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| "Split "1996 |
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I was first introduced to Billy Lee’s work in the mid 80’s
when he was a candidate for a teaching post at
UNC-Greensboro and I was on the
selection committee.
His work at that
time made it clear that he was very much an artist in the Modernist tradition. His
imaginatively engineered geometric wall pieces spoke of the ground and pattern
of an underlying reality. His demeanor was imbued with the air of someone aware
of his accomplishments. And indeed in the modernist realm he has accomplished a
lot. He came to the US in the mid- Seventies from England to study as a Kennedy
Scholar at MIT ‘s School of Advanced Visual Studies and subsequently had risen
up in the ranks at the University of Michigan. The senior faculty at UNC-G were
not uninterested in the work presented for his application but were more
intrigued by those candidates influenced by Postmodernism which was exemplified
at that time by the style of sculptor Tom Otterness. The tide of Modernism that
had filled the top ranks of many of the top schools in the country during the Sixties
and Seventies such as Michigan was already beginning to subside. If Otterness
was all cleverness, play and social relevance, Billy embodied the seriousness and
purity of a scientist looking for the logical shape of the visual world. It
seemed to me his seriousness about the role of a coherent visual language in
the making of art, made him a good choice to be a professor at UNC-G and I
think more importantly stood him in good stead as a sculptor for the next 30
years.
Billy Lee has always been a maker and shaper of material. For
several years between his stints at Michigan and UNC-G he lived in
Vancouver,B.C. where his extended family resided. He got involved in some
building and renovation projects in the family business. I remember he talked
about them with the same relish he would talk about sculpture. His preternatural
drive is to reach out into our physical world and reshape and remake it. He is
an artist who spontaneously connects with the material and the processes that
allow him to manipulate it. That love of material places him in the company of
such artists as Ron Bladen, Carl Andre and Richard Serra among others of that
generation for whom sculpture reflects back on its reality as physical material
and the raw physicality of the world.
Billy Lee knows that tradition thoroughly and can talk about
it cogently. In our last meeting at UNC-G where I returned recently to give a
talk on my work, it was a thrill to hear him bring up the above mentioned names
from the Sixties and Seventies, which he said he was trying his best to put
back on the radar screen of today’s students. He has internalized that tradition
but surprised me when at the beginning of the Millenium he made an uncanny return
to the figuration of Henry Moore. If there is a dynamic of material vs. form in
all sculpture and if you were to calculate which dominates in any given artist,
Moore’s art would fall on the side of form taking the upper hand. The same
thing happened in Billy’s work.
Since Moore the history of sculpture would evince a split of
materiality from form,
and, moreover, the
notion of form becoming ever more detached and Platonic in the work of Donald
Judd and Sol Lewitt. Materiality now detached from form, would often become
absolutely formless. This is to say nothing of the development of installation art
and its tendency toward a political critique of commodification. The notion of
sculpture as a terrain for conveying the traditional push and pull of natural
forces in the universe has not found many adherents in the contemporary scene. And
in the arts ever obsessed concern for the New you have also the mix of recent
technologies such as cell phones that succeed in dissolving the intimate
interaction of viewer and sculpture that has defined sculpture from its very
beginning.
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| "Helmet" 1997 |
What is lost in all of these evolutions and permutations of
sculpture in the last thirty years and has not been lost on Billy is the notion
of the artist as someone who creates himself in making and building within an
ancient tradition of sculpting. He is a maker who knows the language’s roots which
go back to the Kouros of the Greeks or the ancient Cycladic forms of the Aegean.The
notions of a body in space and time defined by gravity, negative and positive
space, of heft and haptic touch, of the slow movement of the body and eye as it
moves around the sculpture inform all his work. But informing it more deeply is
his understanding of the will that allows the self to persevere and to hold one’s
physical place in the world. I have always marveled at the
psychic force and energy that Billy applies to
the building of his sculpture.Is not this the ultimate meaning of works :They
embody the will to create. They are the artist creating himself.
His series on warrior’s helmets, which reference images of
armed men and which are a looming presence throughout the history of sculpture,
are emblematic of individual self-assertion but also of holding one’s ground. Warriors
can also double as guardians or sentinels, both titles of work done over the
last ten years. Guardians and sentinels sacrifice themselves for the group in
order to establish barriers, deciding who can enter or leave the homeland. Except
for the Big Head series that allows for an ironic interpretation there is a
seriousness about Billy’s work that is startling, because it has been so absent
from art since after the Abstract Expressionists: the artist as hero, as Mahler
in the European sense. This leads to
another notion about his work: these sculptures represent a defense of the
precious values of sculpture’s homeland from the effacement of the modern tide.
Most contemporary sculpture inserts itself in a dialogue
about man’s place in society or in relationship to the ever changing world of
technology. It comes out of sociology, critical theory and deconstructionist
ontology. It’s message is a reminder that we cannot transcend the way in which the
media and technology define us. We are like a fly caught in a spider’s web of
societal norms. Lee’s work suggests that our individuality cannot avoid its mythic
roots. Our individual efforts embed themselves in ancient tropes of meaning
that we are unable to escape. When we confront their power and inevitable
reality it is like the epiphanies at the end of a Greek Drama. They are as
transformative as the energy contained in a Guan Yin figure or a Michelangelo
pieta.
P.S.
I have been out of touch with Billy Lee for awhile. I feel I should now back away from the melancholy mood of this piece and this
more recent piece as Billy has made a leap into the world of global art where the influence of Koons and Oldenburg take over. It is no longer metaphysical and inward looking but has joined the currency of an extroverted global culture. Amazing leap out of metaphysics as Derrida would say. His roots in the UK are nicely dealt with here in this interview on the
BBC.
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| "Changsa" |
