"It Looks Like Us"

by Joshua Glass 

[On 16 January 2021, I published a post on Rick On Theater called “Hyperreal Theater,” which I noted was “little known, and had a short life in the 1980s and then largely passed from the scene.”  I went on to explain:

The concept of hyperreal theater is based on that of hyperreal art, so I should explain the genre in visual art first.  Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are so meticulously rendered that they resemble high-resolution photographs.  In fact, Hyperrealism in painting and drawing is often equated with Photorealism.

[Quoting further from my introduction to “Hyperreal Theater”:

‘Hyperrealism’ is made up of the word ‘realism’ and the Greek prefix ‘hyper-,’ which means ‘over,’ ‘above,’ or ‘beyond. . . .

Hyperrealism is an art form that creates illusions by enhancing reality.  Hyperreal artists in the medium in which they create place added focus in their work on the visual, social, and cultural details of everyday life.

[Joshua Glass’s “It Looks Like Us” appeared in the New York Times’ T: The New York Times Style Magazine of 22 October 2023.  It’s a look at Hyperrealistic sculpture in the age of AI and deepfakes.]

The new eeriness of hyperrealist art.

This past summer [9 June-22 July 2023], a naked man was suspended from the wall of Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris, his arms spread-eagle, resembling something between a crucified person and a cadaver. Onlookers couldn’t help but wince. One aghast couple seemed to turn their heads away. But like the dangling body, they, too, were unclothed sculptures — lifeless yet eerily lifelike.

The work was from “Grace,” an exhibition by the American sculptor John DeAndrea [b. 1941], who at 81 has been making human doppelgangers like these in a studio near the Rocky Mountains for almost six decades. His monthslong process involves first putting live models in silicone rubber molds, which are cured and then built up with layers of plaster. This negative mold is then filled with fortified plaster, which is cured, perfected and eventually recast in bronze. Finally, DeAndrea meticulously applies layers of opaque and transparent oil paints to the skin and eyes and adds hair until everything looks creepily authentic.                           

Art critics have come up with various terms for work like DeAndrea’s, including hyperrealism, although DeAndrea notably has said he doesn’t consider himself an artist. Perhaps a better name for it comes from Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]. In response to a 1906 essay by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch [1867-1919], who wrote of the discomfort that arises when the viewer “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,” Freud expanded on the concept of the uncanny. It’s the place where art and life converge and briefly become muddled, in a way that’s confusing and uncomfortable.

                            

Why do artists keep returning to the uncanny, which Freud placed into “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”? The hyperreal would seem to represent a very modem state of uncertainty: What is that thing? How can it look both recognizable and foreign at the same time? It’s an aesthetic that tends to return at particularly unstable moments in history. Freud wrote about the uncanny in 1919, months after the end of World War I, which had left millions dead and Europe in ruins. DeAndrea — who says his work “ain’t dark” to him — in the mid-1960s began experimenting with casting techniques that would allow him to accurately represent the human body, though he was probably less concerned with the Vietnam War than with the narcissism of what the author Tom Wolfe [American author and journalist; 1930-2018] would later describe as the Me Generation. Other hyperrealists, most notably DeAndrea’s contemporary Duane Hanson [American sculptor; 1925-96], were more overtly political. Hanson didn’t shy away from the war in Vietnam or American racism — his 1969 “Vietnam Scene” depicts dead and wounded U.S. soldiers lying on the floor — though he’s best remembered for his fiberglass-and-polyester-resin sculptures of tourists in southern Florida.

[In his essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”), Freud tackles the horrific concepts of inanimate figures coming to life. It was first published in 1919 (vol. V, iss. 5/6) in the journal Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften (“Imago: journal for the application of psychoanalysis to the humanities”), edited by Sigmund Freud and published quarterly in Vienna and Leipzig from 1912 to 1937. Wikipedia defines the subject thus:

The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or individual as not simply mysterious, but frightening in a way that feels oddly familiar. This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.

[There are many translations of “The Uncanny” into English available.

[Tom Wolfe’s essay, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” ran in New York magazine on 23 August 1976. He didn’t actually use the phrase “the ‘Me’ Generation,” but his coining of the term “the ‘Me’ Decade,” which referred to the 1970s, gave rise to the label for the Baby Boomer generation. Born immediately after World War II, this population bubble started to come of age in the ’70s and Wolfe saw them as the epitome of self-absorption, narcissism, and self-indulgence.]

Each subsequent decade has gotten the hyperrealist sculpture it deserves. Right now we’re living in a moment defined by an erosion of trust in what is and isn’t real — whether that’s a former president’s election fraud claims or the proliferation of deepfakes and artificial intelligence software. The uncanny valley has transformed from a horror film trope — in movies from Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979) to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) to the unsettlingly human robot in [Gerard Johnstone’s] “M3gan” (2023) — into a more quotidian concern, as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos propose a fleet of humanoid robots to address the U.S. labor shortage. It’s possible that hyperrealist art has never felt as topical, or as chilling, as it does today, and advancements in technology have also rendered the style more real than it’s ever been.

Over time, hyperrealism incorporated elements of extreme exaggeration, which only seemed to heighten the shock of the uncanny. That effect is palpable in, for instance, the Australian artist Ron Mueck’s [b. 1958] gargantuan child made of glass fiber, “Boy” (1999): Installed in the ARoS museum [Aarhus Kunstmuseum (Aarhus art museum)] in Aarhus, Denmark, the child is nearly 15 feet tall, even crouched in an almost fetal position, and all his details are rendered with excruciating precision.

The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan [b. 1960], a master of discomfort, has contributed to the hyperrealist tradition for more than 20 years. His funny and disturbing “La Nona Ora” (1999) shows Pope John Paul II in his papal regalia, writhing in pain on the ground after being struck down by a small meteor. The pope retains an odd dignity, still clutching a staff with a crucifix on it, as if that might help him through this encounter. Two years later, Cattelan made “Him,” a dreadfully realistic sculpture of Adolf Hitler, kneeling like an altar boy, hands clasped as if in prayer. As in the work centering the pope, it’s the absurdity of the contrast — between evil and innocence — that’s so effective and obscene. “It is a fake until proven otherwise,” explained Cattelan of his installations of this nature.                                

Many works of hyperrealism call on old traditions of mimesis, among them anatomical wax models based on real carcasses, a technique dating to the 18th century. Lately, though, new technology has made hyperrealism easier for humans to achieve, while simultaneously complicating the practice. The Australian visual artist Patricia Piccinini [b. 1965], 57, has been making anthropomorphic chimeras out of silicone, fiberglass, leather and human hair for the past two decades: a grotesque porcine creature, its brood suckling at its teats (2002’s “The Young Family”); a bearlike man who could pass for a shaved Bigfoot (2012’s “The Carrier”). Recently, however, she had a disconcerting encounter of her own when she came across images of artworks online that appeared to be attributed to her. “It had my name on it, but it wasn’t me,” the artist said. It was the product of an A.I. art generator — one that used randomized machine learning to mimic her reimaginations. “What I saw looked like it had been made by someone who had only been told about my work by someone who didn’t understand it,” she said.                                                  

It’s a worrying development for any artist, but also one that has made human-engineered hyperrealism even more relevant — us versus the machines. In 2011, the Austrian-born sculptor Erwin Wurm [b. 1954], 69, modified a red Mercedes-Benz MB100D van so that its rear half curved up the side of a wall. When it was installed four years later outside of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, a traffic warden gave it a parking ticket. Wurm says that we live in an age when our brains are constantly trying to make sense of what we see. “Is it nature or is it copying nature?” he asked. “You think it’s nature, but then you realize, ‘Wait a moment, it’s not. It’s something else.’”                                              

With his series of “One Minute Sculptures,” begun in 1988, Wurm has taken hyperrealism to its inevitable extreme: He’s turned actual people into bizarre and improbable sculptures. He directs strangers to participate in seemingly impossible scenes — in which office supplies protrude out of orifices, or a forehead is attached to a leaning tower of oranges — instructing them to pose for 60 seconds or less as he photographs them.                                                   

“Reality is totally insane, we have to compete with it,” said Wurm. That, ultimately, is why such art matters: By jolting us out of our usual perspective, it makes us question what we may be overlooking every day. “I see the world going in a strange direction,” Wurm added, “and I’m scared for the future.”

[Who remembers the “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” ad slogan for the company’s audio cassettes in the 1970s and ’80s?  Isn’t that what artist Erwin Wurm meant when he asked, “Is it nature or is it copying nature?”

[And Patricia Piccinini’s complaint that the imitations of her work made by artificial intelligence looked as if they “had been made by someone who had only been told about my work by someone who didn’t understand it” is very much like the anecdote about a blind person who’s asked to describe an elephant by touch.  After the examination, the person states, “This is a large animal with two tails.”]

'Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start' (MoMA, 2021-22)

 

On 1 January 2020, I posted a report called “The ‘New’ MoMA, 2019.”  It was my account of the last visit I made to an art museum, on 19 December 2019, before the pandemic shut-down.  (New York City’s Museum of Modern Art had just reopened on 21 October after an extensive reconstruction of its West 53rd Street building.  This had been my first chance to see the new facility.) 

I hadn’t set foot in any sort of art show since then and, consequently, I hadn’t posted an art report of my own on Rick On Theater since that date.  (I have, though, republished articles on art by other authors.)  Then, on 31 December last year, the day of New Year’s Eve 2021, my usual theater partner, Diana, and I checked out Immersive Van Gogh, a virtual art experience, but not an actual exhibit of art, which was followed on 10 and 13 January by my report on the animated digital video show.

Now I have a true, in-person art exhibit, for the first time in almost 25 months, on which to report.  On Wednesday, 12 January, Diana and I went back to MoMA to catch Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start before it closed on Saturday, 15 January.  (Originally scheduled to close on 7 August 2021, it was extended in June.)

I’m going to try to reboot my art-appreciation eye and re-ink my pen (metaphorically speaking) and see what I can make of my first live art experience in over two years.  So, first I hope I can make something cogent out of this different kind of art immersion (to appropriate the terminology of IVG and its sister programs; there are a dozen, give or take).  Then I have to see if I can articulate that experience to try to communicate it to ROTters.

Wish me luck.  Whatever skills I ever had for this task feel rusty—not to say atrophied. 

Let’s do the prelims—the factual background of the exhibit—and see if that doesn’t limber up the ol’ joints.  (I’m going to take this slow, so bear with me . . . .)

Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start opened on 14 March 2021 in MoMA’s Edward Steichen Galleries on Floor 3.  (There were two pieces in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden outside the first floor; I’ll mention these later.)  The show included approximately 70 artworks supplemented by films, historical photographs, printed matter, letter facsimiles, and other archival materials from MoMA’s own collection, augmented by loans from the Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation.

Organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, with Zuna Maza and Makayla Bailey, Curatorial Fellows in that department, the exhibition delves deeply into the full breadth of Calder’s career and inventiveness.  Modern from the Start brings together early wire sculptures and carved wood figures, works on paper, jewelry, mobiles in motion (some by way of ancient motors), and monumental abstract sculptures called “stabiles.”  

(Mobile is a word invented by Dada and Surrealist painter Marcel Duchamp [French, 1887-1968] in 1931 to characterize Calder’s moving sculptures.  Stabile was coined by Dada artist Jean (Hans) Arp [German-French, 1886-1966] in 1932 to describe Calder’s non-motile sculptures.  Somehow, I find that neat. 

(Outside the field of invention itself, I don’t know how many folks have had even one word made up just for them—and here’s an artist who not only got two, but the coiners were world-class artists themselves!  That’s like a Nobel Prize in art.)

Diana and I met at the museum at 12:30 on Wednesday afternoon.  As usual, I got there before she did, but I was early, so we were right on time for out timed tickets.  The last time we were at MoMA, Diana was a member (she let her membership lapse over the shut-down) and we had attended a Member After Hours, so we used a different entrance than the main one.  I hadn’t seen the new Entry Lobby since the remodeling.

The main lobby just inside the 53rd Street entrance, next to the Museum Store, used to be basically a wide-open area with large, square hassock-like seats.  I expected to sit on one, facing the doors, and keep an eye out for Diana, as I had the tickets. 

But the redesigned lobby has no seating at all, just rope lines, checkpoints, and counters; the only seats near the entrance were off the left (as you enter) in the West Lobby.  (It’s the space that used to be the store, which is now on the floor below, beneath the West Lobby.)  I wouldn’t be able to see Diana as she went through the vaccination and ID check outside and she’d never see me even after she got inside unless she knew to look there.

So I took the one seat, a hard, unupholstered bench, that was right at the corner of the wall that separates the entrance from the seating area.  I soon lost all feeling in my tush.  (Eventually, I got up to stretch the muscles and took the few steps to my left to where the security guards stand to monitor visitors—and Diana showed up just outside at that moment.)

So, even at this late date, I discovered a consequence of MoMA’s redesign that’s disadvantageous.  I’ll add to that the signage—for where each exhibit is displayed—inadequate and confusing.  The listings of the contents of each gallery are almost all next to the elevators, so first you have to find one.

Then, the directories are light boards—and they change every few seconds.  That means if the exhibit you’re looking for has just been displayed before you find the directory, you have to wait while the sign goes through all its changes floor by floor before the exhibit you want comes up again.

(MoMA, like most art museums, used to have printed guides visitors could carry with them, but like all other printed matter, that courtesy has disappeared.  The brief brochure for each exhibit that was so useful was dispensed with a long time ago.  Everything has migrated over to the museums’ websites and smart-phone apps, it seems.)

Okay, enough bitchin’ and moanin’ for now.  Let’s get to the art and the display thereof.

I should acknowledge here that Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976) is one of my favorite artists.  (There’s a short bio of the artist in “Calder: Hypermobility at the Whitney,” posted on Rick On Theater on 21 August 2017; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/08/calder-hypermobility-at-whitney.html.)  I love his whimsy, his sense of humor, his ingenuity, his inventiveness.  His work makes me chuckle, wonder, imagine and dream, and delight.

One of my favorite Calder pieces, by far his largest mobile and the last major art work he created, the red-and-black Untitled (1976), hangs from the ceiling of the center court of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, D.C. 

I used to visit NGA’s East Building hundreds of times when I went to Washington, and Calder’s Untitled and the Joan Miró (Spanish Surrealist, 1893-1983) tapestry Woman (1977) in the same vast, open atrium just beyond the museum’s entry were always my first pleasures, no matter what show I was there to see. 

Both pieces were removed for cleaning and maintenance, the Calder in 1988 and the Miró on 2003, and I missed them dearly.  (The mobile was returned to its proper place, but the tapestry was replaced.)

For many years, I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.  As much as anything else I accomplished there—mounds of research—I loved walking under Le Guichet (“The Box Office”), Calder’s monumental 1963 black stabile directly in front of the library’s entrance. 

When it, too, was removed during a make-over of the Lincoln Center Plaza, I actually missed it.  I suppose that’s partly because I often used to “open” the library and arrived a few minutes before its noon opening and sat looking at the sculpture or walking around it for the time I had to wait.  (There was also a Henry Moore [English sculptor, 1898-1986] sculpture, Reclining Figure [1963-5], in a pool a few yards north of the Calder.)

I even own a Calder lithograph that’s of the same iconography as the sculptor’s mobiles—the same color palette and the same blobby shapes.  It could, in fact, be seen as a study for a possible mobile (though I’m pretty sure that’s not what it was intended for).  The title, Magie Eolin (1972)—the nearest translation for which I can come up with is “magic of the wind”—might suggest that it was inspired by the wind-driven sculptures so beloved by both the artist himself and his fans.  

I have a faux-Calder mobile in my study, too.  My mother bought it as a gift for my father at one of the Washington museum shops, the NGA or one of the Smithsonians, and they passed it on to me sometime after I moved into my present apartment—which has an extra room for my study/guest room.  It’s not an actual Calder, but it was clearly modeled after his work (and could almost pass for one of Calder’s mobiles . . . if you don’t look too closely).

So you can judge why I was so ready to get to Modern from the Start before it closed.

Calder had a long and symbiotic association with MoMA.  It started when the institution was in its infancy and the sculptor was just beginning his career.  Each gave a boost in prominence and stature to the other. 

In the words of Artbook, a distributor of art books and museum exhibition catalogues, “Through MoMA, Calder came to be known as a pioneer of modern sculpture, and through Calder, MoMA came to understand itself as an American museum of modern art.”

Calder’s work was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930, in the exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans, just months after MoMA opened to the public.  (The museum opened in November 1929 and led a peripatetic existence for 9½ years.  Painting and Sculpture ran 3 December 1930-20 January 1931.)

The museum’s unofficial “house artist,” Calder created a number of pieces commissioned by MoMA for special events during its earliest years.  In 1939, for example, when the Museum of Modern Art moved into its permanent home on West 53rd Street, the sculptor made Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, a multicolored mobile that still hangs at the top of the lobby’s grand staircase for which it was made.  The staircase, with the mobile, is just outside the exit from the last gallery of Modern from the Start.

Also in 1939, for the celebratory dinner on 8 May MoMA hosted for its tenth anniversary, Calder was commissioned to make huge free-form silver candelabra.  Some of the candelabra, which when connected up looks like a model rollercoaster, were on view in Modern from the Start.

Calder also worked closely with the MoMA curator, in collaboration with artists Marcel Duchamp and Herbert Matter (Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer, 1907-84), on his major 1943 mid-career retrospective at MoMA, Alexander Calder, which introduced the artist, already known in Europe, to an American audience.  

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Calder’s sculptures were a mainstay of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where they have continued to reappear in the succeeding decades.  For Modern from the Start, for example, Man-Eater with Pennants, a giant standing mobile of several different painted metal components affixed to rods that move around a central post by means of air currents, commissioned by MoMA in 1945 for the Sculpture Garden, has been remounted there after an absence of 50 years.

In 1966, ten years before his death, Calder made a gift to MoMA of 19 artworks in order to fill out the institution’s holdings.  The donation included mobiles, stabiles, wood and wire sculptures, and jewelry dating from the 1920s to 1964, making the institution’s Calder holdings the largest and most complete collection by the artist in any museum at the time.  The works were put on display in Calder: 19 Gifts From The Artist (1 February-5 April 1967).

Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start used the connection between the artist and the museum as the lens through which to look at Calder’s career and his art.  It started in a large gallery devoted to the artist’s stabiles (plus one mobile, Snow Flurry, I, 1948) from the 1930s to the ’50s.  The rest of the exhibit proceeded mostly chronologically.  (I won’t, however.)

Cara Manes’s organization clearly revealed that Calder had what amounted to multiple careers.  “One of Calder’s objects is like the sea,” wrote philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (French, 1905-80), “always beginning over again, always new.”  In addition to his several forms of sculpture, he made lithographs, children’s books, jewelry, and theatrical set designs.

I wasn’t in the least disappointed with the exhibit.  The last Calder show I saw, the Whitney’s Calder: Hypermobility in 2017, was devoted to the artist’s mobiles, his wonderful kinetic sculptures.  Modern from the Start covered the whole range of Calder’s creativity.

That’s a little like the menu item labeled a “mixed grill,” an assortment of several kinds of broiled or grilled meats and vegetables served together.  My dad wouldn’t ever order such a meal, which he complained included too much of things he didn’t like and not enough of things he did like.

Well, Modern from the Start didn’t suffer from that failing.  It was a wonderful sampler of Calder’s delightful, imaginative creations.  For instance, I hadn’t seen a display of his wire sculptures, whimsical and often satirical little portraits or caricatures made from bent wire—like, maybe, three-dimensional doodles—since I saw Focus: Alexander Calder (14 September 2007-14 April 2008) at MoMA.  Modern from the Start had a terrific selection of about half a dozen examples.

The wire sculptures, made mostly in Paris, were from the 1920s through the ’40s.  The playful figures, both human and animal (Sow, 1928; Cow, 1929), generic (The Hostess, 1928; Portrait of a Man, c. 1928) and famous (Josephine Baker (III), c. 1927; Marion Greenwood, 1928), are delightfully rendered. 

They’re almost childlike, except that they’re too sophisticated in execution, both in terms of ingenuity and visual sense, to be by a child.  Calder’s ubiquitous whimsy is still evident: in Cow, which is otherwise in steel wire, the sculptor gives us several tiny cow pies made from brass!

The Hostess, subtitled Dowager, is a great example.  The forward thrust of her body suggests what a snob she is; the lorgnette, extended almost at arm’s length, is a sort of illustration of looking down her nose; offering the limpest of handshakes shows her sense of her superiority.  All this is communicated by the merest suggestion of corporeality—just like a satirical cartoonist, except Calder used steel wire instead of ink lines.

The wire sculptures were shown with some of Calder’s wood carvings because both artforms were his earliest efforts.  The Horse and Cow were both carved in 1928, the same time Calder was making his wire pieces. 

Cow (not to be confused with the wire sculpture of the same title) is particularly interesting because it looks as if the animal is emerging from the block of wood, possibly a found piece.  The head is sweetly naturalistic, but as the body recedes toward the wood block, it becomes more impressionistic and ambiguous, until it melds into the wood.  It reminded me vaguely of Michelangelo’s explanation of sculpting that his subject lives in the stone and all he has to do is get rid of everything else and the statue emerges.

Except, of course, nothing Michelangelo ever carved was as cute as Calder’s wooden cow.  (I feel I should add at this point that if Vincent van Gogh [Franco-Dutch painter, 1853-90], on whom I blogged on 10 and 13 January, is my all-time favorite painter, Michelangelo [Italian sculptor and painter, 1475-1564] is my all-time favorite sculptor.  My remark was not a put-down, just a differentiation.)

In the section displaying the mobiles, among the many engaging pieces, is one of special significance to this exhibit.  I’m going to give the mobiles short shrift because I covered the topic so extensively in my 2017 Hypermobility report, but I will say some words on 1934’s A Universe, one of Calder’s first motorized mobiles. 

First of all, how could I ignore a work of art that gripped Albert Einstein (1879-1955), according to the museum, so that he “reportedly stood transfixed in front of its slowly moving orbs for the entire forty-minute cycle.”  MoMA curators allege that the scientific genius uttered, “I wish I’d thought of that.”

Second is the aspect that made A Universe important to Modern from the Start: it was the first piece of Calder’s art to become part of MoMA’s collection, purchased the year he made it.

First shown in MoMA’s Cubism and Abstract Art (2 March-19 April 1936), A Universe is an abstract vision of the cosmos.  A small red sphere and a larger white one suggest planets and move along curved wire orbits at different speeds, completing a full cycle in forty minutes. 

Note, particularly, that it isn’t the universe.  Prompted, reportedly, by the discovery on 18 February 1930 of the (now demoted to dwarf) planet Pluto, the mechanized sculpture is an abstract representation of a conceptual collection of worlds. 

Calder’s mobiles date from 1931, a year after he paid a visit to the studio of his friend Piet Mondrian (Dutch Abstract painter, 1872-1944), which marked a turning point in Calder’s career: it fully opened the American sculptor’s eyes to Abstract art.  As Roberta Smith, the New York Times’ “co-chief art critic,” put it, Calder “suddenly got what modernism and abstraction were all about.”  It is to this epiphany that the MoMA exhibit’s subtitle alludes.

The mobiles, however, clearly show Calder’s background in mechanical engineering (see his bio in my Hypermobility post or some other site), both the mechanized ones and the wind-driven ones (though for different aspects of physics).  That’s one of the elements of his creativity that so fascinates me—the confluence of science and art.  You can see it in the work, and it isn’t even incongruous in practice—only in people’s minds is there a conflict.

Physics informed Calder’s art-making in that the scientific laws shaped the pieces and made them work. Different forces act upon the sculptures—gravity, air currents, vibration at the hanging point—setting them in motion.  Yet these forces aren’t evident in the experience of the artwork; that depends on the viewer’s perception of how the work’s many parts function together to achieve its full expression.

As obvious as this is in the mobiles, especially the wind-and-gravity-driven pieces, it’s also present, though less visibly, in the stabiles.  Though they don’t move, the stabiles are still in balance, even if only to the viewer’s eye. 

In the Brooklyn Rail, sculptor Brandt Junceau asserted that “the stabile is a special case of the mobile: same vocabulary, sans only wire, plus only stove bolts.  Both planar, with the same touch-and-go relationship to support and gravity, but the stabiles bristle with a menace that is often vanishing but never entirely disappears from the fully airborne works.”

Optics is also a physical science, and Calder’s stationary constructions work on the eye in not dissimilar ways that the mobiles move and turn: they draw your attention from one element to another by its size and shape. 

In the Wall Street Journal, art reviewer Lance Esplund, who’s the author of The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art (Basic Books, 2018), declared that the stabiles “feel alive” and remarked that they “appear to be in continual states of interplay and metamorphosis.”

The gallery displaying the stabiles contained both three large sculptures (Black Beast, 1940; Black Widow, 1959; Spiny, c. 1939)—not quite the monumental size of Lincoln Center’s Le Guichet and Flamingo (1973) in Chicago—and a pair of maquettes (Spiny, c. 1939; Black Beast, 1940).  (A maquette is a small model or study in three dimensions for a sculpture.  The two in Modern from the Start were, indeed, models of two of the full-sized stabiles on exhibit.)

Calder’s stabiles, monumentally scaled abstract works in steel and aluminum, quite the opposite of his delicate, kinetic mobiles, which they closely followed chronologically, were, like the moving sculptures, influenced by Calder’s momentous 1930 visit to Mondrian’s studio.

Despite their often massive size—many of his later stabiles were created for outdoor public spaces or voluminous indoor atria—the great, soaring arches, the blocky triangles and trapezoids joined by thick metal plates and reinforced by ribs, all held together by large bolts come together to seem almost delicate and airy.

Earlier, I mentioned taking pleasure from walking under Le Guichet to get into the performing arts library.  Calder intended the stabiles to be accessed that way; he wanted people to walk through them, touch them, lean against them.  They invite interaction with people.  Indeed, the Wall Street Journal’s Esplund asserted that the stabiles “demand that we not merely consider them as works of art, but that we interact with them.”

They also engage the viewer, like me when I sat in the Lincoln Center Plaza and spent some minutes watching Le Guichet while waiting for LPA to open.  As big as they are, they please the eye.  Consider Spiny, one of the full-sized stabiles in Modern from the Start.  With a fat crescent near the floor at one end and large triangular panels in the middle and the other end, the piece still looks like a graceful, elegant dance in progress.

The bulbous crescent down at the bottom of one side is opposed to a tall, thin upside-down-L-shaped spike high up at the other.  The crescent-shape anchors the sculpture, but the spike acts like an arrow pointing off to a distant destination.  Almost all Calder’s stabiles work like that.  It’s art and physics in tandem.

In the section where the silver candelabra was shown were also examples of Calder’s jewelry, something he made throughout his life.  Most of the pieces are items he made for friends as gifts, such as the curled brass J and S cufflinks he made in the 1930s or 1940s for James Thrall Soby (1906-79), a longtime trustee of MoMA and an early supporter of Calder’s work.  I found these objects little more than curiosities next to the wire pieces, the mobiles, and the stabiles.

I said at the beginning of this report that I’d say something about the Calder pieces on display in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, outside the north side of the museum’s first floor.  The reason I didn’t make any comments in the body of the report is that, though Diana and I came to MoMA with the full expectation of seeing the exhibit in the garden, when we arrived and asked for directions to Modern from the Start, the staffer who checked us in said that the main exhibit was on the third floor, but that the garden was closed that day.

The upshot was that we didn’t see the two pieces out there.  I don’t know the reason for the closure; it wasn’t on the website and there’s no indication that the garden is closed Wednesdays as a rule (there have been many events scheduled there on Wednesdays).  Here’s what we missed (not counting a glance out the windows from the lobby):

I’ve already mentioned the return to the Sculpture Garden of Man-Eater with Pennants, the 1945 standing mobile Calder created for the garden on commission.  It was on view there from 1945 to 1949, when it was removed, ostensibly because of reconstruction of the garden space.  Reportedly, however, the story is that the sculpture was considered a failure.

Among the complaints was the concern that the mobile, limned by the Wall Street Journal’s reviewer as “an unapologetically intimidating conflation of tree, anchor, flagship and farm machinery—like standing under an alighted helicopter,” didn’t move enough due to the weight of the steel-rod-and-sheet-iron structure and the absence of ball bearings.  The museum’s head of the Department of Architecture and Design had reservations about the ironwork, which he called “clumsy,” the “far from pleasing” colored forms, and faulty engineering.

Furthermore, fears about the public injuring themselves on the mobile began immediately, and, in the interest of public safety, a small fence was set around the mobile.  Of course, there were also supporters, but the sculpture was nonetheless removed. 

Man-Eater traveled to outdoor venues in London and Houston in the 1950s and then returned to MoMA. Its last showing at the museum was from 1969 to 1970, and then it was put away in storage, where it’s remained until reinstalled in the Sculpture Garden for Modern from the Start. 

When the exhibit closed on 15 January, Man-Eater was once again removed from display.

The other Calder sculpture on view in the Sculpture Garden for Modern from the Start was Sandy’s Butterfly from 1964, another standing mobile that’s been a favorite of the garden curators and visitors since MoMA acquired it in 1966.  The Journal’s Esplund described it as “a carnivalesque combination of windmill, flower and whirligig.”  Roberta Smith called it “sturdy [and] bright” in the Times.

Esplund’s entirely laudatory assessment of the show overall, which he dubbed a “compact retrospective,” was that it was “a spirited, synergistic environment from start to finish” that “will surprise even diehard Calder fans.”  The Journalist made separate comments about some of the component displays of the exhibit throughout his notice.

Of the opening gallery, where the stabiles were seen, Esplund declared it “absolutely stunning”—“[p]layful, muscular, fantastical and serene”—and pronounced it “among the most striking gatherings of Calder's art I have ever seen.”

The WSJ writer labeled the jewelry on display “endlessly inventive” and compared the wall-mounted “Constellations,” a name devised by Calder’s friends Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney (1900-86; curator of MoMA from 1935 to 1946) for the spidery sculptures from the World War II years (when there was a scarcity of metal) made from small pieces of carved wood linked by wires into a new, open form of sculpture, to “still-writhing animals, enormous bugs and trophy heads.” 

Esplund’s sum-up of Modern from the Start was, “This exhibition, a roaring toast to Calder, should become a permanent installation.  It’s a tribute to one of Modernism’s giants, and a living reminder of what made MoMA modern—from the start.”

On HypeArt, a website associated with the fashion site HypeBeast, Shawn Ghassemitari, the associate editor of HypeBeast, observed, “Few artists can take an existing medium and completely reinvent it.  Alexander Calder is one such artist, who took the idle grounds of sculpture and brought a kinetic dynamism that continues to spin the minds of millions to this day.”

“The amorphous shapes of his sculpture invite deep reflection,” explained Ghassemitari, “but just as you think you’ve grasped the idea of one, they continually change to varying degrees of light and shadow.” 

Fellow sculptor Junceau warned in the monthly Brooklyn Rail that Modern from the Start is “[n]ot a career retrospective, but it is a lot of stuff.”  He characterized Calder’s motorized mobiles as “tottering between an age-appropriate quaintness (they’re nearly 100 years old) and their original, nervy DIY impudence.”   Junceau added that “we know perfectly well every mobile, every stabile is alive.”

The pro tem review-writer asserted, “The exhibition may not answer some of its own questions, but . . . Clement Greenberg [very influential visual art critic, 1909-94; an editor at Partisan Review, art critic for The Nation, and associate editor of Commentary in the ’40s and ’50s] . . . acknowledged Calder’s multifarious talents and noted the light felicities of his work, but was that enough?” 

Junceau summed up Calder’s imprint with the assertion, “Calder is justly beloved for his unpretentiousness, but there is an aethereal condescension somewhere high in that egalitarian voice.”  (I confess that Junceau said many things in his article—I’m not sure it should be labeled a review—that I couldn’t unpack.  It wasn’t the words he used, but the ideas he was expressing that confounded me.)

In the Times, Roberta Smith reported, starting with the stabile exhibit, “The first gallery’s austerity is startling.  It . . . reminds us that while visual wit is rarely absent, Calder’s work has its dignified, somber side.”  She explicated:

Constructed of several planes of cutout sheet-metal, the sculptures emphasize his control of nuanced shapes, both rounded and straight-edged, and his ability to angle them together so that your interpretations change restlessly among animal, human and abstract as you move around them.

“The contrast between the first two galleries—the big black sculptures and the delicate wire pieces—form a Calder primer,” the Times art reviewer continued.  “The bent-wire pieces speak to his extreme sensitivity to line, including the linear shadows cast by the wire portraits, which provide alternate, moodier expressions.”

After the first two galleries, explained Smith, “The remainder of the exhibition is one large, loosely divided space that tracks Calder after 1930, examining the different ways he made modernism his own.”  She remarked of the mechanized mobiles that “[t]hey are some of the most lovable abstractions in modernist art history, partly because they are too casually handmade to be purely abstract.  They brim with personality, a condition of much of Calder’s art.”

(Smith made an additional comment that I found particularly droll, suggesting that the mobiles “bring out the previously unknown playfulness of Russian Constructivism.”  Constructivism, a largely austere art movement, was founded in 1915 and flourished in the Soviet Union, in support of the Bolshevik Revolution until Socialist Realism was established as the official artistic style by Stalin in 1934.)

Smith ended her notice with what seems to me a somewhat romantic notion, characterizing Modern from the Start as “a beauty of a show that . . . will make the world a better place.”  Let’s hope.

In the Upper East Side neighborhood paper Our Town, Val Castronovo explained that

the curators [of Modern from the Start] are less concerned with chronologies and timelines and more intent on letting viewers experience the works, taking their cue from the artist himself, who, in fact, wanted most of his sculptures to be lived with—touched and engaged with at home—not put on a pedestal in a museum, where touching is prohibited and viewers are cautioned to distance themselves from the art.

Castronovo concluded his comments on the MoMA show by advising, “With virus fears spiraling again, it seems like there’s no better time to enter Calder’s universe and be spirited away.”

For Reuters, the London-based international news service, Soren Larson reported that Modern from the Start “draws on the rich and varied holdings MOMA has by Calder” and that curator Manes asserted that “her aim was to show how varied and experimental the artist was.” 

Larson felt, “From large, sheet metal sculptures bolted together, to tiny hanging wire caricatures called ‘stabiles,’ the MOMA exhibition offers new insight into the resourceful and creative artist.”  (Note that Larson got his Calderian terms mixed up: the “large, sheet metal sculptures” are, of course, the stabiles, and the “wire caricatures” are . . . well, Calder’s wire sculptures.)

I can’t say how well I made out conveying this art experience to you all; you’d have to judge that.  What I can tell you is that I enjoyed the attempt.  After so long a lay-off, it was a pleasure to be writing about art again.  It turned out to have been a fortunate turn of events that the subject was Alexander Calder, not just because his work is so familiar to me by now, but because I like it so much.  It was actually fun to write this report.  Calder does that to me!

[This report is Rick On Theater’s 1,000th post.  I started the blog on 16 March 2009, just under 13 years ago.  I’m surprised ROT’s lasted that long.  I'm astonished I’ve lasted that long!]

Frieze Sculpture 2019

On 16 May 2019, I posted a report entitled “Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA,” covering Art New York 2019 and Frieze New York 2019 (both 2-5 May), along with the Museum of Modern Art’s Joan Miró: Birth of the World (24 February-15 June).  After the report proper, I added a short afterword in which I said that in conjunction with its 2019 art fair, the Frieze organization would present Frieze Sculpture in Rockefeller Center from 25 April to 28 June, a free, mostly outdoor exhibition of sculptures by 14 artists in 16 locations around Rockefeller Plaza.  (Some artists’ works were shown in more than one spot and several locations included more than one piece.  There are actually 23 sculptures on exhibit.)  When my companion at the Frieze art exhibit on Randalls Island, Diana, saw the announcement of the sculpture show, she expressed interest in checking it out.  In the end, she wasn’t able to get to the Rock Center display, so I went alone on Wednesday afternoon about 1 p.m., 26 June, two days before the show closed.

2019’s Frieze Sculpture was intended to be the first of an annual event.  Conceived by Loring Randolph, artistic director of Frieze New York, it was inspired partly by Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park, an offshoot of Frieze London.  Randolph hired Brett Littman, the new director (since April 2018) of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, Queens, to curate the exhibit.  Littman, in turn, collected sculptures by artists from diverse backgrounds to display around Rockefeller Plaza: Kiki Smith, Walter De Maria, Sarah Sze, Hank Willis Thomas, Nick Cave, Aaron Curry, Jose Dávila, Rochelle Goldberg, Goshka Macuga, Joan Miró, Jaume Plensa, Paulo Nazareth, Pedro Reyes, and Ibrahim Mahama.  

Frieze Sculpture wasn’t the first time that Rock Center has been the venue for art displayed on a large scale.  Jeff Koons (American, 1955), Thomas Houseago (British, b. 1972), and art partners Michael Elmgreen (Danish, b. 1961) and Ingar Dragset (Norwegian, b. 1969) have been among the recent artists who’ve had displays in Rockefeller Center.  The Frieze show, however, was apparently the first exhibit with multiple works occupying most of the area.  The curator explained his plan thus:

One thing that I was very concerned about was doing something that was different from what other institutions have done there, which is generally just one monumental sculpture, either on 5th Avenue or in front of 30 Rock Plaza.  The thing that I really wanted to do [was to] curate an alternative sculpture park that was more human scale.  I really wanted to force the viewer to be a flaneur and to walk the whole campus, so not everything is consolidated in one place.

By definition, Frieze Sculpture was also the first to have works of art displayed in several spots in the Center at the same time.  Flâneur is a French word that means ‘loafer,’ ‘idler,’ ‘dawdler,’ or ‘loiterer,’ and usually carries an indolent connotation, but, of course, Littman wanted us to stroll leisurely, but not obliviously or self-absorbedly, around the plaza and take in the art, always mindful, I think, of the site and its echoes, sometimes its dissonance, with the art we were seeing.  The New York Times’ Martha Schwendener seemed to think Littman and the Frieze sculptors succeeded when she declared: “Despite the distractions, the sculptures do exactly what public art is supposed to do and activate the space.”

In sum, the Frieze Sculpture was interesting, but I wouldn’t want to own any of the piece on display . . . well, maybe a couple—but not enough to come by after closing to pick them up!  (For those who don’t know, when I used to go to art shows with my mother, we’d judge if it was a good exhibit or not by whether we’d come back on a “Midnight Shopping Trip” to pick up a painting or sculpture or two.)

Porte II by Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) from 1974 was the only “old” piece in the show.  A large cast-bronze Cubist and proto-Surrealist piece, the sculpture is shaped like an opened step ladder with a rusty, large-linked chain hanging down the center.  (Miró “made it . . . decades before ‘Game of Thrones,’ where it could fit right in,” quipped Barbara Hoffman and Tamara Beckwith in the New York Post.)  I didn’t find it nearly as appealing or whimsical as his paintings.  (Other posts pertaining to Joan Miró are “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” 5 October 2012, and “Van Gogh & Miró at MoMA (2008),” 12 October 2016.)  The next oldest sculpture was a kind of installation called Truth / Beauty which Walter De Maria (American, 1935-2013) started in 1993, but which wasn’t finished until 2016, three years after he died.  The rest were all 2017 and 2018—very contemporary.  Many were more curious than engaging. 

On the other hand, the walk around Rock Center was pleasant enough—though it was quite warm in the bright sun.  There's precious little shade around the plaza—though a few of the pieces were in building lobbies.  But for 16 sculptures, it was fine.  (Finding all of the pieces wasn’t easy—a bit like an Easter egg hunt; I found the map of the art locations a little misleading sometimes, but I got home at about 2:30, in time for a late lunch.} 

I should also express a complaint that neither Frieze nor the Rockefeller Center provided anything on the exhibit except in a loose-leaf binder at the visitors’ desk in 30 Rock which was only available to look at.  Even on line, there was very little—except a PDF of the layout map—on the artists or their works on display.  To be sure, there were large signs standing near each art work (or, in many instances, a group of works), but these provided only the artists’ names, the works’ titles and dates, and the galleries that handle the artists.  Artists’ life dates and nationality, and the composition of the sculptures weren’t indicated, nor was any explanation of the pieces’ intents or meanings. 

Museums have cut back severely on exhibit materials—I don’t know if galleries have also reduced their printed materials as well; it’s been a while since I went to a commercial gallery.  The art fairs, like Frieze New York and Art New York, seem to go all out to provide background material like artist bios and descriptions of the works, but those are special exhibits.

Rockefeller Center, of course, is a year-round repository for a great deal of art, largely from the 1930s, the era in which the complex was built.  Almost everyone knows Lee Lawrie’s (German-born American, 1877-1963) iconic bronze statue of Atlas (1937) on 5th Avenue in front of the International Building (also known as 630 5th Avenue or 45 Rockefeller Plaza), across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  There’s also the immediately-recognizable Prometheus (1934), the gilded, cast-bronze sculpture by Paul Manship (American, 1885-1966) at the west end of the Skating Rink (which, during the summer season, is converted into an outdoor restaurant called the Summer Garden & Bar).

Like most of the permanent art works in Rockefeller Center, these two well-known sculptures are classic examples of Art Deco-style art.  Also on display around the Center are murals and bas-reliefs that decorate all the buildings of Rock Center.  Isamu Noguchi’s (Japanese-born American, 1904-1988) stainless steel bas-relief entitled News (1940) in 50 Rockefeller Plaza (formerly the Associated Press Building) on the pedestrian promenade west of 5th Avenue, between 50th and 51st Streets.  (News was the piece of art at Rockefeller Center that inspired Randolph to organize Frieze Sculpture.)

The hub of Rock Center, 30 Rock (formerly called the RCA Building, later the GE Building, and now renamed the Comcast Building), is replete with works of art.  Behind the visitors’ desk, across from the entrance on Rockefeller Plaza (the pedestrian walkway that runs from 48th Street to 51st Street between 5th and 6th Avenues), is a mural from Josep Maria Sert (Spanish, 1874-1945) called American Progress (1937), an allegorical depiction of men constructing modern America.  It was commissioned by the Rockefellers to replace Diego Rivera’s (Mexican, 1886-1957) mural Man at the Crossroads (1934), which Nelson Rockefeller (1908-79; later Governor of New York State and Vice President of the United States) ordered destroyed because it included an image of Vladimir Lenin.  (Rivera was famously a committed communist.  The Rockefellers were famously capitalist industrialists, politicians, and bankers—and rock-ribbed Republicans.)

Flanking Sert’s mural, in front of the desk, were two pieces from Frieze Sculpture, Jaguar and Seer (both 2018) by Pedro Reyes (b. 1972).  Ironically (or perhaps deliberately), Reyes is, like Rivera, Mexican and his two sculptures clearly evoke Mayan or Aztec motifs; Rivera was devoted to the native images of Mexican life and culture, celebrating both its Indian and Mestizo origins.  Both artists share a commitment to social and political concerns.  The sculptures are carved of dark gray volcanic stone and stand on four-foot-tall rough-hewn stone pedestals. 

Jaguar depicts a mouth-shaped hole within which is a human-like eye.  (Certainly ironic and unintentional is the positioning of Jaguar with its all-seeing eye in the building that houses the headquarters and studios of the National Broadcasting Company.  The eye is recognizable as the perpetual symbol of the Columbia Broadcasting System!)  Seer is stylistically similar but shows an eye-shaped hole out of which protrudes a mammalian tongue. 

Reyes’s Jaguar and Seer, are surely exemplars of the friction between the art work and its display setting.  In a building devoted to communication and journalism, seeing and speaking are apt images.  According to curator Littman, as a pair, Reyes’s sculptures represent “sentinels, in a way. providing a witness to an important moment of censorship of art in this country.”  It was no accident, then, that the Reyes pieces were placed at the location of the destroyed—it wasn’t merely removed; it was smashed—Rivera mural, a violent example of political censorship by a powerful “conservative” family. 

When Frieze director Randolph first saw Noguchi’s News, she explained, it affected her profoundly:

It felt really important in this moment because it was a commission for the Associated Press.  We’re in a kind of difficult moment in the world, politically and socially.  And given what is going on with the war of the press from our administration, it felt like it had real relevance now.

Nonetheless, Littman, who had a free hand to select and site the art in the show, didn’t make deliberate, or at least conscious, politically oriented choices.  “I don’t think that was necessarily part of the calculation,” he said, “—maybe subconsciously, of course, one thinks about that.”  Randolph affirmed, “There are works in the group that make a statement.”

“We are in unstable times politically,” Frieze New York’s artistic director pointed out, “and if there is something to be gained through artistic understanding, artistic output and knowledge, collaboration—all of these things—then that is definitely something that I would want to have and make central to what our presence is in the middle of Manhattan.”

A work that has political implications, aside from the two Reyes sculptures, is perhaps the most unusual piece in Frieze Sculpture.  Most of the art was made of the usual contemporary sculpture materials: metal, stone, wood, resin—some was cast, some carved, some bent and twisted.  Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987), a Ghanaian artist, created 50 tattered jute flags to replace the 192 national banners of the members of the United Nations that surround the Summer Garden. 

Unlike the flags they replaced for Frieze Sculpture, Mahama’s piece don’t wave or flutter in the wind (the jute, from bags that had been used to carry coffee, concrete, and other goods, and other components are too heavy); they just hang down the poles, limp and immobile.  The artist observed, “These containers gather a lot of memory over time as they encounter various forms of labor.  These labor forms are mostly unaccounted for once the commodities reach their destination due to the system of global trade.”  He added, “I believe that it is important to allow true independence for labor to be fully appreciated in these current times.  The issue of exploited labor is a global one, and I wanted to address that through the form of this installation.”

In an interview, the Ghanaian artist explained: “The flags themselves are not necessarily what I think of as being the sculpture; however, the entire space and forms that they create are.  The poles help complete the idea of the sculpture.” 

“For Mahama,” explained Littman, “these pieces are about global capitalism; the idea of the spice trade, the slave trade; the idea of recycled materials, of third-world economies and how things can be reused.”  For himself, as curator of the public exhibit, he asserted: “What I’m doing is taking down the whole world—the whole UN—and replacing it with a very pointed artwork, which will definitely change the feeling of Rockefeller Center.”

Probably the works with the most obvious political commentary—made perhaps more meaningful at this moment than the artist might have predicted when he conceived them, are Paulo Nazareth’s (Brazilian, b. 1977) four pieces called DRY CUT [from BLACKS IN THE POOL] (all 2019).  The larger-than-life size aluminum cut-outs, two in front of 30 Rock (Tommie and Ruby) and two inside 45 Rockefeller Plaza (Martin and Rosa), depict significant figures of the Civil Rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Tommie Smith (one of the Olympic medalists in Mexico City in 1968 who raised the black-gloved, clenched-fist Black Power salute from atop the medal podium to protest racism and injustice against African-Americans), and Ruby Bridges (the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960). 

All these figures stood up and spoke out against injustice, which was a theme of Frieze Sculpture, even if Littman hadn’t intended to send such a message.  Quite a few of the art works in the show expressed this idea, some much more obliquely and metaphorically, like Nick Cave’s (American, 1959) 2018 untitled bronze piece which is a an old horn-shaped gramophone speaker with an arm emerging from it, ending in a fist. 

For most visitors, the entry to Rockefeller Center is on 5th Avenue, then west through the Channel Gardens to the Skating Rink/Summer Garden to the Plaza.  Standing about 25 feet high, right at the entrance, was Behind the Walls (2019) by Jaume Plensa (Spanish, b. 1955).  The monumental white polyester-resin and marble-dust sculpture depicts the elongated head of a woman with her hands in front of her face, covering her eyes as if she were playing peek-a-boo or saying, “I can’t look!  I can’t look!”  On his website, Plensa asserts:

Sometimes, our hands are the biggest walls.  They can cover our eyes, and we can blind ourselves to so much of what’s happening around us. . . .  To me, it’s an obsession to create a beautiful object with a message inside.

The artist says, “It is a very direct piece.  Many times we are blinding ourselves with our hands to be in a more comfortable position.”  Personally, Plensa hopes the sculpture will serve as a “mirror” so “you can look inside and think about your opinions, your attitudes, what you are doing in your own life.”  Says Littman, in contrast: “It’s kind of the way that I feel every morning.  You put your hands over your eyes and you go, ‘I can’t believe we’re going to have to deal with another day like this.’”  A palpable example of art taking on different meaning for different people at different times.

A few steps along the gardens’ flowery path, a Frieze Sculpture visitor would have encountered Rest Upon (2009) by Kiki Smith (West German-born American, b. 1954), a life-sized bronze sculpture of a female figure, very evocative of Alice of Through the Looking Glass portraying Mary of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (or, as Liddy Berman of Architectural Digest felt, “the work feels like a fairy-tale tableau, something a lucky woodcutter would stumble upon in an enchanted glade”), dozing with a lamb lying on top of her recumbent form. 

In the context of the art in conversation with its exhibition environment, Rest Upon is immensely complex.  Smith’s statue is, of course, a recreation of nature: a human being and a lamb, but created of an artificial substance, and not cast in a totally realistic representation of an actual woman or lamb, as Smith’s art work is slightly impressionistic.  The sculpture’s placed within an artificially created imitation of a natural environment, a carefully designed and landscaped garden with hewn-stone walkways and flower and greenery plots.  The young woman is lying not on a grassy lawn or meadow, but on hard stones. 

There are other people all around, walking through the Channel Gardens, shopping in the stores that line the garden walk, or simply going to or from Rockefeller Center and 5th Avenue.  Few, aside from me, were even looking at Smith’s sculpture.  The total image is a very mixed one—a collaboration, though an inadvertent one, among Smith (who created Rest Upon), Littman (who placed it “based on very specific conscious decisions”), the architects of Rockefeller Center (who designed the overall environment), and the grounds keepers and gardeners of the Center (who selected and maintain the flowers and plants in the immediate venue).  Passers-by have a hand in this as well. 

Littman had selected the sites for each display carefully, with deliberate consideration of “the Rockefeller Center campus and its history.”  He “wanted the layout to compel the viewer to explore beyond just the outdoor spaces, which is where public sculpture has traditionally been sited.”  Of the nearly two dozen pieces in Frieze Sculpture, the works of four artists were placed in the lobbies of four of Rockefeller Center’s Art Deco buildings. 

In 10 Rockefeller Plaza, formerly the headquarters of Eastern Air Lines, once (1926-91) one of the “Big Four” domestic airlines in the United States, Littman set out two installations by Goshka Macuga (Polish, b. 1967), International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 25, First Man: Yuri Gagarin, centered on a portrait head of the Soviet cosmonaut, the first man in space in 1961; and International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 26, Before the Beginning: Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned astrophysicist (both pieces from 2016).

The heads are cast in bronze but painted: Gagarin’s in his space helmet is eggshell white and Hawking is candy-apple green.  The heads have several feet of one-inch pipe radiating from them—or leading into them.  Littman explains, “For me, these works act as a conceptual homage to all kinds of travel, so it seemed perfect to use the location of [Dean] Cromwell’s [American, 1892-1960] mural [The Story of Transportation (1946), displayed behind the Macugas in 10 Rockefeller Plaza] to highlight this aspect of the work.”

Across the promenade, at 1 Rockefeller Plaza, was Truth / Beauty, an installation of three black granite pallets (from a series of 14) in a line on which sat two pairs of polished polygonal stainless-steel bars.  The assemblage was started by Walter De Maria (American, 1935-2013) in 1993 and finished in 2016 by his estate according to the artist’s wishes.  Each granite base has “TRUTH” and “BEAUTY” engraved on opposite sides—“TRUTH” on one edge and “BEAUTY” on the other—and the rods increase by two sides with each successive couple. 

(The full series starts with five-sided bars and ends in 17-sided rods.  I didn’t count the sides on the three pairs in Frieze Sculpture.  De Maria had apparently completed the rods, but the bases and the assembly were left to the estate after the artist’s death.  He had also not yet engraved the labels on the edges of the bases, but his studio director worked with Gagosian Gallery, which handles De Maria’s work, to locate an expert engraver for the project.)

The bases were oriented north-south in 1 Rockefeller Plaza, and the labels were on the north and south sides of the square pallets.  On the northernmost and southernmost pallets, the rods were laid out in a chevron configuration, all four pairs facing south; on the center base, the bars were in an X formation (or two single chevrons, pointed toward each other).  Permutations of polished steel bars is a motif of De Maria’s work.  According to Amy Verner of the design and architecture magazine Wallpaper:

[Truth / Beauty] is not the first time that De Maria imbued a work with language; but with these two words, he is inviting viewers to confront a powerful duality that has inspired and challenged philosophers and artists since the dawn of Plato. . . .  Indeed, one can’t help but think of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

There was considerable coverage of Frieze Sculpture, but it was either descriptive—much of it drawn from the exhibit publicity and press releases, so it was an echo chamber—or interviews of Frieze New York, Frieze Sculpture, or Rockefeller Center officials.  (Two or three articles, such as one in the New York Post, quoted many visitors to the exhibit as well as a few of the organizers and some of the artists.)  While these articles and posts were often informative and interesting—I drew on some of them myself—they weren’t reviews.  So where I planned to quote press criticism of the sculpture show, I can’t. 

I could glean that most of the journalists authoring this coverage were excited to see this innovative use of an important and historic Midtown site and the artists whose work Littman selected to display, particularly the ones making U.S. débuts or rare appearances here.  The newness of the art and the way it was mounted were obviously impressive to the members of the Fourth Estate who covered the event, but I can’t tell you if any of them actually liked the inaugural Frieze Sculpture—or if they felt a little like I did: interested in the phenomenon, but not so much drawn into the art experience.  I’m going to have to leave you with only my assessment without knowing how I fit into the patchwork quilt of opinions.