Mia Westerlund Roosen: Namesake
Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. until April 3
560 Broadway, Suite 308, at Prince Street, 212-941-0012

Once the enfant terrible of the New York School, Lynda Benglis is now one of the grande dames of American sculpture. But she has never lost her essential brashness. A compact survey of her work since 1967, now at Cheim & Read, shows her to be a truly original force, at once deeply serious in her explorations of form and material and a fearless vulgarian.

Ms. Benglis is something of a changeling, even at times a hermaphrodite. Her work oscillates between exquisite form consciousness and consummate poor taste – just as, in another direction, it does between solid and flux. She was part of the generation that put process above object, yet she is clearly a maker of things, reveling in the tactility and tangiblity of her creations.

Her career, as presented here, is bookended by phalluses (and this from so feminist an artist). The earliest work, “Embryo II” (1967), is a three-foot-long pole encrusted with weird accretions of purified, pigmented beeswax and damar resin. In the tradition of Giacometti’s “Disagreeable Object,” it is at once compelling and yukky. The latest work, from this year and installed in the gallery’s chapel-like project space, is a 13-and-a-half-foot-high hanging lampshade, with bulbous curves. Titled “Bikini Incandescent Column,” the piece puns the feminine garment and the island of atom-bomb fame in a collision – typical of this artist – of the sexual and the political.

The phallus as political gesture will always be conflated with Ms. Benglis’s name thanks to her notorious stunt, in November 1974, of placing in Artforum an advertisement in which she posed naked, greased up in the porno style of that era, and sporting a dildo. Ostensibly announcing a show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, this act – which caused great scandal at the time, bitterly dividing the editors of the journal, for instance – presaged a period of performance and video in Ms. Benglis’s career.

None of this work is represented in this survey, but issues of sexuality and gender are never entirely absent from Ms. Benglis’s concerns. In the late 1960s, she pioneered a hybrid form between painting and sculpture, which entailed congealed puddles of brightly pigmented polyurethane foam. These would be nonchalantly deposited on the floor, looking as if they were still oozing forth, or heaped in a corner, as in “Quartered Meteor” (1969).

Such works were much of their time in terms of the prevailing obsession with process and penchant for un-arty (industrial) materials, but Ms. Benglis subverted the severe rationalism of male-dominated minimal art with metaphorical intimations of nature and anatomy. Her embrace of the fluid and the decentered was a counterpoint to her mock-worship of the phallus.

These puddle pieces, rooted as they may have seemed in an anti-object, process-driven aesthetic, developed into monumental sculptural installations whose poured forms solidified into floating entities of ambiguous weight. These suggested that, despite Ms. Benglis’s allegiances to the avant-garde, a baroque sensibility – a love of the conceit and deceit of frozen gestures, the solid object as metaphor of movement – is her defining characteristic.

The artist’s abstract “knots” of the 1970s approach figuration, with limb-like forms writhing to and fro. Later works explore the artist’s Greek heritage, with references to caryatids and to carved drapery. But no one would accuse her of giving in to classical refinement – “Summer Dreams” (2003), a shiny bronze fountain made from orgiastic heaps of gnarled, pummeled matter, is truly an exercise in the grotesque.

Mia Westerlund Roosen has, in more ladylike manner, followed a similar career trajectory to Lynda Benglis. She, too, started out steeped in the aesthetics of process and installation. Inspired by the women’s movement, she explored sexual and erotic content in pared down abstraction. Both women’s work relate, also, to the nebulous, erogenous forms of Louise Bourgeois.

Ms. Roosen’s major contribution so far has been in site-specific works, often temporary, such as those in her widely acknowledged outdoor exhibition at Storm King in 1994. Ms. Benglis, too, has made such pieces – carved brick works in India that I have only studied in photographs but that seem to represent a departure in her work and a close point of formal similarity with Ms. Roosen’s elephantine, robust awkwardness. Where Ms. Benglis is a priestess of volume, however, Ms. Roosen serves at the altar of mass. Her sensibility is genuinely monumental.

