John McCracken: New Sculpture
David Zwirner
525 West 19th Street (between 10th Av. and West St.)
New York, NY 10011
212 727-2070
January 28 to February 29,
2004
By BENJAMIN
LA ROCCO
John McCracken Light
2004
polyester resin, fiberglass, plywood
each panel 32 x 5-1/2 x 6 inches
Isn't Minimalist sculpture
a dead genre? It had its day in the late 60's and early 70's when artists
like Don Judd and Robert Morris defined it and made ground breaking
work that challenged the boundaries of what sculpture could be. Why
revisit it? On to newer and more exciting genres. Or so one might think
before visiting John McCracken's installation of new sculpture at David
Zwirner gallery.
Of Zwirner's three galleries,
the first is the least interesting. A row of the artist's rectangular
fiberglass sculptures (McCracken's modus operandi has changed little
in recent years: highly polished fiberglass skin over wooden frames)
hangs on the left hand wall their colors deep primaries. Moving down
the length, the viewer's reflection shifts and bends around the elongated
forms.
The real excitement comes in galleries 2 and 3. In the former, a long
rectangular space, stands one great black monolith, a broad rectangle
on end. It has unearthly presence of the sort I associate with the floating
geometry from Kubrick's film, A Space Odyssey 2001. It seems not to
have been crafted but to have grown, fully formed from the gallery floor,
as natural as the walls, but far more imposing.
McCracken's interest in the
supernatural and alien life forms is well documented and the feel of
gallery 2 is heightened in gallery 3's expansive space where six rectangular
monoliths, four standing, two leaning, create a sort of corral into
which the viewer instinctively marches. Despite the automotive finish,
the work conjures the feel of antiquity. The spacing of the monoliths
in gallery 3 is that of Stonehenge or the carved heads of Easter Island.
Their colors are brooding, reds that tend toward purple, warm blues
and black. But it's the reflections that cinch the deal.
John McCracken Dimension
2004,
polyester resin, fiberglass, plywood, 96 x 30 x 14 1/2 inches
with other works in backround;
Courtesy David Zwirner
I've never been in a room
with Robert Morris's mirror boxes, but I imagine the way he makes use
of the mirrors' reflections to be clinical (almost everything that Morris
did was). The boxes, each essentially identical to the next, are set
at equal distances from one another, close enough so that, from most
angles, any one box reveals reflected fragments of other boxes and of
the gallery space. The result is confusion. The boundaries between sculptural
object and gallery space are blurred, the sculptural autonomy of any
one box compromised, and the viewer's attempt to situate him or herself
relative to the piece is obstructed.
The reflections of McCracken's
work do not partake of Morris' calculated evasiveness. The sculptures
are indeed reflected in one another as are the viewer and gallery. Yet
rather than obscuring relationships, McCracken's reflections reinforce
them, heighten them. The ghostly monoliths become even more mysterious.
Their different colors, bathed in the color of the reflecting sculpture,
remain distinct. More over, due to the scale and spacing of the work,
the viewer tends to be isolated bodily in the reflection when outside
the corral and in the company of one other sculpture when inside.
McCracken breathes warm breath
into the chilly lungs of Minimalism. Where Morris' sculpture, impervious
to penetration, pushes out at the world, McCracken's absorbs it, bends
it into an altered version of itself. The slight spatial distortion
of the fiberglass, compressed toward the edges and rippling at the center,
heightens the impression of being drawn into an alternate world, one
cloaked in mystery and full of potential. McCracken's work is proof
against the notion of a genre's being outmoded because its moment is
passed. He reminds us that it's the artist and not the genre that counts.
Benjamin La
Rocco is a painter and writer based in Brooklyn, New York.
