ONE ARTIST CAN HIDE ANOTHER ONE
Since the beginning of the 1980s, it has frequently been possible to see Peter Briggs' work in group shows that have made their mark historically. In the 1980 Paris Biennale, he showed an installation: four pieces divided the space rhythmically, each occupying its own specific space whilst rendering the space itself palpable. In the centre of the room, a piece made up of blocks of slate, black sand and a metal ring lead the eye towards another piece made of sheet steel stood vertically, parallel to the wall, which in its turn visually echoed a third glass piece slotted vertically into the corner of the room. The fourth piece entitled "Treble Clef" summed up the other three. Thus it was from the very first time that he showed his work, that Peter Briggs was to be seen as a sculptor using a multiplicity of rich modes of expression ñ in the diversity of materials he used, his way of treating space and his involvement with the relationship between weight and balance. The same year at the Saint Etienne Museum exhibition entitled "Après le Classicisme", he showed a piece, in which equilibrium, fragility and transparency were brought into play, made of cut out, painted glass.
In 1981, at the Paris Musée d'Art Moderne, he showed one of his first screw-shaped, sawn marble pieces in the "Baroques 81" exhibition. The inside and the outside of the sculpture were visible from all sides as in a Moebus' strip: the movement of the form given by the sculptor was set in opposition to the raw material. Other similar pieces were shown in 1982 at the Pompidou Centre (the Musée National d' Art Moderne) in the "In Situ" exhibition.
From 1983 onwards and especially at the 1984 Fontevraud Abbey Symposium, Peter Briggs worked on small-scale refractory clay and porcelain pieces which resembled objects. These "Pots à Feu" and "Fours" were made in series, so that the artist could make the form he was seeking evolve as far as it could.
During approximately the same period, the artist was working on pieces made from wood and copper or copper and porcelain, the inspiration for which was the forking of branches. These pieces gradually evolved into lost wax and 'lost wood' sculptures. Fire and heat become a tool for the sculptor ñ certain sculptures make this idea concrete by using the representation of flames, others are heart-shaped. The notion of circulation metaphorically sends the light to the heart of the sculpture.
Peter Briggs has worked iron, steel, copper, bronze, clay, glass and felt; he has cut out, cast, hammered and forged. What link can there possibly be between these sculptures made of cut out glass, porcelain covered with silver leaf, sawn marble and lost wax castings in bronze? There is no point looking at the sculptures chronologically as the artist often works in several ways at one and the same time. Recently he was working on small-scale porcelain pieces in his studio at the same time as a large-scale commissioned sculpture for the city of Rennes.
It is not just the artist's excellent knowledge of the history of sculpture and especially of minimal and conceptual art, as well as arte povera that allows him to work in this way, it is only in fact when one visits Peter Briggs' studio that it is possible to see what is the common denominator in all these different forms of sculptural expression. The first thing that one might notice is a kind of question-mark, or more poetically, a spiral. This form allows him to fix a point around which the sculpture can develop, defying the laws of gravity, showing us at one and the same time the interior and exterior of its surface, allowing air to circulate within its open and closed spaces, to capture light, and even to make it shine from the interior on occasion. This form is worked into and through a whole range of materials on differing scales, from the small art-object, worked by hand up to the monumental stone sculpture. The materials bend, sway and entwine themselves around each other.
Far from being aloof and didactic, Peter Briggs' work, while respecting the basic tenets of sculptural activity, can be read and understood on different levels. Occasionally, one element predominates: symbolism is present in his recent bronzes, whereas in the steel and glass pieces, it is their fragile equilibrium that is brought to the fore. However, concentrating too long one just one characteristic is to miss the point. This is why it seemed to me important to assemble all these pieces for this exhibition, in order to be able to rediscover in our own time its range and complexity. Perhaps we will be able to understand what Peter Briggs is searching for, be it a "vision of nature", a "closer link between gestuality and form" or perhaps "the space where the historic relationship between our era and the mannerist period is played out".
Blandine Chavanne
PETER BRIGGS HEARTH, HEART, EARTH, EAR, ART, HEAR
In the early twentieth century, when statuary became sculpture, it opened up whole new areas of investigation. It is often thought that changes in notions on volume in contemporary sculpture have been as significant as abstraction was to painting. Painting and sculpture were thought to share each other's deepest enthusiasms, discoveries and passions.
However, even though from a didactic point of view this may be true, it has no base in fact. Whereas abstraction in painting will let its mental relationship with subjectivity be so refined as to be precious, sculpture cleaves to matter, to the object and the primitive aspect of its basic proposition.
