa,One Thought Fills
Immensity, 1997
Bronze, copper, rope, and water
Dimensions variable
Gori Collection, Santomato di Pistoia, Italy
27
cant. The artist often associates the number with the seven major musical notes. For him, letters
and notes are the abstract building blocks of languages that, like sculpture, are able to convey
transcendent experiences:
Musicians are working with seven notes, and it seems so few elements to create the cosmos,
which is amazing. A writer is using twenty-six letters, which seems like nothing, but with this you
can create the universe. And sculpture has this kind of capacity to talk about the main questions,
things that affect human beings. In the deepest part of our memory, it’s a language that connects
everybody. Sculpture has this amazing capacity.7
The intimate association of words and music derives in part from Plensa’s formative experiences.
He is fond of telling the story of growing up “surrounded by letters, texts, books and music.” At the
center of these childhood memories was the piano that his father “was always playing.” “And I
remember the piano was a vertical piano in front of a wall, and I was so small, or the piano so big,
that I had the capacity to hide myself inside the piano.… I remember the smell of the piano, the
flavor of the dust on the wood, the felt.”8 For Plensa, the associations of books and music are bound
together with the visceral experience of an object – the piano – that could enclose and contain
his body.
Twins I and II also points to another recurring concern in Plensa’s work: duality. His exploration of the theme can be seen as early as the paired cages of Itinerari in 1981. Plensa has used
the title “Twins” in various languages, throughout his career, perhaps beginning with Mémoires
Jumelles (Figure 6) in 1991, an installation that featured pairs of bronze containers pinned overhead
to opposite walls of the gallery by tension bars. The fascination for Plensa is the idea that an entity
can embody itself and its opposite: light produces shadow, the body contains the soul. For him, duality is inherent to sculpture: “the use of the physical to touch on the world of the intangible.”9
The notion of a sculpture being a container also pervades Plensa’s work. From the open cages
of Itinerari in 1981 to the Boîtes d’Ombre of 1991–92 (Figure 7) to all of the works in the current
exhibition, Plensa’s sculptures have functioned as containers of space, or of the body, but also of
ideas. A 1995 installation, Islands I (Figure 8), arranged on the walls of the gallery seventy-three narrow polyester resin cases each containing a glass bottle varying in size and shape. Each of these
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Figure 6 (top)
Jaume Plensa, Mémoires Jumelles, 1992
Bronze and iron
Variable height x 275 1/2 x 433 in.
(700 x 1,100 cm.)
View of the installation at Palacio
de Velázquez, Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2000
Jordi Soley Collection, Barcelona
Figure 7 (center)
View of the artist’s studio in Barcelona
with Boîtes d’Ombre, 1992
Figure 8 (bottom)
Jaume Plensa, Islands I, 1995
Polyester resin, iron, fabric, and glass
Seventy-three elements, each 41 3/8 x
7 x 14 1/8 in. (105 x 18 x 36 cm.)
View of the installation in the Städtische
Galerie, Göppingen, Germany, 1995
29
vessels contained the remnants of a yellowish liquid and was sealed with a wax-soaked cloth and iron
ring stopper. The cases were inscribed with a number, 1–73, and the name of an artist, from Giotto
to Broodthaers, who was important for Plensa. As the art historian Carsten Ahrens noted, “each
individual sculptural vessel becomes a molded form of memory,” embodying “the spirit of an artistic
attitude, the island of an individual conceptual world whose importance for the present is frozen
by Plensa in a rigid form of resin.”10 Islands I constitutes a kind of self-portrait by proxy, as well as
an acknowledgment that the unit of the self is made of a multitude of independent elements or parts
of other selves. Many artists have made works as a kind of homage to figures of great influence,
in particular Pablo Picasso, who quoted from Old Master paintings in his work throughout his career,
but particularly in the last decades of his life.
Although the names in Islands I mean very specific things to Plensa, they may evoke other
ideas and emotions in other viewers. Plensa explains:
If I speak of Proust, Berlioz, or Velázquez, each of us will have a different memory from the
same information. If we speak of colours (blue, red, or black) of trees, of countries, or of words of
any kind, they are all like containers of a collective memory thanks to the personal experience
each of us actually has. I prefer to simply offer the word as a container and, from your own tradition
and experience with it, you can continue to enrich its contents.11
Typically, Plensa thinks of words and their formation in sculptural terms. For him, a mold for making a
sculpture, “the empty space that guards the memory of its form and volume,” is like the mouth.
They are containers that give life to the forms they produce: “the mouth seems to me to be a wonderful image of the mold. It is in the humid darkness of the mouth where words are born. It seems that
saliva helps us to unmold these words and issue them from the mouth like living springs.”12
Twenty-nine Palms (pages 51–55) belongs to a family of works including Silent Rain (2003)
and Song of Songs (2005) that present texts as strands of steel letters hung like curtains. The
works follow the primary methodology Plensa has adopted recently. They are assemblages of individual elements combined to create a larger, more complex body. In this case, steel letters
are strung together to make up texts, twenty-nine selections of poetry and prose meaningful to
30
the artist by authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Blake, León Felipe, Allen Ginsburg, Goethe,
William Shakespeare, César Vallejo, Oscar Wilde, and William Carlos Williams. The structure
echoes the formation of language itself: groups of letters form words; groups of words form ideas;
etc. The arrangement and position of the installation further underscore the abstract nature of
language. Hanging vertically, the letters float in the air, individuated, removed from the familiar horizontal, left-to-right format of the written word in the Western tradition. Because the letters twist
and turn, it is difficult to read the lines of text. Moreover, there is no clear theme that unites the
texts, other than their profound effect on the artist. In fact, it is this visceral and lasting effect that
Plensa means to evoke. The texts are meant to be experienced physically, more than read. The
strands of letters create a transparent curtain through which the viewer is obliged to pass. As one
moves through the curtain, the letters collide, making tinkling sounds like chimes. Poetry is transformed into music, the letters expressed as musical notes. The result is analogous to speech: the
written word is activated by the sound of the voice. Here, the notion of speech, of communication through sound, becomes palpable through one’s physical interaction with the letters. Plensa
associates these, and works like Islands I where words are frozen in resin, with a passage in
the book Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, in which words spoken in the frozen night
air crystallize and fall on the deck of Gargantua’s ship, forming a mound of frozen symbols that
only become audible with warmth.
The transparency of the curtain format and the act of passage through the text are
crucial signifiers of the transformational effect of reading. As Plensa expressed it recently, “Why
should the page of a book be opaque if when I pass to the other page my life is completely different
thanks to the experience of reading it?”13 The title, Twenty-nine Palms, equates the poems with
trees, an ancient symbol Plensa frequently employs to suggest the germination and organic development of ideas, rooted in the earth and growing toward the sky. There is no prescribed order for
installing the work. The strands have been installed single file in a long line, as well as in shorter
overlapping planes, or used to create a mazelike environment. Because the meaning of the work is
contingent upon the viewer’s own reading of and experience with the texts, possible interpretations expand exponentially.
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Plensa has treated the ancient Song of Songs, a book of the Hebrew Bible or Old
Testament that is also known as Song of Solomon or Canticles, in several works, including the curtains mentioned above as well as Song of Songs III and IV (pages 77–81). The text consists of
a cycle of poems about erotic love, largely in the form of a dialogue between a bridegroom and his
bride, which is often interpreted allegorically as a testament of God’s love. In this treatment
of the Song of Songs, Plensa combines the structural template of glass block enclosures, which
date to the mid-1990s in works such as Bedroom (Figure 9), with text and colored light, as he had
in works like The Traitor, The Porter, and Lady Macbeth (Figure 10). These installations provide
an environment for retreat and contemplation. Visitors are welcome to step inside the glass cubicles to experience isolation in a sensuous environment of modulating colored light. On the metal
doors to each cubicle are inscribed verses from the Song of Songs, so that one literally must
pass through the language of the text in order to enter the interior space, providing just one experience or reference for contemplation when within. The quietude of the interiors, the soft, hazy,
colored lights, and the aura of the ancient language provide a rich experience conducive to selfexamination and thoughts on the beauty of love in its many expressions.
Plensa’s process of elaboration by association is not limited solely to fabrication of individual works of art or related series. The artist extends this experimentation to the installation and
exhibition of his work. Plensa is frequently involved in the organization and installation of his exhibitions and relishes them as opportunities to “verify [his] intuitions.”14 Several of the installations
in the current exhibition (Twins I and II, La Llarga Nit, Song of Songs III and IV ) are made up of independent, self-sufficient sculptures that are shown together as coherent entities. These installations
extend Plensa’s investigation of language and communication, expanding the singular sculptural
statement into more complex dialogues. Such flexibility in presentation calls into question what
precisely constitutes the work of art and makes the meaning contingent on varying circumstances,
but also invigorates Plensa’s body of work by establishing new relations and suggesting new avenues of investigation.
