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October 2009
Vol. 28 No. 8
A publication of the
International Sculpture Center
www.sculpture.org
Time and History

in the Body
and the Object
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From the Chairman

You are holding one of my favorite annual issues of Sculpture. Every
October, we highlight the winners of the International Sculpture
Centers Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture
Awards. 2009 marked the 15th anniversary of this wonderful program,
which was created in 1994 to recognize undergraduate and graduate
student excellence in sculpture. This year, 176 sculpture programs from
around the world participated, and 441 students were nominated.
Their work was judged by a distinguished panel of jurors featuring
Jeanne Jaffe, Willie Cole, and David McFadden. They selected 11 winners and 10 honorable mentions.
In addition to having their work profiled in Sculpture and receiving a
free ISC membership, Student Award winners participate in an exhibition
at Grounds For Sculpture (GFS) in Hamilton, NJ. This years show is on
view at GFS, October 10, 2009January 10, 2010. Winners may also compete for a prestigious residency in Switzerland, sponsored by sculptor
Heinz Aeschlimann and arts advocate, collector, and patron Gertrud
Aeschlimann. Youll find short essays from two recent residents on page
80, as well as more information about the Swiss residency program.
As I have mentioned, we have been planning to expand the exhibition
component of the program into a multi-venue, national touring exhibition. We have received three very generous grants toward this effort
from the Jon and Mary Shirley Foundation, the Johnson Art and Education
Foundation, and the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation,
and we hope to secure the balance of the funding soon.
In other ISC news: if you are a Sculpture subscriber, but not an ISC
member, you might notice something different about this issue. This
month, all of our readers are receiving the members edition of the
magazine, which includes the Insider newsletter featuring opportunities, resources, and member news. If you like what you see, please
consider upgrading your subscription to a full ISC membership. All ISC
membership levels include a subscription to Sculpture and a host of
other useful benefits.
You may have recently seen the news that Sculpture is now available
in an on-line digital edition. We hope that this will be a welcome development for readers on the go and anyone else who might consider
electronic access a complement to the print edition. Check out the
new on-line version of Sculpture today and let us know what you think.
Current subscribers and ISC members will receive access to the digital
edition without additional charge for a trial period, and those who are
not currently subscribers or members can sign up for a three-month
free trial of the digital edition.
By the time this issue reaches your hands, many of us will be heading to New Jersey for the ISCs 2009 Symposium: Strategies for Success
in Challenging Times. I hope to see you there. We are also busy preparing for our 2010 London conference (April 79, 2010): What is Sculpture
in the 21st Century? Our call for papers drew a record response, and
this promises to be an exciting ISC event. Save the dates and watch
these pages and <www.sculpture.org> for more details.
Josh Kanter
Chairman, ISC Board of Directors
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ISC Board of Directors

