Ursula von Rydingsvard

David Levi Strauss writes frequently for Aperture. He is the Chair of the graduate program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His new book, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual, delves into the mysterious process whereby an idea is born in the mind and materialized through the hand in the expression of artwork. In the excerpt below we learn about Ursula von Rydingsvard‘s artistic process.

Ursula von Rydingsvard‘s sculptures have often engaged and activated the relation between a tool or implement – something used to make something else – and the thing made. She’s found the clarity of this relation most present in the most primitive examples of it, where one rude object impacts another to make an impression. Working into the physical reality of that prime encounter, she uncovers a certain incommensurability of cause and effect: there is always something let over when the work is done, a remainder that may in fact be the beginning of the aesthetic.

I’ve often heard this sculptor speak of the honesty of a given material: the way a certain kind of wood or type of viscera holds up under pressure and over time; the way it takes a cut or weeps when it dries, but especially the way it bears and shows its transformation through labor. She constantly tests the integrity of her materials as she pushes them beyond their defining limits. She is alert to the indwelling potency of organic materials, but insists that they be transformed through work. She understandings the cult of relics (being an irrepressible collector of old, old remnants), but recognizes these things a raw material to be worked, rather than merely contemplated.

In its Greek beginnings, the tool or implement was the organon, “that with which one works.” From there we get to bodily organs as instruments of sense or faculty, and the organic as the entire category of organized bodies (plant and animal), but always in the sens of them acting as an instrument of nature or art, to a certain end. All this comes from the root of work.

Her incorporation of actual organs – the stomachs of ruminants – as sculptural material happened in the late 1990s. When I visited her studio in 1999, Rydingsvard showed me the cow stomachs stored in her refrigerator, packed in salt and shrunken into velvety white wads. As she held the tripe under a faucet, massaging it and filling out its form with water, she described the “exotic landscape” of almost unbearable beauty she had found inside the carcass of a freshly killed cow, “like what one might find under the sea.”

Rydingsvard isolates particular sculptural effects – the way the skin of organs draws tight over striae, or the laminate, sexual (adhering) embrace of a malleable substance after being compressed between two more rigid surfaces – in order to open up the sensuous rapport of a made object to its utility: a waffle iron impresses a grid pattern on cooking batter; a farmer’s plough cuts furrows in the ground; wet laundry is rubbed over the ribs of a washboard; animal hides are stretched on racks to dry. All of these acts have effects based on the zero point requirements of necessity and candor.

The present work can be seen in the context of a number of other sculptures Rydingsvard made after returning from her first trip to Poland in 1985. Though she was raised in a Polish Catholic home, it was never in Poland, but always on the tortured edges of it, always in exile, where memory was both sweet and painful, love was bound up with loss, and labor was mixed with violence. In these dreadful works, especially Ignaz Comes Home (1986), Zakopane (1987), Dreadful Sorry (1987-88), Oj Dana Oj Dana (1989), and Dla Gienka (1991-93), individual repeated members or columns (sometimes alluding to household implements) are distressed, stained, leaded down, even whitewashed. In the latter two works, Rydingsvard’s signature cuts into milled cedar beams line up into series of striations.

But the most direct precedent or seed for this work is Maglownica (1995), in which a 12-foot-high flat paddle formed of four laminated four-by-four milled cedar beams is sheathed in stitched cow intestines. The edges of the cedar paddle are cut into spines or ribs so that the membranous covering is stretched taut as if over bones. The piece was inspired by the rasp-surfaced paddles traditionally used by Polish farm women to soften linen sheets after laundering. As Rydingsvard recalled to Martin Friedman, “the linens were so harsh, it was often difficult to sleep on them, for fear of bloodying yourself.”

Maglownica is a work of tremendous compression, of contained violence and pent-up energy. The critic Michael Brenson has observed that it “suggests the attentiveness of a solitary child observing a world to which he or she does not belong, or perhaps the last moments of a man in front of a firing squad. But this object maintains its ability to react. In fact, like most of Rydingsvard’s creations, it seems ultimately unconquerable.” This resonates with what Rydingsvard said when Dore Ashton asked the artist what her earliest artistic experience had been: “I remember something about unbleached, coarse linen. It would almost take its own form. I remember its being on me, almost like a nightgown – something about light on my body. Maybe I was three or four…outdoors, on the steps.” This is the image I can’t get out of my head, looking at this piece. A row of little girls, standing up straight in their coarse linen wraps before the world, unconquerable.

These sculptures have always seemed to me to arise from a kind of diastrophism, twisting and turning in different directions around a solid core. Whether these repeated inset columns of viscera over cut boards makes one think of snow fallen on furrowed fields or dressings on wounds, they definitely form an embodied passage from one state to another. I see it as passage leading from the memory of innocence to experience, where the unjust torments of matter and memory are transformed through inspired labor, and where, in the final judgment, laborare est orare, labor is prayer.