Born in France in 1946, Kirili  came of age amidst the beginnings of post-war French critical thought. The influence of Roland Barthes is particularly evident in the emphasis he has always placed in semiotics and their manifestation in the body. This had been his impetus to study Chinese calligraphy, Hebrew script and the iconography of global cultures. The embodiment of language as sensation and as a sensual experience is, according to Kirili, communicated through working with the hand. “It’s something I refuse to surrender, it’s in my DNA.”

I met with Kirilli in the Tribeca loft he has shared since 1980 with his wife, the artist Ariane Lopez-Huici. We are looking together at his new works on paper, massed on the wall flanking metal sculptures set against colored grounds. The organic lines in the paper pieces are open to multiple readings, as script, brushstroke or some other kind of signifier that references Kirili’s own sculptural forms. They exude confident improvisation. They also bring to mind the late cutouts by Matisse in the way color operates as light. Another ongoing new series functions equally on the wall or on the floor. These are elongated, vertical rectangles of several sheets of newspaper taped together and then intersected in the center by a thin, single “zip,” sliced, pinned, and draped from the center.  Placement, displacement, materiality and references to Barnett Newman reframe these ephemeral remnants from The New York Times. They are physically light, seemingly instantaneous and undulating with the slightest breeze.

ALAIN KIRILI
My life as an artist is an antidote to what I should have become. Kirili is a pseudonym. I left the conventional expectations of my family and chose to become an artist. The creative process for me has always been sacrosanct, I’ve devoted my life to it, and now it is how I stand up to the current negativity of my body. I have bone marrow cancer and am undergoing various treatments. I never know when one will succeed. I confront this negativity with the joy of creation, this is deeply ingrained in my identity. The illness is a new experience for me. Until now, my body has always been a great source of joy and inspiration.

MARY JONES
It’s no wonder that you’ve found a kindred spirit in the late work of Matisse, who having survived his successful surgery for cancer in 1941, felt he had been given a second life and consequently invented the cutouts.   

The new work is a good sign that I want to survive. So, I’m an heir of Matisse’s second life, because when I came out of the hospital I was starving to create, and to challenge any form of negativity. I’ve worked intensely to achieve a celebration of life in this new body of work.

We are now quite used to seeing a field or rectangle of painted color behind your large sculptural works. I’m reminded of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s theory about the “container and contained.” There’s an interplay between the painted space and the sculptural object. They seem at once to have emerged from that space but also to be extending from it or attached. At times the colored rectangle functions as a base or pedestal. The tension is closer here, as the contrast between materials has narrowed, the color relationships advance. Is this partly due to your renewed admiration for Matisse?

Yes, the fresh, direct perception of color and shape is very new in these works, and there is a specific link to Matisse, to his book “Jazz” and to the “Matisse Chapel,” the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France. Ariane and I have attended mass there several times and it has always been very stimulating for me. Of course, I’ve admired the colors of the stained glass, but also the very rich collection of chasubles that he created. The young priest Father Paul Anel even did a mass in honor of Ariane and me wearing a striking chasuble. With that in mind, I’ve been studying the symbolism of colors in religious art in the well-known book by René Gilles, “Le symbolisme dans l’art religieux” (1961). It is crucial to understand that color in a church always has a profound symbolic dimension. I’m choosing and mixing beautiful, resonant colors with specific, ascribed spiritual attributes. There’s a dialectic between the formality and symbolism of the color and the organic aspect of the line, a powerful tension that I like to explore.

The “zips” of your newspaper pieces have a similar armature to the paintings of Barnett Newman, who was a formative influence for you. How do you feel the sensual and the spiritual are resolved in his work? 

