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<< Return to list of essays and reviews
Sculpture, September 2004 Vol. 23 No. 7 Philadelphia
Fritz Dietel's sculptures of the last year work best as forms (or ideals) that are not fully realized, not perfectly brought into actual existence. Like bird's nests, hives, or clam shells—forms from nature that broadly resemble Dietel's ovoid vessels—these sculptures are hollowed volumes formed by an accretion of material bits according to a form that is clearly visible, yet not perfectly achieved in any one individual instance. In a sense one could consider them as being made before our eyes, and not yet finished. Materials, process, and perhaps external disruptive events yield entities and implied narratives that are splintered, interrupted, eccentric, or abandoned. The swelling shapes of Green Hive and Orange Hive are made of small sticks of wood carefully assembled into volumes three or four feet tall, through which oozes the brightly colored epoxy that binds everything together. The color of the exposed epoxy makes the flow and implied movement of the assembled patterns dramatically clear. It's as if we are looking at both a diagram and a freezeframe photograph of the making of the sculptures. At the same time, the epoxy forms a brightly colored interior that is revealed as the curving shapes unravel at the top and bottom. Since the works are hollow and hung on the wall, gravity and mass become secondary to process and material: the issue is not how they are held up, or how they stand in the world, but how they came to be—how they were generated. Papoose and Bivouac are networks of short pieces of wood joined at their ends. They allow one to see the inside and the outside of the sculptures at once. The title of the latter refers to improvised military shelters, which leave their inhabitants exposed to enemy fire. Dietel's works from the '90s, not shown here, such as Equatorial Reflections, are also concerned with disclosing their interiors. However, these earlier pieces often played with references to scale and vague technological uses, as if they were huge models from a pattern book of decorative furniture, diagrams from a geometry text, or models for pre-industrial scientific devices. Throughout his career during the last 15 years, Dietel has focused on a tightly defined territory in which object, material, and sculptural form are defined by allusions to use and purpose, and these definitions are made to carry the resonance of our interest as observers. His sculptures, from this point of view, are objects obsessed with their own making. A weakness or limitation of working in this way—which is shared by a range of contemporary work—is that all the references and the weight of associations, all the pleasures and meanings revealed by the work, have to be translated into what one might call the metaphysics and narrative of making. Here, facture is the one voice that makes pleasure and meaning possible. While some artists use organic forms as metaphors for mystery, Dietel modifies them through repetition, pattern, and implied purpose, rendering the organic as a metaphor for use or life. Viewing Dietel's sculpture is not like regarding the ruins of a lost civilization through a Romantic conceit for the poetry of temporality and impermanence; instead these pieces evoke the interest of an anthropologist in what shapes and textures reveal to a careful observer about the activities and intelligences that generated them. The emotions of the viewer do not so much engage the poignancy of existence and the ephemeralness of life as they do the acts of making and the processes that initiate, promote, and interrupt the production of things. Such work derives strength from the fact that its intentions, stripped of shadowy resonances or dissonances, declare themselves with one voice and are fully exposed. -Tom Csaszar
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