Nils Krueger's Sculpture
By DeWitt Cheng
In our day the highest merit in public life, society and art— is to amuse….Nowadays anything put up for seeing or hearing is only meant to be taken in casually. If it holds your eye and focuses your wits for even a minute, it justifies itself…the Interesting has replaced the Beautiful, the Profound and the Moving…if modern man’s most sophisticated relation to art is to be casual and humorous, is to resemble the attitude of the vacationer at the fairgrounds, then the conception of art as an all-important institution, as a supreme activity of man, is quite destroyed… —Jacques Barzun, Why Art Must Be Challenged, 1967
There have always been critics who have deplored the current state of art, and there has always been justification for their worry, since masterpieces, except during a few privileged periods —the High Renaissance, the heroic period of Early Modernism— are rare. Yet there are still occasional works of art that rise above the chatter, radiating presence, power, complexity, and the contradictions of life. The welded steel figures of German-born sculptor Nils Krueger, now working in San Francisco, are such exceptional, charismatic works. Beautifully crafted, compelling, imbued with a searching intelligence and rich with associations, these abstracted figures provoke complex and contradictory reactions, startling and amazing the viewer at first, yet seeming, the longer we take them in, somehow inevitable: almost forgotten and remembered, restored to consciousness. Reserved, even austere by contemporary standards, yet dense with implications and blessedly free of irony, they provoke us to puzzle out their secrets; they make us work for their rewards, and, even more notably, they make us want to look and do the work. It’s a refreshing change from the high-concept esthetic contraptions that waggle, grimace, preen and posture, asking little of the audience but unconditional and casual tolerance. Krueger’s masterly meditations on the figurative tradition stand up as our equals and equivalents, physically, intellectually, and emotionally.
Human perception is limited to surface appearance. Our senses give us access to only a limited range of nature's reality. Beyond and below the boundaries of our senses are other aspects of the same reality…
It is because of the openness of its linear construction that the sculptural space does not cut itself off from real space, but it rather becomes a metamorphosis of real space, making it more perceptible. Thus, I achieve a free flowing transition between sculptural and external space, which in the viewer evokes a sense of interconnectedness.
Krueger, quoted above, began working a scant dozen years ago, swiftly finding his medium and message.
Figure Study #1, #2, #3: These early sculptures establish the basic vocabulary: the contrast between different modes of stylization, with the linear scaffolding of the body sometimes more naturalistic, sometimes more abstracted and geometricized. #1 presents a female nude, complete and only slightly distorted in her proportions, caught in mid-stride. With #2 and #3 Krueger adopts the fragmented statue as his model, the former standing, arm raised, like Cellini’s Perseus, the latter a cluster of geometric solids only roughly approximating a human figure.
Head Study #1, #2: These architectural lattice-work busts recall both Constructivist monuments and the introspective portrait drawings and paintings of Giacometti, dense hatchings and erasures building, destroying and weaving together subject and surrounding space. The head-cage of #1 is filled with polygons; in #2 we see hemispherical forms analogizing cranium and mouth.
Structure-Form-Surface: This sculptural triptych sets its three protagonists on heavy circular metal stands within architectural niches, rather like Greco-Roman heroes and gods, or their later Renaissance reincarnations as saints and soldiers. Both figures and niches are fashioned from welded steel rods, the architectural features geometrically perfect, with the figures, shells of broken statues, wrought in varying styles or degrees of simplification and elaboration. The figure on the left reveals through its open mesh wire-frame skin its internal structures: shoulder blade, ribcage, spine, pelvis, thighbone. The figure on the right, its skin or garment of a tighter weave, resembling crocheting or embroidery, stands with parts unfinished, as though the weaver left off or undid the work. The central figure is an extreme geometricization, and recognizable as a human torso only in the context created by its brothers; its stacked metal polygons recall both Cezanne’s famous dictum that Nature is made of spheres, cones and rods, and Cubism’s pursuit of the monumental and geometric amid the sensory haze of hectic modern life.
Compositional Forms Series #1-#10: These figures are more loosely organized, more improvisatory, and more surrealist than the previous work, completed concurrently. They imply not so much architecture as jewelry. The surface of the skin is less in evidence, with the human form, reduced to leg plus torso, emerging from the arabesque of metal. The artist’s re-envisioning of human anatomy results in surprising metaphors that never stray so far from reality as to destroy the larger image: the orb/gyroscope forms read as shoulder muscles, kneecaps, or stomach; the metal branches mimic thigh muscles and ribs; and the axial spines, straight and constant, transform us into strange plants. The animated, floating internal structures suggest orreries (astronomic models), clockwork automata, molecules, and constellations. It is as if anatomical engravings, become infected by Art Nouveau stylization, sprouted exuberantly into three-dimensional space. #8 transforms the torso into planetary chronometer, and #9 reintroduces the female torso, as ethereal and elegant as Botticelli’s Venus.
