On Carving Non-Traditional Ivory Sculpture

Abstract

Ivory sculptures differ considerably from those made in other materials. For one thing, most ivory sculptors have clung to traditional figurative subjects treated in a representational way. It has even been suggested, with some plausibility, that because ivory is basically an organic material, it will never lend itself to abstract or non-figurative works. For a long time-since the 'thirties in fact-sculptors who wanted to carve ivory and yet claim modernity sought recourse to the accidental cracks and fissures that appear in the surface of some tusks. They stopped carving the inside of the tusk and concentrated on the outside. Black spots and 'shakes' in a tusk's crust, which would have been sawn away by the old style ivory carver, now became the point d'appui for a whole series of forms. The greatest exploiter of these 'accidental forms' in ivory is undoubtedly Jan Holschuh. Like most nontraditional ivory sculptors, he is a German, working in Erbach. Although he is still alive and very influential, I cannot help feeling that much of the impetus of his approach has now worn itself out. For one thing, because most elephant tusks present a fairly unified exterior with few cracks and blemishes, Holschuh has had to resort to mammoth tusks, which provide all the cracks and fissures he wants, but are in such bad condition otherwise that it is almost as though a painter had deliberately opted to paint on mouldy canvases, full of holes. For another, because Holschuh is necessarily concerned with the accidents which have happened to the outside of the tusk, he does not go far enough into the ivory to suit my taste. It is as though someone had picked up a packet of modelling clay, with the intention of making a figure from it and then decided to do something with the wrapper. If we are to abandon 'accidentalism' as I think we must, what avenues remain to the modern ivory sculptor? There is no reason why ivory carving should not use non-figurative subject matter. Indeed, Michel Belloncle recently suggested that it was only by having recourse to abstract art that the Dieppe school, once so famous but now reduced to two carvers, could manage to keep going. It is very curious that abstract art has, hitherto, appeared much more frequently in the work of unsophisticated indigenes such as the Central Eskimo, than among Western sculptors. A lot of