Fred Sandback: pedestrian space

photo courtesy of dia beacon

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.