Vitruvian Series #1-#5: Leonardo’s famous 1490 drawing illustrating the writings of the Roman archjitect Vitruvius depicted man created in the divine image — the mathematical; and geometrical model for the universe. The boxes and grids in this series add the connotation of measurement and scientific scrutiny, recalling Muybridge’s photographs of human and animal movement. The phone-booth-like boxes not only constrain and contain the statues/specimens, and visually frame them (think of Bacon’s glass cages), but also allow the introduction of X-rays aligned with the sculpted elements, so that we reconstruct the figure from different perceptual modes. Science fiction metaphors come to mind: three-dimensional holograms with popup databases for skin, muscle, bone displayed at different angles, somehow frozen into metal and acrylic plastic, but easily transformed with new information. #1 hews closely to Leonardo’s drawing, with Adam’s outstretched limbs defining circle and square centered respectively on navel and groin. #2 presents a female figure, one arm outstretched, and #3 simplifies the figure down to a ‘constellation’ of four planetary systems (orbs and orbits) replacing calf, thigh, stomach and heart. Krueger constructs elliptical orbits to describe motion because metaphors for movement enlist the imagination in way that actual motion may not, just as Bernini disdained colored stone as an unnecessary distraction from his emotionally charged white marble.
The space we perceive is filled with objects, and while such an object might appear still, the components of its matter, such as atoms, electrons, neutrons, quarks, etc., are in constant movement. Thus, rather than being static, space is a dynamic and active environment….I believe space to be a process, rather than what one might describe as a constant, or "state of being". I see it as a process in which space, matter, and time are interdependents. I conceive it as the activity of ever changing relations between matter in space through time.
Creating an explanatory metaphor usually helps in fathoming an artist’s intentions. But these figures have so many readings —artifact, fossil, skeleton, anatomical display, puppet, android, cadaver, ruined statue, or any permutation thereof—that it’s impossible to settle on one interpretation. Giacometti’s perplexity while confronting the model comes to mind: “At first, one sees the person who is modeling; but, little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model….There are too many sculptures between my models and me.” Krueger’s works, while eluding simple explanations, are thematically rich and multivalent, and compelling in all of their multiple guises. To my eye, three factors combine in these works to play different musical lines, solo or together:
—the classical figure tradition;
—modernist modes of vision, or artistic styles;
—and postmodern theory’s denial of absolute truth.
The Greco-Roman figure tradition of idealized nudes — in Leonardo’s words, as cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm)— continues in Krueger’s figures modernized, but also renewed. Adopting the classically proportioned male and female forms as a basis for improvisation, as Jasper Johns seized on flags and maps, “things the mind already knows,” Krueger reconstructs the body in contemporary terms: fragmented, disembodied, transparent, X-rayed. When we think of modern artists’ attitudes toward the grand style, we think of disillusionment, of parody, of ironic laughter, of pathos. Giorgio di Chirico painted faceless mannequins perched on the stageset of empire at the twilight preceding the Great War. Alberto Giacometti made atomic-age ushabti (Egyptian tomb statuary meant to serve as slaves in the next life) that persist in life despite the erosions of time and space. In the Bay Area today, Manuel Neri carves marbles mimicking unfinished and broken Greek statues streaked with bright color, and Stephen DeStaebler models androgynous partial figures barely emerging from their clayey matrices, or perhaps sinking back into them, earth to earth, exuding an Ozymandian “aura of heroic antiquity,“ in the words of Donald Kuspit.
But many artists saw modernism as a way to revitalize a classic tradition by now overburdened with Victorian realism, narrative and sentimentality, even on occasion dragooned into propaganda to help one noble race exterminate a brutish Other. Fernand Leger painted working people with bluntness and elegance, balancing harmony and contrast, and always eschewing drama: “no eloquence, no romanticism.” Oskar Schlemmer, a dancer, painter and printmaker, depicted simplified, elegant figures promenading through a clear, luminous pictorial stage space, the whole suffused with tenderness and optimism (His Bauhaus Stairway used to hang in MOMA’s stairwell, by the way.). Werner Haftman writes of Schlemmer: “His aim was to create a single spiritual order embracing both organic life and the geometrical ideal. Man, in his system, was the point of intersection between the natural and spiritual orders.” The rationalism of Leger (Catholic belief notwithstanding) and Schlemmer celebrates humanity’s inherent worth without invoking the supernatural: classicism and modernity join hands.
