Of Empathy,Appropriation,and Time
GillianJagger

BY EDWARD M. GÓMEZ30 x 20 ft. View of installation at Jagger’sstudio.

DAVID LACKEY, WHIRLWIND CREATIVE

Rift, 1999. Calf stanchions, animal bones,
farm implements, and barbed wire, 11 x

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Rift (detail), 1999.

art and a natural proficiency as a draftsman.
Recently, she recollected, “My sister and I
spent hours on end in our father’s studio,
making pictures or clay figures. I suppose I
learned by watching; plus drawing cameeasily to me. My father was classicallytrained and made bas-relief and freestanding
sculptures, so I acquired an understandingof the relationship between drawing andthree-dimensional form, and about how certain materials could be used.”
After studying painting at Carnegie Tech
(now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Jagger moved to New York to pursue
a master’s degree in painting at New York
University. In Manhattan, Andy Warhol, anolder Carnegie Tech graduate, was a supportive pal. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jagger
brought sculptural elements into her semiabstract paintings, including plaster casts ofmanhole covers that she had made on citystreets. “Manhole Covers Make for Holesome Art,” quipped an August 1964 headline of a New York World-Telegram article
about Jagger’s working methods.
In the fall of that year, Jagger presented
a solo exhibition of mixed-media “paintings”
at New York’s now-defunct Ruth White Gallery. Some incorporated plaster casts of

Manhattan manhole covers. “One of themwas mounted on a big board, on which I
had painted a yellow line,” she says. “Several men had to carry it up five flights ofstairs, because it didn’t fit in the elevator.
When I told the dealer, Ruth White, that I
had been called a ‘sculptor’ in the newspaper, she said, ‘If it takes five men to carry
your piece up the stairs, you cannot call ita painting. It’s a sculpture.’”To Jagger’s dismay, the media threw her
into the Pop camp, a response that frustrated her: “I wasn’t trying to be detachedin the Pop Art way. Instead, I wanted myworks to feel real; that’s why I put ‘real’
objects in them.” For a while, she withdrew
from the Manhattan art world; she moved
to New Jersey and focused on caring forhorses, one of her enduring passions.
Eventually, she resumed making casts,experimenting with plaster, sodium alginate (used to make teeth-impression molds),cement, and lead. After casting the manholes, to make one form, she says, “I stuck
my own rear end in plaster.” Similarly, inthe 1970s, using plaster or malleable polyurethane foam, she made casts of theimpressions left by her friends’ bodies after
they had slid through sand; of horses’ hoof-Sculpture 34.1

RUSSELL PANZCENKO

How do you solve a problem like Gillian
Jagger’s label-defying work? It does not fit
into any familiar art-market niche andconfounds many of the art establishment’strend-conscious poobahs. It is not postmodern-ironic, nor does she send her designsout to nameless fabricators to be manufactured—bigger, shinier, more expensive—
and then sold to trophy-seeking Russianoligarchs or oil-rich Qataris. Certainly, manyof her mixed-media works are large—andcomplex and unusual, too—sometimes
incorporating the dried bodies of dead animals or rusty sections of farm implements.
Despite or perhaps because of their strangeness, her sculptures do not traffic in onetrick sensations; instead, they conjure
resonant, ambiguous emotions and atmospheres that feel at once primordial andtimeless, charged with some kind of unnamable, soulful/psychic energy.
Jagger, who is now in her early 80s andhas lived for several decades in the rural
Hudson Valley, northwest of Manhattan,says, “As human beings, we’re interconnected with each other and with nature.
We are or we should be, that is, and I want
my works to reflect that idea.” Jagger is aprofessor emerita of Pratt Institute, where
she taught for 40 years. She continues toteach, in the role of visiting critic, at thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
She was born in London in 1930; her father,
the sculptor Charles Sergeant Jagger, hadstudied at the Royal College of Art and won
the Prix de Rome. He was awarded a medal
for his valorous service in World War I andlater created monuments depicting British
soldiers heroically, in a realist style. His bestknown work is the Royal Artillery Memorial
at Hyde Park Corner, in London.
Charles Sargent Jagger died when Gillian
was a little girl. After her mother married acoal magnate from upstate New York, thefamily moved to Buffalo. Jagger remembers,“Within minutes of getting married andthen heading with us girls to the States, it
was clear that there was no understanding
between them.” A few years later, she wasdevastated when her older sister diedof spinal meningitis at the age of 12. Jagger
recalls, “I went dead for a year. I didn’t speak.
I refused to go to school.” Throughout her
childhood, Jagger displayed an interest inDAVID LACKEY, WHIRLWIND CREATIVE

