anya gallacio

martin puryear and richard serra

Post-Modernism is dead and I am "calling it," as they say on Grey's Anatomy and E.R. The movement had been on life-support this Fall 2007, evidenced in the Richard Prince exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum and the Kara Walker exhibition at the Whitney Museum. These were two very important shows which recontextualized images in order to signify that human behavior can be shamefully violent and repulsively nasty. Richard Prince brings us pornographic nurses and tabloid rape victims (as well as silly old jokes and advertising mythology); Kara Walker seduces us with elegant black silhouettes of female slave degradation in the Ol' South (producing voyeurism to atrocity). Today, as the political wind changes direction, the art of recycling to enlighten the audience seems tired and suspiciously self-serving, as if pandering to the auction houses while sanctimoniously beefing up the museum's reputation.

Thankfully, two recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art—Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (June 7 to September 17, 2007) and Martin Puryear (November 4, 2007 to January 14, 2008)—have blown fresh air into the art-mosphere. Both sexagenarians, Serra (b. 1939) and Puryear (b. 1941) reaffirm that Modernism brings out the best in us, because it asks us to engage in the moment of our absolute being—the here and now—regardless of our ethnic, political or gender differences. Known as Post-Minimalist Modernism, Serra's and Puryear's sculptures induce an exhilarating awareness of sheer physicality in art and one's own physical presence in relation to the work of art. This visceral confrontation recharges our commitment to immediacy as the art experience, eschewing for a moment our personal baggage, culpable pasts and divisive identities that take us out of the gallery and into ego-enhancing navel-gazing. In front of Serra's and Puryear's sculptures we dive deep into the absoluteness of our being—our sentience—to consider, if only for that moment in the museum, the essence of living in time and space. That said, these two exhibitions are very different: Serra creates forms that make us aware of space, while Puryear invents forms that challenge our preconceived notions of space.

Most of Richard Serra's sculptures, such as Band, Torqued Torus Inversion and Sequence (all completed in 2006), require walking into the piece. Situated one after another in a vast open gallery on the second floor, these three enormous architectural settings induced a state of dizziness and visions of Theseus entering the mythical Labyrinth on Crete to find the Minotaur (if only we had taken that ball of yarn from Ariadne ...). Serra expects the visitor to experience disorientation as he or she meanders through the works. This disorientation also brings on confusion, as the visitor may leave one work to enter another without realizing the transition.
Nevertheless, being self-aware in relation to the work of art is Serra's mission. Therefore, you walk (or ride) slowly through the works, registering all along the way the sensation of existing in this overwhelmingly humungous construction, similar to a prehistoric cave or natural canyon. The sensation is majestic: here is grandeur, vastness and geometric complexity—torque, for example, is the curvature of a surface vertically and horizontally (like the wheel of a car). This torque provokes a weird sense of instability among these giant walls.

Other Serra installations, such as Delineator (1974), define space. Here two 26 by 10 foot steel plates, one on the floor and the other suspended from the ceiling, form a separated cross "delineating" (Serra explains) the volume of the room which becomes part of the work itself. The heavy rectangular metal plate hovering above also imparts a sense of danger, as it introduces possibilities that are a bit disconcerting. The work harks back to Kasimir Malevich's Black Cross (1923), which Serra thought about while he lay in bed recovering from a herniated disc.

The anxiety of wondering if a huge metal sheet might smash your body to smithereens or flop down on your toe occasions other compositions, particularly in the 1969-1972 retrospective works Equal (Corner Prop Piece), Floor Pole Prop, Circuit and One Ton Prop (House of Cards), made up of steel plates and lead pipes pushing against each other, and held together only through the laws of gravity and force. Earlier works, such as Belts (1966-67), To Lift (1967) and Slant Step Folded (1967) also experimented with gravity and play.

Martin Puryear's Modernist sculpture also incorporates serious observation with free play, but in a more sensual way than Serra's. Several times I leaned in to smell the wood as I read off the suggestive names: pine, hickory, maple, Sitka spruce and ash. There was little fragrance to inhale, but the potential to indulge this olfactory sense augmented the desire to linger among these elegant visual expressions of interiority and exteriority. Self (1978), for example, carries this idea. It is a biomorphic form, composed through a composite method of compound curves, rather than made of one solid block carved to become a curved shape. Self looks like a whale emerging from the water, sighted from a distance. Stained and painted black on red cedar and mahogany, its smooth, polished wood surfaces bent into a curvilinear form shapes its exterior appearance. But the work is hollow—a secret interior has been hidden, a metaphor of the self and its duplicate identities: appearance and essence. "I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them," Puryear explains in a ubiquitous wall text. "But coherence is not the same as resolution. The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence." Exterior surface versus interior space often creates this "tense coexistence" in Puryear's art.

