Word: buchman
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...look at a massive heavy shape without thinking it backward and funky, or parroting the once obligatory cliches about Stonehenge. An exhibition very much to the point opened this month at the Sculpture Now Gallery in Manhattan's Soho: some 30 tons of granite and steel by James Buchman, 26, a Memphis-born sculptor who lives on a farm in Vermont. It is the most promising first one-man show in Manhattan this season...
...Buchman, a mild, prognathous giant with a Jeremiah Johnson beard, has been working at sculpture for six years. He studied painting and sculpture at the Skowhegan School in 1969, and for a time made constructions of logs held together with cut-up truck inner tubes. Buchman first noticed the stuff for his monoliths as he was driving north to Vermont one day in 1972, after one of his infrequent trips to New York: the highway went through a cutting, and ragged chunks of stone were littered all along the roadside. Realizing that "granite has to be the cheapest thing...
...result must be among the most imposing "homemade" sculpture produced by a young American since the early '60s, when Di Suvero was making his big constructions of railway ties, dock piles, chains and tires. Instead of effacing their weight, Buchman's sculptures proclaim it: heaviness, the state of being dug from and bound to the earth, is part of their meaning. The stone is not carved. The lumps stand as they came from the rock pile, craggy and rhino-gray: one thinks of them as things, not as material, and each sculpture becomes a kind of frozen juggling...
Eyeball Stuff. Buchman ties the stone together with massive, clumsy steel connectors, hammered in sheets around the granite (like unwieldy Band-Aids) and then either tied on with steel cables or fixed through the rock with heavy bolts. The engineering, he frankly admits, is "just eyeball stuff" but, though it is crude (probably, if anything, too strong for its tonnage), it works visually. Sometimes the connectors are too busy, with all those nuts and bolts. But in works like Levi, 1975, the jacket of forged and cold-beaten metal encloses its granite haunch with an astonishing delicacy. Because they...
Directed by RENÉ CLEMENT Screenplay by SIDNEY BUCHMAN and ELEANOR PERRY...