The paintings of Newman are fire. Barnett Newman gave us one of the most beautiful titles for a work of art in the in 20th century art. “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.”  It means “Man,” but also “the phallus.”  The spiritual world of Newman is really burning with passion. I think of him as a source of white fire. His first sculptures, “Here I” (1950) and “Here II” (1965) were so important for me. I found them extraordinary. They were not anthropomorphic or architectonic. The only thing left was a presence. The quest for presence is something that has been with me from the beginning and I was happy to discover that in Newman. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with Tom Hess about him, and to discuss the Talmudic presence in Newman’s work. But I also have a great love and respect for de Kooning, in part because he made one of the most beautiful quotes imaginable, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”  De Kooning and Newman stand very close to my heart and carry me, and I’d like to add something that I find very impressive, and that I feel is also very lovely. Barnett Newman did a show of “The Stations of the Cross” at the Guggenheim in 1966, and around the same time John Coltrane released “A Love Supreme.”  I’ve always loved to look at “The Stations of the Cross” in the Guggenheim catalog, listening to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”

But there is another Abstract Expressionist artist who has been especially important to me, almost as if he was part of my family: David Smith. I admire his work and character for many reasons and one of them is that he was an artist born in Americawho confronted and forcefully challenged his Protestant heritage. He denounced it in many of his works, including a great one called “Puritan Landscape,” (1946).  He stood up to the Puritan traditions of this country and rose above the influences that could have destroyed or suppressed him. He protected himself by working with such dedication, making more than 500 pieces during his lifetime. I find this incredibly inspiring, and like David Smith I also take issue with all things Puritan!  This was an ongoing argument I had with Louise Bourgeois. We were friends and were very supportive of one another’s work. Although we had verticality and sexuality in common, we had completely opposite views about the Puritan attitudes in America. She loved it, and I hate it. I interviewed her for Arts Magazine [March 1989) and she told me, “Alain, you have too much empathy for the world. I love confrontation, I had a great crush on Alfred Barr, because he was a temple of Puritanism, absolutely inviolable, this challenge was part of the attraction.” So I said, “OK, Louise, I am not like you!”

You’ve studied Smith’s work extensively, visited and studied his library at Bolton Landing many times. You’ve also organized exhibitions and written about his work. But how do you see your essential differences?

A huge difference is that he is a master of the scrapyard. He had the ability to find old metal that he that he could transform through welding. There’s some blacksmithing and forging in his work, but mostly he could make and envision his work from this found raw material. Whereas in my work, I’m deeply concerned with the trace of the hand and blacksmithing. Let’s say, I’m much more of a blacksmith than David Smith. He was a welder. Today, people don’t know the beauty of blacksmithing. It is, for instance, crucial in African art and society. The blacksmith is highly respected. He is a central figure in the village, performing necessary tasks in both utilitarian and cultural ways. When I worked in Mali in 2003, I met a blacksmith among the Dogon and worked alongside him. We had a great experience together, built out of mutual respect.

Even your large metal sculptures have the directness of drawing. Your new pieces are created from drawing subtractively. Is this a new experience?

Actually, the process is almost like blacksmithing. The pleasure of blacksmithing is mysterious and sensual—to create a vibration on the surface of metal and then form a curve. It’s a way to introduce gracefulness, an expression of emotion through the marks of the hammer, or the power hammer. In my new work the signs and shapes are slightly trembling, like in blacksmithing, and like in life.

What’s trembling in blacksmithing?

The fact that you start with rigid line of metal and as you shape it, a trembling quality is created, one that takes away the rigidity.

Is there sound?  Is it percussive?

Oh, yes. You could almost shape it with the sound alone and with your eyes closed. If you beat the metal when it’s getting too cold, your ear is also getting too cold, and when it’s red hot, it’s a different sound. And that’s why a lot of music is born in blacksmithing, in the forge.  It’s very often the secret source of Flamenco.

In this new series, there’s certainly a rhythm you’ve created from piece to piece, and as a whole.

Each work can be by itself, but as an installation they become monumental through multiplicity. Monumentality has always been with me, and I’d like to show them in an environment that activates this potential fully. There’s also an “archeology” of my own work here. Recently, I did some corner pieces of an iron rod and a piece of newspaper on the floor that relate to clay pieces I did in the 1970. The recent sculpture utilizing newspaper on the floor and on the wall is revisiting some floor pieces in zinc from 1972. Wire and paper are traditionally used to give thickness to free standing sculpture before it disappears with the addition of clay or plaster.

Today for me, to show the use of paper and wire is a way to break the traditional hierarchy where only bronze is the final version of the sculpture. Now, paper and wire are revealed and are the final versions of my sculptures.

Monumentality can be thought of as imposing, formal and static, yet your work consistently involves movement, especially with the new paper pieces.

I’m concerned with movement, not stasis. My free-standing sculptures are tactile, fully indicative of the human movements that made them. That’s the beauty of sculpture, a free-standing work of art and that you can touch, and that has brought you something new, and to experience it fully you are compelled to move around it. Sculpture invites you to circumvolution. You are not just in front of a work of art, you turn around it, you dance around it, you have a spiritual experience enacting this very profound, performed movement that human beings need. In every religion in the world, whether church, temple, or a sculpture like a stupa, this movement is practiced. There is a fundamental sense or drive for circumvolution.

And speaking of movements, you and Ariane have recently become US citizens. How’s that going for you?

I first arrived in 1965 and traveled back and forth several times. In France, after the second world war, the art community was destroyed. So, it was great for me to meet artists here that were close to my age, like Mel Bochner, Robert Morris, Marcia Hafif, and to go with Robert Ryman to hear jazz. There was nothing better for me than to meet living artists. I admire them, have great empathy for the difficulties they face, and for the determination of contemporary artists. Life is short, it’s urgent.

I’ve been so moved to see women emerge in the artworld, people I originally met in the 80s, like Elizabeth Murray, who was a close friend. To belong to a community is important, and to be part of an open world where women are recognized has been wonderful. The “Me Too” movement of today is something that gives me so much satisfaction, and something I never expected. It’s signaling the end of patriarchal power. It’s a revolution and it’s great. To be married to an accomplished woman artist and see that we both can achieve recognition has been very gratifying. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “In a couple there should be room for two.”

I’m not afraid of the feminine or the emotional in art, I welcome it.  I’m completely in love with Italian art and I’ve gone to Italy at least 20 times. It’s my first destination. It’s absolutely stunning what the church has allowed on its walls regarding ecstasy, it interests me very much. The lightness of being is a crucial aspect of sculpture. We speak about weight. When does a woman experience weightlessness?  When she has a climax with God!  That’s exactly what the St. Teresa of Bernini is saying!  There are Hindu temples in India where you see carvings of beautiful bodies undulating, and you begin to understand that when you bring together sexuality and spirituality, you are in masterpiece mode.

The post Lightness of Being: Alain Kirili discusses his new work with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

January 9 to 25, 2014
Crane Arts LLC
1400 N American Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122-3803

Many Americans declare their credo by displaying Warner Sallman’s soft-focus portrait of Jesus in the front hallway. Icelanders used to do the same by hanging a portrait of a cold and unreachable rock—the legendary “Lonely Mountain.” The choice encapsulates the outside world’s image of Iceland as a forbidding place, and one that prides itself on difference. Its population of 320,000 keeps alive a language so archaic that speakers more easily read thousand year-old poems than the words of its modern-day cousins, English and German.

The exhibition Due North at Philadelphia’s Icebox Project Space exposes cracks in Iceland’s ice.  Juxtaposing well-known Icelandic artists’ work with that of Americans who recently visited their country, the show affirms, but more often demolishes stereotyped views of the country. It also suggests that in this globally-connected world, Iceland’s singularity is likely to fade.

That Iceland is warmer than we think is evident in the experience Philadelphia artists had when they journeyed to the country as part of a grant-funded trip. Arranged by the exhibition’s curator Marianne Bernstein, who is also an artist in the show, the excursion brought five U.S. artists to the island country in February 2013, and this group later met other Americans at the Nes residency in Skagaströnd, a rural village in the north. The curator describes carefree car rides around the country, the unbridled hospitality of locals, and a cadre of Icelandic counterparts who were open-minded and free of the art world’s cutthroat mentality. Unique to Iceland was a culture of “singing and making” in which visual artists crossed over to the music world.

This “cold country, warm people” theme expressed itself in the Icelandic artist’s friendly and exuberant formal choices.  Examples include Hrafnhilder Arnardóttir’s Raw Nerves II and Sun, both of which contain bundles of fluffy red synthetic hair;  Haraldur Jónsson’s colorful,  blob-like vinyl TOKENS; and Magnus Sigurðarson’s Contained STORM I, consisting of white Styrofoam balls blowing like popcorn kernels in a glass case. Most telling was Guðmundar Hallgrímson’s (aka MUNDI’s) cartoon-like textile version of the above-mentioned “Lonely Mountain,” made of soft, thick wool.

