GRAVES
Nancy Graves (b. 1940)
-has been called a "verb," to suggest the unabating speed and energy with which, she finds inspiration in the most unlikely places and deftly transforms it into aesthetic objects of breathtaking wit and originality.
-mines the domains of science for her forms and subjects, industry for her materials and techniques, and Post-Modernism for the exploratory freedom to convert her nonart appropriations into decorative works.
-daughter of an official at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, she virtually grew up in an institution that spe cialized in exhibiting art, history, and science side-by-side. While watching the curators classify minerals, shells, furniture, and paintings, Graves developed a respect for natural and human creation alike.
Observing technicians as they made dioramas and models of animals, she conceived a lifelong appreciation of craft.
Like a taxidermist, but with a different purpose, she began making small stuffed animals and assembling them with found objects. In this menagerie she discovered a now-famous breakthrough image--the Bactrian, or double-humped, camel--a form that, because specific, left the artist "free to investigate the bound aries of art making". From the start Graves seems to have seen the camel pieces as pivotal, as the first step in a long unfolding line of development.
Thematically, they took her into fresh territory, ancient, mythical, and fascinating, yet uncoopted by previous Western art. Formally, this made their marvelous, seriocomic lines and volumes open to an unfettered consideration of such problems as how to deal with mass and scale, how to cope with armatures, with structure and its articulation, with strange materials and new techniques. Thus absorbed, Graves made several series of full-scale camels, at first fabricat ing them of table legs, market baskets, polyurethane, plaster, and painted skins.
More important for Graves, the beast sculptures signwed a major step toward the discovery that she could resolve the conflict between abstraction and representation by basing her art on nature. The Bactrians also taught Graves that she had to learn or understand whatever she intended to permute or synthesize. And so while investi gaang the camel from the inside out, she discovered all manner of partsÑfossils, skeletons, bonesÑthat proved interesting in their own right as organically abstract forms, eminently subject to aesthetic reordering, for variety or serial repetition, for single units evoking wholes or otherwise laden with primal, symbolic import.
In 1976 a commission for a bronze version of one of the bone sculptures brought Graves together with the Tallix Foundry in Peekskill, New York. Inevitably, a new technology launched the artist into a new phase of aesthetic experiment, this time on a tidal wave of fantasy and inven tion. Now her creative energies poured into exuberantly open-form, polychrome, freestanding constructions, their giddy combinations of natural and industrial shapes, their look of filigreed lightness, their rhythms and asymmetrical balances, their exotic colors all made possible by the sophisticated Tallix casting and patinating processes.
And these one-of-a-kind pieces become more vir tuosic all the time, as Graves regularly arrives at the foundry with shopping bags filled with fern fiddleheads, squid and crayfish, palmeno and monstera leaves, lotus pods and warty gourds, Chinese scissors, pleated lampshades, Styrofoam packing pellets, and potato chips. At Tallix she may expand the repertoire of forms to include pieces of broken equipment, old drainage pipes and plumbing fixtures, or even spillages of molten metal.
Once cast by the direct method and thus frozen in minute surface detail, this modey collection becomes a stock pile from which the artist takes the building blocks of her incredibly fertile and ongoing series of constructed sculptures. Without preparato ry drawings or models, Graves proceeds spontaneously, selecting the elements and improvising their assemblage, with each decision quickly welded in place, this operation carried out by a technician standing at the ready.
The object that emerges is a genuine Post-Modern hybrid--Graves's long-sought integration of the real and the ideal-- for although fully present in shape and texture, the natural and man made forms have also been abstracted and aestheticized, not only by appropriation, casting, and recontextualization, but also by a camou flage of brilliant, synthetic color. This arrives as a final stage, after the construction has been assembled, when Graves applies pigments either by patination or by hand painting, the brushwork as freewheeling and extemporized as the structure it embellishes. As the sculptures become more chromatic and painterly, Graves's canvases break down many of the same barriers shattered by the assemblages, but from a different angle).
The pictures, for instance, reiterate the new imagery made available through bronze casting, not only in grandly meandering contour drawing, its tendrilled, filamented shapes often profusely layered against broad, flat fields of extravagant color, but also in light-weight aluminum or fiberglass combine elements attached to the support. The latter, formed like a fragment or quotation from one of the assemblages, elaborate the spatiality of the painting by introducing a real bit of three-dimensional sculpture, along with the mysterious shadow it casts upon the plane--that "something beyond the given" Graves has always sought to incorporate in her art.
MATTA-CLARK
Activist interesed in urban decay and the hidden networks of power that result in the despoiling of neighborhoods in post-industrial cities. He sees this issue as more "local" (compared to foreign war, for instance) and the houses show a microcosm of larger issues of inequality and deprivation.
He's best known for his sculptures which use abandoned houses as "found objects" but he also did a work called "photo fry" (where he burned photographs in a performance) and the "open house" he held in a garbage dumpster.
With the "splitting" works, he "finds" a vacant house slated for destruction and uses a chainsaw to cut a one-inch slice down the center to divide it in two. He then pares down part of the foundation to open up the split, letting bright sunlight into every room. Sometimes he carves out pieces of the house (such as corners of rooms) and saves them as "souvenir" sculptures. Critics talk about these buildings *formally* based on the play of light on the interiors.
Matta-Clark calls them (1) "non-uments" and (2) examples of "anarchitecture" -- reflecting his counter-cultural critique of dehumanized urban renewal and also presents them as a comment on the international style of architecture (office buildings etc.)
The entire building in these works serves as a readymade, which he then transforms (readymade-aided).
His actions are similar in a sense to the Situationist group from Paris, whose members would "recycle" existing works of art and/or architecture in order to give them new meanings.
He says: "by undoing a building [I open an] enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the [exploitative real estate] industry which prolifigates suburban and urban boxes as a context for ensuring a passive, isolated consumer--a virtually captive audience."
NEVELSON
Russian-American sculptor born at Kiev. She was taken to the U.S.A. in 1905 and lived at Rockland, Maine, until 1920, when she moved to New York. Louise's affinity for wood dates from her childhood, spent in the proximity of her father's lumber yard. In 1920 she married Chades Nevelson, whose family owned a cargo shipping business. She began the serious study of art at the Art Students' League in 1929-30 and then studied under Hans HOFMANN at Munich.
In 1932-3 she worked with Ben SHAHN as assistant to Diego RIVERA in Mexico City. She began to hold one-man exhibitions in New York from the early 1940s but it was not until c. 1955 that her work achieved general recognition.
It was towards the end of the 1950s that she began the 'sculptured walls' for which she became internationally famous. These are wall-like reliefs made up of many boxes and compartments into which abstract shapes are assembled together with com monplace objects such as chair legs and slats, bits or balustrades, finials and other 'found objects'. These constructions were painted a uniform black or afterwards white or goldÑand their formal elegance counteracted the banality of the enclosed forms and contnbuted to her growing reputation as a leader in both ASSEMBLAGE and ENVIRONMENT sculpture.
These large-scale works are constructed from fragments of wood, arranged in compositions within box-like enclosures. They are always painted a uniform color. During the 1950s, the color was black, but later the color changed to white, then gold. However, the black sculptures are the best known and most characteristic of her works.
Nevelson began to enclose her sculpture in boxes in 1956 for emotional reasons: "I wanted to be more secretive about the work and I began working in the enclosures.... There's someting more private about it for me and gives me a better sense of security."
She want ed to maintain a monumental scale for her sculpture, so she began piling these boxes on top of one another to create larger-scaled works: "I attribute the walls to this I had loads of energy I mean, energy and energy and loads of creative energy. . . So I began to stack my sculptures into an environment It was natural. It was a flowing energy I think there is something in the consciousness of the creative person that adds up, and the multiple image that I give, say, in an enormous wall gives me so much satisfaction.There is great satisfaction in seeing a splendid, big, enormous work of art."
Nevelson believes that her work reflects her identity as a woman: "I feel that my works are definitely feminine.... A man simply couldn't use the means of, say, fingerwork to produce my small pieces. They are like needlework.... My work is delicate; il may look strong, but it is delicate.... My whole life is in it, and my whole life is feminille.... Women through all ages could have had physical strength and mental creativity and still have been feminine The fact that these things have been suppressed is the fault of society. "
FERRARA
Architectural sculpture.. informed by counter-culture urge to carry art outside precincts of art world.
Also influenced by feminism.
Uses wood planks 1x2, 2x3 and 2x4 in modular/serial stepped arrangements. See the forms of pyramids and mastabas frequently in her work (therefore a sense of history here...)
See relationship of her work to that of Carl André (who bought prefab items at building supply stores and arranged them as floor pieces etc.), Smithson (who liked to work outdoors with natural materials), LeWitt (who was the king of "serially" produced sculptures.
The walls of her works are rarely identical... you see gaps, slits and niches... which are intentional and break down the masculine "perfection" of both architecture and minimalism.
She says "as I continue to make objects (...) I want to make larger works related to specific cities. [ My] notion of site has grown to encompass its surroundings, its neighborhoods, its physical environs."
SERRA
Relationship to minimalism in his forms, which evoke a psychological/emotional effect on the viewer by their instability. They exist as unstable objects that take up space (the definition of sculpture). Because they are not really "detached" (b/c of the emotional effect of the unsteadiness on the viewer) and are not really focusing exclusively on the "object" they move beyond the normal definition of minimalism.
He says: "I stood up the four lead plates which I had been using as props. The plates overlapped each other for about 5cms, and weighed 220kgs. It all at once became clear to me that it was not exclusively the properties of the material which intercsted me, but that my work would fulfil all the criteria of a sculpture: it had volume, weight, mass and one could walk around it. From this moment onwards I was concerned with the nature of sculpture."
Serra works in lots of media... little unity of style beyond "anti-form" orientation. His "tilted arc" became the subject of intense criticism by workers in the building upon whose plaza it sat (in "plop art" fashion---this is what critics called sculptures of this period which appeared to be simply "dropped" into public spaces). The criticism stemmed from the fact that the large wall blocked the nice view... which was Serra's point. The fact that the view was blocked caused people to experience the space of the plaza differently (be more aware of its volumetric properties). The wall also worked a lot like one of Christo's wrappings (obscuring what inhabitants of that particular area *expect* to see on a daily basis.. thus temporarily changing the relationship of individuals to their surroundings. But Serra's "tilted arc" was not supposed to be temporary.. which is why people complained and eventually had it removed.