Along with the classic figure tradition’s idealization of form we must also consider the modernist tradition’s experimentation with different modes of perception and expression. (The march of styles and manifestoes would seem the diametric opposite of classicism, but they both distinguish between the primary, real, and timeless and the secondary, false, and transitory; between the cerebral and the sensory, the ideal and the real.) Cubism’s search for hard reality in the flux of modern life led to a breakup of form, an embrace of fragments, and an overlapping of differing views. Georges Braque said that in order to portray a woman accurately it was necessary to make three drawings of her —plan, elevation and section—, as with a house. The following description of the viewer’s mental reassembly of Cubist fragments might be from the instruction manual for Krueger’s automata.
The illusionistic fragment thus served as a kind of emblem, as a clue which helped the viewer to identify the object. Such fragments of reality use simultaneously enable us to complete a real object in our minds, even if in the picture it appears only as a fragment or an emblem. The organism eliminates all the dross of natural appearance, which cannot be transmuted into form, retaining only essential, representative elements, which evoke as it were the names of things.,…. Now begins an exciting play with fragments of reality, with isolated things which only by dint of a slow constructive process are made to combine into a living organism, in which they lose their absurdity and become part of an order. They enter into communication with one another and with the mind that had arranged them. —Werner Haftman
Beyond the fracturing of time and space, and the imaginative reconstruction such an approach demands of the viewer, is the postmodern acknowledgement that no one mode of seeing is privileged, unique, or indisputable — and the frequent combining, or colliding of disparate systems of depiction in one work. Krueger’s work proposes several metaphors or models, as mentioned before, waxing, waning, overlapping, no single one predominating. There are several styles of fabrication as well that the artist employs as well: 1) a wire-frame shell, as used in 3D computer modeling familiar to moviegoer today, but carried to artistic heights by Krueger’s meticulous craftsmanship; the polygons resulting from the innumerable welds create a texture like cracked paint or cracked mud craquelure, in ceramic-speak, or like vastly magnified skin cells, and the effect is rather as if the skin had vanished but left its interstices intact; 2) a woven, knitted or embroidered clothlike surface: skin as lace, as garment, as armor; and 3) a longitudinal set of parallel lines, bunched and striated like muscle fibers. The result of this pictorial richness is a multidimensional model, synthesized from different viewpoints and disciplines, of man as the measure of all things. Five hundred years after Leonardo’s discovery of Vitruvian Man, marrying circle and square, spiritual (celestial) and material (terrestrial), another artist presents man without twentieth- or twenty-first-century angst or ironic apology — the pattern of the universe, the noblest of living forms.
I believe that creating work which makes us re-conceptualize our bodies and our own impulses enables us to see dignity and nobility in the world of non-art and non-figure objects as well.
We’ve discussed Krueger’s revitalization and modernization of the classic figural tradition by rooting through art history, turning up antecedents and ancestors. Much of the power of these sculptures comes from the dialogue between our internalized individual body concepts and the racial or cultural ideals evolved through millennia of art. Clearly these are portraits not of individual persons, but of concepts of humanity, transparent and exposed, which examine the DNA of the classical ideal through the lenses of modern technology. Krueger’s subject, then, is not the individual or hero or saint, but the human adventure as revealed through the prism of art. We know that we are midway between the microscopically small and the astronomically large. We know that our atoms in our bodies change every seven years. We know we are made of stardust. Perhaps we are divine to the extent that we think we are — not forgetting our individual ephemerality, of course, or the current political juvenilities that put our survival at risk. It is clear that we do need to reach beyond the old tribal supernatural metaphors. Triumphant heroes and wrathful gods we should discard into the dustbin of history, embracing instead the race as a whole. Nobly formed (by our own lights, at least), we are self-created beings redeemed and justified by our spirituality and quest for knowledge, and our own intelligent designs on the world and cosmos. Joseph Campbell in his filmed PBS interviews of the 1980s with Bill Moyers called for a new mythology that would resolve our biological and psychological imperatives, our links with the earth with our need to understand and grow: to resolve faith and curiosity, being and becoming. Notwithstanding Moyers’ filmic nod to light saber duels, I think Campbell was right, and that something of that new myth is embodied in Krueger’s work. Marrying art with science, ancient with modern, figurative with abstract, mortal with timeless, these sculptures challenge the privileged irony of the current scene to re-assert without sentimentality our human relevance and potential.
