If you type into Google "Rafts, plinths and islands", you get a reply that points to the different types of land and structures found in the survival game 'Raft'. However I'm thinking about how we present artwork and how we sometimes try to isolate the work from the world, so that we can contemplate it.

Rafts, plinths and islands are three dimensional ways of thinking about framing. They are also usually associated with sculpture rather than drawing, however there is a fair amount of territory that overlaps and I have in the past looked at drawing as very thin sculpture, a reminder that all physical things, no matter how flat are all three dimensional.

I can remember first coming across Anthony Caro's work in the late 1960s and one of the things that was fascinating about it, was that it didn't need to stand on a plinth.

Anthony Caro, Prairie: 1967

By eliminating the plinth the work became part of the world you were in, it occupied the same space as you did. This was such a different feeling to encountering sculpture on a plinth. It felt at the time liberating and democratic, to bring sculpture down from off its aristocratic pedestal.

Rodin: Hand of God: 1998

Sculpture presented on a plinth, such as 'The Hand of God' by Rodin, is presented to us as if it belongs to another place, in effect it occupies an island that you have to get to in order to appreciate it. The island plinth is rather like another country, the game 'Raft' taps into the psychic feeling tone we have when we encounter islands as places of intrigue, mystery and/or danger; islands hold within themselves secrets that can only be discovered by exploration and getting there is sometimes a struggle. The plinth standing isolated in a gallery space, operates in a similar way to an island, the work that stands upon it may be new and uncharted, but we know someone has presented this work to us as something worth contemplation.

The aesthetic 'struggle' to understand what art means is often encountered in galleries, especially if the work on display is of classical provenance. The 'special' nature or 'aura' of the work is signified by the plinth, you immediately know it is of cultural and monetary worth by the fact that it has been three dimensionally 'framed' and presented.

From the Dauphin website

Companies such as Dauphin operate as art display consultants and if you are thinking about how to present work, it is always worth looking at what they do, if only to steal ideas. If you go to their website you will find that they operate as a service that adds value to the work they present. Compare what they do to shop window displays, where expensive items are spotlit and are given small pedestals to isolate them from other objects or set into felt or silk. For art display consultants the art object is no different to any other culturally valuable item, the job is to heighten the allure of the object and at times to give it an almost religious significance.

Jewellery shop display

St Mark's Basilica treasury

Spotlit and behind glass, the religious treasures of St Mark's in Venice, are presented as objects for veneration. The sculpture as presented by Dauphin it is suggested ought to have a similar level of veneration. However the relics in St Marks are set into a vitrine, a way of presenting things that is closely related to plinths and pedestals but more concerned with religious value than monetary value. I shall preserve the issues related to vitrines for another post, as they not only signify religious value, but the idea of the museum gaze and the sanctity of research.

The plinth is a modern version of the pedestal. The pedestal is a sort of shorthand version of the column and it signifies Classicism, which was and still is, an aesthetic attitude that suggests the primacy of the culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

A classical pedestal.

If you place modern sculpture on a classical pedestal or niche, as I have done with one of my ceramics, or in the work of Lee Bul further below, it is framed or separated out from life, as well as curiously, unframed, the incongruity making the observers very aware that they are meant to see that a point is being made.

Ceramic votive fetish presented on a classical pedestal

Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo 2024

Of course you can simply place your work on a domestic object such as a chair.

Contemporary artists are very aware of these issues, but perhaps the first modern artist to play with the idea of the plinth was Brancusi.

Brancusi display currently at the Pompidou centre

Brancusi shapes his plinths into forms that chime with the sculpture placed upon them.

Dogon: Kambari style

Certain sculptures made in the area of Africa that we call Mali by the Dogon people are given the attribute, 'Kambari' style. Made at exactly the same time as Brancusi made Portrait de Mme L.R, and for many years before he began carving, these sculptures also integrated their bases into their body forms. They remind us that the carvings are made from tree trunks, the base often being both something that is a 'ground' for the figure to stand on and a formal device that echoes the shape and form of the material that the figure was carved from. Brancusi used to celebrate his 'primitive' approach, often by incorporating elements from Romanian folk art and African sculpture into his work, which he saw as a source of more authentic artistic feeling.

Brancusi: Portrait de Mme L.R. 1914–17

Brancusi's 'Portrait de Mme L.R.', is like the Dogon sculpture shaped out of wood, the supporting base, or plinth, is an integral component of the sculpture, you can't take the top part off and put it on another base. If Brancusi had been a painter, it would be as if he had begun painting onto the frame of his painting. Something that we see happening in the work of Howard Hodgkin, 60 years later.

Howard Hodgkin:Blue Movie: 1986/7

Picasso of course got there first. He realised you could use the frame to play a perceptual game.

Picasso: Still life with chair caning and rope frame. 1912

Picasso asks us questions as to how we see and what we see. The chair caning is a print, a slice of existing life, but non the less an illusion. The letters are real letters, the fractured viewpoints of the painted still life are reminders of the various positions taken by the artist as he looked at the still life and the rope frame asks us to think about the caning again, as its twisted material is of the same material family. But it also asks the question, "`Where does the image stop?" Does it stop inside the frame, or is the rope part of the experience? This conundrum is opened out in some of my earlier posts in particular in relation to the parergon.

We have now returned to the wall space and framing a flat image, hopefully it now makes sense as to why I'm looking at the plinth within a blog focused on issues related to drawing.

There is a sort of halfway house for sculpture and that is the raft, something that in the case of a flat image is not that dissimilar to the shelf.

Sébastien de Ga: Aluminium Sculpture on Pallet 1, 2017

The wooden pallet is often used as a type of raft when presenting work. It is high enough to separate the work out from the floor, but low enough to suggest that the work still bears some sort of floor relationship. Pallets also have a sense of a working life or everyday reality associated with them. They are made for easy manoeuvrability and suggest therefore impermanence.

The raft can also be a small island, in the case of Hans Op de Beeck's still lives, he 'frames' the work by installing it on a low platform. That halfway house between a full blown plinth and the raft is as I pointed out similar to the relationship between the frame and the shelf, another presentation technique de Beeck uses.

Hans Op de Beeck

Standing frames on a shelf or ledge

Standing a frame on a ledge reintroduces the physical presence of the frame. It is another of those contradictions that we sometimes encounter when displaying work. On the one hand we want to cut the work out of an everyday space to suggest that it is something different and that you ought to spend time focusing on the ideas that the work is holding. On the other hand we may want to suggest that the work is available or 'domesticated' is some way. There was some work presented in the last Venice Biennale on old chests of drawers. The sculptures therefore feeling more like ornaments.

Objects sitting on top of a contemporary chest of drawers

Michael Samuels

Michael Samuels has made sculpture from furniture, therefore the plinth is an integral part of the sculpture, table legs still operating as table legs, even though the table is no longer a table.

The image above could be a plan view of a gallery floor with island positions marked for sculptures or an elevation view of a gallery wall with flat works displayed as isolated images. On a flat wall the space between images set out like this can feel vast. The difference being that in plan view you are actually in the room space, standing on the floor, therefore you are also activating the room space as an additional three dimensional object, this is not the case on the wall. On the wall you can cluster a group of works together rather like islands and then put one larger work some distance away, suggesting a larger land mass off in the distance. The viewer it is suggested needs to travel between these images, just as you would when sailing at sea. However you travel in the mind, your eyes do the work, as you stand on the outside of the situation.

So yet another series of things to think about when displaying work. There are always more issues and the next subject related to presentation methods I shall deal with is that of the display case and how that effects and affects the meanings associated with art work. I'll leave that for another post.