The definition of artistry is continuously subject to change
If the creators of the pyramids in ancient Egypt were nameless servants of their god-like pharaoh, then Rubens and Rembrandt were, despite their fame, in essence no more than servants of their various patrons, entirely dependent on them for commissions. In romanticism, however, we see how the arts emancipate themselves and become supply, instead of demand, led. The artist is dominant and sets the agenda, his clients are moneyed citizens who want to feed upon his genius and art becomes autonomous.
The variations between the two poles sketched here are endless and the study of the artist and his role in the world are sources of permanent fascination.
When appreciating artist Ronald A. Westerhuis’s sculptures, viewers cannot shy away from issues such as public art, aesthetics of the public, real-life memories and experiences, at this point, his sculptures serve as a form of art premised on public space. Public art of today fundamentally intervenes and develops in publicly accessible urban or natural spaces, which function as the object in this regard. Public art, in effect, is staged in urban places, which are hard to be defined in terms of functionality owing to their rather complex, cross-functional, and overlapped characteristics. People’s behavior within the localities, however, could be tremendously unconstrained, as a result, such places could become a public domain that appeals and marshals the general public’s participation, communication and discussion. The public sphere, furthermore, literally refers to the domain of public opinion. In other words, only with community involvement could public art be planned and executed, accordingly, public art has been realized as one of the cultural practices within the public domain. The public domain signifies all the fields, venues and localities except for privately owned spots, referring to places where the general public could freely enter and exit, willingly acquire and exchange information. As such a place is part of the real-life world, there mustn’t be public domain at all without involvement of human beings. The public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas, is “made up of private people gathering together as a public and articulating the needs of society”(1). The most defining feature of the public sphere is that it is a place where opinions can be openly shared among people and where the public can articulate their opinions of diverse kinds within such a liberal and unfettered realm. That is to say, the public sphere can be most efficaciously organized and maintained through conversation, communication and discussion. In this sense, public art ought to relate to public space and have singular performance visualization of its own. Since public art in the public domain exhibits a sort of cultural correlation, it allows people to freely enter and exit, meanwhile, it plays a role as a venue for communicating and conversing between the artistic works and the public. Fundamentally, the prominence of public art dwells in its prompting interpersonal communication; instead of being an established locality or an enclosed venue, the public art has substituted the expansion, relativity, and ambiguity for its earlier stability and symmetry. By now the concepts including public art, artistic public, urban art, art in the public sphere essentially share the same denotation.
The on-going Sculpture Projects in Munster, Germany, Roppongi Hills Public Art Project, Tokyo, Japan, and Shanghai Jing’an International Sculpture Project, P. R. China, undoubtedly manifest the epitome of public art in urban domains. A city, in fact, usually acts as a sketchy carrier or spatial interface, however, the genuine subject of a city is the dwellers who reside in it. It is the artists’ interventions and creations in addition to the involvement of community that allows for people’s interpretation and fascination of cities, enabling the community to appreciate the vitality and spirituality of cities in unforeseen encounter with art.
However, to integrate public art into urban space, living space and natural space, public art should be exempted from both of being isolated from public space and suffering solitariness and monotonousness, meanwhile, public art should be considered as a constituent of public sphere with respect to ecology instead of being expelled from a whole design or serving merely as a sort of decoration or embellishment. Therefore, Ronald A. Westerhuis views sculpture as a medium used to disclose analytical, imaginative and expressive competences of individuals in the course of immersing themselves in public spaces, advancing a kind of grand narrative of sculpture and giving rise to a new interaction with the space. For instance, one of his works titled “Eye” combines abstract and representational characteristics, suggesting a relation between “gazing” and “being gazed” based on the viewers’ viewing as well as the reflections of themselves in the circular, central stainless ball (that resembles an eyeball). By putting human beings, nature, images together and transforming them based on individual experiences and imaginations, the artist created a surrealistic, stunning spectacle. The charisma of his sculptures precisely lies in the fact that while initiating an expansive work of sculpture the artist produced an intriguing public domain resembling the world of aliens, which is a space for meditating as well as a sphere of peacefulness. In such a context, He creates such a new dimension in his sculptures (2). In another work titled “Circle of Life”, the artist consciously formulated the work in an unfinished form rather than coming up with a complete integrity in attempt to represent the denotations of life, which incorporate restlessness, affection, pain, experience, and death. In terms of “Flash” and “Tree of Life”, Ronald A. Westerhuis explains, “For me, a sculpture needs to grow in size and idea. The tree series is a perfect example of this not knowing where the next piece is going to go; it’s finished when it’s finished” (3). For instance, the Tree series, which includes “The Tree of Love”, “The Tree of Hope”, “The Hangman’s Tree”, is utterly full of creativeness, flexibility and variety. Through the focus on tree as the subject, we could easily realize the artist’s soulfulness and self-consciousness of life, which reveal a reflection on life and death, a contemplation of pain and hope, a meditation full of Christian spirituality.
Stainless steel as the medium, in many cases, is converted into artistic vocabulary such as dream, beauty, coldness, purity, trend, and love, it also symbolizes that human beings are being constantly alienated. What Ronald A. Westerhuis has created is a kind of “ultra-realistic” sculpture, in which the experimental characteristic is far greater than its being à la mode. Not only does the artist look into the exquisiteness of life depicted in sculpture, he also centers on how to accommodate the structural mass of sculpture. Being inspired by abstract art, minimalism, and kinetic sculpture, the artist has acquired an ethereal, kinetic approach of his own. Articulately, it is the adequately philosophical vocabulary of his sculptures that allows for a meditative and delightful connection with the audience.