DeWitt Cheng is a freelance art aritic and curator. His writing has been published in Artweek, Art News, Print Impressions and several online publications.
There have always been critics who have deplored the current state of art, and there has always been justification for their worry, since masterpieces, except during a few privileged periods —the High Renaissance, the heroic period of Early Modernism— are rare. Yet there are still occasional works of art that rise above the chatter, radiating presence, power, complexity, and the contradictions of life. The welded steel figures of German-born sculptor Nils Krueger, now working in San Francisco, are such exceptional, charismatic works. Beautifully crafted, compelling, imbued with a searching intelligence and rich with associations, these abstracted figures provoke complex and contradictory reactions, startling and amazing the viewer at first, yet seeming, the longer we take them in, somehow inevitable: almost forgotten and remembered, restored to consciousness. Reserved, even austere by contemporary standards, yet dense with implications and blessedly free of irony, they provoke us to puzzle out their secrets; they make us work for their rewards, and, even more notably, they make us want to look and do the work. It’s a refreshing change from the high-concept esthetic contraptions that waggle, grimace, preen and posture, asking little of the audience but unconditional and casual tolerance. Krueger’s masterly meditations on the figurative tradition stand up as our equals and equivalents, physically, intellectually, and emotionally.
Human perception is limited to surface appearance. Our senses give us access to only a limited range of nature's reality. Beyond and below the boundaries of our senses are other aspects of the same reality…
It is because of the openness of its linear construction that the sculptural space does not cut itself off from real space, but it rather becomes a metamorphosis of real space, making it more perceptible. Thus, I achieve a free flowing transition between sculptural and external space, which in the viewer evokes a sense of interconnectedness.
Krueger, quoted above, began working a scant dozen years ago, swiftly finding his medium and message.
Figure Study #1, #2, #3: These early sculptures establish the basic vocabulary: the contrast between different modes of stylization, with the linear scaffolding of the body sometimes more naturalistic, sometimes more abstracted and geometricized. #1 presents a female nude, complete and only slightly distorted in her proportions, caught in mid-stride. With #2 and #3 Krueger adopts the fragmented statue as his model, the former standing, arm raised, like Cellini’s Perseus, the latter a cluster of geometric solids only roughly approximating a human figure.
Head Study #1, #2: These architectural lattice-work busts recall both Constructivist monuments and the introspective portrait drawings and paintings of Giacometti, dense hatchings and erasures building, destroying and weaving together subject and surrounding space. The head-cage of #1 is filled with polygons; in #2 we see hemispherical forms analogizing cranium and mouth.
Structure-Form-Surface: This sculptural triptych sets its three protagonists on heavy circular metal stands within architectural niches, rather like Greco-Roman heroes and gods, or their later Renaissance reincarnations as saints and soldiers. Both figures and niches are fashioned from welded steel rods, the architectural features geometrically perfect, with the figures, shells of broken statues, wrought in varying styles or degrees of simplification and elaboration. The figure on the left reveals through its open mesh wire-frame skin its internal structures: shoulder blade, ribcage, spine, pelvis, thighbone. The figure on the right, its skin or garment of a tighter weave, resembling crocheting or embroidery, stands with parts unfinished, as though the weaver left off or undid the work. The central figure is an extreme geometricization, and recognizable as a human torso only in the context created by its brothers; its stacked metal polygons recall both Cezanne’s famous dictum that Nature is made of spheres, cones and rods, and Cubism’s pursuit of the monumental and geometric amid the sensory haze of hectic modern life.
Compositional Forms Series #1-#10: These figures are more loosely organized, more improvisatory, and more surrealist than the previous work, completed concurrently. They imply not so much architecture as jewelry. The surface of the skin is less in evidence, with the human form, reduced to leg plus torso, emerging from the arabesque of metal. The artist’s re-envisioning of human anatomy results in surprising metaphors that never stray so far from reality as to destroy the larger image: the orb/gyroscope forms read as shoulder muscles, kneecaps, or stomach; the metal branches mimic thigh muscles and ribs; and the axial spines, straight and constant, transform us into strange plants. The animated, floating internal structures suggest orreries (astronomic models), clockwork automata, molecules, and constellations. It is as if anatomical engravings, become infected by Art Nouveau stylization, sprouted exuberantly into three-dimensional space. #8 transforms the torso into planetary chronometer, and #9 reintroduces the female torso, as ethereal and elegant as Botticelli’s Venus.
