By Mike Winters

The vision of Clement Greenburg [sic], 1950s preacher of Modernist art, is alive and well in Edmonton. He was the guy who argued for a “pure” art in which content was derived from things like line, colour, and proportion alone.

The steel sculptures at Edmonton Sculpture: The Next Generation follow the same principle of formal austerity. The exhibit’s seven sculptors are clearly preoccupied with composing cubist chunks of metal, not making grand cultural pronouncements like those of most installation artists.

“I don’t believe in taking away context of everyday life,” says Terry Fenton, the exhibit’s curator, “but I think issue-based art doesn’t get much beyond the issue itself. If you want issues, go to the newspaper. Visual art is usually very clumsy with issues. I think some of the best artists don’t have an idea of what they’re going to make–they find it.”

Of course any time you exhibit formalist art, you’re expecting a leap of faith from the average viewer. You’ll remember the controversy surrounding the National Gallery’s purchase of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire in 1990. For the low, low price of $1.76 million dollars, Canada got a red stripe on a big blue canvas. People didn’t much like that.

To be fair, the exhibit’s sculptures offer much more to look at, but Fenton agrees that the work may not be immediately accessible.

“If you haven’t looked at much sculpture, it’s harder to see the internal logic. Until you get immersed in it a bit, it’s like a foreign language. But it’s easy to learn,” says Fenton.

As the exhibit title suggests, there is an older generation of steel sculptors in town that includes Clay Ellis, Catherine Burgess, Vesna Makale and Peter Hide. The show’s new generation of sculptors all studied under Hide, who teaches sculpture at the University of Alberta.

Fenton, the former director of the Edmonton Art Gallery from 1972-88, has been around long enough to see local sculpture evolve through different styles.

“In the last 30 years it has tended to get more compact and borrow from achievements in earlier sculpture. In the 1960s it looked like it was broken very far from figurative sculpture. Now there are more echoes of that. I also think there is a tendency to explore more–not just using steel but other combinations of material,” says Fenton.

More artists may be incorporating lead, brass, steel and bronze, but I wondered why so many local sculptures, including those in Fenton’s exhibit, still only use steel. One answer would be that steel is cheaper and easier to weld. But if a sculpture is primarily about formal aspects, the materials must be a big part of the message. Doesn’t it become limiting if everyone uses the same material?

“I could see the exasperation that some of the artists must feel. Every material has some limitations, but I think these guys are learning the strengths of the material and I don’t think they’ve bumped into any limitations just yet,” says Fenton, who thinks the exhibit showcases new work in a long line of sculpture that’s under-appreciated.

“I wish there was a way that [the] rest of Canada could find [out] about the sculpture scene in Edmonton. It’s one of the best kept secrets in Canada.”