Puryear achieves the tension of exterior and interior space by fashioning arcs, circles, slats, basket weaves and other rounded forms out of wood that are both well-wrought and astonishingly subversive. Most notably, Puryear's spare circular works (often untitled) seem to defy wood's natural characteristics. Cerebral and mystical in clarity and roundness—or, as the essay by chief curator John Elderfield suggests: controlled risk—Puryear's works are not about the banality of craft. They are about the presentation of opposites. Brutally course materials vie with smooth amorphous components, as in Maroon (1987-88), made of wire mesh, pine, yellow poplar and tar. The black wire mesh, flattened on one side with a raw surface of wood, encompasses a bulbous form with its porous skin, permitting us to peer into its interior or stand back to behold a strange biomorphic exterior. Open to close examination, Puryear's work remains mysteriously ambiguous and unresolved, a metaphor of life itself.

martin puryear

Martin Puryear. Bower. 1980. Sitka spruce and pine. 64" x 7' 10 3/4" x 26 5/8" (162.6 x 240.7 x 67.6 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
There is so little mystery in many of today's most famous painters whose lives are readily available for public consumption. But interestingly, Martin Puryear's work, which is also on view shares a certain quiet reflectiveness , a stand-aloneness that shouts out:Puryear came from segregated Washington DC and so access to the National Gallery was special and magical; then in Chicago, the science and natural history museums added to his fascination with exotic objects. He enlisted in the Peace Corps and lived in West Africa among indigenous peoples; here, he began the move towards abstraction and to using local materials. But he has never joined an art movement and cannot imagine being held to one or another political or social idea. He began as a figurative painter but his experiences overseas changed him dramatically, and unlike many artists, he doesn't mind if his work is beautiful--and indeed it is. But in a Seurat-ian echo, he finds the most interesting art has a "flickering quality where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence." As Seurat sees the sculpture in the human body, Puryear sees the biomorphic forms in sculpture. Puryear's work has one other subtext which stands out: it feels like he has been thinking about the evanescence of the natural environment--and that in a pinch, we could crawl into one of his bentwood structures and be protected, somehow from the ravages of man, if not nature.

fred sandback -more space and volume

Sandback’s sculptures outline planes and volumes in space. Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn to create works that address their physical surroundings, the “pedestrian space,” as Sandback called it, of everyday life. By stretching lengths of yarn horizontally, vertically, or diagonally at different scales and in varied configurations, the artist developed a singular body of work that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity.The exhibitions will examine the broad scope of formal invention that the artist achieved within a defined idiom. The works on view will range from smaller-scale, metal and cord works from the late 1960s to constructions from the 1980s and 1990s that encompass entire rooms, thus demonstrating the artist’s signature vocabulary of forms in varied combinations and at different scales.