So the parallel history of these two art forms would be that of a separation rather than a harmonious love affair. In fact, painting has never stopped providing its own subject-matter, producing a richness of inspiration which constitutes its implicit paradox, making it at one and the same time, archaic and modern. Sculpture, however, after abandoning all the tenets of statuary sculpture, opened up a vertiginous space which first of all had to be occupied or controlled in some way, or saturated. By that I mean, that as long as sculpture concerned itself with recreating a pre-existing form, the sculptor focused on the idea of a copy whose implicit qualities created so sharp a focus for the imagination that only the desire for its existence was channelled into this "stone extravaganza". Sculpture was reminiscent of Don Juan, moving through space in search of forms to possess and recreate.
Contemporary sculpture has been confronted with limitless space, in which the vital force of representation has run down, and from which the pre-existing forms have forever disappeared. Like all the sculptors of his generation, Peter Briggs was faced with this immense empty space which becomes an object in itself, the subject-matter, the work.
What is there left to do when space is no longer defined in reference to statuary sculpture? How do you occupy such a new nomadic space? Conceptualists, land artists and minimalists have all answered the question in their different ways, occupying space with their ideas, yet the installations they produced worked strangely enough independently of the artist, rather like a series of anonymous propositions, the product of an epoch, a civilisation or a situation. Yet again, the most recent generation of British sculptors, deliberately avoiding the metaphorical content implicit in any act of creation, set out to fabricate sculptures, just as one makes objects, rediscovering the lost innocence and simplicity of the work process. Peter Briggs does not work like this.
Now, finally, the desire for a global view of what is largely a retrospective exhibition has made itself manifest. The work appeals through its clarity of exposition but the apparent diversity of forms is disconcerting. Peter Briggs' sculpture up to now has moved in different directions with mobility being its only constant. Since the Paris Biennale, when his work first appeared geared to a multiplicity of statements, it has never stopped proliferating, a sign of surprising energy. Peter Briggs has his place on the contemporary art scene but he has deliberately set himself apart. A French sculptor, though English by birth, he is marked by a cultural ambiguity. But why undertake such an adventure if not to lose oneself on the pretext of ultimately finding oneself? Thus the artist almost refines himself out of existence, surrounding himself with silence. Lightness is the watchword for this artist who could play the heavy guy if he wanted. One of the secrets of Peters Briggs' work lies in the alchemical transmutation of form and matter, and in this context his silence is suitably enough a way of being rigorous. Peter Briggs, the sculptor, is no mere juggler, and the finished object, the result of his labour and his discoveries, has a visual impact, related to time, to gravity and the secret ingredients inherent to matter. In the midst of this mobility, my affection leans to what the artist keeps to himself: the drawing-books' confessions and secrets of his strength.
For me, the way in which Peter Briggs constitutes and disseminates his work resembles the pastoral activity of a shepherd, custodian of a multitude of ideas and propositions. A shepherd moving along at his own rate surrounded by thoughts and gestures, a host of sculptures, evoking their common destiny through a myriad of signs. In such a richly constituted and numerous group, no act of creation, no matter how old it might seem, is abandoned simply because it was a first draught, a first try. The internal logic of the work as a whole allows concepts to be lost only to be found again at an opportune moment and to come to the forefront.
The notion of the heredity of the ideas is never lost, and it is often by renovating the oldest concepts that the body of work is renewed. The sculptor therefore moves forward, constantly accompanied by the whole of his work, with no remorse, never abandoning anything in the backwaters of trial and error.
This exhibition shows at one and the same time the work but also its constituent elements that lend themselves especially well to being shown in a necessarily analytical museum context.
INVENTORY
Even before any confirmation became necessary, the poetics of the work became apparent as an essential part, regulating the internal movements of this production with its harmonic resonances, its caesuras and its silences. From amongst the forces uniting the manifold forms the artist deals with, the secret mortar holding them together must be found. In the artist's notes, his preoccupation with an inventory is betrayed. On one page, the materials desired are named, like so many duties to be performed in life. His speculative movement through space begins exactly in this way ñ naming the materials, foreseeing how they will come together, seeing in the mind's eye what the hand will eventually perform. All this means that for Peter Briggs, any surprise is ruled out, the mind is trained to grasp all the possibilities as if adventure were itself a sort of destiny. The imagination controls any roughness in the material ñ the malleability and elasticity of the clay, the transience of the sand. The inventory is an invocation, a process of disenchantment and a means of getting closer, a litany sent up to what could be.
