Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 4

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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 1
Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 2
Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 3

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Buren to McLaughlin: view from Gallery 3 to Gallery 4

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We are in Gallery 4, where the walls have again become gray. The glimpse of Daniel Buren’s work in the previous gallery should orient you somewhat. As I noted earlier, this space is the mirror image to Gallery 2; so where the dividing wall held Mary Heilmann’s work in Gallery 2, here it holds four prints by Blinky Palermo, which you will see shortly.

Above, and below, with our back to the Palermos, we’re looking at two lithographs by John McLaughlin. Being a lifelong East Coaster, Northeaster specifically, and New Yorker most specifically, I am not familiar with the oeuvre of this California-based painter. Minimalism is certainly his focus, though color does not seem to be a strong point.

John McLaughin, two untitled lithographs, 1963; at left, 18 x 21 7/16 inches; at right, 18 x 21 1/2 inches

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Now we turn around to face the Palermos, which face Gallery 3. My own camera didn’t get the vertical shot I wanted, so I have pulled the four images from MoMA’s website and arranged them as they were installed. These four, oriented vertically, are not so much narrative as declarative The shapes are what they are. I don’t know the artist’s intent, but I find these works almost playful and related to the Ellsworth Kellys in Gallery 1.

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Installation view of Blinky Palermo screenprints in foreground; Josef Albers screenprints on the far wall

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Four prints by Blinky Palermo, 4 Prototypen, 1970, each 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches. Images from the MoMA exhibition website

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With the Palermos still in our view, we look to the left to see 10 Josef Albers screenprints. These works are in a mirror-image installation to the Kelly drawings and collages on the mirror-image wall in Gallery 2. The symmetry of the spaces and of the Albers and Kelly installations underscore the geometry of the exhibition in a fundamental and deeply satisfying way.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962, a portfolio of 10 screenprints, 16 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches

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This series, Homage to the Square, is classic Albers. How do I love it? Let me count the ways: the color, the order, the variation, the simplicity, their systematic and intellectual study of something as sensuous and subjective as color. Whether or not you’re interested in the physics and relativity of color—and if you’re a painter, how can you not be?—or in the empirical studies that resulted, you can simply bask in the refulgence of the hues, or thrill to the formality of the installation: a grid of square-framed work of squares within squares.

Squares to more squares: Albers to Stella

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To maintain that thrill a little longer, we move around to the Frank Stella screenprint, Double Gray Scramble, which alternates and and opposes tonalities of color and gray. The maze-like, but in fact concentric, progression pulls you deeply into its depths. This work, to me, is the abstract version of those Russian nesting dolls set into a hall of mirrors. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer this early work of Stella’s, before it exploded into dimensional frenzy. (I don’t dislike the new work, which I wrote about last year, I just like these flat geometries better.)

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Frank Stella, Double Gray Scramble, 1973, screenprint, 29 x 50 3/4 inches

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The Stella print is to the left of the doorway that takes you back into Gallery 1. To the right of the doorway is this celestial Sol Lewitt, below. The artist’s title is the dry Lines from Corners, Sides & The Center, To Points on a Grid, but it suggests to me nothing so much as a star map for a cubic universe. (I know, bad minimalist, reading poetry into the work.)

Sol Lewitt, Lines from Corners, Sides and the Center, to Points on a Grid, 1977, etching and aquatint, 34 5/8 x 34 13/16 inches

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Sol Lewitt at left. Francois Morrellet, 8 Wefts 0 Degrees 90 Degrees, 1974, eight screenprints, each 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches

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To the right of the Lewitt is a series of eight screenprints by Francois Morellett. The proportional order of the works seems a minimalist cliche to my eyes in 2008; still, there’s no denying the graphic power of these eight works as they move from white to black, maintaining the simplest geometric expression into a compressed infinity of blackness. Its placement after the Lewitt is graphically brilliant.

An enormous Richard Serra punctuates the dividing wall, and the gallery, with a muscular sweep of black oil stick and graphite. This work predates by about three decades the mighty steel sculptures shown at MoMA last year, but in this work you can certainly see where he was headed. And let me express awe for the framing job as well. How many of us have either the financial werewithall or the museum support to get a frame like this?

Richard Serra, Heir, 1973, paint stick and graphite on paper, 114 5/8 x 42 1/4 inches

These last three images are meant to give you an overview of the exhibition:

Here we're standing with our backs to the Stella print so that we see Gallery 4 as it flows from Gallery 3

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Here we're in Gallery 1 by the vitrine looking into Gallery 4, with a view of Serra and the Morrellets

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Below, we're back at the entrance, peeking at the Albers in Gallery 4

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It has taken us four posts, but we have traveled a circle within a square, so our geometric journey has in fact been geometric itself.