As can be seen, incorporating nature, minimalism, and abstract vocabulary into the sculptures, Ronald A. Westerhuis has put together an absolutely formal aesthetic, which deals with the realistic world and dissociates itself from the realities in the mean time, allowing the viewers to willingly fantasize and involve themselves in a sculpture. By joining vague alienation and intuitive vitality together, it seems to unmask a common destiny predetermined for all. In the “Rise”, the artist should have absorbed the simplistic language of Chinese ink wash painting. In accordance with “Less is more”, the sculpture is subjectively fashioned in an ambiguous form, which resembles a naturally growing plant, a rope or even an unidentifiable object. Such a mutated, ultra-realistic vision vividly reproduced a tranquil, ethereal domain and the estrangement of it. Throughout his works, the artist made the most of the rounded, smooth contour and sleek line of modern stainless steel, metaphorically showcasing the indifference and orderliness of the modern society, meanwhile, the kinetic form projects the infinity of time and boundlessness of space. The “Stepping Stone”, for instance, suggests the influence of the static on the dynamic and epitomizes the aesthetic of “dynamic moment of sculpture”.
The prominence of Ronald A. Westerhuis’s concepts, as a matter of fact, dwells in how he deconstructed and integrated the balance of nature, the coolness of industrial materials, and the poetics of soundless spaces. Visually, such serves as a metaphor for the overlapped, disorderly postmodern society. Accurately comprehending the ecologic connection among cultural viewpoints, everyday experiences and the realistic world, the artist has created a series of surreal sculptures with features of nature, daily life, and industry as a whole, touching upon the connotations of being public. When the viewers make contact with the sculpture, the reflection produced by the stainless steel surface enables the light and shade to bring about a staggering, picturesque realm, additionally, all of this attempts to prompt to re-examine the references of everyday experiences and the changes of external environment, and to constantly reconsider the subjective consciousness and investigate into the changes of the objective world (e.g.“Waterspit”, a sculpture in the park). His sculptures, therefore, imply a linkage between form and space, and also trigger a dialogue between the artwork and the public.
It’s worth mentioning that after visiting Jing’an Sculpture Park in Shanghai in 2014, Ronald A. Westerhuis created the sculpture titled “New Life” (material: stainless steel; dimension: H600x123x33.7cm), in which he gave full rein to imagination. Inspired by the emerging bamboo shoots, in a fine way of laser engraving, a series of murky patterns suggestive of Baroque style were engraved on the stainless surface. All of this readily added to the sublimity of the work, demonstrating a flawless combination of the grandeur of nature and the fineness of craftsmanship. Metaphorically, it symbolizes the infinite vitality of living beings, such as water droplets in the sea and seeds in soil. In a sense, the structure implies the determination and persistence of urban dwellers, at the same time, such an individual work mirrors the city as a whole, unveiling the fact that human beings are not only the subordinate individuals dwelling in the city but also an indispensable part of the integrity of it. Highlighting the singular perspective of the artist’s own, the work manifests his understanding of the universe and life. The work, meanwhile, aims to unmask an ultimately tranquil world of soundless observation and meditation so as to call for people to resonate with their own daily experiences and the external world and locate a sort of balance between the internal and the extensional.
Attributing to his mastery of the relations between the static and the dynamic, orderliness and disorder, nullity and actuality, completeness and incompleteness, in addition to his fascination with the asymmetrical contours, Ronald A. Westerhuis eventually pinpointed the enchantment of artistic language in the course of practice, constantly extending its beauty of being incomplete and bent. Regardless of the locality, as the sculptures are situated in a square, a park or in front of a building, all of them unexceptionally demonstrate a linkage based on the relationship among the work, environment and people.
Such a postmodern quality of sculptures primarily highlights and focuses more on the association with cultural terminologies in the urban context, as Rosalind Krauss observes, “Within the situation of post-modernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium—sculpture—but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium—photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself—might be used”(4), that is to say, “space takes for us the form of relations among sites”(5).
At this point, artist Ronald A. Westerhuis regards the relation between sculpture and space as an internally ecologic bond, a “field” related to narrative, and a production that conveys the significance of his works. As a form of public art, sculpture could be neither measured by physical means nor considered as a decoration of a building or the environment, in effect, sculptures have helped create a kind of public cultural interaction. In this perspective, his works do not signify anything specific, none of his works denotes any established meaning in the varied space. The space, therefore, exhibits a sort of variability, productivity, and creativity. A space of this kind is a place where people could encounter and listen. As a result, the space (including the environment and the conditions) becomes the “text” of artistic intervention.
The sculptures of Ronald A. Westerhuis ought to be viewed as an integral form of art. Since a public space is being considered as an interface of sculptural extensions, cities have become a constantly changing massive field. Talking about the various subtle changes that the metropolises of today are undergoing in addition to the far-reaching developmental transformations from single center to multiple centers in the city, all of the occurrence happen to meet the needs of updating visual orders. That is to say, the ever-changing visual phenomena in big cities, including the increasingly emerging social affairs, intensively functioned social networking, personalized individual activities, numerous and diverse products, rapid and accessible logistics, constitute the charisma of a city. Precisely in such a context, Ronald A. Westerhuis’s sculptures have initiated a series of cultural dialogue or interaction with the buildings, locations, environment or audiences, henceforth, the audiences could engage in free articulation, discussion and communication, and that’s why his sculptures, in terms of publicity both in social and cultural senses, have utterly exhibited the statements and significance of their own, including life, growth, speed, change, infinity, experience, and aesthetics.