Thinking about writing about the sculpture of Richard Clements

by Robin Peck

 ...about the forms of keys and matching padlocks, secret codes and cyphers, the enigmatic Pumapunku stones, engineers speculating on advanced machining in ancient times, various Hindu, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek,and also Andean temples, and Jaina Temples, Buddhist Stupas, Joseph Campbell's claims for a cult of Ptah/Shivathat “invented” sculpture, ignoring the bloody Paleolithic, Nandi and the Apis bull, the Golden Bough, Emerald Tablets of Giza and Hattusa, Jules Verne and the green flash at sunset, occult sense and occult nonsense, the lens in ancient times, the prism of Goethe, ancient temples as telescopes and temples as microscopes, masonic and other secret initiation rites, Napoleon's overnight in the Kings Chamber, polished stone floors and thick glass doors, Egyptomania of late 19th c., Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Deco and Robert Smithson's essay Ultramoderne, Entropy and the New Monuments, Michael Heizer's desert/deserted city, the use and abuse of architectural and other scale models, plaster-capped mountains, Cubism and Constructivism, mold-making, my inability to form written sentences, Pure Land Sutras about metal soldiers guarding the summit of Meru, Mount Kailas in the Trans-Himalaya, the Kailasanatha temple, Gurla Mandhata, Nicholas Roerich in Central Asia, Sven Hedin in Central Asia, RCA in Central Asia, Alexandra David-Neel in Central Asia, Aurel Stein's lost cities, my old copy of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, The Psycho-Cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stupa, Lobsang Rampa, Rudolph Steiner and the cult of Anthroposophy, the Goetheanum and Goethe, Obelisks, the megaliths at Baalbek, the abandoned Nile obelisk, half-finished sculpture, Michelangelo's slaves, gypsum plaster, crystals, Vajrachunam: “diamond plaster”, the crystalline, purified (calcined) earth, Selenites, the pale cheese moon, Robert Morris' process sculpture, Brancusi's pedestals scattered, Carl Andre and Thomas Bang, Giacometti's Palace at 4 AM, the recumbent  sculptural torso dissected, so then Duchamp and docks and piers and quays, Teotihuacan, the lighthouse and library of Alexandria, the harbours of Athens and Carthage, Plato vs. Aristotle and no longer having a need to choose between them, Entropy and New Monuments (again), the way wood never seems to die but continues to move with moisture, armatures swelling to crack plaster, the speeding up of Brancusi's commerce (Duchamp) through the use of power tools that led to the simplicity of his forms, the Smaragdine table, Melville's Whiteness of the Whale, the skeletal rib cage of fish eaten, Mammoths as Cyclops, Cyclopean architecture, Ancient Egyptian votive tables, Thrice-Great Hermes, Daedalus and the manure stink of the Minotaur's maze, old man Krupp, excavation and archaeology, the shallow fish pond of my own perception, fear of losing one's mind, his tidy and my messy plaster studios, the molds and casts of dentistry, cut-away motors, broken engines, broken bodies, dissected corpses, skeletons and skeleton keys, the tunnels beneath, catacombs and reptiles, simple and complex boxes, files, the scale of furniture, the size of home computers and computer desks, basements, both flooded and otherwise, Atlantis, naval architecture, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the retired Captain Biggles gardening in his window boxes, chemistry sets, crystal growing kits, ant farms, the inletting of rifle stocks, both Ancient and Medieval siege engines: catapults, trebuchets, etc., Archimedes, plus graves, sarcophagi and other coffins, mine shafts, pranks, the underground streams of Oxford and T.E. Laurence’s youthful exploration of same, not understanding at all and understanding all too well, individualism and anti-Socialism, glacial slowness, overly patient planning (laziness) of Walter De Maria, the development of the alphabet, runes, Inga and beauty, of Curonian women, Coleridge's Xanadu, Thomas Cole, pyramids as rare metal sluices, more bridges and tunnels, a travelogue narrative about passing through both the Panama and Suez canals, mirror travels, locks on the St. Lawrence seaway, canals, private property, Popsicles and Popsicle sticks, ice cube tray molds, metal ingot molds, libraries, books, and more books, a Secret Games of the Gods: Ancient ritual Systems in Board Games, the non-commercial commerce of art, De Stijl furniture of Gerrit Rietveld, science-fiction paperback cover art, Michael Moorcock, crypts, Kafka, The Prisoner, the Cubist sculpture of Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the demon David Askevold, T.S. White's Merlin, comic books showing Thor in Asgaard, the secret of not trying to put it all together, never trying too hard, Dennis Young's dandyism, all that and more or less...an endless list becoming very nearly but not quite (some notes for) an essay on the sculpture of Richard Clements.