Richard Serra: orienting space

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Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cook
Concerns quintessentially sculptural have engaged Richard Serra for more than thirty years, although as a young artist in New York in the late 1960s he was strongly affected by the work of a number of contemporary dancers, above all Yvonne Rainer. Such work prompted him to consider “ways of relating movement to material and space,” he has explained, in that it allowed him “to think about sculpture in an open and extended field in a way that is precluded when dealing with sculpture as an autonomous object. I found very important the idea of the body passing through space, and the body’s movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement.”

A visit to a number of Zen gardens in Kyoto while on a trip to Japan in 1970 reinforced Serra’s growing preoccupation with work that was defined through the processes of its reception. There he discovered that “your vision is peripatetic and not reduced to framing an image. It includes and is dependent upon memory and anticipation. The relationship of time, space, walking, and looking—particularly in arcs and circles—constitutes the only way you can see certain Japanese gardens.”

Redefining this requirement of extended temporality and nomadic vision, Serra’s recent series of Torqued Ellipses elaborates concerns with orientation and movement into tightly contained sculptures that radically challenge modernist notions of sculptural space. For in these works space shifts and moves in wholly unpredictable and unprecedented ways: so destabilizing yet so beguiling is this sensation of movement that the spectator quickly gets caught up in an exploration of extended duration.

Rolled-steel plates, each two inches thick and weighing twenty tons, stand abutted. This forthright, direct presentation, characteristic of Serra’s aesthetic, gives little hint of the fundamental newness and potency of the experience offered in these monumental works. They alter the proportions of the room in which they are located, testing perceptual and conceptual apprehension of the relation between the assumed horizontal plane and the ground, and tempering routine assumptions regarding the built environment and the spectator’s relationship to it.

Fred Sandback: pedestrian space

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Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cooke
“The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire was the outline of a rectangular solid . . . lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me,” Fred Sandback wrote in 1986, looking back over twenty years of activity to a seminal sculpture he had executed in 1966. The key implications of that determining impulse remain at the heart of his practice today. In wanting to create sculpture that did not have an inside, he found through this seemingly “casual act” the means to “assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it.”

For more than three decades, Sandback has pursued these governing insights with remarkable consistency and inventiveness, creating a body of work that is informed by a signature style and yet, as a result of the close interdependence of each piece with the architectural site in which it is realized, ever different in its manifestations.

"My feeling persists,” he avowed, in that same article from 1986, “that all my sculpture is part of a continuing attitude and relationship to things. . . . The sculptures address themselves to the particular space and time that they’re in, but it may be that the more complete situation I’m after is only constructed in time slowly, with the individual sculptures as its constituent parts.”

The character of any particular work is relative to its site, its proportions and form subtly calibrated in response to the architectonics of the area it inhabits. Thus not only the specific measurements and proportions but also the tone or hue of the yarn may be adapted or altered as the artist intuitively adjusts a work to both its neighbors and its new location. In these sculptures, space is both defined and imbued with an incorporeal palpability, so that often the spectator concentrates less on the edges, on the yarn demarcating the forms, than on the planar or volumetric components contained within. Whether transparent geometries, as in Untitled (1977)—a two-part vertical construction—and Untitled (1996)—two triangles—or simple linear trajectories, as in Untitled (1996)—a six-part vertical construction—Sandback’s sculptures unequivocally occupy the same physical site as the viewer. Inhabiting what the artist has dubbed “pedestrian space”—the ordinary matter-of-fact space coextensive with that of the spectator and of the site—they reveal themselves over time, from different vantages, and according to different perspectives.

While any apprehension of his works involves a process of kinesthetic viewing, a phenomenological experiencing of each piece in situ, Sandback has been careful to distinguish his sculpture from so-called Installation art, from the creation of a holistic place, set apart, in and of itself, sui generis. His work is never environmental, if that implies transforming the context. On the contrary, as he states, “It incorporates specific parts of the environment, but it’s always coexistent with that environment, as opposed to overwhelming or destroying that environment in favor of a different one.”

The artist in characteristically adroit fashion engages the viewer actively in the immediate context—in the world at hand. In his exploration of physical relationships via the incorporeal rather than through concrete matter—via the interplay of vacancy and volume— he recognizes that the illusory and the factual are inextricably intertwined.