La Llarga Nit (de Ausias March a Vicent Andrés Estellés) [The Long Night (From Ausias
March to Vicent Andrés Estellés)] (pages 47–49) belongs to a family of works featuring translucent
32
Figure 9 (top)
Jaume Plensa, Bedroom, 1995
Polyester resin, iron,
synthetic leather, and light
78 x 34 1/4 x 84 3/8 in. (198 x 87 x 217 cm.)
Fonds National d’Art Contemporain
Collection, Paris
Figure 10 (bottom)
Jaume Plensa, The Traitor, The Porter
and Lady Macbeth, 2000
Three sculptures, each molten tempered
glass, stainless steel, and light
91 x 35 x 35 3/8 in. (231 x 89 x 90 cm.)
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York
33
figures with changing colored lights atop tall, stainless steel poles, and more remotely to a whole
range of internally illuminated kneeling or seated figures adorned with text, such as the works in
the Tattoo and Sitting Tattoo series. All of these present the body and sculpture as a source of
energy and vehicle for communication. Perched high above the street, the figure acts as a beacon,
emitting energy and calling people with its cryptic message of changing lights. The title refers to
two great Valencian poets, Ausias March and Vicent Andrés Estellés, and quotes a line from
an Estellés poem that talks of the poet as a sentinel standing guard:
And you will hunger and you will thirst,
You will not be able to write poems
And you will stay silent throughout the night
While your people still sleep,
And you alone will be awake,
And you will be awake for all of them.
You were not born to sleep:
You were born to stay awake
In the long night of your people.
You will be their living word,
Their living word so bitter.15
Although La Llarga Nit is an autonomous sculpture consisting of a single figure atop one pole, the
artist requested that two copies of it be shown in the exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center. The
two versions will differ only in the rate at which the lights change colors, creating a dialogue between the two and further underlining the themes of communication and duality that run through
Plensa’s work. The artist has grouped several of the figures on poles before: seven in Conversation
à Nice (Figure 11), a 2007 installation in Nice, and six in Talking Continents, a permanent installation
in Jacksonville, Florida, created in 2003.
Another group of internally illuminated figures in the exhibition, Where Are You? I, II, and III
(pages 71–75), has only been exhibited as a group, but consists of three sculptures that could
34
Figure 11
Jaume Plensa, Conversation à Nice, 2007
Stainless steel, polyester resin, and light
Place Masséna, Nice, France
35
be autonomous artistic statements on their own. The works continue Plensa’s exploration of the
idea of the body as an intimate geography whose skin carries the memory of past experiences.
Each translucent, polyester resin figure is marked with words indicating geographic locations: one
details the poles and critical longitudes and latitudes; another carries the names of the major
land masses; and the last is marked with the names of the major bodies of water. Affixed high on
the wall and glowing with white light, any of the works would make a powerful and entirely selfsufficient statement on its own.
The question asked in the title is meant metaphysically, prompting the viewer to think about
his or her own transient experience and sense of place in the world. As Plensa scholar William
Jeffett has noted about these works, “Transparency suggests fragility, the ephemeral, and an inevitable entropy or mortality.” He then goes on to quote Plensa stating “I have always found the
transitory nature of matter to be quite beautiful and fascinating.”16 The form and content of Where
Are You? I, II, and III suggests interesting parallels with the work of Plensa’s contemporary,
British sculptor Antony Gormley. His sculpture Three Places (1983) features three cast lead figures
in different positions: lying, sitting, and standing. Although the casts were taken from molds of
Gormley’s own body, the figures are anonymous, like Plensa’s. They are also hollow, acting as containers of the space of the body. Here, Gormley also highlights the ephemeral condition of the
body and our experience of it in the world, identifying the body as a place, a site of transformation.
The Heart of Trees (pages 87–91) is related to an extensive series of self-portraits – some
with trees, some without – that pay homage to musicians and writers important to Plensa. Like
Islands I, these self-portraits recognize the impact all of these figures have had on the artist and acknowledge the multiple nature of the self. Their names are emblazoned in raised letters on his
skin. In The Heart of Trees, the seven figures carry the names of some of the greatest composers
and musicians. Of the other works that incorporate trees, this one is the only multiple-figure installation. The number of figures is significant here. As with Twins I and II, the number seven again
refers to the major notes. The arrangement of the figures is flexible, altered for each location in
which it is displayed. In this way, the seven figures function like musical notes or beats that
36
Figure 12
Jaume Plensa, Nomade, 2007
Quai Saint-Jaume, Musée Picasso, Antibes
37
can be rearranged to change the tenor of the piece. Clustered tightly together or spread out more
disparately, the artist can alter the rhythm and tone of the experience. Sprouting from the loins
of the figures, the tree serves to reinforce the theme of reproduction and variation. Again, Plensa’s
theme mirrors his method. The figure becomes the template on which he can change the letters to alter the references and evoke a variety of associations. The tree also symbolizes the growth
of ideas. Plensa associates it with the alchemist emblem, the Philosophers’ Tree, “sinking its
roots into the earth (the physical) and reaching with its branches into the cosmos (the spiritual).”17
Reborn from dead matter, the Philosophers’ Tree represents the endurance of the spiritual beyond
the physical.
Plensa’s reliance on the figure, repetition of forms, incorporation of nature, and evocation
of the transcendent through the physical find an analogue again in the work of Gormley. For his
installation Another Place from 1997, Gormley created a hundred solid iron figures from seventeen
body cast templates, virtually identical but with slight variations in posture, and arranged them
along the shoreline looking to the horizon. The figures stretched for 2.5 kilometers down the beach
and 1 kilometer out to sea. They were all positioned at the same level so that the changing tide would
alternately conceal and reveal more of the figures. Clustered together in some areas and widely
dispersed in others, the rhythm of the arrangement of the figures was reinforced by the rhythm
and movement of the tide. The slow decay of the iron figures in the salt water provides a powerful
metaphor for the transience of life and human experience, as well as the eternal persistence
of nature.
Plensa’s multi-figure installations provide an instructive counterpoint to the work of Juan
Muñoz. Using the same face and general body shape as templates, Muñoz created several
installations in the 1990s of groups of generic figures distinguished only by differences in pose and
posture and engaged in social interactions. In the first of these, Conversation Piece I–V (1991),
Muñoz brought together several figures made as distinct, independent works of art and arranged
them in the gallery to suggest a complex range of social relations. Despite the similarities in their
methods and their common investigation of the limits of communication, Muñoz’s work is intentionally theatrical and emphasizes the psychological tensions in our personal interactions.
38
Figures 13 and 14
Jaume Plensa, Crown Fountain, 2004
Millenium Park, Chicago
39
The exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center also includes an installation of eleven
monumental stone heads. The group of heads is based on three-dimensional scans of the heads
of five models: Alegría, Anna, Awilda, Irma, and Núria (pages 63–69). Each scan is digitally
altered and then the volume is rough-hewn mechanically in alabaster, with finishing details carved
by hand. Like Plensa’s crouching figures gripping their knees and the glass block enclosures,
the heads also evince a pronounced interiority. The figures have their eyes closed, suggesting, like
the symbolists of the late nineteenth century, the interior world of dreams and the subconscious.
This is the newest species of the Plensa kingdom, related to the large-scale, open-work
head, Sho, the monumental installation, Dream, and descended from the artist’s work on the
incredible Crown Fountain in Chicago (Figures 13–16). This twenty-first century interpretation of the
public fountain includes two, fifty-foot-tall glass block towers facing each other over a broad,
shallow pool. Water cascades down the towers as enormous screens inside project the faces of
average Chicagoans. At certain moments, the gargantuan heads on the screens pucker their
lips and, like modern-day gargoyles, spew a stream of water onto the plaza below. The fountain has
become a gathering point and place of respite for the entire city. Residents and tourists come
to splash or relax by the edge of the pool, refreshed by the life-renewing force of the water. Like the
heads of the people who appear in the screens of Crown Fountain, the heads in the installation
at the Nasher Sculpture Center are elongated and monumental. Although each stone head is an
independent work of art, they are shown here as a single, unified installation.
This type of experimentation with grouping several independent yet related objects together
for exhibition recalls Alberto Giacometti’s presentation of the Women of Venice at the 1956 Venice
Biennale. In preparation for concurrent exhibitions in Venice, Italy and Bern, Switzerland, Giacometti
modeled ten figures out of clay, using the same armature for each. When he would finish a figure,
his brother Diego would take a mold of it to be cast in plaster. Then, Giacometti would completely
remodel the figure using the same clay and armature. Although each figure represented a unique
and independent work, Giacometti exhibited the six figures he selected for Venice on the same large
platform (Figure 17). In the late 1940s and early ’50s, the artist had created small-scale compositions of multiple figures on a sculpted ground plane, like The Glade (1950). The exhibition of the
40
Figure 15 (top)
Jaume Plensa, Sho, 2007
Painted stainless steel
157 1/2 x 157 1/2 x 118 1/8 in. (400 x 400 x
300 cm.) Meadows Museum, SMU,
Dallas. Museum Purchase with funds from
The Pollock Foundation, the family of
Mr. and Mrs. Richard R. Pollock,
and the family of Mr. Lawrence S. Pollock,
III, in honor of Mrs. Shirley Pollock,
MM.2009.01
Figure 16 (bottom)
Jaume Plensa, Dream, 2009
St. Helens, Liverpool
41
Women of Venice offered Giacometti an opportunity to see what effect a multiple figure composition would have at a larger scale. One can suppose that the artist drew from this experience two
years later when he was commissioned to create sculptures for the plaza of the new headquarters
of Chase Manhattan Bank.