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Serra on the Surface: Looking at the Sculpture with a Painter’s Eye

Click here for The Artist as Curator, updated with pictures and review

In my previous post, Serra and Stella: Big Boys in Big Spaces, I talked about walking around and through the massive works. You can talk about the sculptures in formal terms: the sinuousness of their line opposed to the muscularity of the material; and of the torques, which define the exterior and interior spaces, sometimes simultaneously, with a different shape at the bottom than at the top.

A painterly surface and....color!

Exterior view of Intersection 2, in the MoMA courtyard. To me, the work is as much painting as sculpture

You can also talk about the achievement of the artist in mathematically wresting the material into shape so that the huge machines used in shipbuilding could roll and forge the metal to deliver the work physically.

Another view of Intersection 2 showing three of the four slabs that make up the work, each with a distinct surface

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I've already talked about my physical experience, which had me pleasantly disoriented, lightheaded and, to be honest, a little fearful. Gravity is anchoring these bent and twisted slabs; couldn't it also pull them down? But there is no experiencing this work if you don't get past that--so, er, que sera, sera; you take a breath, set aside what may or may not be an irrational fear, and enter the work. My emotional experience of the work was that these muscular slabs of metal were almost maternal in the way they enveloped the body.

And how can you not make the connection between iron oxide and blood? Indeed, in some places the iron has bled onto the marble of the courtyard, so that when the sculptures are removed, a physical trace of their presence will remain permanently. (I hope the museum won’t replace the pavement.) So the work is all very First Chakra and earth centered.

Above: A view from inside Intersection 2. This stretch of slab is particularly topographic, so I composed the detail shots (three shown below) to suggest maps of uncharted territory

In this post I want to talk about the surface. I’ve seen several Serra installations at Gagosian and the permanent installation of the big basin-like shapes at Dia Beacon, but indoor lighting—including the glaring overhead illumination at MoMA—does not prepare you for the experience of seeing his work out of doors in full daylight. The mottled and scratched surface texture, always interesting, reveals itself in daylight to be something more like skin: thick here, thin there, pocked, shiny, flaky, smooth. Or skins, plural: human, animal, mammalian, amphibian. Or planetary: a sandy strand, a lunar crust, a Martian landscape. There are red-orange tracks formed by liquid (rain?), and deep gouges, perhaps wrought in installation. Wherever the treated surface of the metal is rent, there is rust—pits, scars, scabs, craters.
Still inside Intersection 2, above, this stretch of metal is pitted, scabbed, scarred. Two details are below
Then there is color. The vibrant spectrum of rust is richly satisfying, from yellow-orange through coral (!) to ocher and brick red. But the surprise--the shock, really--is in the other hues: lavender, pale pink, gray-blue, even blue-green. I’ve used the parable of the blind men and the elephant before in describing the experience of Basel Miami and its satellite fairs, but it’s more apt here. Depending on where you (visually) touch these mammoths, you will perceive a different creature.

This stretch of Intersection 2 is marked by a dramatic counterpoint of granulated rust and a smooth gray-blue surface where the surface treatment had not been broken. Along the bottom curve of the slab you can see where the rust has bled into the marble pavement.What I found surprising was the particularly lovely coloration--note the light blue, below-- and the delicate scrim traced by the path of bleeding metal. Like watercolors, no? The brick hue and matte surface of Torqued Ellipse IV, the second sculpture in the garden, held a different surprise when you passed through the spiral slot. . . . . . an inner surface whose cascading waterfall of color might have come from the brush of Pat Steir. . .

. . . and calligraphic markings as light as anything you might see on rice paper.

What I haven't read anywhere is how much of this stupefylingly beautiful surface patination is the result of planning. Surely there was a decision to rupture the weatherproof coating. So are we seeing unintended consequences or simply the painterly passage of time? What will the work look like a decade from now? A century from now?

Serra and Stella: Big Boys in Big Spaces

Click here for The Artist as Curator, updated with pictures and review

There’s a unique experience to be had in New York right now. Two big-name sculptors are showing big work in big spaces. Richard Serra is at the Modern; Frank Stella is at the Met. The museums' large indoor galleries are not enough to contain the enormous metal sculptures, so both artists have the primo outdoor space as well.

Serra’s solid steel sculptures (Intersection 2, above) stake a muscular claim on cubic space, yet they’re also about the interior spaces they define. Stella’s sculptures (Memantra, below) are so open, you see their positive and negative spaces as a whole. One’s a bodybuilder, the other a dancer.

At MoMA: View of the Sculpture Garden and Serra's Intersection 2

Serra in the Garden at MoMA

The images in this post are of Serra’s work in the sculpture garden because it’s what I could photograph (no picture taking allowed inside), but my comments are also informed by the installation of the large works on the upper floors.

In the Sculpture Garden, above and below: Views of Intersection 2 from opposite vantage points

With their curved and torqued planes, Serra’s sculptures are physically as well as visually compelling: part cavern, part vessel (as in ship, basin, silo), part funhouse. Each sculpture simultaneously closes in, opens out, sucks you down and lifts you up. I’m not overstating here. I felt a heady mix of vertigo, claustrophobia, levitation, and a kind of stoned giddiness. And mystery. Unless you see the work from an elevated viewpoint, you don’t know how large it is or exactly what its shape and proportions are. Like love, you plunge in and see where it goes, trusting you won’t get lost or crushed in the process.