richard deacon

On a cold, wintry afternoon, the strip of 20 buildings huddled along a railway track hardly fizzes with creative energy. The only immediate sign of life is a grim-faced man in a bobble hat scuttling out of one unit and into another, identical but for the words "plastic handrails" emblazoned on its façade.
Yet here, on this dreary industrial estate in south-east London, one of Britain's foremost sculptors has his studio.
"I first came here in 1991," says Richard Deacon, leading me upstairs past bookshelves and a bicycle to an airy pigsty of a room in Unit 18. "It had no history and no atmosphere, but, after renting a space for years in an old meat-pie factory in Brixton, I wanted to buy somewhere, and these units were on the market for less than their building costs."
So it was that the Turner Prize-winning Deacon, whose work is housed in many of the finest art collections in the world, ended up with a studio sandwiched between an organic food company and a dairy. "It was quite an upmarket dairy," he says defensively. "The milkman used to pop in to comment on the sculptures."
Fifteen years on, the original neighbours are long gone. "What started as maybe 25 companies is down to only around five," he says, a hint of nostalgia in his slow, booming voice. "And me. I'm still here."
As if to reassure himself of this fact, the artist has packed the upstairs room of his studio - "a sort of drawing, conceiving kind of space" - with material evidence of his existence. Every available surface is buried beneath a blanket of sketches, clay models, photographs, objects and books.
Perhaps the most striking feature in the studio, and certainly the most organised, is a set of shelves filled with a dizzying array of plastic creatures, rocks, fossils, and junk, neatly arranged according to some indiscernible code. It looks like something one might find in a schoolboy's bedroom.
"They're my collections," says the 56-year-old artist, brushing a giant hand across the bald crown of his head. "Found objects, toys, little bits of nature, souvenirs, whimsy and all the rest of it. They're here to keep me company, I suppose. There is a sense in which the studio accumulates bits, some intentionally and some not."
Bits, and ways of putting them together, have been central to Deacon's work for the best part of three decades, from his early laminated wood-and-vinyl constructions to his more recent steamed-plank sculptures.
The last of these, Restless, was the highlight of the artist's one-man show in Tate St Ives last year, and today hangs in the studio's "less congenial" downstairs room, writhing in the half-light like a mythical sea creature. "I haven't touched a piece of wood since finishing this," he says, patting its distorted surface affectionately. "This was a culmination of sorts."
These days, as his current exhibition at the Lisson Gallery demonstrates, Deacon's preferred material is clay. The tightly structured show centres on a set of ceramics: hollowed-out, angular blocks that look like the frameworks for unconventional tents.
After years of wrestling wooden planks into impossible curves, the move to clay has brought about a fundamental change in Deacon's approach. "I was interested in generating something without building it," he says. "Because these sculptures start as a lump, you don't have to worry about where the top piece will connect to the bottom piece."
The act of carving also takes Deacon back to his earliest artistic memories. "My very first sculptural experience was in Sri Lanka, when I was seven," he recalls. "I remember looking at rock-carved sculptures of the reclining Buddha, and being very aware that the cliff face had been removed. It was like an experience of negative space: something had been taken away and the figure was there."
Two years later, the young Deacon made his first tentative steps as a sculptor, taking his father's best saw and using it to cut a brick in half. "I couldn't see why he was upset," he smiles. "I was just really interested in the fact that it was possible."
Even now - despite the monumental scale of much of his work - Deacon remains more fascinated by the process of sculpture than by the result. Although he has hardly hung on to a single finished piece, he has "never got rid of any drawing, any models, any notes".
"I've never said this to anyone before," he says, "but thinking about how to leave things in the world, I am more likely to leave behind an archive than a permanent series of sculptures - a germ for other ideas to come out of, rather than a bunch of final statements." He sighs, one heavy hand returning to his head. "But how you present something like that without being a boring old fart, I don't know."

richard deacon

richard deacon

martin boyce-interior/exterior

In a series of new works developed specifically for presentation in Venice, Martin Boyce has devised a lyrical installation for seven inter-connected rooms of the second floor of the 15th-century Palazzo Pisani (S. Marina).
The artist transforms the fading grandeur of this palace with suspended, geometric chandeliers, sculptural autumn leaves, stepping stones, brass letters, tables and benches – all altered from the everyday into an atmospheric, poetic landscape. Boyce has set out to ‘delve into the city’s interior landscape’ and with this exhibition he conflates the internal and external and echoes the labyrinthine nature of Venice, creating a heightened sense of displacement and abandonment.Martin Boyce (born 1967) lives and works in Glasgow. He is one of Scotland’s most prominent artists and is well known for his sculptural installations that recall conventional public spaces – the playground, pedestrian subway, discarded or abandoned sites – to form a cohesive and immersive environment, one that the writer Will Bradley calls, “both a proposition about social space and a dreamscape in itself”. Individual works comprising of sculptural forms recall familiar public furniture: benches, bins, signage and lighting. Drawing on the iconography and subsequent production of modernist design, these objects take on an alternative life by being displaced from their original context and purpose.

john cage: chess pieces

Chess Pieces, was only rediscovered and played for the first time in 2005.

Cage had been invited to participate in a chess-themed exhibit at the Julian Levy Gallery organized by Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, and he created a chessboard-sized painting with fragments of musical scores in each of the squares. Each square held about twelve measures in three rows. The painting went into a private collection where it remains, almost completely invisible to the outside Cageian world until 2005, when the Noguchi Museum recreated the 1944 exhibit, "The Imagery of Chess." [Noguchi had contributed a chess set to the show, as did artists such as Man Ray and Alexander Calder.]

Anyway, Cage pianist Margaret Leng Tan was commissioned to transcribe and perform the score in the painting, which premiered alongside the 2005 exhibit. The DVD of the Chess Pieces performance includes several other Cage sonatas and some short-sounding documentaries, including one about the history of the work. Not sure what that means.

As a painting, the collaged, juxtaposed chaos of the notes contrasts with the order of the grid. It kind of reminds me of the cut-up technique William Burroughs and the Beats' applied to books and printed texts a few years later. [The history of cut-up mentions an interesting, even earlier reference: Dada pioneer Tristan Tzara, who was expelled from Breton's Surrealist movement when he tried to create poetry by pulling words out of a hat.]

