The Whitney Biennial, arguably, is an academy of the moment.  But New York hosts two venerable, national visual arts institutions that boast the word academy in their title: The National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Their annual exhibitions don’t garner the press and attention of the Whitney, or even the raucous, spirited Brucennial for that matter, but the academies have a singular advantage over most institutions and festivals: selection processes (for invitationals and membership alike) rest in the hands of living artists.

The National Academy has dropped the confusing “design” from its day-to-day name—to its 19th-century founders, design meant disegno in the renaissance sense, but today most people think of teapots.  And it has been experiencing a veritable renaissance itself since the start of the 2011-12 season when its stunning program of renovations was unveiled.  Suddenly, the old warhorse looked sprightly.

Tomorrow (May 17) Arts and Letters, as it is colloquially called, will open its none-too-catchy titled “Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards”.  It follows on the heels of the annual invitational that opened the same spring week as the Whitney.  Make no mistake, however: this is a show of artists more likely to persist in the consciousness of connoisseurs than many in the flashy, headline grabbing, portentous museum surveys that eclipse such an event.  In place of themes that professional curators come up with are individuals of quality selected by revered peers.  The award selection committee at the American Academy consisted of Lois Dodd, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Thomas Nozkowski, Judy Pfaff, Dorothea Rockburne, Peter Saul, and its chair, Joel Shapiro.

Among cash prizes of $10,000 each, to be distributed at a ceremonial at which Chuck Close will deliver the keynote address, are the Jimmy Ernst Award for a lifetime achievement, picked up by sculptor of zany furnishings and decorations Forrest Myers; the Merit Medal for Painting, awarded to Joyce Pensato; other awards to John Newman and Rebecca Smith;  prizes earmarked for young artists going to Nathlie Provosty, Elisa Soliven and Nicole Wittenberg.  The exhibition also includes artists in the invitational from whom works were purchased on behalf of American museums, among them Cora Cohen,  Suzanne McClelland and Ann Pibal. New artist and architecture members inducted this year (the academy also elects writers and musicians) include Lynda Benglis, Elizabeth Diller, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Gober and Kara Walker.

It is a matter of some pride to me personally to note artists on these lists who have also featured in the pages of this magazine, received attention at The Review Panel, or were subjects of shows that I helped organize.  I will also mention having written for the catalog of Wittenberg’s debut New York solo show opening at Freight & Volume Gallery in Chelsea next week.  Critics don’t go out of their way to cultivate academic tastes, but it is validating to find commonality with an academy as august as this one.

American Academy of Arts and Letters, 633 West 155 Street at Broadway, New York City, 212-368-5900, open Thursday to Sunday, 1 to 4 pm (closed Memorial Day)

Nicole Wittenberg, from May 24 at Freight & Volume Gallery, 530 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-691-7700

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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.

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“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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