Mount Rushmore - Sculpture on a boundless stage of freedom

Sculptor Christian Forsen on the Mount Rushmore Monument and the tasks of sculpture

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota was founded on 3 March 1925. What is it all about?

Forsen: First of all, I had to do some research because Mount Rushmore is not an insane viewing base for a sculptural artist. It's a speciality. It is often referred to as a national monument, in other words a site that fulfils a fundamental function for the USA as a nation. To this day, four oversized heads of four presidents have been carved into a granite rock. In modern terms, you could call it 'land art' (land art is a visual art movement that emerged in the USA at the end of the 1960s, editor's note) because it has changed the landscape. It's monumental, oversized, the heads are 18 metres high, a really crazy thing.

But originally there were no presidential heads planned, were there?

Forsen: The idea was triggered by a historian, Doane Robinson. At the time, it was still about the mood to open up the West. In this question, Robinson envisioned the idea of giving local landscapes a special character. Today we would say to create a tourist attraction. He suggested depicting people there, i.e. prominent people who were in the public eye. These included two people, Louis and Clark, two expedition leaders who took part in the westward exploration of the country, who, like most people today, are no longer known to me, but also Buffalo Bill, a colourful person who was known both as a hunter and a showman. What surprised me is that a Native person, Red Cloud, could also have been taken, i.e. suggested, who was considered a peace activist in the last phase of his life. Interesting, as it laid the foundation for discussions right from the start. However, this was then abandoned, probably primarily because Robinson had to find someone who could support his project in terms of craftsmanship and realisation. By then, at the latest, the people were being discussed. The sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, on the other hand, was more interested in heroic depictions, such as the presidential candidates. For him, these were key aspects of American history.

Each head is up to 18 metres high. Are these commissions of particular interest to a sculptor?

Forsen: I asked myself the same question. Let me put it this way from a modern perspective: you always find that artists endeavour to use an issue of maximum confrontation, intensity or emotion. Perhaps it is also the case in sculpture that you can think about proportions/dimensions. And Borglum is a candidate for this. At the time, he was campaigning for sculpture in the USA and already had commissions. He pursued the normal career path, went to Paris and then dealt with the current themes of sculptural art there, because the theme of monumentality also existed in France at the time. We are less familiar with it in the work of Rodin, whom he also met, but there is, for example, a student of Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle: If you look into his studio in Paris today, you can still see plaster models of equestrian statues up to six metres high. You can already see the inclination at the time... It must also be said that the question of the monument in the 19th century - also in Germany - naturally had a strong influence on the question: how do I visualise this? The monarchy was still very pronounced for the most part and in the USA, too, people seemed to need groups of people to look up to.

What is the difference between a sculptor and a stonemason?

Forsen : You could probably look for different answers. I could actually formulate one: Stonemasons and stone sculptors are actually skilled trades that are considered craft training in Germany, and the training in the final year of the apprenticeship differs in terms of the examination, so this is of course intended for traditional reasons, as it is understood that the stonemason must mainly deal with the use of stone in terms of architectural-technical tasks, i.e. columns, walls, many things in tombs. And the sculptor, if we want to take him specifically as a stone sculptor, must then at a certain point be more interested in and concerned with reproducing the pictorial aspect of a spatial situation: traditionally often meant figuratively, in today's art then more comprehensively and more diversely. So the term is used more or less as a beautiful vessel in which you can put an incredible amount (of conception) today. However, just like the painter, one has the task of giving us all, quasi as perceiving contemporaries, an image that cannot be expressed in any other way. That will have been true of Borglum at the time, but if you look at his other monuments, it also shows that it was a very personally coloured thing that was very popular in the USA.

The work on Mount Rushmore took a total of 14 years, with blasting, brickwork and chiselling. Surely that was a tour de force for those carrying out the work?

Forsen: I certainly think so. If you look at the pictures of how it was literally 'climbed', from today's perspective it doesn't fulfil any safety requirements. Interestingly, however, nobody died back then. Borglum also underestimated the work itself, because they changed the technique several times because they realised that you can't get very far with the normal way of working stone, like the sculptors do, with a hammer and chisel. So they carried out very well-planned blasting operations. These blasts were planned and prepared throughout the day, and in the evening, when the workers left the construction site, they were blasted from the bottom up so that the rock could fall freely downwards.

But stone or rock is not a sculptor's favourite material, is it?