Here the desire to neglect nothing to do with the physical aspect of the sculpture is forcefully stated: whether it is grey marble or sand, steel or clay, raw materials or a ready-made object, an anvil or a pouring funnel, this message is hammered home time and time again, in everything beaten out by the tool used.
The range of the written inventory of materials reflects the depths of desire that engendered it and expresses more aptly the concrete nature of Peter Briggs' work than ever words could. After the Word comes the Deed.
Peter Briggs' work was in the first instance quite obviously analytical. His relationship with one or other of the materials used, the key role they play in the syntax of his forms bear witness to his anxiety and the curiosity stemming from his anxiety. Peter Briggs seems to be constantly in the centre of his work and on the periphery, anxious to produce and to protect it. It is no doubt for this reason that several pieces seem to have been produced together: the hemp rope helping along the slate whose corner sends the eye abruptly to the metal, which in turn is companion to the glass.
Frequently the constraints of a certain dependence on materials are played off against the pleasure of licentious infidelity to them.
Dependence comes when the solutions adopted are definitively worked into the piece. Peter Briggs then sets himself to encounter the materials, as if duty-bound to face them as an apprentice whose acts are never gratuitous, since henceforward they will always be remembered. Within the logic of his inventory two forces or two strategies are measured against each other: the force or strategy of a mass against the force or strategy of the density of matter.
The infidelity of freedom lies in swiftly appropriating ideas, inasmuch as devotion is only rivalled by infidelity. The new idea is needed, grasped, comprehended and confronted to the work as a whole. Peter Briggs chastely organizes his galaxy through the amorous relationship he has with the materials he uses. What he constantly explores are the resistance and breaking-points of a material with equal fascination for the fragment as for the mass.
Density and fragility go hand and hand in his work, texture and fracture as well. The pieces in granite, glass and lead show the same fascination in a material for that which guarantees both its solidity as a whole or its fragmentation. When broken glass and stone are used in Peter Briggs' work, wreaking the violence of their own strength upon themselves, the violence is measured. The first part of his work is therefore largely based on the idea of fracture, with materials working for the sculptor, who is still observing the accident which he has set up and yet allows him to call himself a sculptor.
The sculptor's logic is close to that of the strategist when he plans the approaches to the materials in order to triumph over their inertia.
FORMS
This work is based, as in any sculpture, on a repertoire of forms. A sculptor's purpose, whatever the effects of volume may be, is to inscribe in space contours held by the memory, thus sacrificing density and depth. What do the artist's ideas become in two dimensions under the synthesizing effect of memory?
Initially Peter Briggs used two opposing lines ñ the circle and the angle. Both forms address space identically.
The circularity contains in itself the image of the desire for his sculpture to work in relation to space. The gesture which forms the circle, coming from the depths of time and whose meaning a magician such as Crowley tried to unravel, is an attempt to appropriate the image of the world. Although such a gesture owes something to the demigod, it is also reminiscent of an embrace. Symbolically, the transcription of the circle is related to Prometheus' theft, to that moment in his disobedience when the thief became the intermediary between the power of the gods and the world of men. Fire and light appear in Peter Briggs' work as a result of this transgression. However, as far as the first sculptures we are discussing are concerned, this involvement is non-violent, signifying through a geometric figure that imagination proposes a solution to the infinity of space by creating a centre. Peter Briggs worked on the idea of circularity for a long period until he evolved the idea of a matrix which produced the work and also conferred upon it its initial form and definitive structure. The sculptor is now no doubt in the centre of the circle, around him his work his work is organized retrospectively. Being simultaneously eccentric and concentric is part of the logic of his way of working. From the point of view of a circle, the acuteness of an angle, a form standing erect showing its edge are so many ways of taking over space, not by horizontal extension but by vertical elevation. Furthermore this aspect of Peter Briggs' work is contained in the density of the heavy materials he uses such as granite, slate or marble. The circular launching-pad the angle uses thrusts up a rocky outcrop, reduced to its most elementary form, constituting a theatrical landscape ñ the idea of relief.
Peter Briggs' sculpture is initially structured around these two forms which become two of its dimensions. It is interesting to note that the third dimension does not really fill out the volume but quite simply gives it its weight and density. It is sculpture that is being discussed here with its inevitable reference through the statue to the ambiguity of representation. In this part of the work, it is the circle that gives rise to the elevation that is in turn contained by the angle. In fact the work is contained in the notion of measure ñ measure for measure.