The Americans’ art was by contrast much more severe. Katie Baldwin’s prints were more stripped-down than in the past, with large empty areas punctuated by dark forms. Looking like a foggy horizon view from the bridge of a fishing boat, Marianne Bernstein’s Braille Constellation series consisted white squares embossed with a line of braille. And tucked in a dark corner of the exhibition space, Cindi Ettinger and Katya Gorker’s video What we Did projected the Martian landscape of northern Iceland onto a pair of boulder-like forms.

The exhibition’s video art, in fact, showed the largest contrasts of style and aesthetic. The show’s centerpiece was a sequence of enormous projections that turned the 100 foot expanse of the Icebox into a colossal View-Master. David Scott Kessler’s Lopi: A Traveler’s Saga in Four Divinations was a Wagnerian epic of Iceland’s harsh landscape. With the iconic Icelandic fortune-teller as a narrative nexus, the video showcased steamy geologic formations, the northern lights, and nighttime shots of shaggy Icelandic horses. Compare that to Ragnar Kjartansson’s Guilt Trip, a 10-minute piece running on a standard-sized monitor. In it, the well-known Icelandic artist wanders the icy landscape dressed in a city overcoat and pointing a shotgun at nothing in particular. With a goofball humor reminiscent of Jon Stewart’s fake news correspondents, this video took pot-shots at the business corruption that led to Iceland’s recent banking collapse.

Subjects like this one—and that of artist Rúrí’s Future Cartography III, a pair of large printed maps showing global climate change’s subtractions from the coastal landscapes of both Iceland and the eastern United States—were a sign that Iceland’s artists are thinking about the same issues as artists everywhere. Although the rocks on which they live are strange and wonderful indeed, Icelanders’ DNA seems to be same as everyone else’s.

The post Warmer Than You Think: Due North at Icebox Project Space appeared first on artcritical.

This review,  posted August 22, 2012 is offered as A TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES as a tribute to the author, Janice Van Horne Greenberg, who passed away October 14, 2015.  artcritical extends condolences to Jenny’s family and friends.

Students of Clement Greenberg are already much in debt to the critic’s widow Jenny  (Janice Van Horne).  Under her exemplary editorial care, the stash of youthful letters to his friend Harold Lazarus from 1928 to 1943 was published in 2000, six years after the critic’s death, while his riveting and legendary Bennington lectures had been masterfully collected in both transcribed and published forms under Greenberg’s title for an unwritten work, Homemade Esthetics, in 1999.  Four volumes of Greenberg’s collected criticism, edited by John O’Brian and covering his oeuvre up until 1969, had begun to appear during the critic’s lifetime, published by the University of Chicago Press. Van Horne entrusted a collection of late writings, mostly consisting of talks and interviews, to Robert C. Morgan and Minnesota Press.  She bequeathed his papers to the Getty and sold what was left of his art collection to the Portland Art Gallery in Oregon.  Any major intellectual would be lucky to be dealt with so tidily and diligently.

Now we have a volume from Janice Van Horne herself, A Complicated Marriage: My Life with Clement Greenberg.  For the Greenberg nut, like this reviewer, news of the publication was extremely welcome.  Simply put, Greenberg is an inexhaustible source of fascination to students of American art and culture. A woman he marries is expected to have an interesting life and know how to write about it – both of which prove to be the case.  And insight into Greenberg’s character written with a degree of warmth is much needed to counterbalance Florence Rubenfeld’s now widely dismissed 1997 biography and the more scholarly but mean and unconvincing portrait by the late Alice Goldfarb Marquis.

It has to be acknowledged, however, that Jenny Greenberg has delivered a hybrid publication, less “My Life with Clement Greenberg” than “My life, by the Widow of Clement Greenberg”. For the book is in fact autobiography masquerading as memoir.  There are whole swathes in which Greenberg is hardly referenced.  Even in the artist vignettes – “double-dating with the Newmans [Barnett and Annalee] was not high on my hit parade” – Clem remains a supporting player as it is still much about Jenny: how to be a famous artist’s or critic’s wife is a particular fascination.  Slights endured from a gruff David Smith dismayed that she is washing dishes with water that he has lugged up to Bolton Landing commands more attention than Greenberg’s relationship to the sculptor.  His later travails as Smith’s executor are not mentioned.

