When I go to New York I stay with a friend who loves the opera and we go to whatever is playing at Lincoln Center. We go early so he can walk through the park and so I can visit my favorite Henry Moore statue, which resides there. If I am lucky, the sculpture sits in a dark pool of water where its reflection is shattered by ripples, but more often it sits in a shallow pit waiting patiently for the water it was promised — it doesn’t want to be here but I am so in love with this bronze I would never let it go.
Moore’s sculptures are not really pretty but oddly graceful for such lumps, not really human but with attitude and a haunting sense of the past. His sculptures are beautiful and at the same time bewildering, even frightening when they are not locked up in a museum or placed in a park. To stumble across one half submerged in a lake or commanding a desolate hillside would be awesome. Why do these stones have such power? Because they bypass your mind, your consciousness, your reason, even your imagination, and talk directly to your soul, leaving the rest of you standing in the hall like a child with an ear to the door. Grabbing only bits and pieces of the conversation, you understand something you don’t understand, and you understand it deep in your heart, like a rock being dropped into a well. You understand it from long ago, before you were born, it travels in your blood — it’s the same message your ancestors felt when they walked towards Stonehenge, or stood beneath the giant lintels of Machu Picchu, a ghostly message whispered by the pyramids as they disappear into the sand. Moore’s figures are the women, the keepers of this secret, and now they are sinking back into the dirt, taking everything with them. Are they from another age, a better age or a more terrifying age? I don’t know, but an age that all the skyscrapers of Dubai could never hope to reach.
We all have feet of clay but Moore’s figures go farther, they have no feet. They are half-buried in dirt far down where the lava flows like blood in and out of the earth’s heart. Unlike Giacometti’s gaunt figures which seem to be forever walking on an endless forced march across a landscape incapable of producing food or rest, Moore’s figures remain rooted to the spot. The more abstract they are, the more primitive they become, primitive and female.
They recline in an imitation of the hills that sleep along the horizon, a giant shoulder bone and a piece of throat suggesting the ruined rib cage below, followed by a pelvis or what’s left of one. Sometimes Moore cut holes in his figures as if to say they can see through you — holes where a face or a heart should have been, but now only the earth or a piece of the sky rushes through, and they can still see through you.
Artillery Magazine Vol 3 no. 3 January/February 2009