Peter Briggs keeps a tight rein on form, in a deliberately limited range, so as to avoid the risk of any untoward offshoot springing up. In fact more than one would think that Peter Briggs has an authoritarian attitude to his sculpture and refuses to let it go out of bounds.
Over the last few years, he has started using white porcelain clay and lost wax bronze casting, and so has taken up modelling after a long period avoiding it. But although circles and angles seem to dissolve into the more fugitive forms, one cannot help but notice the permanence of these initial forms transferred to a vertical plane. In this forest of trees, flames, hearts and candelabras, angles are present but in the way the branches fork, thus structuring an upright circulation. These two highly significant forms, which were long explored horizontally from the floor upwards or in a vertical plane, now become internal parentheses containing the entire work. The interiority of the angle had already been admirably stated with the idea of penetration in such granite pieces as "Sword in the Stone", where a reflex angle gives the stone its own power of penetration into space.
TERRITORY
Given his sensitivity to the vital qualities of forms, circles and angles and the way they can be resolved, it is obvious that Peter Briggs, as regards the penetration of space, sets out to conquer territories in order to enlarge them, take them apart, to rearrange them but always in order to keep them for himself. Such constancy will make this retrospective exhibition into something of a magic sculpture garden where someone has created his own Carnac or Stonehenge, where each piece is placed within the unity of an ephemeris, which determines movement in space as well as counting off the days. Dispersed through public and private collections, the pieces nonetheless remain within the geography of art where they started out, their circle widens within the geography of art without ever disintegrating.
Peter Briggs' work is structured around the forge, his first territory, with its tools and myths, a place of strength, labour, metamorphosis and fire. His task as a sculptor is first to regard as sacred the tools he uses to extract the form and its power and potential to become sculpture. There are crucibles, anvils and tools which the sculptor first takes in hand gently so that the subsequent brutality of the blow can produce the greatest intensity of energy. The onlooker can feel the materials vibrating with the memory of the blows they received. Homage is paid in all this aspect of the work to knowledge gained from the powerful impact of the mythology of fire.
Linked to the idea of the forge, is also an element suggesting warmth, but warmth coming from traces left in woodland, the hollow left by an animal after sleeping or nesting for example. Such forms which are almost circular are neither objects nor drawings but rather a defined area.
This arrangement of such elements in a non-violent territory is perhaps what is most poetic in Peter Briggs' work. Art for him is not warlike but simply being in a world that is pitifully civilized. The sculptures nostalgically evoke intimate places which are disappearing today and thus create a sense of loss. Forging a weapon gave one the time to think about not using it, placing the sword in the stone in order that meaning could come forth from it. The modernity of Peter Briggs' statement lies in this.
DURATION
Briggs has used the passage of time in two different pieces, which are both based on an hour-glass principle. A fine, free-flowing mixture of black sand and iron dust (a by-product left over from casting) is heaped over a tiny hole and slowly flows down to the floor below, where it forms a cone, as if collecting the forces that the piece above has had to relinquish. The sculptor is even more present here, creating more than just a "happening", reminding us what the conditions for making and appreciating a work of art are. The action of time is nowhere more apparent than in sculpture, which in itself expresses the desire for permanence. Being a sculptor can mean overcoming matter in order to confer on it some degree of immortality. Such intimations are a simple truth in Peter Briggs' work: there is no excess of lyricism or affectation. The hour-glass's double cone reflects the principle of exchange in the work ñ the circle and the angle, ideas of correspondence and affiliation, building up and taking down. In one way, these sculptures are self-producing and self-destructive, like a fire without a flame.
This image is a precursor to the lost wax technique which Peter Briggs finds so fascinating and has used for his most recent pieces: wood and wax disappear from the mould, the molten bronze fills the empty space thus created.
For Peter Briggs, culture is a system of exchanges, between sensations, materials, hearts and flames. The artist's latest pieces are produced with the smoothness and fluidity that fire gives to matter. But for those who are surprised to see a contemporary work of art resting on a base, and think that porcelain and bronze must always be the equivalent of objects, it should be said that Peter Briggs' work by using the idea of duration, refers to the growth principle itself, even in the way that the pieces are modelled. The strength of these pieces comes first and foremost from the delicacy of touch in modelling, and the constancy with which he addresses all his ideas.
As regards his sculpture, Peter Briggs could say that he has preferred to experience the knowledge coming from his imagination rather than to turn to lyricism and the unknown. As Theseus said to Hippolyta in "A Midsummer Night's Dream":
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
" Le songe d'une nuit d'été" : Michel Enrici
Such shaping fantsies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold.
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends, some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear?