Clifford Last Sculpture

In twentieth century painting, for example, the seminal abstractions of Kasimir Malevich can be read in terms of sociopolitical ideals, and those of Wassily Kandinsky as entrancing distillations of the primal forces and elements of the natural world. In sculpture, outstanding examples of the potential of an extremely schematic language to communicate beyond the limits of insular and self-centred dialogue are the wood and stone carvings of Constantin Brancusi. With these works, no matter how ruthlessly the artist has stripped his forms of ornament and no matter how rudimentary the motif might be, Brancusi’s message remains an exhortation to the soul, a passionate celebration of the human spirit, and sometimes a paradigm of human sensuality.

By the same token, the colossal earthworks of Robert Smithson and the precipitous excavations of Michael Heizer confront us with the emotive authority and formal resonance of a prehistoric fortification or ceremonial barrow. In so doing, however, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) or Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-70), to take specific examples, are clearly more than grandiose exercises in a form of bogus archaeology. In reality, both works serve to place the viewer in spectacular communion with a tract of otherwise undistinguished landscape on the one hand or seascape on the other. In line with their “reshaping” according to some imagined upheaval in the earth’s crust, these locations now assume such distinctive and unexpected configurations that the fact of human intervention – of the enduring human need to impose on nature an artificial matrix of order – becomes a compelling metaphor for the seeming indomitability of the human spirit, or, conversely, for the inevitable submission of the will of the individual in the face of a truly awesome spectacle of a ‘genuine’ natural phenomenon.

Olympian scale and extramural feats aside, examples abound in recent sculpture which demonstrate the ability of a contemporary visual language to evince an exquisite mood or intensely private narrative.
At first glance, the sculpture of Clifford Last can appear inscrutably formal, yet it registers a richly expressive note, serving to reveal once again how a language of abstract form and gesture can sustain an enquiry spawned by resolute concern with the circumstances of human interaction and aspiration.

Sourced from: Geoffrey Edwards, Clifford Last Sculpture: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, 1989, p.11