To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour.

Apr 26, 2025

Today, the last Saturday in April, is International Sculpture Day.

I love sculpture. If I had to devise a formula for poetry I’d say it was music + sculpture x mysticism.

If Goethe with his ‘music is liquid architecture and architecture is frozen music’ hadn’t got there first, I’d call poetry on the page sculpted music.

Happy International Sculpture Day.

To mark it I’m going to give away an entire sculpture installation in a 10cm x 10cm white box. One of only ten editions I’ve made, each numbered and signed. I’m selling them for £50 but a reader can have one for free.

If my career ends in literary triumph or widely-reported personal ignominy then you’ll have a valuable collector’s piece in your poetic collection. If my career continues on its current trajectory of being just a man messing about with language whilst no one pays attention, then you’ll have a nice white 10cm by 10cm box in which to keep rings given to you by those whose hearts you break.

It’s win / win. In a moment I’ll tell you about the installation and how to claim it.

Three sculptures first.

The title of this post is one of Duchamp’s brilliant artwork titles. Strange how Duchamp almost seems passé now, yet he created so much of the 21st century. I still love him. One of my favourite works of his is Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?

Of it Duchamp said ‘it is a Readymade in which the sugar is changed to marble. It is sort of a mythological effect’.

And Breton said ‘I have in mind the occasion when Marcel Duchamp got hold of some friends to show them a cage which seemed to have no birds in it, but to be half-full of lumps of sugar. He asked them to lift the cage and they were surprised at its heaviness. What they had taken for lumps of sugar were really small lumps of marble which at great expense Duchamp had had sawn up specially for the purpose. The trick in my opinion is no worse than any other, and I would even say that it is worth nearly all the tricks of art put together.’

I like a trick and Duchamp was one of the best tricksters. As is Maurizio Cattelan. This is his La Nona Ora. If you’ve seen Conclave and know this sculpture, then I’m sure you’ll have spotted the witty reference to it.

I find it hard to believe that when La Nona Ora was first exhibited in 1999 it caused such a scandal that a museum director was forced to resign. Personally, I’ve always seen it as a deeply religious work about humbling and mystery. The idea of the meteorite is an incredible shorthand for the unknowable heavens. The ninth hour in the title was the hour Christ yelled at God about being forsaken. I have a sculpture about that coming up.

And then there’s Joseph Beuys and his I Like America and America Likes Me. Ok, this *could* be deemed performance art, but not by me Rose Sélavy, so there.

In the piece Beuys flew to New York and, wrapped in felt (a recurring material in his work), was picked up by an ambulance and transported to a room in an art gallery. The room contained a wild coyote and for eight hours a day for the next three days, Beuys lived with the coyote in the small room along with a felt blanket and a pile of straw.

In the room Beuys made gestures, such as striking a triangle and tossing his gloves to the coyote. At the end of the three days, the coyote had gotten used to Beuys and allowed him a hug. Ah. Beuys was transported back to the airport in the ambulance. During the sculpture he never set foot on American soil nor saw anything of America other than the coyote and the inside of the gallery.

Sorry Americans, but this all feels like a very good metaphor for whatever it is you’re doing over there right now.

My own contribution to the canon of sculpture is much smaller. Or bigger, depending on your imagination. I held one installation in 2019 in the Swiss Church in Covent Garden. A collaboration with my friends at Studio Sutherl& and with an ambient soundtrack (in fifths) by the brilliant Alex Baranowski, Twenty-five sculptures in five dimensions featured twenty-five plinths upon each of which was a text made up of twenty-five syllables. The texts, when read, form a physical object from the raw material of your consciousness.

And then, for my recent six year retrospective at Field System gallery, I re-staged the installation in ten beautiful white boxes. Catch a glimpse of one in the short rustly film below.

Here are some of the twenty-five sculptures. Remember, if you genuinely picture the object as you read the twenty-five syllable text, then that object actually exists, sculpted in the material of your imagination.

This is the first sculpture in the box. Tricksier than it first appears – peonies never being blue of course and snowflakes anything but generic.

Here’s my crucifixion scene. In the original staging in the Swiss Church it was right in front of the altar.

Throughout his life the painter Francis Bacon, who surprisingly never made a sculpture, would tell friends about an object he’d one day like to craft. This is that object, I’m happy to bring to physical form his long-held vision.

One more? This one’s an illegal sculpture. Many of you will know that the artist Anish Kapoor owns exclusive rights to use the blackest of blacks, Vantablack. Well, I’ve thrown caution to the wind and used it anyway. Please don’t tell him.

SO, I have one box of twenty-five sculptures, from the edition of ten, signed and numbered, to give away. Competition closes in a week. All you have to do is comment on this post with the title of a sculpture. Any sculpture ever. I’ll draw an answer at random and will post anywhere in the world.

If you’d like to DOUBLE your chances of winning, then I’m also running the competition on my instagram. Follow me and again comment on that post with a sculpture’s title for a second bit of conceptual paper in the hat.

Talking of sculpture, this poster I made for the Henry Moore Institute was a hit. For a while it outsold Henry Moore’s drawings of sheep. Scroll down and you can buy one here. I’ve always been very proud of the main message, but also that endline ‘Sculpture doesn’t do. Sculpture is.’

I hope you’re having a brilliant International Sculpture Day. In my opinion it’s easily the thirty-sixth best day of the year. Here’s a poem from Black ribbon my new book, which you can buy here. It’s about the one true Platonic form of the Sphinx.