John Duff: Designed
with You in Mind: Various Sculptures, Variously Entailed
Knoedler & Company
19 East 70th Street
New York, NY 10021
tel: 212 794-0550
- March 13, 2004
By JOE
FYFE
John Duff Equilateral
Torus II 2002
plaster and steel, 12-1/2 x 48-1/2 inches
Courtesy Knoedler & Company, New York
COVER: March 11, 2004: Hemisphere II 2002
steel and plaster, 19-1/2 x 36-1/2 inches (diameter)
Artists find themselves
today in an increasingly intricate dialogue within broader political
and social contexts. Visual artists often face harsh and even arbitrary
categorization as either progressively aware or reactively aesthetic.
Artworks, in turn, are often judged by whether or not references to
politics, culture, identity and other intellectual themes are included
at all.
Consider the vantage point of Times Square in the context of the subjects
that are made accessible for artmaking. At this hub, many identities
cross paths on the street, commercial culture meets hard news in the
signs overhead and drama, personal expression and performance are on
the surrounding blocks. Using this metaphor, we can understand that
certain artworks function like the sidewalks that we are standing on
while we the world continues around us.
This paradigm suggests itself when viewing the recent work of John Duff.
In his current exhibition of sculpture and related drawings, we are
not confronted with a dismissal of the larger world so much as an attempt
to place oneself in a core experience in relation to it. Most of the
sculptures are made from plaster and steel rods. Rivulets of rust imbed
the textured plaster. One thinks "that sculpture is as big as a
bucket, or it is like a tire" but all the sculptures thwart a clear
reading of scale and object identity. They are deceptively complex.
One work fuses curved walls with inset planar angles. Another semicircular
sculpture's discontinuous walls magnify the proportional relationships
between the remaining scalloped halves of the work.
Another work, a sculptural group entitled Five Materials in Combination,
is exactly that. The work seems to interrogate the idea of an object
but denies it a noun-ness by emphasizing the preeminent importance of
its material makeup. The sculptures are set on the floor; none are much
above knee height, so that there is no direct correspondence to the
body. In this significant way, the sculptures present a situation where
the viewer is not directly addressed. Duff may have titled his exhibition
with a glint of irony, but he keeps the viewer in mind in the way he
has produced such an exceptionally seductive and intelligent group of
work.
