Rodin, Reproduction, Repertory

Why, Rosalind Krauss asked her readers, would one begin a discussion of avant-garde art with a story about Auguste Rodin’s sculpture? As Krauss established in the introduction to her landmark essay “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,” Rodin took advantage of the replicative possibilities of casting techniques, thereby disrupting the aura of singularity foundational to modernist aesthetics. His "Gates of Hell" (1880-) serves as her case in point. The version we know today, cast 60 years after the artist’s death, gives illusorily fixed form to a work that Rodin never considered complete. During his lifetime, as Rodin repeatedly rearranged the monument’s composition, the "Gates" existed in a constant state of becoming. This presentation builds upon Krauss’s essay by putting her insights in dialogue with another method of reproducing artworks: a repertory. While Rodin’s interest in dance is well known, there has been surprisingly little recognition of the medium’s profound impact on his art and his self-conception. Like a sculptural cast or a photographic negative, the dance work is inherently a copy with no original. No two renditions of a choreographic piece are exactly alike: each iteration is both the same and necessarily different. Rodin’s understanding of this principle is, I argue, borne out in a group of twelve sculptures that he produced around 1911, posthumously titled "Dance Movements." Like the "Gates," he created the "Dance Movements" through the repetition and reassembly of body parts. This group indicates that Rodin perceived his sculptural process as quasi-choreographic.