Van Horne describes meeting her future husband as a young and insecure Bennington graduate, Greenberg on the rebound from a stormy affair with Helen Frankenthaler.  She breaks with most of her family over their anti-semitic stance towards her marriage. Being the stepchild of an alcoholic, about which she writes touchingly, is good training for marriage to a functioning alcoholic and witness to the death of Jackson Pollock. She deals in copious detail with Clem’s decline and passing, and their being swindled in a Ponzi scheme, but is absent from the scene in what for many readers are crucial years of hegemony and fall from grace.

Van Horne is an engaging writer, but sans Greenberg, is there intrinsic interest in her tale? There is a hilarious account of training with fitness pioneer Joseph Pilates, and genuine insights aplenty into the worlds she enters as a toe-dipping career woman and glacially gradual feminist – as a trade magazine editor, a semi-professional underground actress, a heart-not-quite-in-it swinger.  But extracting hard information about Greenberg himself from such a memoir is not so much a mining operation as fracking.

Tellingly, the most riveting part of the narrative is told through Clem’s meticulous daybooks charting their first trip to Europe.  But details do accumulate to portray a softer side of Greenberg than comes across in other accounts.  Laid off from Commentary where he is an editor, Clem argues against switching from his preferred Tanqueray to Seagrams as an economy, saying that “if you expect less you will get less.”  He loves Lenny Bruce, the young Barbra Streisand, and any music he can dance to, including the Bee Gees.  He enjoys surprisingly warm relations with Jasper Johns thanks to shared Southern connections.  He is a nature enthusiast, feeling special affinity for dolphins, stopping at every reserve on their Florida vacation with an aquarium.  And he is a doting father to their daughter Sarah, especially as the couple had lost a child to miscarriage, and despite the misery of his relationships with his own father and his son by a first marriage.  He is also super-tolerant of his young wife’s antics, agreeing, for instance, to a divorce she demands, by her own account, for purely feminist reasons as they have a happily open marriage.  In an endearingly and typically pragmatic way, Clem insists one lawyer draws up the divorce contract, strikes the incompatibility clause because he says they are compatible, puts the contract in a drawer, and continues with life exactly as it had been already.  Later they trundle off to City Hall and remarry.

Clem’s relationship to the older mentor artists like Hans Hoffman, the excruciatingly pretentious Newman and the insanely cold Clyfford Still is presented as largely passive.  Where roles might be expected to have reversed – when he in turn is mentor to the likes of Larry Poons, Jules Olitski, and a host of much younger artists, Jenny is absent – either during the California phase in her life, or just mentally. She is able, however, to offer a perceptive contrast between Greenberg’s outlook and that of the painters in his life.  Artists like Smith, Hofmann, Rothko and even Pollock are mistaken as “teddy bears” by their female admirers whereas “all too often, the heat within did not spill over into warmth toward others.

Hans was a hard call.  As compelling as I found his robust energy, it was tamped down by an impenetrable layer of detachment.  As if he were saying, ‘What doesn’t serve my art doesn’t serve me.’  On the other hand, Clem, who never, to my knowledge, had been called anything even faintly resembling a teddy bear, and despite his relentless passion for art, was an outspoken believer in life before art.  And how grateful I was for it.

Janice Van Horne, A Complicated Marriage: My Life With Clement Greenberg (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012.)  387 pages, illustrations, ISBN  978-1582438214. $27

The post Life with a Dolphin: A Memoir from Mrs. Clement Greenberg appeared first on artcritical.

February 3-May 14, 2006

David Smith’s preoccupations with human and animal form had less to do with a romanticized yearning for a pre-industrial past or, as some critics have suggested, opportunistic cultural grave robbing, than they had to do with an abiding interest in the transformative aspects of technology. In Gary K. Wolfe’s book, “The Known and the Unknown, The Iconography of Science Fiction,” an analytical and theoretical study of the recurring icons that appear throughout the science fiction genre, he states that “Technology not only creates new environments for humanity, it also creates new images of humanity itself, which tend to mediate between the natural environment of mankind and the artificial ones it has created, between the past and the future, and between the known and the unknown.” Smith was interested in the ambiguity of form and the ambiguity inherent in the materials he used. He dwelt upon the fact that steel could be used to make agrarian tools and destructive weapons; it had the potential to manifest a wide spectrum of psychological impulses.