As a musical composition, Chess Pieces is nice, old-school Cage, abstract and occasionally abrupt, but with a still-traditional piano feel. Since the piece's randomness comes from its structure--the distribution of the notational fragments across the grid--and not from the performer's own decisions, it somehow has a "composed" feeling to it. So though it's new to audiences today, it's also classic, early Cage.

fred sandback: space and volume

Sandback’s sculptures outline planes and volumes in space. Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn to create works that address their physical surroundings, the “pedestrian space,” as Sandback called it, of everyday life. By stretching lengths of yarn horizontally, vertically, or diagonally at different scales and in varied configurations, the artist developed a singular body of work that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity.

toby paterson

Toby Paterson makes paintings, reliefs and constructions which explore the relationship between abstraction and reality. He has a keen interest in post-war modernist architecture which he deconstructs both materially and politically, developing a practice in which some works are almost understandable as architecture, while others are expressions of purely abstract form.

martin boyce- developing a motif

Martin Boyce presents a suspended sculpture composed of standard fluorescent light fixtures in the form of a spider web. Measuring approximately forty by fifty feet, the piece will fill the entirety of SculptureCenter's ceiling space and hang twenty feet above the ground. Boyce has employed the web as a motif for several years, a form that references the urban grid and simultaneously suggests organic order, both possessing the ability to expand infinitely. The sculpture will diverge from an earlier version of the piece in that the web will be irregular, reflecting a broken grid.

robert irwin: light and space

September 17 — October 19, 2008

For his exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard, Irwin has created two new installations. On the ground floor, Black³ features a series of floor-to-ceiling parallel scrim material panels, which the viewer must navigate, thereby altering the perceptual field of the space. In addition, Irwin has made subtle adjustments to the optical conditions of the room, as a means of altering the phenomenological experience of the work. Positioned on the west and east walls are two square lacquered black paintings, echoes of which reverberate through the space, transmitted on and through the perpendicular translucent screens.

In Light and Space II, located in the basement gallery, Irwin has created an installation with hundreds of fluorescent lights mounted at right angles in a non-repeating, grid-like formation. With no fixed focal point, the enveloping visual field resonates with geometric patterns, drawn by luminous lines, which redefine the characteristics of the space. Light and Space II brings together, in a large-scale but concise installation, the three principle points of reference throughout Irwin’s career: light, architecture and space.

christo and jean-claude; wrapping stuff

Although their work is visually impressive and often controversial as a result of its scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to create works of art or joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Art critic David Bourdon has described Christo's wrappings as a "revelation through concealment."[3]To his critics Christo replies, "I am an artist, and I have to have courage ... Do you know that I don't have any artworks that exist? They all go away when they're finished. Only the preparatory drawings, and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain."[4]

james turrell; skyspace

For over three decades, James Turrell has used light and indeterminate space—not objects or images—to extend and enhance perception. The artist once remarked, "I am really interested in the qualities of one space sensing another. It is like looking at someone looking. Objectivity is gained by being once removed. As you plumb a space with vision, it is possible to 'see yourself see'. This seeing, this plumbing, imbues space with consciousness."
The work of James Turrell (b. 1943, Los Angeles) has been the subject of over 140 solo exhibitions worldwide since 1967. In addition to a permanent installation at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and The Nasher Sculpture Garden, Dallas, which opened October 2003, permanent installations of James Turrell's work are on view in several museums including: The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; P.S. 1. Long Island City, New York; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; and the Springel Museum, Hanover, Germany.
Since 1972 Turrell has been transforming the Roden Crater, a natural cinder volcano situated on the southwestern edge of the Painted Desert in northern Arizona into a large-scale artwork. Through the medium of light, the piece relates to the surrounding sky, land, and culture. As an observatory, the Roden Crater will allow visitors to see celestial phenomena with the naked eye. Construction of the project is under the direction of the Dia Art Foundation and the Skystone Foundation with support from the Lannan Foundation.
Since 1968 when Turrell received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the artist has been the recipient of a total of nineteen awards ranging from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1984) to being named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government (1991). For six consecutive years, from 1997 to 2002, Turrell was given six various prizes and awards and three honorary doctorates from the Chicago Art Institute (1999); Claremont Graduate University, California (2001); and the Royal Academy of Art, London (2002).
James Turrell has a B.A. in psychology from Pomona College. He attended graduate art classes at the University of California, Irvine from 1965-1966 and received an M.A. from Claremont Graduate School in 1973. The artist currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

james turrell; playing with light

The piece consists of a beautifully lit square room with walls lined by benches and a rectangular opening cut into its roof. Meeting, like many of Turrell’s pieces, shapes the act of perception using the medium of a nearly tangible light, allowing viewers to experience the development of their own sensory responses over time.
Writer Ina Cole captured the viewer’s experience perfectly in this description in Art Times, “Certainly, the sense of disorientation felt once inside Turrell’s configurations is profound, as the distinction between solid and void areas is often unclear; even after the eyes and brain become accustomed, a sensation of altered states prevails for the entire time spent in the structure.”
For the summer of 2008 P.S.1 is delighted to have on view a remarkable work that succeeds both in complement and contrast to Meeting. Olafur Eliasson’s Take your time, which can also be found on the third floor, consists of a massive, rotating mirror affixed to the ceiling of an otherwise empty room.

With its precise skew and motion it plays with both vertical and horizontal orientation, creating multiple inversions of both space and self. The Danish-Icelandic artist’s work often recontextualizes existing architectural elements to shift perceptions of the places in which they have been placed. With the two pieces in such close proximity in one building allows for a delicious and challenging personal inquiry. Interestingly, during his early artistic training, Eliasson was influenced heavily by the California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, of which Turrell is often seen as a leading figure. Eliasson, like Turrell, creates environments that are meant to be entered and experienced, awakening viewers to their own modes of perception and the power of environment to bring such understanding into view.
When questioned about the meaning of his works, Turrell has often responded by saying, “It is about how you confront space and plumb it. It is about your seeing.” Eliasson subsequently declares that “There is no fixed interpretation of my works. Everyone experiences and understands them in his own way.”

slinky light

Slinky like light pattern in the blackness of moonlight sky produced by a time exposure of the light tipped rotor blades of a grounded helicopter as it takes off into the dark sky”, says Life. Images by Andreas Feininger. More here. Via But Does it Float.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. ( Albert Einstein, 1947)

rachel whiteread; casting, rubber and polystrene

In her castings from common objects, British sculptor Rachel Whiteread proposes a reverence for the everyday. Among her unique monumentalizations are mattresses, furniture, and bathtubs. To greater or lesser degrees, these sculptures resemble their household counterparts yet, as art, they have a different status. First of all, they are nonfunctional; they exist to be seen. In looking at them, routines are dislocated; our relationship with the object on view may become more self-conscious or assume a fresh significance.

In Untitled (Yellow Bath), cast from an old tub, a gentle hollow familiar to all bathers makes a concave protective subject. Site of respite, dreams, and cleansing, the tub, for all its sculptural bulk, exudes intimacy. Its translucency simultaneously heightens and denies the work's tactility: when lighted, it glows but repels touch. As the negative of a worn object, Whiteread's cast shows the inverse of a familiar surface as well as a geometrized block of surrounding space.

robert morris ; untitled, felt work

I like this work, made in felt, which is a soft material but in such a sculpture it takes on a quite solid look, probably due to the thickness of the felt. In some of his other work, for example his plywood polyhydrons, he create minimalist sculpture that is very architectural in its presentation.

anya gallaccio -ice piece

Not sure of the title of this piece, need to research it more, but I'm beginning to like work in ice.

'Cast,' Anya Gallaccio
Materials: Acorns: Quercus Robur and Quercus Rubra; one unique cast bronze acorn; box.Size: 6 x 6 x 2.3 inches.Edition: 35

"Cast" brings together a handful of real English acorns and one unique cast bronze acorn in a box specially produced by BookWorks for the project. The buyer is invited to plant the acorns for the future, keep them to dry out and die or throw them away, leaving only the cast acorn. "Cast" has both the association with throwaway culture and that of permanence.

In 2002 Anya Gallaccio installed seven felled oak trees in the monumental space of the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. Stripped of their branches but with their bark intact these powerful structures continued Gallaccio's dialogue between "nature" and "culture", "permanence" and "ephemerality".

The English oak tree symbolises tradition, permanence and value. The oak doesn't even reach its prime until it is at least 100 years old. This association of the oak with the long-term - much longer than human life - contrasts markedly with the short-term nature of contemporary life.

ARTISTS INFO:

Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2003.

She has had recent solo shows at Camden Arts Centre (2008), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2007), Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, the Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena and the Sculpture Center, Long Island (2006).

Her work is featured in numerous public and private collections such as the Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and South London Gallery, London.

robert smithson; nonsite works

An example of Smithson's nonsite work, Mono Lake. Used here to illustrate research for installation workshop in Jan 2010.