 |
|
A
mysterious pole: Dan Flavin's Untitled.
|
The
Four Season
By David Brickman
Form/Structure/Place:
Minimalist Art from the Guggenheim Museum Panza Collection
New
York State Museum, through March 14
If you’ve ever been to the beach a little out of season, and
it was a foggy day, and you perhaps sat on the sand watching
the shades of gray and white swirl around you, shifting ever-so-imperceptibly
before your eyes, and you didn’t question the value or meaning
of this natural display, but merely took it in as an experience
worth having—then you’re ready to enjoy the latest exhibition
in the New York State Museum’s Fleet Great Art Series.
Form/Structure/Place:
Minimalist Art from the Guggenheim Museum Panza Collection
is, in itself, a minimal exhibition of just 10 pieces by six
artists in four distinct spaces (an additional piece by one
of the six, on loan from the Empire State Plaza collection,
is mounted near the entrance to the show, making 10 plus one—but
it is not, technically, a part of the exhibition). The four
rooms of the installation are like four seasons—each with
its own atmosphere or temperature, and each worthy of contemplation.
In approaching the first room, one passes the plus-one—a monumental
1968 wall piece by Donald Judd titled Untitled. The
stacked vertical array of stainless-steel boxes with amber
Plexiglas top and bottom panels shimmers and glows like a
waterfall, reflecting light brightly off the brushed steel
and casting a warm, yellow glow on the wall behind it. Like
a fountain in a public plaza, the sculpture becomes the focal
point, causing the space around it to surround it; thanks
to its color and energy, this translates as a pleasant, welcome
turn of events. It is a very likeable sculpture.
But more challenging experiences beckon: specifically, a ghostly
green glow that spills from within the gallery, bathing the
security guards at their post in its oddness. And like a carnivalesque
haunted house, it pulls us into its orbit as well. The source
of the light is a Dan Flavin sculpture from 1963 (titled
Untitled) that consists of an 8-foot fluorescent light
fixture with a green bulb in it, mounted vertically at the
juncture of the floor and the wall. This utterly simple installation
transforms the gallery, with its white walls, into Flavin’s
green world and spills onto the next piece, a large, shiny
square of aluminum girders tilted up from the floor on two
legs by Robert Morris. (It, too, is called Untitled,
from 1967.)
Morris’s piece reflects the green light (and white light from
another Flavin mounted around the corner) and casts purple
shadows, feeling remarkably animated for a big, square hunk
of industrial metal sitting on the floor of a museum. The
second Flavin, titled monument on the survival of Mrs.
Reppin, alludes to the balance between gloom and gladness
that this room evokes.
The next room, occupied by two Robert Mangold paintings and
a Carl Andre floor piece, generates a completely different
sensation. Both artists deal directly with geometry and invite
interaction. Visitors are encouraged to walk over the Andre,
which consists of 100 20-inch squares of copper laid like
tile, and which shows the patina of more than 35 years of
such exposure—but not without getting into the line of fire
between the two Mangolds, which appear to be facing off in
an endless argument over the relative merits of the square
and the semicircle. I couldn’t help thinking of the Andre
as a giant chessboard, and of the room as a battlefield for
mathematical theorists.
The next room is a place of rest, of winter. There, 12 nearly
identical paintings in white enamel on steel by Robert Ryman
are arranged along three walls with a long, low bench in the
middle. Titled Standard, this installation brought
back the beach memory for me—and the more I looked at the
paintings, the more dissimilar they all became from each other.
Finally, there is a smaller space featuring three diverse
sculptures by Judd. All titled Untitled, they consist
of meticulously fabricated metal boxes; one, painted a flat,
UPS brown, sits unprepossessingly on the floor—its mute presence
is perhaps a foil for the other two, which are wall-mounted;
of those, the first, in fashionable silver and purple, plays
with positive and negative spaces determined by a mathematical
formula known as a Fibonacci progression; and the other, in
copper with sensuous, curving geometry, reflects a corona
of warm light not unlike that of the Judd outside the entrance,
allowing us to come full-circle into the familiarity of sunlight,
and ready to face the mundane world outside the museum.
|
Columns
& Opinions
