Jene Highstein, Grey Clam, 1990/2001. Site specific sculpture. The Wanås Foundation, Sweden Photo: Anders Norrsell

In what proved to be his last public event, Jene Highstein, who died on April 27 at his upstate farm of lung cancer, described his childhood summers swimming and fishing off the white sand beaches of North Carolina.  This dialogue took place in late February at ArtHelix, Bushwick, where a selection of his recent Cape Breton drawings formed an exhibition curated by Bonnie Rychlak.  Cape Breton was a place where many of his friends had bought land in the 1960s although he visited it for the first time only in 2002—and instantly fell in love.  It reminded him of the idyllic holidays of his youth although the landscape was northern and very different.  But he loved the “wildness” and “remoteness” of Nova Scotia, the restless, constantly changing weather that re-drew sky, sea, and earth.  And above all, he loved the light.  So he, too, bought land, spending parts of summers and sometimes other seasons in this private arcadia. The light-flickered, delicately colored Cape Breton drawings are a Postminimalist sculptor’s musings on phenomena, on what disappears, what changes and what remains, one whose work over an almost 50-year career was more typically characterized by refined, although enormously scaled, weighty, often distinctly architectural forms in monochrome, in shades of blacks, whites, grays and the natural coloration of the material. Yet a rebellious sensuality could almost always be detected in these austere, potent sculptures of metal, stone, wood, concrete, plaster, glass, their geometry softened by the artist into something more idiosyncratic, humanized by a curve, a swell, an irregularity, as it was in his playground-sized sculpture for the Wanås Foundation in Sweden, a sloping, irregular ovoid that he dryly called Grey Clam (1990/2001).

Like any good artist, Highstein liked to challenge and be challenged, and like any good artist, he was compelled to experiment.  He was at ease within a range of media and disciplines, collaborating at times with other artists, dancers, musicians, and architects such as Steven Holl with whom he constructed a resplendently luminous nine-meter tall ice edifice in Finland in 2003.  Called Oblong Voidspace, this piece was, as Highstein explained, “about the absence of sculpture: the outside being more architectural and the inside more experiential.  Like a ceremonial space, the interior focuses attention on the convergence of body and mind.”  Highstein also designed sets for theatre productions, working with the ELD Dance Company in Stockholm for many years. The evolution of his work, he had often stated, depended upon finding new forms.  These forms were abstract, not taken directly from nature but from experiences of nature, associations with nature, steeped in nature but conceived in the studio.  These memorable configurations were distinctively his own in the particular integration of the abstract and the biomorphic, an empathetic, substantive “convergence of body and mind” that is present in all of his works, seen most recently in New York at Danese in a well-received show of his towers and elliptical sculptures.

Jene Highstein on a visit to Nova Scotia. Courtesy of Kitty Highstein

Jene Highstein was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1942 and attended the University of Maryland, then the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s, where his major was philosophy.  He later studied at the New York Studio School and the Royal Academy Schools in London, earning a degree in art in 1970.  His first exhibition was at Lisson Gallery, London, in 1968.  Returning to New York, he showed at 112 Greene Street for a time, part of the utopian-minded, fiercely independent, artist-run alternative space that included much of the downtown avant-garde such as Jeffrey Lew, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, Alan Saret, Mary Heilmann and Vito Acconci.  By 1976, Highstein was showing with Holly Solomon among other galleries in New York and soon after with Ace Gallery in Los Angeles and in New York. More recently, he had solo exhibitions at Texas Gallery, Houston and Danese, New York, as well as in Europe and Asia. His many one-person museum shows include those at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California (1980); the Philips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1991); MoMA PS1, New York (2003); and a solo throughout Madison Square Park, New York (2005).  An exhibition of early works is scheduled to open at the Clocktower in Lower Manhattan this June.  Highstein received four National Endowment of the Arts awards over the years and a Guggenheim Fellowship among other honors and his work is included in numerous private and public collections, including every major museum in New York.

Extremely well-spoken, well-read, and well-traveled, a student of Buddhism, deeply committed to art, a keen observer of the world and the art world with an elegant, highly original turn of mind—he was trained as a philosopher, after all and reveled in argument and paradox—Highstein also had a bracing streak of irreverence and a dislike of pretension. When an audience member approached him after the ArtHelix talk and asked if a statement he had just made was contradictory, he replied, laughing, “don’t believe anything I say, I’m making it up as I go along.”  Which of course meant, don’t believe that—or do.

click to enlarge

Deborah Garwood, Evans Pond, November 17, 2008 (2-part suite), 2009. Selenium toned gelatin silver prints, 21-1/2 x 16-3/4 inches each image, each sheet 24 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

The tranquil, beguilingly lovely Evans Pond, approximately 80 miles south of New York City in Camden County, New Jersey, is surrounded by a tangle of woods. It is also the subject of an ongoing, multipart visual exploration by Deborah Garwood, an artist, critic and scholar who grew up nearby. She has studied its history, learning that, in colonial times, it was a millpond established by Quakers in co-existence with the Lenni-Lenapes, a Native American tribal people; in the 19th Century, it was a “station” on the Underground Railroad; and now, it is a public parkland. Photographing it in different seasons and lights, she has captured Evans Pond’s range of guises and moods, a range that inevitably reflects her own. It is a prolonged portrait, a visual biography, the afterimage of which is a self-portrait, a visual autobiography, an alter ego. Investigated with singular dedication—she has photographed it one weekend a month for 10 to 12 months of the year every year since she initiated the project–it is part historical record, part environmental report and land survey, and part poetics of place, a meditation on the cycles of life, on what is lost and what remains. In Evans Pond: A Long-Term Study of a Single Place, Ms. Garwood taps a naturalist vein in American culture, one that is deeply attuned to landscape, to memories of wilderness altered by the encroachments of industrialization and (sub)urbanization, to the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman (Camden’s most famous resident)) and William Carlos Williams (who made a New Jersey river immortal).

sponsored link - click to enlarge

Ms. Garwood’s suites of modest sized images, 2,3, or 4 to a suite, are most often gelatin silver prints although some are in color. Taken with a variety of cameras–from view cameras to box to digital—and using different films and processes, Ms. Garwood has created an archive of the medium, synopsizing its aesthetic and technological history. The pictures themselves vary, the clear brilliant colors of digital prints in contrast to the dreamy tonalities of the black and whites, the former very much of the present, the others moodier, some in soft focus and less crisply perfect, evoking 19th-century scenes. It is a survey in real time but also a survey of the history of the medium, the pond seen through the camera eye of different periods. The point of view can be close-up or more panoramic, looking upward or straight-on, creating in its sequencing an immersive experience. These still photographs, formatted as diptychs and three or four-part sequences are installed so that the resultant rhythm creates a cinematic sense of movement, the progression slowed, stopped for a moment by the shift from one image to another, by the intervals between images, the site deconstructed and reconstructed. The effect is like that of a film in slow motion, one with a pause button handy.

Evans Pond, as a project, seems straightforward, factual but, ultimately, it is much more quixotic, a kind of fine, understated madness, an act of private possession as well as public presentation—which is what makes it particularly gripping. Who photographs a pond for 12 years? In Ms. Garwood’s narrative, we are quietly offered a place, unpeopled because people come and go although their presence is implicit. With that, we are also offered reassurance as well as Ms. Garwood’s stubborn belief in some imagined beauty, in the invincible, renewable earth.

Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic

Slideshow: click thumbnails to activate: