ARTWEEK
THE SENSUALITY OF STONE

by Michael McManus, February 1987

Stone carving is more than a technique. Direct and manual it is inseparably intertwined with the prehistoricproduction of hand-axes and spearheads–those primal extensions of tooth and claw that divide the human realm from the other seamless entirety of nature. Stone carving obsesses an immense metaphysical dimension. It is an emblem of agonistic character of art-making, of the struggle to remold a hard, resistant material (and my analogy, the world) into a personal expression of good and true adn beautiful. Stone carving is also an anachronism, an activity that was beginning to look faintly quixotic even in Michelangelo’s time, when the visitation of the stucco angel signaled the dawn of the age of mechanical reproduction. But like Don Quixote, many people today find no satisfying substitutes for goodness, truth and beauty in simulations, digital logic and coded reassurances of neo-Berkelian hyperrealists that everything is relative (to the system) and that the real and the simulated are categorically interchangeable (if being understood that the simulation is somehow more “interesting” this season).

Those dinosaurs in the viewing audience who still prefer “the real thing” to its simulacrum, who scrutinize the work’s edges to the banked flares and faint illuminations of its aura (however whithered), may find the traditional object of their ritual pleasures in the stone carvings of Doron Rosenthal on view at the Natalie Bush Gallery through January.

Rosenthal is young. This is his first one-person gallery showing and it is a formidable debut–shot through with intrigue, novelty and sensual enjoyments that evoke in many a profound meditation on the preconditions and ends of modern sculpture. Alabaster is the artist’s metier, locally indigenous alabaster for which he sours the Anza-Borrego and the wild lands around the San Bernardion mountains. He carves these interestingly colored slabs of hard, compact calcite to play the slight translucency of the stone against its beautiful banding and layers. In two formally related works, Medusaand and Maelstrom (both 1986), Rosenthal takes the sort of plate-tableau motif that Giacometti developed in The Palace at 4 A.M. (1932-33) returns it to the geological realm of the tectonic plate. Medusa turns the stone plate at a right angle to set the arrangement of the surfaces before the viewer, like a low relief. Unlike classic low-relief, however, the work’s vertical faces, giving the eye a sense of panoptic omnipresence–an illusion of examining something very large and being immeasurably larger oneself.

Maelstrom plays a similar game with a horizontal flow of stone facing that bears an irregular raised X surrounding a funnel hole. There is in these works and old-fashioned modernist sort of subtlety elaborately polished detail that is set against a simplicity of overall shape (the shard fragment) thus generating an excruciating contrast. The alabaster of Medusa is dark, cold gray faced with veins and pools of rosy white. The stone of Maelstrom is an even middle gray with homogeneous salt-and-pepper flecks set in fine layers like magnetized iron filings. Individual features and articulated areas of Rosenthal’s works evoke ground-down mortars, glacial grooves carved in northern bedrock, dolmens and menhirs and the Venuses of Lespungue and of Willendorf.

In Stone Shell (1985) the artist has fashioned a massive, irregular, organic, spiral shape. Ponderous and improbable, the piece balances on its small, flat base. The open mouth of the spiral reveals a rounded U-shape similar to the yoni form that signifies the feminine principle in Tantric Buddhist art. A western European equivalent, “the delta of Venus,” characterizesI saw bone like that once (1986). In this piece, the form is roughly an isosceles triangle, point down. The work is posted at eye level on a tall, slender steel cylinder. An inverted teardrop-shaped hole is cut through the center of the stone triangle. Even ridges, like the knuckles of a clenched fist, radiate downward from the upper side edge of the hollow. The work is at once closed and open. The pale multicolored banding of the stone is fascinating, and much of the shape and orientation of the carving aims to reveal this banding to best advantage.

As battle lines are being drawn in late twentieth-century art between technological critial-media artists and authenticists/auta object artists. Rosenthal has clearly positioned himself in the latter camp. This show of stoneworks is a strong opening gambit.