Sol LeWitt: basic seriality

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Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cook
“Serial components are multipartite pieces with regulated changes,” Sol LeWitt argued in 1966. “The differences between the parts are the subject of the composition.” Such works, which have constituted the mainstay of his practice since the mid-1960s, “are to be read by the viewer in a linear or narrative manner . . . even though,” he conceded, “in its final form many of these sets would be operating simultaneously, making comprehension difficult.”

LeWitt first articulated his long-standing commitment to seriality as a mode of composition and a thematic as his practice was evolving from its roots in Minimalism to a pioneering Conceptualism. In response to seminal works by peers such as Donald Judd and, more particularly, Dan Flavin, LeWitt, too, pared his vocabulary to simple geometric forms. Focusing on the cube and square, he fabricated neutral three-dimensional structures, in a pristine white, which he then parsed in permutational progressions or finite preset series. For example, 1 2 3 manifests all possible variations on three different kinds of cubes. Eliminating the play of the arbitrary, the expressive, and the subjective, eschewing all trace of his hand and taste, LeWitt accorded priority to underlying ideas over their physical counterparts.

The work’s basic unit, a square measuring one meter per side and divided into quarters, is grouped to make a larger square of four equal units, then stacked into four rows centered on each of the four walls of the gallery. A recurrent form in LeWitt’s early drawings, the square, like the cube, from which most of his early sculptures were composed, is for him among the “least emotive” of any possible forms.

“A more complex form would be too interesting in itself and obstruct the meaning of the whole. There is no need to invent new forms,” he contends. “The square and cube are efficient and symmetrical.” This elementary syntax constitutes “the best form to use as a base unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed.”The four directions assumed by the lines in Drawing Series. . . represent the basic directions in which lines may be drawn: vertical, horizontal, diagonal from top left to bottom right, and diagonal from top right to bottom left. In accordance with the artist’s preset plan, these lines have been overlaid in every possible combination so that the resulting sequence methodically exhausts every variation that may be derived from the given logic and within the formal limits established by the location.

Donald Judd: multipartite entities

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Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cook
Celebrated as a preeminent Minimalist, Judd refined, honed, and parlayed his rigorous visual vocabulary through an enormous range of industrial materials. His simple geometric forms, whose mode of fabrication is directly exposed and immediately legible, are presented as single works, or combined serially into greater wholes, or composed according to conventional mathematical progressions. Judd stated, “the image, all of the parts, and the whole shape are coextensive.”

In relentlessly probing issues of similarity and difference, likeness and identity, Judd required that each of his works be closely and attentively scrutinized. The recognition of the specificity of each element informs the viewer’s appreciation of the relation of the individual to the collective, of the singular entity to the larger series, and of repetition to order. Such recognition has implications that are as much social and ethical in character as they are aesthetic. “Aspectual diversity”—the sequence of distinct vantage points required to navigate each work, and to negotiate its multiple faces, in an engagement that necessarily takes place in real time and actual space—plays a fundamental role in the apprehension of his work.

He closely engaged with issues of site and presentation and accorded greater emphasis to the problem of created space (as opposed to space treated as simply an empty surround).
Just as no rigid system has been exhaustively explored to determine all the different configurations possible with this elementary module, so no identifiable system accounts for their overall sequence—that is, for the juxtaposition of any one box with its often quite distinctively different neighbors.

Nevertheless, a sense of order can be apprehended, one that eschews both a hierarchical placement and the suppression of the individual to the whole. As art historian Dieter Koepplin aptly stated, Judd favored “free individuation” over structural subordination, the likely outcome of uniformity. Each box consequently retains its autonomy and identity. A multipartite entity, the work is constructed collectively, by consensus, as it were, neither given nor preordained.

Composed of twelve stainless-steel boxes with deep blue Plexiglas panels forming the back plane of each interior, untitled (1975) contrasts tellingly with the plywood piece discussed above, in that here all the units are identical. Once again, though, appearances change radically as the viewer explores each element in the sequence.

For example, the color of the inner spaces fluctuates according to the play of light, the back plane at times darkening almost to black—like the negative of a mirror—at other moments swelling with a sumptuous blue that diffuses the crystalline interior into a softly glowing ambience. A hue relatively new to Judd’s palette in 1975, ultramarine inevitably compromised the effects of “transparent factuality” (formerly considered axiomatic), since it permits shadow to modulate light, eroding angles and edges and rendering space indefinite.

Even as Judd tempered his desire for the uninflected clarity that had been a hallmark of his early endeavors, his approach was not fundamentally altered: rather, he now more fully acknowledged the contingencies inherent in the act of looking.