Forsen: Not really. I'm familiar with the discussion, but we have a ceramics studio here in the degree programme, so it has to be said that working with natural clay as a sculptural material perfectly supports the question: How can a three-dimensional form be shaped? How do you formulate it? There's no getting round clay. Many people can't necessarily think in three dimensions or their imagination isn't strong enough to make it clear and then you have to visualise it, i.e. bring it into reality. Clay offers much less resistance and you can achieve results more quickly. The stone has perhaps almost been taken out of the study programme at art colleges. We live in a fast-moving age and the slowness of stone - everyone would have to prove this with attitude - is less used today. And the other materials: Borglum also did this in his own way and then, for example, brought in other specialists such as metal casters and mould makers for bronze castings. But even that always starts with clay.

Which presidents are depicted?

Forsen: From left to right, you will find the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved into the granite wall of the mountain.

The figures should actually be extended to the waist. Why wasn't that done?

Forsen: There is still a beautiful model, perhaps three metres high, made by himself, where you can see how Borglum built it up to the bottom so that he could create more spatial staggering and body gestures. The main reason why it wasn't realised was probably the permanently difficult financing. He constantly had to collect money from politicians and the project was often on the verge of being cancelled. Also, the material of the mountain was not always perfect everywhere, which you can't always see from the outside of a stone. The head of Jefferson was once completely replaced, as it was supposed to be on the left side of Washington. They started by blasting it and then realised that there were quartz veins running through it, so Borglum changed the model and the head was placed on the other side. We know this from other famous sculptors as well, as you can only ever look at the surface of the stone, but work it in depth. Natural material can then change in the working process. A famous example by Michelangelo is the Pietà Rondanini. The figure of Jesus actually has three arms. Michelangelo created the first body position and probably realised at some point that this arm would no longer be beautiful due to the material. So at some point he turned the whole arm and the shoulder further back and created a new position for the figure. And he didn't finish the project, he didn't remove the old parts, and if you look closely, you can suddenly see that Jesus has three arms.

Originally, the sculptor was a craftsman. But that has changed. How would you describe a sculptor today?

Forsen : There used to be such beautiful descriptions: Painters were allowed to paint directly at the royal court, sculptors had to work outside the city gates because they were often too dirty and made too much noise. Today's sculptors no longer necessarily have to assert themselves in the face of resistance from the material; they work more than ever on a stage of freedom without boundaries. Today, the focus of studies is also designed so that the actual core area: the formulation of things that visualise themselves in space through shaping, is the most important thing. Whether with materials that you mould yourself or with objects that you find, today you have all the possibilities. Because questioning the world in the sense that it confronts us will not change what it means to be human. The subject-object relationship manifests itself through material and material has form. And this form can be shaped.

The mountain is considered sacred by the Sioux Indians and they never accepted the 105 million dollars in compensation offered by the government at the time. Instead, the even more monumental Crazy Horse Memorial has been built a few kilometres away since 1948.

Forsen: These monumental buildings certainly have a certain appeal, I can understand that, the visualisation in landscape, but does it have to end in such an understandable figurativeness today? The Crazy Horse Memorial, which you can see today, has also stalled again for financial reasons. There is the face and with a good will you can guess what is planned. However, this idea is almost more interesting than looking forward to when it is finished. Unfinishedness is a fundamental question in today's reception of art anyway: what should be triggered in our perception? Is it not perhaps this reflection in the mind of the perceiver himself? Imagination is part of it. And that could be much more interesting in human terms than the power of realisation.

What material do you personally prefer to work with?

Forsen : In terms of sculpture, I come from a classical study programme in some areas. I studied with Toni Cragg in Düsseldorf and he always said: 'The materials are open to us'. There are still so many materials that are not yet known for sculpture, but which do exist, such as plastics and so on. I have tried out a lot of them, sometimes in contrast to traditional techniques: moulding hard foams like polystyrene and covering them with a classic old technique of paper lamination, so that the material changes in appearance, and of course the fact that it is so light is appealing. Apart from that, I love wood because of its versatility, which is also where I come from in terms of the tradition of wood sculpture training at the Werkkunstschule Flensburg. You can tell that wood as a material was incredibly important for the development of our civilisation.

Uwe Blass

Christian Forsen learnt wood sculpture at the Werkkunstschule Flensburg and studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Tony Cragg and Georg Herold. He teaches art practice for ceramics and sculpture at the University of Wuppertal.