Chairman: Josh Kanter, Salt Lake City, UT
Chakaia Booker, New York, NY
Robert Edwards, Naples, FL
Bill FitzGibbons, San Antonio, TX
David Handley, Australia
Richard Heinrich, New York, NY
Paul Hubbard, Philadelphia, PA
Ree Kaneko, Omaha, NE
Gertrud Kohler-Aeschlimann, Switzerland
Marc LeBaron, Lincoln, NE
Patricia Meadows, Dallas, TX
George W. Neubert, Brownville, NE
Albert Paley, Rochester, NY
Henry Richardson, New York, NY
Russ RuBert, Springfield, MO
Walter Schatz, Nashville, TN
Sebastin, Mexico
STRETCH, Kansas City, MO
Steinunn Thorarinsdottir, Iceland
Boaz Vaadia, New York, NY
Chairmen Emeriti: Robert Duncan, Lincoln, NE
John Henry, Chattanooga, TN
Peter Hobart, Italy
Robert Vogele, Hinsdale, IL
Founder: Elden Tefft, Lawrence, KS
Lifetime Achievement
in Contemporary
Sculpture Recipients
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Fletcher Benton
Louise Bourgeois
Anthony Caro
Elizabeth Catlett
John Chamberlain
Eduardo Chillida
Christo & Jeanne-Claude
Mark di Suvero
Richard Hunt
William King
Manuel Neri
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen
Nam June Paik
Arnaldo Pomodoro
Gio Pomodoro
Robert Rauschenberg
George Rickey
George Segal
Kenneth Snelson
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October 2009
Vol. 28 No. 8
A publication of the
International Sculpture Center
74
46
Departments
Features
14 News
24
I Want Your Imagination: A Conversation with Kris Martin by Karlyn De Jongh
30
Mobile Homes: A Conversation with Casey McGuire by Melinda Barlow
16 Itinerary
22 Commissions
80 ISC News
36
Malia Jensen: Thinking Through Objects by Polly Ullrich
40
Physical States of Being: A Conversation with Carole Feuerman by Edward Rubin
46
Nina Levitt: Re-Presenting Enigmatic Women by Margaret Rodgers
Reviews
50
Random Observations Regarding Futurist Sculpture by Fred Licht
74
Venice: 53rd Venice Biennale
56
The International Sculpture Center 2009 Outstanding Student Achievement
76
St. Louis: Gedi Sibony
77
New York: Mike Womack
77
Ghent: Mark Manders
78
Shanghai: Xiang Jing
79
Dispatch: Toronto
In Contemporary Sculpture Awards
On the Cover: Kris Martin, Mandi VIII, 2006.

Plaster, 220 x 150 x 100 cm. Photograph:
Achim Kukulies, Courtesy Sies + Hke,
Dsseldorf.
30
40
36
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I N T E R N AT I O N A L S C U L P T U R E C E N T E R
Executive Director Johannah Hutchison
Conference and Events Manager Dawn Molignano
Office Manager Denise Jester
Membership Coordinator Lauren Hallden-Abberton
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Conferences and Events Associate Valerie Friedman
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SCULPTURE MAGAZINE
Editor Glenn Harper
Managing Editor Twylene Moyer
Editorial Assistants Elizabeth Lynch, Deborah Clarke
Design Eileen Schramm visual communication
Advertising Sales Manager Brenden OHanlon
Contributing Editors Maria Carolina Baulo (Buenos Aires), Roger Boyce (Christchurch), Susan Canning
(New York), Marty Carlock (Boston), Jan Garden Castro (New York), Collette Chattopadhyay (Los Angeles),
Ina Cole (London), Ana Finel Honigman (Berlin), John K. Grande (Montreal), Kay Itoi (Tokyo), Matthew
Kangas (Seattle), Zoe Kosmidou (Athens), Angela Levine (Tel Aviv), Brian McAvera (Belfast), Robert C.
Morgan (New York), Robert Preece (Rotterdam), Brooke Kamin Rapaport (New York), Ken Scarlett
(Melbourne), Peter Selz (Berkeley), Sarah Tanguy (Washington), Laura Tansini (Rome)
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About the ISC

The International Sculpture Center, a member-supported, nonprofit organization
founded in 1960, advances the creation and understanding of sculpture and its
unique, vital contribution to society. The ISC seeks to expand public understanding
and appreciation of sculpture internationally, demonstrate the power of sculpture
to educate, effect social change, engage artists and arts professionals in a
dialogue to advance the art form, and promote a supportive environment for
sculpture and sculptors. Members include sculptors, collectors, patrons, educators, and museum professionalsanyone with an interest in and commitment
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Membership
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International Sculpture Conferences
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Sculpture Magazine
Published 10 times per year, Sculpture is dedicated to all forms of contemporary
sculpture. The members edition includes the Insider newsletter, which contains
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of recent public art commissions and announcements of members accomplishments.
www.sculpture.org
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ISC programs include the Outstanding Sculpture Educator Award, the Outstanding
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Vol. 28, No. 8 2009. Sculpture (ISSN 0889-728X) is published monthly, except February and August, by the International Sculpture Center. Editorial office: 1633 Connecticut Ave. NW, 4th floor, Washington, DC
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Educating Sculptors: Past, Present, and Future