Andy Warhol: nonordered order

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Exerpted from an essay by Lynne Cook
In the mid-1970s, shadows increasingly began to haunt Andy Warhol. The result was an exceptional series of paintings, notably one vast environmental work in 102 parts, together with sundry others in different formats and with different motifs.

Purchased as a single entity by Lone Star Foundation, this cycle of paintings was first exhibited in January 1979, at 393 West Broadway in New York City. Its current presentation in Dia:Beacon mimics that debut, for it, too, incorporates as many canvases, hung edge to edge and close to the floor, as will fit the space, but it sequences the works by acquisition number—an equally random order. Warhol left decisions regarding the initial order of the paintings to Cutrone and his assistants. In adhering to no system, they conformed to Warhol’s own practice when he chose the colors for the grounds, or selected prints from contact sheets to be made into screens. Yet his method was far from completely arbitrary: restricting the vocabulary of the group to two compositional formats, confining the total number of hues to seventeen, and limiting each canvas to a single color, Warhol filtered a controlled and circumscribed serendipity through the proclivities of taste to create an environmental ensemble that pertains as much to decor as it does to high art.

The shadow, which holds a seminal role in the originary accounts of both painting and photography as art forms, assumes in Warhol’s depictions a paradigmatic identity: devoid of identifiable source, detached from its maker or creator, it exists in and of itself, a purposefully made image of “nothing.” “There is almost nothing on them. Yet they seem to be pictures of something.”

Blinky Palermo: permutations

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Excerpted from an essay by Anne Rorimer
Palermo’s decision to use the same three hues throughout the work as a whole gave him the foundation for a set of combinations with which to set forth a controlled permutational color scheme. The scheme, however, evinces no regularized, inflexible system. Even while it takes full advantage of the visual power of repetition, it spares itself of an unyielding, mathematically determined seriality.

Free from representational obligation within a single rectangular unit, the colors of red, yellow, and black carry the eye from panel to panel and around the room without enforcing a sequence. Although Palermo refuses to impose a definite system of color arrangement, viewers may tend to want to look for one, a desire that encourages them not to dwell on any one panel. Instead they participate in the experience of observing unenclosed, resonating hues that ”float and breathe in the space of the gallery,” Having escaped referential responsibility and subjugation to the strictures of formal delineation.

The compositional relationships among the colors foster a sense of the color as disembodied from the unframed aluminum panels, which are almost imperceptible, projecting only minimally from the wall by hidden fasteners. These chromatic relationships are marked by their inherent potential for an open-ended interplay between individual panels and sets of panels.

Gerhard Richter: reflecting windows

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Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cooke
The key mythemes grounding Western painting derive from the notion of a painting as either a window offering a view on to a world beyond or a mirror reflecting whatever is held before it. These two tropes, the window and the mirror, which metaphorically figure painting’s relation to visuality, now became his subjects.

Poised between architecture and painting, this seminal work invokes mythemes of glass, including the German Romantics’ reverence for it as a mystical substance, the German Expressionists’ fascination with it as the inculcation of a visionary new world, and salient modernist preoccupations with it, such as the embrace of transparency by Walter Gropius and his peers as integral to a utopian functionalist architecture.

Concurrently, in a series of paintings titled Fenster (Window), begun in 1967, Richter directly addressed abstraction, modernism’s primary pictorial language. Wittily and subtly reformulating the axiom that any representation is necessarily an abstraction, he simultaneously postulated the converse: abstraction is inherently referential. All languages of representation, the mimetic as well as the nonfigurative, are constructs whose formulations depend on the establishment of governing pictorial codes and conventions.

Subsuming spectators into that fluctuating matrix, depriving them of any clear, fixed, stable relationship to space and place, his mirrors seductively undermine the viewers’ authorial indepen-dence and autonomy by dissembling traditional hieratic perspectival systems of perception.

Bruce Nauman: sensory place

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Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cooke
It was in the late 1960s, when he was a recent graduate, that Nauman began his exploration of the practice of artmaking and of the role of the artist. Performances that put his own body under duress were matched by those that demanded as much of paid performers or of spectators: compare the physically exhausting Slow Angle Walk with Untitled or Body Pressure (1974), exacting mental exercises in which an actor and viewers respectively are required through intense concentration to try to suffuse themselves into the architecture of the room. Sometimes these works were orchestrated for the camera in the studio, to become single-monitor video pieces; sometimes they were choreographed for a gallery or museum situation.

