Sculpture At Play

Sculpture At Play				Main Gallery, Gallery II, Small Works Room			Nov 3 - Nov 28, 2007

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	Sculpture At Play For centuries, sculpture served very specific functions. If a ruler needed a monument on a heroic scale, if gods and goddesses were to find three-dimensional forms, if an event was to be commemorated for all time, artist looked to expression in wood or stone or bronze. Seldom, if ever, was sculpture the preferred medium if an artist wanted to channel playful tendencies or explore the possibilities for wit and iron, and then it was usually anonymous craftsmen of no-Western cultures who gave free rein to their imaginations. (There are notable exceptions, of course, such as the fantastic stone creatures on Romanesque cathedrals, but for some 5,000 years, at least, sculpture was the medium of permanence and gravity, of faith and awe.) And then somewhere at the beginning of the last century-with the daring Cubist adventures of Picasso and the anarchic drives behind Dada and Surrealism-mew qualities began to undermine sculpture’s fundamental self-importance. Humor, whimsy, chance and playfulness crept into artists’ vocabularies; simultaneously, the lexicon of materials extended will beyond traditional to embrace all manner of components, from cardboard boxes and other discards found on the street to fabric and string to neon tubing. More than one sculptor decided, Hey, you know what? This can be fun. The four artists in this show-Susan Manspeizer, Alexey Klimov, Renee Lerner and Richard Pitts-all in one way or another partake of what whimsically adventurous streak while at the same time firmly aligning themselves with past masters of sculptural innovations. Part of the pleasure for the student of art history turned critic is seeing theses antecedents in new work. Lerners’s delicate and improvisatory constructions of fabric, ribbon and other ephemeral materials carry within them the painterly and gestural impulses of abstract painting, particularly Abstract Expressionism. She herself cites affinities with Brice Marden, a relationship that is not entirely clear until you compare the looping, graceful wires and tubing of Erato III, for instance, with some of Marden’s “Cold Mountain” paintings. Similarly “feminine” in her approach, Susan Manspeizer uses seductive color and curving shape to engage the viewer, but her work still owes something to the casual grace of Sir Anthony Caro, especially his paper sculptures. As she sees it, her great breakthrough has been in rendering wood, a traditionally tough and sturdy material, into softly yielding forms Alexey Klimov’s bursting and aggressive shapes have their roots in Constructivism, but in some sculptures he contains the energy within a kind of Minimalist grid or sabotages the fundamentally “pure” geometries of that movement by introducing analogues to the natural world-eyes, birds in flight, and even the human body in Queen of Scots and Queen of Spades. And he has more than a little fun spoofing the pedestal concept with bases that resemble ordinary table supports. I was reminded of both Jean Dubuffet and Roy Lichtenstein when I fist saw the work of Richard Pitts, who makes his reliefs and totems out of woodcuts mounted on wood supports. He shares with both a certain childlike goofiness-a love of cartoony shapes and bright clear colors-but in keeping his language purely abstract he leaves open the possibility of multiple readings. Is that a birds’s head or the neck of a fiddle? A lightning bolt or a drunken snake? But then again, why bother to assign real-world equivalents when the works just asked to be loved for their own buoyant personalities? It seems strange to think of sculpture as “lovable”; though it often invites touch, sculpture is seldom what one would call “touchy-feely” or even “warm.” Yet all four of theses artist make work that is human and humane in scale and invites us, if only for a brief time, to lighten up and enjoy the trip. Ann Landi Ann Landi is a contributing editor of ARTnews and the author of the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Art.