Vitruvian Series #1-#5: Leonardo’s famous 1490 drawing illustrating the writings of the Roman archjitect Vitruvius depicted man created in the divine image — the mathematical; and geometrical model for the universe. The boxes and grids in this series add the connotation of measurement and scientific scrutiny, recalling Muybridge’s photographs of human and animal movement. The phone-booth-like boxes not only constrain and contain the statues/specimens, and visually frame them (think of Bacon’s glass cages), but also allow the introduction of X-rays aligned with the sculpted elements, so that we reconstruct the figure from different perceptual modes. Science fiction metaphors come to mind: three-dimensional holograms with popup databases for skin, muscle, bone displayed at different angles, somehow frozen into metal and acrylic plastic, but easily transformed with new information. #1 hews closely to Leonardo’s drawing, with Adam’s outstretched limbs defining circle and square centered respectively on navel and groin. #2 presents a female figure, one arm outstretched, and #3 simplifies the figure down to a ‘constellation’ of four planetary systems (orbs and orbits) replacing calf, thigh, stomach and heart. Krueger constructs elliptical orbits to describe motion because metaphors for movement enlist the imagination in way that actual motion may not, just as Bernini disdained colored stone as an unnecessary distraction from his emotionally charged white marble.
The space we perceive is filled with objects, and while such an object might appear still, the components of its matter, such as atoms, electrons, neutrons, quarks, etc., are in constant movement. Thus, rather than being static, space is a dynamic and active environment….I believe space to be a process, rather than what one might describe as a constant, or "state of being". I see it as a process in which space, matter, and time are interdependents. I conceive it as the activity of ever changing relations between matter in space through time.
Creating an explanatory metaphor usually helps in fathoming an artist’s intentions. But these figures have so many readings —artifact, fossil, skeleton, anatomical display, puppet, android, cadaver, ruined statue, or any permutation thereof—that it’s impossible to settle on one interpretation. Giacometti’s perplexity while confronting the model comes to mind: “At first, one sees the person who is modeling; but, little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model….There are too many sculptures between my models and me.” Krueger’s works, while eluding simple explanations, are thematically rich and multivalent, and compelling in all of their multiple guises. To my eye, three factors combine in these works to play different musical lines, solo or together:
—the classical figure tradition;
—modernist modes of vision, or artistic styles;
—and postmodern theory’s denial of absolute truth.
The Greco-Roman figure tradition of idealized nudes — in Leonardo’s words, as cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm)— continues in Krueger’s figures modernized, but also renewed. Adopting the classically proportioned male and female forms as a basis for improvisation, as Jasper Johns seized on flags and maps, “things the mind already knows,” Krueger reconstructs the body in contemporary terms: fragmented, disembodied, transparent, X-rayed. When we think of modern artists’ attitudes toward the grand style, we think of disillusionment, of parody, of ironic laughter, of pathos. Giorgio di Chirico painted faceless mannequins perched on the stageset of empire at the twilight preceding the Great War. Alberto Giacometti made atomic-age ushabti (Egyptian tomb statuary meant to serve as slaves in the next life) that persist in life despite the erosions of time and space. In the Bay Area today, Manuel Neri carves marbles mimicking unfinished and broken Greek statues streaked with bright color, and Stephen DeStaebler models androgynous partial figures barely emerging from their clayey matrices, or perhaps sinking back into them, earth to earth, exuding an Ozymandian “aura of heroic antiquity,“ in the words of Donald Kuspit.
But many artists saw modernism as a way to revitalize a classic tradition by now overburdened with Victorian realism, narrative and sentimentality, even on occasion dragooned into propaganda to help one noble race exterminate a brutish Other. Fernand Leger painted working people with bluntness and elegance, balancing harmony and contrast, and always eschewing drama: “no eloquence, no romanticism.” Oskar Schlemmer, a dancer, painter and printmaker, depicted simplified, elegant figures promenading through a clear, luminous pictorial stage space, the whole suffused with tenderness and optimism (His Bauhaus Stairway used to hang in MOMA’s stairwell, by the way.). Werner Haftman writes of Schlemmer: “His aim was to create a single spiritual order embracing both organic life and the geometrical ideal. Man, in his system, was the point of intersection between the natural and spiritual orders.” The rationalism of Leger (Catholic belief notwithstanding) and Schlemmer celebrates humanity’s inherent worth without invoking the supernatural: classicism and modernity join hands.
