Figurative works in ceramic and bronze made by Stephen De Staebler (1930-2011) during the past few years were shown concurrently during January, 2012, at San Francisco’s Dolby Chadwick Gallery (the show ended January 28) and at the de Young Museum (Matter + Spirit: The Sculpture of Stephen De Staebler). I wrote about an earlier De Staebler show at Dolby Chadwick; the review was published in the December 2010 issue of Sculpture magazine but is not available online, so I have reprinted it below, with some minor deletions restored. For more, please see Peter Selz’s fine piece on DeStaebler at http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag02/may02/staebler/staebler.shtml
A few photos from the 2012 DCG show are included here, but most of the shots come from the de Young’s retrospective, modestly sized, but thoughtfully curated and beautifully displayed.
A panel discussion on De Staebler takes place on February 25 at 1:00pm, featuring—here I C&P from the museum website—Timothy Anglin Burgard, Ednah Root Curator in Charge of American Art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco [and the show’s curator]; Nancy M. Servis, Executive Director of the Richmond Art Center; and John Toki, a noted Bay Area sculptor and former assistant to Stephen De Staebler. The discussion will be moderated by John Handley, a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Free.
An excellent catalogue, edited by Burgard, is available as well. I’m not sure how much will remain to be said or written after I finish reading essays by the likes of Burgard, Rick Newby and Dore Ashton, but De Staebler’s work is rich, fascinating and profound, and I recommend the de Young show, which is up until April 22, very highly. The 2010 review follows.
STEPHEN DE STAEBLER: Recent Work
(Dolby Chadwick Gallery, January 14-February 27, 2010)
We may still marvel today at the art of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, but an Old-Europe time traveler inculcated on Holy Writ and seeking ethical and spiritual meaning in our art would be completely flummoxed. Modernism evolved a century ago as a gradual rejection of the past; religion (with the exception of the stalwart Catholic Georges Rouault, and, perhaps, a few others), monarchy and feudalism, especially after the shattering debacle of The Great War, were replaced by the alternate values of republicanism (i.e., democracy) and even anarchy, secularism, and skepticism, and naturalism, that simulation of the sensory and sensual, was deemed a lie; even the human body, for centuries the locus of empathetic projection, was reshaped and reconfigured into ecumenical colored planes and pure geometries as artists abandoned their traditional role of ethical instruction in order to explore, individually, or in stylistic affinity groups, intuition, subjectivity, and the role and definition of art.
Stephen De Staebler’s ceramic figure sculptures—tragic and transcendental, poetic and profound, in the antique style—may thus appear to be anachronistic these days, but to viewers unblinkered by orthodoxy, and hungry for intellectual and emotional fiber in their visual diet, they’re satisfying and delectable. Human figures or statues (or some petrified/fossilized human-clay hybrid) that have been seemingly excavated from ancient ruins, these works belong emotionally to the grand humanistic, faith-based tradition of Michelangelo, Bernini and Rodin; intellectually and formally, however, they derive from the modernist collage tradition based on fragmentation and recontextualization. Although De Staebler studied theology in college, writing a thesis on St. Francis, he cannot be categorized as a religious artist, with all that connotes, despite the moving art he has created for churches in his home states of Indiana and California, any more than Giacometti, an important influence, with his spectral figures eroded by light and space, could have been labeled the house artist iof postwar existentialism. Former San Francisco Chronicle art critic Thomas Albright aptly characterized De Staebler’s anonymous figures, embodying fragility and strength, growth and decay, birth and death, endurance and transcendence, as “contemporary parables of death and resurrection.” The dozen or so works displayed at Dolby Chadwick Gallery are all “transgenic (to employ Rick Newby’s term)” i.e., composites assembled from pre-existing fired clay fragments—three-dimensional collages. that extrapolate from the artist’s earlier works, archaeological matrices of earth/clay cut into sections, with buried statues emerging from their dark wombs/tombs. The new works, cairns/caryatids/columns assembled from stacked fragments, we seem to have moved indoors from excavation to speculative reconstruction without sacrificing visual authority or spiritual power, thanks to the human presence afforded by their lifesize scale and judiciously worked anatomical details amid the ruins. Figure with Black Torso (2008), a symmetrical piece standing atop a small layered-earth plinth, features a horizontal piece suggesting chest and shoulders supporting a bipartite vertical head. Figure with Lost Torso (2008) is a stack of rough-hewn flat blocks that might be part of a reconstructed wall but for the legs at the bottom and vestigial shoulders and head at the top. Figure with Split Torso (2008) features one of the artist’s elegant, elongated figures with partial shins and feet, an intestinal jumble of clay resting atop the hipbone, the whole surmounted by a blocklike head and the suggestion of a scapular wing. Two Found Legs (2008) depicts only a pair of shins and feet mismatched in color and size, but posed in classic hipshot contrapposto, resting atop a seemingly hewn wooden (or petrified wood) base. Two Feeble Legs (2008) possesses a rudimentary torso (sans head), but the sloping base and mismatched legs suggest that balance is a dynamic resolution of contraries and thus precarious. De Staebler sees the archaic figure in modern, relativistic terms, with the psyche “not a whole or a unity but an idiosyncratic bundle of contradictions.”
Donald Kuspit writes that De Staebler “addresses the loss of our primitive sense of being human, in effect our primitive sense of ourselves” and that because religion addresses suffering, the artist “wants to create a modern religious art [for]...the articulation and remediation of suffering.” He creates “regressive ruins..[that] articulate the subjective complexity of being human.” De Staebler: “I want to express the quality of erosion in the loss of limbs over time and the restoring of the figure to the earth in time, so that it becomes in its way an extension of earth, which we are. We only exist by the grace of the earth’s nature. So what you see is this feeling of an eroded separation from something larger in time.” De Staebler resurrects the archaic idea that life and art—notwithstanding Rauschenberg’s famous quip—can be made, and fruitfully combined; even lowly mud, “slip, then slop, then sludge,” is also stardust. —DEWITT CHENG
Ron and Susan Casentini and Kyle Milligan (Studio Quercus) with De Staebler ceramic chair.
Artist Jim Melchert.