In the case of Plensa’s installation of the eleven alabaster heads, the effect is one of
creating a ritualistic space. Taken individually, the sculptures evoke the colossal stone heads found
at Olmec archeological sites like San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán (Figure 18). Collectively, the group
recalls ancient installations like the large stone figures at Easter Island, or, as Plensa has mentioned,
the avenue of the sphinxes at the Great Temple of Amun complex at Karnak in Egypt (Figure 19).
Like Karnak, Plensa’s installation plan calls for the heads to be aligned in two rows, facing each other,
with one head placed in the center at the beginning of the rows. One can imagine the serial repetition of the forms having a similarly numinous effect. As Plensa has said, “It’s like music when you
repeat, repeat, repeat the same note.”18 Also like music, one’s experience of the sculptures is
intuitive and evocative of a broad range of references in our collective consciousness:
My dream is if [viewers] could feel these primary emotions that sculpture has the capacity to
convey. It’s like a container of memory. I’m excited to see if this group of pieces can evoke all these
ideas, but in a very direct way. I would love if the people feel emotions immediately, not with the
kind of intellectual reflection. My intention is the same I felt in Egypt. You are a part of that. You are
one more head walking through. You are the twelfth element.19
The exceptionally broad appeal of Plensa’s work stems in part from the richness of its
references, as well as the clarity of its symbolism. Language is by nature hermetic: it includes those
who speak it and excludes those who don’t. But Plensa’s handling of language – any language,
every language – makes it symbolic of the universal effort to communicate. Sculpture, like poetry,
is a succinct and evocative expression that enriches and ennobles our common experience.
The impact of each can be both immediate and long-felt. For Plensa, sculpture provides the physical and visceral link to a shared, persistent, and ineffable sensation of our humanity.
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Figure 17 (top)
Alberto Giacometti
installation of six Women of Venice
at the Venice Biennale, 1956
Figure 18 (center)
Olmec, San Lorenzo Monument I
c. 1200–900 BCE
112 1/4 in. (285 cm.) in height
Figure 19 (bottom)
Avenue of Sphinxes at Karnak, Temple of
Amun, Karnak, September 1, 1947
43
1 “If art can have some value, of course,
it’s that of permanently asking the big
questions.” Jaume Plensa in Montse
Badia, “Conversation with Jaume
Plensa,” Jaume Plensa (Málaga: Centro
de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga,
2005), 112.
2 Gilbert Perlein and Jaume Plensa,
“Conversation,” Jaume Plensa
(Valencia: IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art
Modern, 2007), 60.
3 Ibid.
4 The Gospel According to John, 1:1 and
14, The New Oxford Annotated Bible,
Augmented Third Edition, New Revised
Standard Version, Michael D. Coogan,
ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, Inc., 2007), 147–48
New Testament.
5 See, for example, Rosalind Krauss,
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field,”
October, vol. 8 (Spring 1979), 30–44.
6 See, in particular, Harry Cooper et. al.,
Medardo Rosso, Second Impressions
(New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003).
7 Interview with the author, October 14,
2009.
8 Ibid.
9 Perlein and Plensa, “Conversation,”
Jaume Plensa, 58.
10 Carsten Ahrens, ed., Jaume Plensa
(Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2003),
118.
11 Perlein and Plensa, “Conversation,”
Jaume Plensa, 72.
12 Ibid., 60–64.
13 Interview with the author, October 14,
2009.
14 Ibid.
15 Vicent Andrés Estellés, “Proprietats de
la pena,” Llibre de les meravelles
(Eliseu Climent, ed Valencia: 1976) as
translated by William Jeffett, “Jaume
Plensa: The Question of Sculpture,”
Jaume Plensa (Valencia: IVAM Institut
Valencià d’Art Modern, 2007), 34.
16 William Jeffett, “Jaume Plensa: The
Question of Sculpture,” Jaume Plensa
(Valencia: IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art
Modern, 2007), 36–38.
17 Perlein and Plensa, “Conversation,”
Jaume Plensa, 72.
18 Interview with the author, October 14,
2009.
19 Ibid.
Plates
44