October 19, 2014 to April 5, 2015
258 Main Street, Ridgefield,
CT 06877, Tel 203.438.4519

In its struggle for a share of the cultural marketplace, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has devised approaches to the exhibition format that have sometimes been illuminating, sometimes puzzling. Currently, an ambitious, cross-generational, two-part exhibition program titled “The Aldrich at 50” celebrates the ACAM’s half-century mark. Your intrepid correspondent is insufficiently intrepid to trek semiannually to Ridgefield, Connecticut, so he missed Part I (April 6 through September 21) and cannot offer comment. But Part II, on view through­­ April 5 of next year, includes standout performances by all involved, and is well worth the hour-plus trip from New York City.

“The Aldrich at 50” is co-curated by ACAM veteran Richard Klein and newcomer Amy Smith-Stewart, who has been at the Aldrich since May. The duo delivers a convincing clutch of exhibitions aimed at demonstrating the currency of the vision of ACAM founder Larry Aldrich. Mr. Aldrich’s collection was liquidated long ago in favor of a kunsthalle model, and for some time the Museum’s curatorial focus has been on accomplished, accessible artists whose efforts extend something of the adventuresome spirit of the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

Mary Beth Edelson and Jackie Winsor, both of whom showed work at the Aldrich during its first decade, are represented by compact but compelling exhibitions spanning many years. Concurrently, “Standing in the Shadows of Love: The Aldrich Collection 1964-1974” includes one significant work by Richard Artschwager, Eva Hesse, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Richard Serra that “represent” Mr. Aldrich’s aesthetic interests (although the specific works may not have passed through his hands). These objects are interspersed among strong exhibitions, widely varying in scope, by Kate Gilmore, Ernesto Neto, David Scanavino and Cary Smith.

The strategy is in full effect in the Museum’s lobby atrium, which houses Neto’s The Body That Gravitates on Me (2006), as well as Yellow Piece (1966) by Kelly, a 75-by-75-inch, cadmium yellow monochrome painting of which the top right and bottom left extremities are emphatically rounded off: they are curves, not corners. The Neto dangles nearby; pallid in color, its limp, bulbous form resembles a hybrid of boxing gloves and jellyfish. Both works challenge geometry, yet their physical proximity underscores the conceptual distance between 1960s color-field and minimalist concerns, and the idiom of sculptural installation so prevalent now.

Scanavino is an innovative young artist of enormous range. His spectacular Imperial Texture (2014) is made mainly of VCT floor tiles in a wide range of colors, from which bits of pattern and even depiction begin to emerge. The piece is the size and shape of the gallery floor, only torqued about 30 degrees and dislocated off-center, so a differently-sized triangle of flooring climbs every wall. In an adjoining gallery stands Artschwager’s Pyramidal Object (1967). This Formica-clad piece of pseudo-furniture refers to the look of bland institutional functionality; it is as cool and aloof as the Scanavino is dizzying, and just as unsettling

Gilmore’s manner of working tweaks the conventions of rule-based art, and yields a video recording of the artist painstakingly enacting an utterly absurd task that usually requires considerable physical strength and stamina…all in a becoming dress and high heels. The sculptural artifact of A Roll in the Way is an expanse of wood logs, slathered in paint (red, black and/or white) and loaded on end onto a chest-high plywood platform. The video, projected on an adjacent wall, was shot from directly above; the edges of the screen coincide with the edges of the platform, revealing a pictorial dimension to the work. Serra’s Bent Pipe Roll (1968), an emphatically physical prop piece, includes a cylindrical element resembling Gilmore’s logs; beyond a mere visual pun, however, the two works manifestly share a devotion to labor per se.

Smith, an erstwhile New Yorker now living and working in Connecticut, is represented by no fewer than 25 paintings in oil on linen and 19 works on paper. Smith’s buoyant palette and self-evident delight in clean, hard-edged shapes are irresistible, providing an adrenaline rush in two dimensions. Unexpectedly, the exhibition layout and literature associate Smith’s work with a typically restrained painting by Martin, The Rose (1964), in which delicate, gridded striations in red and black pencil produce an atmospheric effect. The matchup seems a stretch but, in light of the many mediated methods now afoot of producing paintings, Martin’s procedural clarity might have a kindred spirit in Smith’s forthright approach to paint application.

“With and Within,” as the Winsor show is titled, includes smallish, mixed-media wall works from 1995 and 2000 that recombine squares, grids and insets in shallow relief. (Disclosure: both Winsor and Smith-Stewart are my colleagues in SVA’s graduate Fine Arts program.) The show centers, however, on Painted Piece (1979-80), from the explosive early period of this artist’s career. A 31-inch plywood cube with square slots penetrating each face, it is covered with 50 coats of acrylic paint (lastly blue-black), its corners bumped and blunted in a way that recalls the Kelly painting. A play between interior and exterior aligns it also with Hesse’s Accession II (1967), a 31-inch cube of steel mesh, left open at the top to reveal a stubbly, repulsive lining of thin vinyl tubing.