prints; of a dead cat; of tire tracks made byheavy vehicles like Jeeps; and, during a trip
to Kenya in 1975 with her companion (andnow spouse), Consuelo Mander, of a baby
buffalo’s legs. “I hauled 60 pounds of sodium
alginate with me to Africa,” Jagger recalls.
“I made castings of tomb walls in Egypt, but
it was the look, shape, and atmosphere of
Kenya’s volcanic landscape that really movedme.” She started paying attention to theforms and textures of the earth’s surface—
years later, she would visit western Ireland’s
rocky Burren coast, too—and to their subtle
function as nature’s markers of the passageof time.
Jagger’s work began to reflect a confluenceof interrelated themes that had long interested her. These included the natural cycleof life and death, the fragility or vulnerabilityof living things, and an insistence on apprehending and depicting reality as it is—sometimes painful, complex, or confounding—
without intervening in typical, artistic ways
to portray it through illusion-creating orstylizing techniques. Not for Jagger was Pop
Art’s winking regard for and representationof its subjects, from fast food and soup cansto beach balls and shiny cars. “If I could
have ripped real manhole covers out of thepavement and used them in my ‘paintings,’
I would have done so,” she says, “Making
rubbings or plaster casts was the only way
I could keep this subject matter clean andtrue, not change it and bring it into my art.”
Jagger admits that she was reacting against
her drawing skills, too: “I could have madeaccurate pictures of what had captured myinterest, but that would have been too arty
for me. I was casting facts, because I couldn’t
believe in arty metaphors.”
Her works became larger and more complex. When encountered in person, some ofher mixed-media creations are every bit as
startling as Damien Hirst’s cut-up cows displayed in formaldehyde-filled tanks, but
without their calculated shock value. Among
Among them: Rift (1999), a phantasmagoriaof airborne animal bones, barbed wire, andominous, metal stanchions that once held
milk cows in place in their barns, and Sideways (2008), two massive tree trunks joinedby a stone slab, a construction that resembles a gigantic clothespin hanging horizontally from the ceiling.

Sculpture January/February 2015

Above and detail: Sideways, 2008. Wood, steel, and stone, 10 x 12 x 30 ft. View of installation at Jagger’sstudio. Below: Absence of Faith, 2002. Plaster, wire, and mixed media, 12 x 7 x 6 ft. View of installation
at Jagger’s studio.

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copper, chicken wire, and cable, 6 x 7 x 12 ft.; and(right) Of The Bull, 2012, charcoal and acrylic pastel
on collaged paper, 11 x 11 ft. Left: Detail of AndThen And Now, 2013.

In time, the signature components in manyof Jagger’s works became large sections ofdead or fallen trees. These are the works forwhich she has become best known. To makethem, she looks for unusually shaped trunksin the forest on her property. Aided by TomMotzer, a skilled carpenter and builder who
has also helped her tackle structural-engineering challenges, she then hauls them backto her studio barns with a heavy-duty tractor. Jagger might paint or cut her appropriatedfrom-nature materials, but generally her
artistic interventions are modest and decisive.
“I might look at an old tree for a year
before taking it away,” she explains. “Tome, these trees hold something special. It’s
as though they know something, as though
they speak a language, and if we could justlearn it, it would comfort us.” Jagger, anexperienced rider, says that she approaches
trees with the same affection she feels forhorses and other animals.
“Why did I start using trees?” she asks. She
explains that, in 1990, when she was usinglead to cast impressions of tree bark, a closefriend was diagnosed with a degenerative
disease. “The lead and a hollowed-out tree