Like the Minimalists, Smith explored serial forms and radically pared down gestalts, though for him these are attempts to explore anthropomorphic and psychological states through dialectical processes rather than intellectualized rejections of the immediate past. He made imaginative improvisations that broke with the history of the carved monolith placed on a pedestal, connecting instead the concept of the totem with the starkly formal, and in his final phase he experimented with scale and geometric forms to explore a duality of structure and collapse and to give his imagination free play.

He liked steel’s anonymous qualities and the fact that it was used to support or embellish almost every public structure. Jack Burnham points out in his insightful 1967 book “Beyond Modern Sculpture” that such “arch-underground American art forms” as the “neon belt and stickout signs” and “roadside pylon signs” were an important antecedent for Smith’s work. This connects him to the important sculptors in the years following his death who focused on sculpture’s being-in-the-world. Smith constructed tenuous arrangements of forms and symbolic barriers, heightening the tension between the known and the unknown in a way that isn’t kitschy. He also explored the concepts of interior and exterior in the way convolutions of linear steel describe movement, form and outline interchangeably between interior and exterior spaces.

Giacometti’s “Palace at 4 A.M.” made a deep impression on Smith. In this sculpture, abstract figures or signs interact in what could be a cage or the skeletal remains of a house. This model or dollhouse structure acts as a boundary, but the space it contains is still visible to those peering into it. Smith created many linear steel sculptures prior to the 1960s that consisted of disjointed and compact arrangements of forms in which negative space became an active component, and abstract and symbolic figures and structures interact in some mysterious way. But such assemblages of mechanical-organic and architectural forms as “Home of the Welder” (1945), articulated shapes propped up in space at subtly different angles and orientations to the vertical and horizontal planes, are meant to be elusive. For Smith sculpture was a peering into or seeing through and around, and even though many of his sculptures can be looked at as if they are two dimensional constructs, the metal lattices or vertebra rotate around invisible cores. To ignore the constructive aspects of the work is to ignore Smith’s complicated formal concerns.

Uninterested in creating volume or describing space, Smith constructed intersections and nuanced surfaces. He was interested in the act of revealing and many of the sculptures he made that incorporate framed fragments of open space in their composition, have distinctly different identities when viewed from the back, front and sides. The sculpture “Star Cage” (1950) emulates scientific models and is a crystalline cage shape made of sharply bent lines of steel. Embedded in the pointed boundaries of this open space, abstract model are mysterious clumps which could be read as molecules or astral bodies. There is no dominant view here and open spaces are captured by and permeate the sculpture simultaneously. The cage flattens and expands as it is examined in the round. He wanted the act of framing or bracketing of sculptural elements to be ephemeral or transient, always shifting. Looking became a process of discerning fragments and pockets of space that expanded and contracted in accordance with the shifting negative and positive spaces generated by the viewer circling the sculpture.

“Agricola IX” (1952) is a sculpture that epitomizes Rosalind Krauss’s concept of “radical discontinuity.” From the front we see an upside down T-shaped stand with a long horizontal, sharply angled bar of steel suggestive of a trowel or machine part welded onto it. Extending from this are tendril-like appendages that crisscross and bend in different directions, ensuring a balancing of linear elements along a horizontal plane. The tops of the appendages resemble the circular frames of magnifying glasses, a reference to the act of seeing. These circular framing devices are positioned in such a way that we can’t make out their full outline unless we go to the side of the sculpture. The seven circular frames are positioned at slightly different angles so that from the front or back we can see different sized and shaped slivers of the perfect circles only seen in full from the sides.

In his seminal sculpture, “The Letter” (1950) the details on the front and back of the sculpture are completely isolated from one another visually. Smith explores the sculptural qualities of script, transforming letters directly into symbols, inventing his own personal language using abstract pictographs, combinations of images and letters. Smith was the first sculptor to make letters into sculptural forms. In “24 Greek Y’s” (1950), for instance, or “17 h’s” (1950) he ingeniously presented a rectangular pillow of space as a metaphorical writing paper. The erect, animated letters are welded onto multi-tiered stands reminiscent of candelabras or lighting fixtures. The slightly puffy letters transform the space directly behind into a ground plane, generating a tension between two and three dimensionality. Smith turned to systems of notation because of his abiding interest in models of reality, and as a way to clearly differentiate his work from sculpture that describes reality.