Still, she is more than capable of singular statuary, as six new sculptures at Lennon, Weinberg and two pieces at the Invitational at the American Academy (reviewed in these pages last week) show. These pieces are at once tough and vulnerable, quirky and strident, personal and aloof. This string of dichotomies reflects, in a way, their facture, which also reconciles a more fundamental sculptural duality, that between carving and modeling, (processes often posited as temperamental opposites) for her concrete sculptures are cast in moulds but their surfaces are worked by hand. .

Each piece in the Lennon, Weinberg show is named for a famous historical or mythological woman. The most striking is “Clio” (2003). The Muse of History is presented as a triad of pulsating balls on cloven feet from whose energized surfaces little pipes protrude like the nails in an African carving. In her tenderness and absurdity, Clio looks like a cross between a baby elephant and a bride of Ubu (as drawn by his creator, Alfred Jarry).

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 18, 2004

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Kim Jones: “escape from flatland,”
177 North 9th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718.599.2144
13 february–15 march, 2004

Height precedes width precedes depth – that’s the standard format for describing the size of an artwork. I thought about this simple formula while viewing exhibitions by two outstanding artists that opened this month – Mia Westerlund Roosen at Lennon Weinberg and Kim Jones at Pierogi.

Westerlund Roosen makes ambitious works that, regardless of scale or material, remain adamantly personal. No mean trick, since her sculptures and installations can be very large indeed. By way of example, her last solo exhibition at Lennon Weinberg in 2001 had a concrete piece titled “Fagin” for which the dimensions listed are 108 x 168 x 39-1/2 inches. Her last exhibition at Santa Monica’s Shoshona Wayne Gallery featured “Madam Mao,” an installation largely comprised of trucked in dirt measuring approximately 36 feet by 20 feet by 8 feet high weighing roughly 2 tons. As compared to these earlier shows, her current exhibition at Lennon Weinberg presents five sculptures of far more modest proportions. Titled after famous women – Althea, Cleo, Magdalena, Victoria, and Iris – and all made with poured concrete, the largest of the group, Iris, measures a mere 39-1/2 x 80 x 70 inches, while the smallest, Cleo, is 36-1/2 x 38 x 36 inches, positively petite as Westerlund-Roosen’s go. Still, even the smallest of works exudes a distinct monumentality.

Monumentality, though often associated loosely with bigness, is actually an aspect of presence. While this concept might be difficult to pin-down in art, in popular culture it can often be obvious: the film Lawrence of Arabia is monumental; the Matrix trilogy is just, well, long. Westerlund-Roosen’s works are, nearly without exception, monumental. One can often get a hint of this in the reproductions – even in small photographs without reference points, the sculptures read large and exude mass. In other words, they appear to project their scale.

But what does that mean, to project their scale? Just look at a piece like “Victoria,” (2003): Its human, if rather stout, proportions are readily apparent. And visually, its skin certainly does display a tactile pale gray seductiveness, even to the point of belying its sand molded concrete origins. The idea of projecting scale, of weighing presence, so to speak, would seem to rest on a non-quantifiable aspect. Yet perhaps there is a simple observation that, although extremely subjective, might be agreed upon as measurable nonetheless.

Look at two people as they stand talking. Note that they are about three feet apart which, one would probably agree, seems normal. Any closer and we would say that they are in each others space. It is understood that when it comes to personal space, we do not end at the physical dimensions, but occupy an area approximately eighteen inches to two foot all around us. In other words, while our body may measure six by two by one foot, we actually represent – to ourselves and others – a projected scale measuring eight by six by five foot. (To those who doubt that our projected space extends above our heads as well, I invite you to spend an extended period in a room with seven foot high ceilings.) Different cultures may view personal space as a little smaller or larger, but would any deny its existence?