And speaking of getting crushed, one sculpture on the second floor, Torqued Torus Inversion, resembled the bow of a ship—or the blade of a leviathan knife. To stand between it and the wall, which was maybe ten feet away, gives you a visceral understanding of the overused phrase, "between a rock and a hard place." But maybe that’s the funhouse part of it. It won’t really press forward and mash you into tartare. It won’t, right?

Curvilinear layers, set within the geometry of the museum

There’s also a lot of energy around the work. Maybe it’s all that iron and rust—connections to magnetism and hemoglobin. These are formidably visceral works. Sure physics and brute force were needed to make them, but the thoughts that resonated for me were earth, blood, womb. Hmm. Richard Serra as Earth Mother?Because it was hot the day I went to the museum, I waited until later in the afternoon to enter the garden where Intersection 2 and Torqued Ellipse IV were installed. The works feel just as enormous outdoors as they are indoors. With daylight, the surfaces of the work are more compelling, all scraped and pocked and surprisingly subtle in coloration (more on this, next post). Experiencing the work in MoMA’s courtyard was the physical equivalent of a mystery wrapped in an enigma: you’re surrounded by a large enclosure, which is itself surrounded by a large enclosure.

By the time I entered the sculpture garden, the crowds has thinned and the day had cooled considerably. There was no touching the work, of course. But the sculpture did something unexpected. All the heat that the metal had absorbed during the day was emanating from the surface as I walked around and through the work. So though I couldn’t touch the sculpture, it reached out and touched me.

Unexpected warmth at the end of the day
Images above: views of Intersection 2, 1992-93
Images below: Torqued Ellipse IV, 1998

More info, with pics, captions and comments by the artist: http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/serra/flash.html

Stella on the Roof
"The roof" is the Met's al fresco gallery, a glorious space to see art and nature and marvel at both.

Before I made my way there, I stopped into the large first-floor gallery for Painting Into Architecture where a couple dozen of Stella’s paintings, sculptures and architectural maquettes were on exhibition. Two views from Painting Into Architecture, a survey of Stella's work from the Sixties to the present

I was able to shoot the two images above before a guard came over and told me to stop. The larger works were too big for the space—true, too, of Serra’s sculptures in MoMA’s galleries—and all that Stella color and patterning, really did make it feel like a funhouse. I have always been a fan of his more minimal, geometric paintings, so I threaded my way through the crowded installation to see works like Sunapee II.

Frank Stella, Sunapee II, 1966, oil on canvas, 127.5 x 120 x 4 inchesMetropolitan Museum of Art




Frank Stella Severinda, 1995, mixed media on fiberglass, 9' 10" x 27'. 7" x 12' Photo by Steven Sloman, New York © 2007

Then I escaped to the roof.

My response to Stella’s work is more visual, less visceral than to Serra’s. And except for the occasion of these dual shows, I wouldn’t think to write about them in the same piece.

Chinese Pavilion, 2007, carbon epoxy composite; 14' 9.5" x 33' 8.5" x 30' 3.5"

In particular I responded to a large, open black piece, Chinese Pavilion, that seems to have wafted onto supporting pylons. In bits of overheard conversation, I picked up words like, "Darth Vader," "spaceship," and "skeletal grasshopper." To me the piece suggested nothing so much as a large cloud, though "pavilion" in the title suggests a more architectural intent. I like this open sculpture as much for its shadows as for its structure, so I wonder if I would have responded in the same way if I’d seen it indoors without the ephemeral lattice of a positive-negative of the positive-negative. Here, it appeared to float, as if we were at the altitude of, say, Machu Picchu.

Detail views of Chinese Pavilion, above and below

Chinese Pavilion demands 360-degree inspection, unlike the the other large works, Memantra and Adjoeman, which seem more oriented in one direction. Of these latter two, I preferred Memantra, which has a large fabric-like square that makes it appear poised to fly off the roof; indeed the square's torque suggests that it has begun to catch the wind. The sculpture's weight obviates any possibility of takeoff, of course, but the tension between rootedness and skywardness is exquisite. And I love how the pattern of Stella's early black paintings reasserts here as a spiralic mandala in low relief.

Memantra, 2005, stainless steel and carbon fiber; 14' x 20' 7" x15'4". Photograph above: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Anna Marie Kellen. My photo is below.

If you follow my blog, you know I like word connections, so indulge me here for a moment: Both sculptors are Italian Americans (first-generation, I’m guessing) and their names are particularly suited to their work at the moment. Serra means greenhouse, an architecturally closed-in space that nonetheless offers views into and beyond its walls. Stella means star, and the artist’s work is right up there under a celestial canopy.

Next post: Serra on the Surface: Looking at the Sculpture with a Painter's Eye