With Performance Corridor (1969) Nauman transformed a prop that had initially been built for one such piece into an autonomous work. Moored to the wall of the gallery, the long, narrow, plywood structure teases the visitor to venture into its claustrophobic recesses. This seminal sculpture soon spawned numerous related progeny, some of which incorporate surveillance cameras and closed-circuit video systems that function as a kind of electronic mirror. Both these virtual mirrors and the real mirrors Nauman used elsewhere allowed spectators to see places that they did not imagine they would be able to see. Typical of these works is the way a frustrating denial of physical access to what can be seen engenders a strange sense of removal or dislocation. Yet other corridor pieces, notably Left or Standing, Standing or Left Standing (1971), saturate the space with a garish luminosity, tiring and taxing the viewer’s perception before producing disturbing purplish afterimages. The laconic text placed on monitors at each entrance to the structure reprises as it skews the disjunctive architectonic experience: paradoxically it is more concrete in defining the sources of the unsettling fear than its eerie physical counterpart.

“Perhaps the space was insufficient,” Nauman conceded. “In a way it’s a poem that stands by itself, next to the space, without describing it. The writing is about language; it includes a kind of anxiety that the space seemed to generate.”

Michael Heizer: absence of presence

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Excerpted from an essay by Michael Govan
In the mid-1960s, during the same period that Michael Heizer was making large-scale, shaped, “negative” paintings in his New York City studio, he began a series of trips to his home states of Nevada and California to experiment on the expansive raw canvas of the American desert landscape, where he created “negative” sculpture. The genre that he and his colleague Walter De Maria invented there—later dubbed “Earth art” or “Land art”—changed the course of modern art history. Working largely outside the confines of the gallery and the museum, Heizer went on to redefine sculpture in terms of scale, mass, gesture, and process, creating a virtual lexicon of three-dimensional form.

Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) comprises two giant rectangular cuts (and the space in between them) in the irregular cliff edges of a tall desert mesa near Overton, Nevada. This monumental piece is iconic of the period and of works made in and of the landscape. Although the “sculptural volume” of Double Negative was created by a massive movement of earth, performed with the help of heavy machinery, it isn’t physical at all. Instead it is made literally of nothing, of negative space: the volume that traditionally defines a sculpture is described in these works by a void, by absence rather than presence.

It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe. Small works are said to do this but it is not my experience. Immense, architecturally sized sculpture creates both the object and the atmosphere. Awe is a state of mind equivalent to religious experience, I think if people feel commitment they feel something has been transcended. . . . I think that large sculptures produced in the ‘60s and ‘70s by a number of artists were reminiscent of the time when societies were committed to the construction of massive, significant works of art.

Ancient sculpture may have specific commemorative or religious meaning to convey, but for Heizer it generates its sense of awe through its intense “commitment” to making an “architecturally sized” work that becomes “both the object and the atmosphere.” Those issues of commitment and scale can equally be embodied in the contemporary artist’s intense and self-reflexive process of abstraction—even negation— with the same overall results.

Robert Irwin: viewer as subject

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Excerpted from an essay by Michael Govan
The primary medium of Irwin’s art is neither steel nor glass, neither trees nor pavement, but our perception, our curiosity, and our desire to make sense of the world around us. By subtly manipulating our environment in unexpected ways, his gestures provoke us to see differently, to question our assumptions, and to pay an attention to phenomena that in turn cause us to redraw our mental picture of the world. The role of the artist, in Irwin’s terms, is to learn to see not only a physical, quantitative reality but the qualitative aspects of a situation, and to empower the viewer to gain access to that vision as well—to engage in a process of discovery. The real subject of Irwin’s art is not the object, then, but the viewer:

As artists, the one true inquiry of art as a pure subject is an inquiry of our potential to know the world around us and our actively being in it, with a particular emphasis on the aesthetic. This world is not just somehow given to us whole. We perceive, we shape the world, and as artists we discover and give value to our human potential to “see” the infinite richness (beauty?) in everything, creating an extended aesthetic reality.

“If you asked me the sum total—what is your ambition?” Irwin told his friend and biographer Lawrence Weschler. “Basically it’s just to make you a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is. It’s not saying that I know what the world should look like. It’s not that I’m rebuilding the world. Basically what artists do is to teach you how to exercise your own potential—they always have, that’s the one thread that goes all the way through.” By Irwin’s measure, a work of art succeeds when it challenges our perceptions to such a degree as to cause us to reconsider our environment and invest it, and ourselves, with greater potential.