Some Bright Morning, 1963
|
Lynch Fragments
Mel Edwards's Lynch Fragments are abstract sculptures. As precise and polemical as they may be, they do not represent any one thing. They are fusions of impulses, ideas, contexts, cultures. They may suggest African masks because of their size and placement on the wall, but very few of them actually resemble heads. They may retain a high degree of literalness and an air of practicality because of their bolts, chains, gears, hammers, jacks, nails, padlocks, scissors, spikes, and wrenches, but their compositional exchanges, sculptural unity, and poetic suggestiveness are always more persuasive than the functional reality of the objects within them. Almost every object in the Fragments carries with it the memory of its function—the memory of function—but when it becomes a tool of Edwards's disputatious yet melodious sculptural logic, it is physically changed, its meanings multiply, and it becomes a voice of personal, racial, and cultural memory as well. When Edwards gets through with them, objects with a hard and fast identity—like the tools and industrial parts on which he depends for his sculptural vocabulary—carry not only specific meaning but also far-ranging, free-wheeling associative potential.
|
