While Hertzel is fascinated with other techniques of making and casting bronze, he consistently produces by lost-wax casting. Hertzel models the pieces in wax, manipulating it by hand, then pieces them together. This handwork reinforces the idea of felt sculpture that remains visible in bronze; that the touch remains. While this textural specificity is important to Hertzel’s project, the depiction of motion in sculpture is critical. Among those artists who made the invisible visible around the turn of the twentieth century, Umberto Boccioni showed the three-dimensional human figure as it marched through space. While 1913’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space displays a sense of movement, its solidity belies time passing.
Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
Perhaps Hertzel’s greatest sculptural influence is Alberto Giacometti. The twentieth-century Swiss sculptor began to re-examine the human figure in 1935, expecting it to be a quick departure from what he had been doing. Instead, it became the foundation for his work from that point on. Giacometti proceeded to eviscerate the figure, eventually describing his work as sculpting not the figure but rather “the shadow that it cast.”*
In Hertzel’s new work, he continues to make the figure using that classical material, bronze, to depict the energetic traces of movement and presence that have passed. Why, he seems to be asking, should what lingers be ineffable when it can be hand-molded wax turned into bronze, as if peering back into that “shadow.”
Hertzel spent 1973 through 1977 studying history at the University of Rochester where he also engaged with both film and modern dance at a critical juncture of post-modernism. Much post-modernist dance of the era addresses everyday movement and the energy with which the body is involved: what emanates from it — what is left in the wake of the movement itself.
“Dance is an art in space and time,” says Merce Cunningham, “The object of the dancer is to obliterate that.”2
Cunningham also focused on chance. Chance can shift a moment, change a system, necessitate different choices in one’s reactions.