“The idea of history and of memory is one of my themes... and very often my characters are remembering past lives in the present tense. I do it all the time. I do it often because it is so effective.”
Marrying such diametric antipodes as motion and stasis, music and silence, mass and light, La Musica / Amnesia from 1990 hails from the most celebrated series of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s titanic oeuvre spanning seven decades. Its attenuated bronze form possesses an incredulous levity, unfurling in its ascent with an aching torque and resting atop a coiled base of silver silk rope. Belonging to the eponymous sculptural corpus which has consumed the artist’s practice since the 1990s, the present work marks one of the first examples of the La Musica series, showcasing her complete fluency in metallurgy and her career-long concerns with memory and commemoration. Chase-Riboud was recently honored with a joint presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, alongside the work of one of her formative inspirations, Alberto Giacometti, and it is in this context that the present work emerges as a paragon of her conceptually-charged artistic enterprise. Held in the same private collection for over two decades, La Musica, in its liquescent splendor, announces the artist’s great proclamation for sculpture’s path forward.
In the 1990s, she inaugurated one of her most significant and enduring body of work: the La Musica series. In memoriam of performer and activist Josephine Baker, the first Black woman to be inducted into the French mausoleum for national heroes, or the Panthéon, the series translated into bronze the calligraphic lyricism of Baker’s dance. The present work sees Chase-Riboud’s expertly-paced choreography and the homage she pays to African and Oceanic aesthetic traditions and broader history of art in its totem-like posture and shamanistic liveliness. La Musica / Amnesia fuses the far-reaching traditions of Mesopotamian antiquity, imperial China, and such icons of Modernism as Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, and David Smith, resulting in a work borne from the past yet resolutely aimed toward the future. This ethos is perhaps best summarized in her 2021 manifesto, entitled “A Manifesto for Sculpture in Pursuit of Futurism.” In it, Chase-Riboud famously urges: “Let us jettison the stale geometry of these remnants and clear terrain to host a raucous, swinging romp. Sculpture must not sit still.” Indeed, the present work’s folded, curvilinear shards of bronze seem to anticipate her heroic call to action; reviving a spirit and sense of urgency last seen in the war years, Chase-Riboud reminds artists of their works’ obligation to the world, to itself, and to each other.
“Bronze is timeless... It’s imbued with history, it’s the material of artisans of the Kingdom of Benin and the Baroque.”
La Musica / Amnesia’s obligation is paid to its acknowledgement and commemoration of slavery’s violent legacy. Through its bipartite title, the present work illuminates the apocryphal myth of reparation and the impossibility of forgetting. Its textile base, punctuated by tangled wire, evokes the bondage and bodily harm imposed upon the African peoples, a formal device and historical reference she poignantly and assertively invokes other works, such as her Middle Passage Monument. Here, the silk base serves a two-fold purpose: to free the artist from the tyranny of solid sculptural armatures, and to stage an affecting allegory for the trauma induced by the transatlantic slave trade. “The idea of history and of memory is one of my themes,” the artist has explained of her literary work, “and very often my characters are remembering past lives in the present tense. I do it all the time. I do it often because it is so effective.” (the artist in: Suzette A. Spencer, “On Her Own Terms: An Interview with Barbara Chase-Riboud,” Callaloo, vol. 32, issue 3, Summer 2009, p. 743) Her abstract sculptural vernacular is thus understood to be a representation of Black disenfranchisement and power, sorrow and triumph, and it is from these collective ancestral wounds that Black Americans, and the descendants of enslaved Africans everywhere, have ascended.
In La Musica / Amnesia the phenomenological complexity of Chase-Riboud’s conceptual program reaches its apogee, and the layered nuances of her relationship to record and remembrance are deftly represented by the simultaneous plasticity and poeticism of the present work. Imbued with the impression of remarkable, non-Newtonian fluidity, La Musica / Amnesia is corporeal, anthropomorphic, and alive, carrying the human touch endemic in all of Chase-Riboud’s best work.
