Lee Bontecou: A
Retrospective
at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, through May 30,
2004
and MOMA QNS
Museum of Modern Art, New York
July 30 to September 27, 2004
see also Maureen
Mullarkey on Lee Bontecou:
Drawings from 1959-99 at Knoedler & Company
By VICTORIA
LUDWIN
Lee Bontecou Untitled
1998 (begun in 1980s)
welded steel, porcelain, wire mesh, canvas, and wire, 84 x 96 x 72 inches
Courtesy the artist and Knoedler & Company
It is perhaps pointless
to write about Lee Bontecou's forty-seven year retrospective. In her
statement, the artist says she relates very little to the volumes written
about her work. Her exhibition history also reflects her disinterest
and disengagement with the art scene. Despite instant and continuous
acclaim from 1959 onwards, she chose to have no solo exhibitions of
her work in New York for nearly 30 years (1971-1999). In this wide-sweeping
exhibition, which originated at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, is now
at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and arrives at MoMA QNS July
28, there is a chance to set the record straight regarding the origins
of her art.
The scope of Bontecou's
vision is astonishing and cohesive. She presents meticulously made,
self-contained sculptures, incapsulating both the miniscule and mighty.
Inspired by the natural world, Bontecou creates mechano-organic systems
from man-made materials. By boiling down elements of both nature and
industry, she brings out the ferocious and sublime in each. She works
beyond the confines of minimalism, abstract expressionism and other
modes of her time, in her pursuit to suss these qualities through wood,
wire and canvas.
Lee Bontecou Untitled
1962
welded steel and canvas, 68 x 72 x 30 inches
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Her early sculptures
from 1959 to 1966 hang on the wall like bulging barracks. They are made
of canvas sewn with wire onto welded steel frames. The rough fabric
and twisted wire suggests a protective shell that's withstood numerous
attacks. The sculptures swell outward aggressively, projecting into
space not only their shape, but also the black, round hole situated
at the farthest point from the wall. The portal-like holes appear to
tunnel into the unknown, suggesting infinite space inside the sculpture.
Her drawings from the same time period capitalize on the dense blackness
of soot to create the same depth. Bontecou creates an outer shell or
armature for the universe and the view inside of it reveals a terrifying
void.
These sculptures
lighten in tone and smooth in texture, as with, for example, Bontecou's
sculpture at the Lincoln Center; some embrace the optimistic form of
a full sail and suggest futuristic ships. She diminishes the prominence
of the void. Then her sculptures move off the wall and into space. Ghostly
translucent fish made of vacuum-formed plastic devour other fish. Flowers
made from the same materials cry tubular streams. One wears a gas mask.
The chrysalis-like forms display such a high level of craft and precision
that they induce the same sense of wonder we experience when we encounter
the uncanny intricacies of the natural world. Her skeletal birds have
a robotic quality, as though she assembled bones and wire to make an
über-hawk. Bontecou accentuates the savage. her sculptures and
drawings appear to be ancient and futuristic simultaneously, bearing
the effects of either too little or too much time on the planet.
Her work from the
last twenty years is the most riveting. Her sculptures, still free-floating,
move toward the abstract while retaining elements of her previous work.
The curve of the sail, the point of the beak, the fins of the fish,
the painstaking detail, and the void like an all-seeing eye; they synthesize
to form a complete galaxy. Made of welded steel, porcelain, wire mesh,
silk and wire and suspended from the ceiling, these sculptures are independent
complex systems with the seeming ability to move, attack, defend, see
and ingest. All of her other sculptures are perhaps magnified views
of life in these larger systems. They exist in the air as though part
of the cosmos.
Victoria Ludwin's
fiction and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, CITY, Riotgrrl, River
Oak Review and other publications. Currently, she is finishing her novel.