With “Voltri XIX” (1962), Smith does something completely different with the found object. This workbench and the various tools placed on it “were simply found at Voltri, and left in their original state.” Smith transforms real objects into allegory, an allegory of the artist craftsman. Time estranges us from these implements of the past, but their utilitarian purpose does not diminish their imposing mystery. Smith was aware of the fact that an exhibition context would transform the actual workbench into a tableau. The normalized space set up by the placement of the object directly on the floor would be thwarted by the viewer’s limited relationship to the sculpture. We can only look not touch. Real objects become weird memorials to past actions in their new context as static symbols. Smith bridges the schism between humanity’s aesthetic creations and its mechanical ones.

It is easy to dismiss Smith as a staid Modernist simply because of his intuitive working method, his interest in the human figure and the needs of human personality, and his use of abstract symbolism during most phases of his career. Critics say that Smith offered little more than riffs on the work of the European Modernists and that his organic abstractions are irrelevant to an age of variegated appropriations. But to see Smith’s work in such a compartmentalized way, simply as a product of its times, is a crude reduction. Critics can’t predict the future so why do they always feel it is necessary to determine what is passé? Do they entirely reject the cyclical or dialectical aspects of history? Why praise Renaissance art or primitive art in an unqualified way, but feel obligated to sound the death knell of Modernist art? I say that critics who claim to be open minded about an artist’s materials but think that steel sculpture began and ended with Pablo Picasso, Julio Gonzalez, David Smith and Anthony Caro, and who consider all Modernist sculptors irrelevant because they came before the advent of “plop art” are being hypocritical.

Smith’s explorations in the borderlands between drawing and sculpture  may be the most prescient aspect of his work considering how prevalent the cross breeding of mediums has been during the last few decades. What particularly continues to influence and inspire many living sculptors is his ability to juggle concepts of presence and absence in the same work, as in the “Cubi” series where etched geometric surfaces dematerialize when viewed outdoors and become recessive or concave spaces filled with the reflected and refracted colors of the landscape and scribbles of light.

The post David Smith: A Centennial appeared first on artcritical.

“Carl Andre: Lament for the Children 1976/1996” at Paula Cooper until April 3 (534 West 21st Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-255-1105)

Gagosian has assembled an exhibition of works by David Smith that any museum would be proud of. It makes one of the most theorized and at the same time imitated twentieth century sculptors seem utterly fresh.

A particular strength of the selection is that it makes new sense of a problematic side of Smith: his paintings and drawings. Beautifully installed and intelligently curated, the exhibition often posits the products of two and three dimensions in friendly exchange in a way that seems to insist on singularity of vision transcending the means at hand.

Smith had started out as a painter, evolving into sculpture as a result of a painterly impasse (and at the urging of an influential teacher, the Czech Jan Matulka). He retained from this background a stronger personal affinity with the painters of his day than sculptors.

But his art is so tactile, both in the way it is conceived and made that at first it is impossible to think of him as a painter turned sculptor. Rather, it is the other way around: His generally monochrome, or else brashly colored, 2-D works, are almost stereotypically the paintings and drawings of a sculptor: personage dominated, form obsessed, and color blind.

His mature sculpture is characterized by its brawny physicality, revealing always the way it was made, and making that facture part of the visual meaning of the piece. Usually, his sculpture is realized “in the round”, to be sensed sculpturally, in other words, rather than “read” pictorially. There is a strong, multi-layered association of his later sculptures of the 1950s and 1960s with machines, bolstering the blue-collar thingness of his vision, the sense of his sculpture being out there in the world.

And yet, there is another element in Smith, especially in the breakthrough pieces of the 1940s, that builds a different relationship with flat works: his calligraphic quality. Whether made of welded-together elements or cut out forms, he often made work that looked like hand writing in space. Although resolutely 3-D, the linear seemed to win out over the volumetric.

