From drawing and painting, to sculpture and even dance, line is ever present in art.
For French sculptor Bernar Venet, line is an opportunity for chance, chaos, and even incompleteness.
In his coil sculpture Indeterminate Line, the line both begins and ends imperfectly, a reference to how the work evolved from an inked sketch on Venet’s studio floor.
The sculpture is a direct transformation of the freedom of the drawn line into the resistance and strength of the metal.
Indeterminate Line finds a moment between the metal’s rigidity and the line’s gracefulness.
Bending and twisting the long square rod of steel with an overhead crane, Venet explained the work as “a battle between myself and the piece of metal.”
Born to a mother who was both a teacher and chemist, Venet was always attracted to systems and scientific theory.
Until the late 1970s, the line was a mathematical exploration for the artist, investigating arcs, angles, and straight lines. By introducing chance into his work, the line became indeterminate, or not mathematically defined.
“These lines represent the liberation of these geometric forms and their relation to minimal art. They allow for the notions of disorder and chaos, and take a lot of formal freedoms,” says Venet, “free[ing] sculpture from the constraints of composition.”
Indeterminate Line becomes a philosophical investigation as well as a mathematical one. It is a balance between the concept of unpredictability as well as the control of materiality.
A contemporary of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt, Venet was an important artist in the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where the idea, or concept, of the artwork is valued over the finished product.
Speaking to his process, Venet states, “My work is self generated. Nothing around me serves as a particular inspiration; I work, and I make discoveries while remaining open-minded to anything that might present a new possibility in the context of my work; this framework looks to enlarge its scope as a result of new formal and conceptual discoveries.”
