sculpture

I’m often amazed by how paper sculptors--working with a practically two-dimensional material, and one that is treated as quite ephemeral--can create inventive and elegant sculptural forms. Artists whose work in paper I’ve been admiring quite a bit lately include Su Blackwell, who conjures complex literary scenes from book pages, and Yuken Teruya, whose tiny forest worlds created from discarded paper bags and rolls invite us to reconsider habits of consumption.

Would you like to investigate paper sculpture? The library has a number of mid-twentieth-century books that I like for the window they open into the medium’s use in advertising and window dressing as well as for the how-to projects they include. Two that I like in particular are Sculpture in Paper and Paper Sculpture, both of which are illustrated with commercial paper sculptures evocative of that period. And here (above and below) are a couple of pages from Paper Sculpture, in which author and sculptor Arthur Sadler shows you how to make an owl:

I live for the day when some person who’s regarded as an arbiter of cultural taste is asked to name their favorite books. “I know you’re expecting an answer like Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, but, truth be told, the one story that really sums up the human condition for me is issue number 55 of The Amazing Spider-Man.” They then proceed to deliver a literate, succinct defense of their preference which would do credit to an Oxford professor’s deconstruction of Beowulf. I know this might sound weird, but then I also hope for the day when the consumers of culture, and not a coterie of critics, decide what they want to read, see, and hear.

Hidden treasures are what make looking for materials on the Mid-Manhattan Library’s Art and Literature floor so interesting. Three-quarters of the books and DVDs that people request will be about art and plays and architecture and novels and cartoons and poems and buildings I’ve never heard of until today. That’s why it’s interesting to flip through the pages of each book that’s pulled from the shelves. I want to see what kind of sculpture Antoine-Louis Barye produced (more on this later), what factors influence the design of an airport, and just what sort of poem is “Aniara” by Harry Martinsson (more on this later, too).

Do you know how a gramophone acts? (Image from NYPL Digital Gallery)

Last Thursday, instead of making myself squirm through the vice-presidential debate as it unfolded live, I went to a concert. The musician Andrew Bird played the Tarrytown Music Hall, and his haunting, looping violin (combined with glockenspiel, guitar, voice, and whistling) filled the room with mesmerizing and sweeping sounds. The performance was unforgettable; I've never seen such an impressive and complex one-man show.

But even before the musician took the stage, I was rapt, because standing in readiness on the stage were four luminous sculptural forms that appeared to be a marriage between gramophones and human-sized flowers. What could they be? Luckily, Mr. Bird anticipated audience curiosity and introduced them to us. These one-of-a-kind custom creations are speakers created by Ian Schneller, who makes musical instruments by hand at his studio, Specimen Products. Schneller's work is featured in Hand Made, Hand Played: The Art & Craft of Contemporary Guitars by Robert Shaw, whose previous books include America's Traditional Crafts.

Schneller's speakers filled the hall with sound, while their glowing and undulating surfaces also contributed to the atmosphere of the Hall. You can view these stunning speakers in action here. And here, you can see the extra-large horn speaker as it is created, step by step.

One of Calvin Tompkins' Bachelors has shuffled off stage left. As the New York Times obituary makes clear, Rauschenberg's impact on the Visual and Performing Arts is pretty much incalculable.

I can't remember when I didn't know of Rauschenberg's work, having probably been exposed to a few pieces in my teens on a weekend getaway to the Art Institute of Chicago, but one of my favorite experiences that encompasses Rauschenberg and his cadre of New York pals was seeing the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform at Lincoln Center in 1999. There in one place--literally and figuratively--were Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman, Bob Rauschenberg and, as something of a weird bonus Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gavin Bryars and Jim O'Rourke.

The Library for Performing Arts actually has a DVD of one night that I attended in addition to other videos and printed material relating to Rauschenberg's work with the MCDC as well as his experiments in Performance Art. In addition, the Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs has a plethora of material outlining Rauschenberg's entire career.

Goodbye 20th century!

Did you visit the Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years exhibition at MoMA? The museum’s website continues to offer the exhibition in audio and video. Most of show’s audio was Richard Serra’s voice supplying histories of the process of the art.

Starting on the sixth floor I was captured by the choice of the first piece overhead. Look up or you miss it and I think some did miss it: a huge steel plate imbedded in the ceiling. Further on, the materials such as vulcanized found doors evoked a lost industrial New York as well as the artist’s opportunistic eye.

The room quartered by Circuit II, composed by four 10ft high sheets of Cor-Ten steel supported only by the room’s corners, corralled viewers in the room’s center. After Circuit II, One Tom Prop ( House of Cards), and Floor Pole Prop, I was left with questions. Are these sculptures displayed on the West Coast unwelded? Not sure. Is physical insecurity intentionally induced by Serra’s work? You betcha.

The immense scale of the elliptical undulating forms of his more recent works, Sequence and Torqued Torus Inversion, with their slanting walls disoriented and unbalanced my progress. Meanwhile the textures of velvet or scaly rust tempted fingers. Somehow I doubt anyone could wander through this exhibition without being puzzled, intrigued, and amazed.

CG 11/7/07

The exhibition catalog Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years. by Kynaston McShine, Benjamin Buchloh, Lynne Cooke, John Rajchman, Richard Serra. MoMA : New York, 2007 JQF 07-1864.

New York Times Installing Richard Serra

ART21 See and hear Richard Serra as well as other artists in this PBS series

KQED with Richard Serra

fSerra at Bilbao Snake