The juxtaposition of “Black Flock (Raven),” (1960) a painted steel piece that despite its date relates to the earlier aspect of Smith, and a group of egg ink on paper paintings of two years prior, is richly illuminating. Smith, in these paper works, relates at one and the same moment to such contemporaries as Pollock and Kline, and to oriental calligraphy. As if in conscious emulation of Far Eastern exemplars, some of his black ink pieces highlight the signature pictographically with an orange stroke. The heavily painted Raven piece, with its energetic, anything but disguised welded joins, has the collaged elements work as words in sentence-like syntax.

A couple of paintings on paper from 1954 exhibited nearby explore a comparable fugal relationship between elements and joins by having ochre gouache lines dig into exuberant black ink brushstrokes, as if the lines are bones, the brushstrokes flesh.

Collage is crucial to any understanding of David Smith, but equally, so is Surrealism. One of the earliest pieces in this exhibition, “Construction,” (1932), brings together found elements in ambiguous, sexually suggestive juxtapositions, in a way that doesn’t compromise on sculptural integrity. The elements retain their individuality while working together as a whole. “Construction” is shown with a bizarre little untitled relief painting from 1958, with bones and plaster painted over in a washed-out French flag tricolor of rose, white and blue. The bones are arranged as personages that read like a cross between Hans Bellmer dolls and Henry Moore figures. These are associations that sit uneasily with the persona of Smith as the torch bearer of American abstraction, which for years was the official line on the artist. They are a compelling reminder, however, never to overlook the oddity in Smith, or the humanity.

Smith was clearly obsessed by positive-negative relationships. In a way, this was the opposite of his line in space idiom. Instead of placing forged or collaged elements in thin air, he punctured vacuums into solid volumes. “Untitled,” (1955) is a flat, white-painted steel shape that’s punctured by a series of circles and a square. It is an extreme instance of sculpture as pictorial support and at the same time three-dimensional object. This is shown with a set of Smith’s spray paintings in which found objects or carved stencils preserve shapes in the virginal white of the page in striking contrast to the surrounding enamel spray paint, lurid and speckled.

Apart from the oddball bone and plaster pieces, the Gagosian show swings shy of a crucial aspect of Smith’s output that has crucial bearings on his traffic between the second and third dimensions: His extensive forays into relief. These were the subject of a rigorously argued tourning show, curated by Karen Wilkin a couple of years ago, seen in New York at the National Academy of Design: relief was presented as a missing link between personal content and abstraction in his work. By sidelining the reliefs, however, the Gagosian exhibition shines a stronger light on the flat works, making them seem like fuel to the engine of his robust sculptures.

Most of the material in this show comes from the artist’s estate, complemented by signficant loans from the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and other institutions. There seems to be a growing trend of liberal lending to commercial high flyers. Earlier this year, similarly top notch lenders made the historic Rothko in 1949 exhibition possible at PaceWildenstein. Whether this increasingly common cause of commercial and public galleries is a healthy sign of the times or not, the policy offers treats for New York’s gallery goers.

The protean David Smith was progenitor to countless sculptors and several directions in sculpture. Among these can be counted minimal art, although formalists like Anthony Caro or Mark di Suvero who consciously took up his mantle after his automobile death in 1965 at the age of 59 chart a contrasting course.

Smith’s machine aesthetic, his sometime tendency towards decenteredness, and his penchant for arranging works in fields, all find echo in the work of echt minimalist Carl Andre, whose 1976 piece, “Lament for the Children”, closes at Paula Cooper this weekend. The work was destroyed after its initial installation at the disused playground of P.S.1; the version on show at Ms. Cooper’s is a reconstruction made in 1996 for an exhibition in Germany.

The work consists of a hundred concrete rectangular stumps evenly placed in a grid, filling Ms. Cooper’s humungous barn: Minimalism, it could be argued, at its most pompous and arid. And yet, as so often happens with this enigmatic artist, as notorious for what he has thrown out as for what he has added to art, the work has a capacity to take on subsquent meanings that belies its obstinate reductiveness.

It is hard, in this vein, to suppress the observation that the odd, poetic title, deriving from a Scottish renaissance dirge commemorating the tragic death of five children, takes on an eerie resonance with the artist’s own personal history. Mr. Andre-to some the artworld’s O.J. Simpson-was tried and acquitted in 1988 of pushing his wife, Cuban-born artist Ana Mendiata, from their 34th floor balcony.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 1, 2004

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