Inanimate object do not, as a rule, have projected scale. We do not perceive tables or chairs to be larger than their quantifiable dimensions. Not even the automobile, the embodiment of the American Dream, projects scale beyond its bumpers. Yet, just as undeniably, Westerlund-Roosen’s five sculptures in this Lennon Weinberg exhibition do. What’s more, they are not unique in possessing this quality amongst the artist’s body of works, nor even, for that matter among the works of other exceptionally gifted artists.

If people project scale, and most inanimate objects do not, but successful sculptures do, then it should follow that the reason that those sculptures do is because they contain some aspect of human attributes, as intangible as they may be. Which, of course, makes sense – art at its most essential and deep level must be some aspect of the human condition made physical. One could even take this a step further and posit that if an argument can be made that projected scale is an essential criteria for sculpture, then the stronger the artwork, the more powerful the viewer’s impression of projected scale.

No doubt there are other important criteria in appreciating a sculpture’s impact and qualities. But there are few as viscerally satisfying as experiencing monumental sculptures – even ones as modestly proportioned as the five in Westerlund Roosen’s current solo exhibition.

Kim Jones’ dimensional transgressions are, it would seem, more immediately obvious and tangible than projected scale. For his current solo exhibition at Pierogi, he has again presented one of his work-in-progress war drawings/installations. Entitled “escape from flatland,” the piece contains at its center one of Jones’ untitled drawings depicting the artist’s imaginary war of the dots and x’s. The drawing, “Untitled War Drawing (triptych),” (1993-2003), 38 x 75 inches, was finished when the artist affixed it to the wall, but the rest of the drawing, the part extending out from the paper’s edges, across the walls, around the corners, and over the ceiling, is in constant transformation throughout the length of the exhibition.

Jones was given off-hours access to the gallery, and came in regularly to add to the drawing. Near the end of the show, the artist stages a huge battle, one in which a line of predefined length represents cannon fire, and explosions are manifest as, literally, erasures. Joe Amrhein, Pierogi’s director, hasn’t decided yet if he’s going to paint over the wall part of the drawing when it’s over or, more provocatively, seal the drawing under a thin layer of sheetrock.

Clearly Jones work resists easy classification when we think of scale, even if most archivists in this case understandably opt for “dimensions variable” in the measurement line. And into this mix one must add yet another piece of history: Jones was what was called a “Tunnel Rat” in Viet Nam, meaning that he went underground into long, dark, narrow, booby-trapped tunnels searching for Viet Cong. While the nature of the his war drawings would naturally assume an overhead orientation on the part of the viewer, if one were to take a more literal view and see the drawings from the side as they are truly presented how easily they might remind one of those clear plastic ant farms or…those Viet Cong tunnels.

Which raises a more interesting question concerning Jones, for it is not “where is the edge of his work?” but rather “what time frame contains these works?” The date on the untitled drawing covers 10 years, a fairly unusual length of time to engage a single drawing. The artist’s drawings in the second gallery are even more striking in this regard. Having been originally started in 1975, just a few years after Jones returned from duty in Vietnam, they were all recently reworked, as the date on “playboy calendar (may),” (1975-2003), attests.

Artists have their own ways of working, but coming back to a series of drawings from twenty-eight years ago and re-engaging them in, apparently, the same spirit as when they were first created is striking. It is also worth noting that all of the Playboy Calendars pages that form the starting point for these drawings date from 1969, which pre-dates Jones’ tour of duty in Vietnam. So we have a body of drawings whose source material is from 1969, which were first worked up in 1975, and were eventually finished in 2003 – that is, if we can have real confidence that the artist won’t pick them up at a later date and have at them once again. Given Jones’ methods, this is a possibility can never be ruled out.

Dating an artwork is not the same thing as measuring its dimensions, but it is a way we mark distance. That is, setting the date of completion on an artwork pegs the object in time to a place which then immediately recedes from us as we move into the future. Through his art, Jones would seem to be making the case that under certain circumstances this measurement might not remain fixed. Instead, a specific moment might expand like a bubble, fusing past and future into a single everlasting present.

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