“Mary Beth Edelson: Six Story Gathering Boxes” summarizes a project that is nearly as long-lived as the Aldrich itself. Begun in 1972, when Edelson was nearly 40, it consists of a growing number of open wooden boxes stocked with wood or paper “tablets,” each about seven by five inches. At the Aldrich, six boxes are arranged on tables: two have wood tablets bearing images and text, themed Great Mother and New Myths/Old Myths; the other four contain stiff paper cards rubber-stamped with prompts (“Describe the future as you would like for it to be”; “The most inspiring stories you have heard about immigration”) to which the visitor may respond by writing on the card. Many such responses are thus preserved.

Edelson’s piece is positioned as an early example of art as “social practice,” the aim of which is to engage the viewer on levels beyond—or in addition to—the observational, and to facilitate “intersubjectivity.” As a mechanism for generating and recording a folk literature, the Story Gathering Boxes have undeniable value, and their presence in an otherwise object-centric roundup of recent art suggests an alternative paradigm of the collector’s activity: to archive not objects, but experiences.

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Locations:
534 West 21st Street
521 West 21st Street
197 Tenth Avenue

192 Books:
190 Tenth Avenue

David Cohen on Christian Marclay, 2011
The Review Panel, November 2010
David Cohen on Mark di Suvero, 2010
Deven Golden on Robert Grosvenor, 2010
The Review Panel, March 2008
Jonathan Goodman on Jackie Winsor, 2008
The Review Panel, February 2006
David Cohen on Carl Andre, 2004
David Cohen on Mark di Suvero, 2003

More information can be found at Paula Cooper.

Full index entry for “Paula Cooper” at artcritical

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Somehow Jackie Winsor has had the ability to transform Minimalist vocabulary into something rich and strange and unlike the work of her fellow travelers from the period of the late 1960s. In a first-rate, if somewhat spare, exhibition at Paula Cooper, the examples of art range from a rope piece that was made in 1969 to three open cubes, created in the mid to late 1980s, to her inset wall works, the most recent of which was constructed in 2001-02. The main gallery had only four pieces in it—the rope piece and the cubes, while the small gallery offered a number of the insets. This anthology amounts to a miniature retrospective of one of the most interesting sculptors to be working in New York; much of Winsor’s originality derives from her enigmatic yet evocative treatment of form, which conceals as much as it reveals.

Winsor’s inspired rope trick, titled Dark Vertical Cylinder (1969), is 85 inches tall and 12 inches in diameter. Overtly phallic, the work is also about sculptural self-sufficiency: the thick ripe seems to spiral upward without end, supported mysteriously from within. In this sculpture as in other works, Winsor works brilliantly with the notions of interior and exterior, turning her cubes into containers of an interior that remains unknown to us.  Winsor’s skill in obtaining mystery from small openings and narrow insets conflate the surface of painting with the volume of sculpture, in a way that seamlessly melds the two. Dark Vertical Cylinderfocuses on the rope’s surface even as it poses questions about what lies within (galvanized tin and wire). In its hierarchical lyricism, the work suggests that its meaning is found not so much in close description as in the appreciation of its ability to hold space—a concern occurring in Winsor’s other pieces in the show.

The artist’s cubes also explore notions of the interior with those of the periphery. Winsor’sPink and Blue Piece (1985), 31 inches in all directions, consists of mirrors banded by pink-painted wood; each of the sides has a small square opening in its center. The gallery’s floor is reflected by the mirrored surfaces of the sculpture—one looks down at them from a standing position. But the viewer also sees the ceiling in the reflective surface of the top of the cube. What is hidden within? We hardly know, and yet we experience enjoyment in the work’s mystery. Circle Square (1987) makes its mark as a concrete form whose overall gestalt is that of a cube without sharp edges. On each side there is a circular opening, into which a series of stepped rectangular edges has cut, ending with a small red square. Again, the viewer looks down from above and tries, futilely, to understand what the internal center consists of. The puzzle remains unsolved.

The gallery’s selection of inset wall pieces shows Winsor tackling the relationship—or rather the difference–between painting and sculpture. Inset Wall Piece Black Plaster with Black Stepped Inset (1995) consists of a gridded frame surrounding an inset of a few inches: the work is five inches deep, although the surface of the frame appears to be flush with the wall. Winsor’s audience naturally wonders about what is happening on the other, inner side of the piece, and assumes that a hole has been carved out of the wall. We are not certain, however, that this is so, and our doubt leads to the question whether we are seeing a two- or a three-dimensional work of art. Winsor has us speculating, on an abstract level, about the nature of painting and sculpture through the simple device of a surface with a cutout in its center—an approach she repeats in the black or white inserts on exhibit. In the aftermath of our contemplation, we, like Winsor herself, become a bit like philosophers of form.

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