Along with the classic figure tradition’s idealization of form we must also consider the modernist tradition’s experimentation with different modes of perception and expression. (The march of styles and manifestoes would seem the diametric opposite of classicism, but they both distinguish between the primary, real, and timeless and the secondary, false, and transitory; between the cerebral and the sensory, the ideal and the real.) Cubism’s search for hard reality in the flux of modern life led to a breakup of form, an embrace of fragments, and an overlapping of differing views. Georges Braque said that in order to portray a woman accurately it was necessary to make three drawings of her —plan, elevation and section—, as with a house. The following description of the viewer’s mental reassembly of Cubist fragments might be from the instruction manual for Krueger’s automata.
The illusionistic fragment thus served as a kind of emblem, as a clue which helped the viewer to identify the object. Such fragments of reality use simultaneously enable us to complete a real object in our minds, even if in the picture it appears only as a fragment or an emblem. The organism eliminates all the dross of natural appearance, which cannot be transmuted into form, retaining only essential, representative elements, which evoke as it were the names of things.,…. Now begins an exciting play with fragments of reality, with isolated things which only by dint of a slow constructive process are made to combine into a living organism, in which they lose their absurdity and become part of an order. They enter into communication with one another and with the mind that had arranged them. —Werner Haftman
Beyond the fracturing of time and space, and the imaginative reconstruction such an approach demands of the viewer, is the postmodern acknowledgement that no one mode of seeing is privileged, unique, or indisputable — and the frequent combining, or colliding of disparate systems of depiction in one work. Krueger’s work proposes several metaphors or models, as mentioned before, waxing, waning, overlapping, no single one predominating. There are several styles of fabrication as well that the artist employs as well: 1) a wire-frame shell, as used in 3D computer modeling familiar to moviegoer today, but carried to artistic heights by Krueger’s meticulous craftsmanship; the polygons resulting from the innumerable welds create a texture like cracked paint or cracked mud craquelure, in ceramic-speak, or like vastly magnified skin cells, and the effect is rather as if the skin had vanished but left its interstices intact; 2) a woven, knitted or embroidered clothlike surface: skin as lace, as garment, as armor; and 3) a longitudinal set of parallel lines, bunched and striated like muscle fibers. The result of this pictorial richness is a multidimensional model, synthesized from different viewpoints and disciplines, of man as the measure of all things. Five hundred years after Leonardo’s discovery of Vitruvian Man, marrying circle and square, spiritual (celestial) and material (terrestrial), another artist presents man without twentieth- or twenty-first-century angst or ironic apology — the pattern of the universe, the noblest of living forms.
I believe that creating work which makes us re-conceptualize our bodies and our own impulses enables us to see dignity and nobility in the world of non-art and non-figure objects as well.
We’ve discussed Krueger’s revitalization and modernization of the classic figural tradition by rooting through art history, turning up antecedents and ancestors. Much of the power of these sculptures comes from the dialogue between our internalized individual body concepts and the racial or cultural ideals evolved through millennia of art. Clearly these are portraits not of individual persons, but of concepts of humanity, transparent and exposed, which examine the DNA of the classical ideal through the lenses of modern technology. Krueger’s subject, then, is not the individual or hero or saint, but the human adventure as revealed through the prism of art. We know that we are midway between the microscopically small and the astronomically large. We know that our atoms in our bodies change every seven years. We know we are made of stardust. Perhaps we are divine to the extent that we think we are — not forgetting our individual ephemerality, of course, or the current political juvenilities that put our survival at risk. It is clear that we do need to reach beyond the old tribal supernatural metaphors. Triumphant heroes and wrathful gods we should discard into the dustbin of history, embracing instead the race as a whole. Nobly formed (by our own lights, at least), we are self-created beings redeemed and justified by our spirituality and quest for knowledge, and our own intelligent designs on the world and cosmos. Joseph Campbell in his filmed PBS interviews of the 1980s with Bill Moyers called for a new mythology that would resolve our biological and psychological imperatives, our links with the earth with our need to understand and grow: to resolve faith and curiosity, being and becoming. Notwithstanding Moyers’ filmic nod to light saber duels, I think Campbell was right, and that something of that new myth is embodied in Krueger’s work. Marrying art with science, ancient with modern, figurative with abstract, mortal with timeless, these sculptures challenge the privileged irony of the current scene to re-assert without sentimentality our human relevance and potential.
DeWitt Cheng is a freelance art aritic and curator. His writing has been published in Artweek, Art News, Print Impressions and several online publications.