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Sculpture 34.1

DAVID LACKEY, WHIRLWIND CREATIVE

Above: Installation view with (left) And Then And
Now, 2013, plastic-coated electrical wire, brass,came together in a piece I was working on.
When I dragged that big tree into the studio, it was like a scream for life. I opened itup and hung it from chains from the ceiling,
and when my sick friend came to see thepiece, she rolled right into it in her wheelchair, as though that’s where she belonged.”
The artist Kiki Smith knows Jagger and isfamiliar with her work. She told me that she
found it “rough and visceral,” adding, “It’sphysically compelling in ways some artists’works are not.” Smith noted, too, that thevery visible chain hoists that often suspend
Jagger’s tree sculptures appear as integral
parts of the works, giving them an edgy
sense of contingency, of “feeling like they’retemporary.” Jagger agrees. Sometimes, as in
Absence of Faith (2002), a fragmented, plaster-cast sculpture of a horse, she suspends
the components of a multi-part work fromthe ceiling using more delicate, thin-gauge
wires instead. A sense of physical tension,
which Jagger associates with the humanbody’s vulnerabilities and sense of gravity,
pervades such constructions, as does
an implied sense of movement. By contrast,
a huge piece like Berlinde De Bruyckere’s
Kreupelhout—Cripplewood (2012–13), which
replicates a massive, uprooted elm treein wax, with thickets of branches wrapped
up like bandaged limbs, also alludes to life,
death, and decay, but its emphatically static
nature is part of its impact, as is its melodramatic air. Jagger says, “Tom and I go to
great lengths to figure out how to hang or
support these heavy pieces, which makeyou keenly aware of their mass, weight,and volume. Some of them are big, lumpy
things, but they look and feel as light asballet dancers.”
In Jagger’s recent solo exhibition at John
Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, engineering prowess came together with her
abiding interest in animals, human nature(or expressions of the human spirit), andmaterial experimentation. And Then, AndNow (2013), a sculpture of a bucking bullmade of chicken wire and interwoven,plastic-covered electrical wires of varying
thicknesses, is related to Of the Bull (2012),
a mural-size rendering of the same subject
in pastel chalk on paper and acetate sheets.
Both works were inspired by prehistoric
paintings and sculptures that Jagger saw

DAVID LACKEY, WHIRLWIND CREATIVE

4th Configuration of Horses Ran By, 2014. Latex, plaster, and rebar, 40 x 22 x 8 ft.

during a 2012 trip to the Dordogne region ofsouthwestern France. There, she visited L’Abride Cap Blanc, a rock shelter that lies just to
the east of the Eyzies Caves.
“What I saw profoundly moved me,” shesays. “A carved wall relief featured nearly adozen wild animals. In front of a deep indentation in the wall lay the skeletal remains ofa curled-up human figure—presumably thewoman who had sculpted these animals
some 17,000 years ago. Through this powerful work, this ancient, unknown artist convinced me that she had felt and believed in
the power of empathy—with the animals,with nature—to give life meaning.”
Back in her studio, Jagger worked on thebull picture, which recalls ancient cave
paintings in its size and flatness; her image,though, features some skillful foreshortening,a tour de force of fine draftsmanship. Eager
to translate her subject into three-dimensional form, Jagger felt that “it would havebeen false for me to try to respond to
he prehistoric artist’s work using my usualmaterials or the materials of her time. I feltthat if I were to reach back so far in timeand space, I’d have to use a very light material, so came the wires. As this sculpturedeveloped, I felt I had to rush to keep up
with it, because it was evolving with or

Sculpture January/February 2015

without me, like something that matteredunto itself.”
In his 1925 treatise, The Dehumanizationof Art, a book with which Jagger is familiar,
the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was prescient; considering still-evolving,
early 20th-century art forms, he noted thatthey tended to regard art “as a game andnothing more,” to possess “an essentialirony,” and to lack any sense of “transcendence whatsoever.” He also postulated what
he called realidad vivida (“worldly reality”)
or realidad humana (“human reality”), bywhich he meant the worldview of any individual based on the sum of his or her life’s
experiences. Such an outlook can be bothobjective and subjective; every person has
one, and, by extension, it might be said
that all humans share a common worldview
as members of the same species, an outlook
based on uniquely human perceptions,knowledge, and emotions.
Jagger’s creations are touching a nervewith viewers who are concerned about theenvironment. Some of her sculptures havejust been shown at David Lewis Gallery in
New York, where they attracted a new audience of younger art enthusiasts. Jagger’s
work implicitly taps into that kind of fundamental human sensibility and, from there,

gently reaches for the spiritual. It also seems
to ply the depths of what Carl Jung called
the “collective unconscious”—a humanitywide repository of shared, psychic, enduringknowledge and experience. The painter Barbara Gordon, a former student of Jagger’s
who, with her husband, Richard Schlesinger,
made Casting Faith: A Portrait of Gillian Jagger (2002), notes in that documentary film:“Gillian’s work is not conceptual. It’s aboutconnections—to land, animals, natural patterns.” It reminds us, she says, “about how
art helps us live in the world.” In the film,
John Perreault observes, “As far as I can tell,there is not an ounce of irony in Gillian’swork…She’s not sarcastic or ironic. In asense, she’s not iconic either.”With its allusions to natural forces and itsinherent spiritual values, Jagger’s work, one
could argue, claims empathy and time as
central themes. She wants us to stop andthink about the character of the trees oranimals whose traces or remains appear in
her works, and how we might relate to themin a grander scheme of life, death, awareness, and enduring soul. That kind of proposition, however, can be a very hard sell.
Edward M. Gómez is a critic and senior
editor of Raw Vision.

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