William Tucker 2017

It is not unusual in ordinary life to wonder about what we are seeing. We hypothesize and when we get it right, our previous guesses are forgotten. Is that dark mass at the end of the road a barn or a clump of trees? It is an either/or question and as the dark mass resolves into a building, the ‘trees’ vanish. If, idly, we want to bring them back, we will have to work at it quite hard. But in aesthetic contemplation we are continually faced by questions that do not resolve themselves in this way. Not either/or but both/and is the order of the day. The sculpture is both an object and an image, both thing and representation. The modern movement stretched the alternatives, pushing them apart and imposing preemptory demands on the viewer’s ability to hold them together. Objecthood is brought in to the foreground and with this emphasis the activity of reading becomes strenuous and reflexive. We have no choice but to watch how we construe our perceptions.

Tucker’s move toward a single form stands for infinitely more than a shift in studio strategy. No amount of forethought could have anticipated what would happen when he embraced substance as a becoming; when he allowed himself to move between the poles of fusion and separateness that are symbolized by the actions of modeling and carving, anymore than forethought could possibly have devised the complexities of imagery that I have begun to name in my description of his sculpture. For what has been put into words so far, represents the tip of things — that thin rind in the encounter with the work where what one sees falls easily into language. The content of the work lies deep in its carnal presence, its energy, its stillness and its unending plasticity. It is how it takes the light — that is to say, how it offers itself to our eyes. It is in how it stands and shows itself to be standing — that is to say, how it offers itself to our standing and our center. It is in how how it unfolds as we move around it — that is to say, how we carry our own bodies over into it, and into the world.

— Andrew Forge, excerpt from “As Many Dimensions as We Have Muscles,” first published in William Tucker: The American Decade 1978-88, exh. cat., Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY 1988)