Théophile Choquet: “The Call to Sculpture”

[Scene: A sculptor’s studio. Perhaps Ipoustéguy’s.]
[When the audience enters, the actor is already on stage. He is warming up with a series of large, sweeping movements, breathing hard.]
ACTOR: I sculpt because it is the only activity where I don’t feel like a coward. Stone, wood, and plaster refuse to lie. The act of sculpting brings me to a state of truth, of full awareness. Total awareness. And this state—a state of both mind and body—is unique. If you are an artist, you have to seek this extreme sincerity at all costs. Which means you have to be prepared to risk…

[He performs a rapid, improvised movement]
…to take risks. More than any other art form, sculpture leaves little room for chance or doubt. There always comes, sooner or later, that moment when the block of marble or wood can crack and shatter if you are not careful. But the good sculptor is also the one who knows precisely how to carve the material to the very limit of its resistance, until it can bear almost no more…
More than in any other art form, the sculptor must fight tooth and nail to give birth to the form that totally inhabits him. My sculpture is the evidence of a deafening anger that has been rumbling inside me for as long as I can remember. All the forms I create bear witness to my position as a man in the world. I spend my life trying to frame this man, to capture him in matter, to circumscribe his authentic movement. Who is this man crossing the twentieth century? Where is he going? How does he get there?

I don’t want to search for anything other than the human being. Let no one say that my work is abstract! I ran away from abstraction. I may have loved it for a while… but it didn’t last.
I took that trip to Greece. It was a seminal trip in my life. Greek statues, ancient sculptures… An emotion seized me. An emotion. You can’t explain an encounter like that.
What is certain now, after Greece, is that my time on Earth, however short, will serve to give the full measure of the human body, of this tragic and marvelous whole. It cannot be otherwise. We absolutely must return to the human body. It is here and not elsewhere that the historical dramas of peoples are played out, that the evolution of a society can be read—the body, the body, the body.

But we can no longer do what the ancient Greeks or Renaissance artists did. I cannot sculpt an ideal of beauty, the divine proportions of women and men… My humanism lies in making man himself, as he is today. So, beauty doesn’t necessarily come first…