-
November 2009
-
Echoes of Ibsen at Vigeland Sculpture Park, Oslo
by Michael Merriam November 2, 2009
Perhaps this always accompanies expectoration in the arts –a conspicuously practicality that covers for operations of the artist’s unconscious. The utopia Vigeland has imagined here is all about the tactile possibilities within “the family” and the artist – who was famous also for the creation of Hellscapes, and who made money by depicting battles of men against lizards and serpents – is not trying to disguise the tormented machinery therein. He is retching it forth, and the smoothness here does for sculpture what Ibsen did for drama. It’s a cousin of irony: You’re saying these people are smooth?
-