Art schools face increased scrutiny these days. The expense (and value) of an MFA, the
pros and cons of a PhD in studio practice, the rise of new media and cross-disciplinary
endeavors, and the infiltration of gallery/market interests have all combined to create
a climate that questions the very essence of art education. What to teach and how to
teach it have become issues of great concern as universities and academies alike seek
to build successful, recognized programs. As art pedagogy struggles to move forward,
it might be helpful to consider its past. A new exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute
(October 10, 2009January 10, 2010) does just that, exploring how sculptors during two
particular moments in the history of art were taught to think three-dimensionally. The
Developing Process compares the examination work of sculptor Thomas Mewburn
Crook, who attended the Royal College of Art in the late 19th century, with works by students in the revolutionary Basic Design
courses pioneered by Victor Pasmore and Harry Thubron at British art colleges in the 1950s and 60s. Using student drawings
and sketchbooks, photographs and textbooks, the show examines key areas of art education: form analysis, technical drawing,
nature study, and life drawing. Cooks archive demonstrates the rigors of a laborious 23-stage program leading to ever greater
refinement in imitation. In contrast, work from the Bauhaus-inspired Basic Design program reveals an abstract exploration
of form and structure from first principles, moving from point to line to plane and from two into three dimensions.
A similar opposition between practice/craft and free/conceptual investigation across materials and styles defines the debate
today, although the Bauhaus model, which balanced radicality with traditional craftsmanship, has now become the old-garde. In
fact, Bauhaus principles and the contrasting Duchampian legacy form the touchstones of a far-ranging new volume available this
month from MIT Press. Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited by Steven Henry Madoff, maps the state of art education today while identifying possible new directions. Essays, conversations, reminiscences, and case studies from more than 30
leading artists and art educators consider what art school can and should be in the 21st century. Recurring issues include the
training of artists versus the training of teachers, conceptual versus craft-based programs, and the place of art education at the
university. Despite nuances in experience and argument, many contributors seek the art school equivalent of Andr Malrauxs
museum without walls. Their almost utopian visions of cooperative artistic explorers, unfettered by physical or intellectual
boundaries, pay homage to the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. But this updated vision will not come easily in a time of
increasing bureaucratization. Like higher education in general, art education is caught between a tendency toward ever greater
Top: Life drawing class c. 1890. Above:
professionalization of specialities and the desire to offer an infinitely expanding curriculum. But an institution cannot offer everyLife drawing class, 1950s.
thing: it can only exercise and open the curious mind. The freeform model assumes an ideal student, one who is interested in the
insights of exploration rather than the rewards of the limelightnot that todays students can be blamed for their priorities, considering the amount of debt they shoulder. Unless
these new approaches can turn out market darlingsand no one has come up with a formula for that elusive synergy, as John Baldessari, Michael Craig-Martin, and others point
outthey will fail, simply because they cannot serve the practical needs of their students. For all their emphasis on social and intellectual engagement, community service, openness, and permeability, many contributors recognize the need to master the basic skills of visual art, or as Baldessari says, You cant have radical without orthodox. Every generation must negotiate that truth. Art school cannot teach everything, but it can provide the tools necessary for visual expression while shaping individuals who question and continue
to learn. One of the most interesting tendencies that emerges from Art School is the think-tank model employed in Olafur Eliassons studio, where assistants (and they have included Jeppe Hein and Toms Saraceno) participate in seminars as part of their work. The next step in the pedagogical revolution might be to study the guild and atelier systems.
Left: Metro Academic Classical High School students, Untitled:

Gathering Place. Right: El Anatsui, Coal Pot.
Contemporary Sculpture on Campus

El Anatsuis Coal Pot was recently installed on the University of Kentucky campus as part
of the Art Museums sculpture garden. Inspired by Anatsuis stint as a visiting artist at the
university in 2003, Coal Pot was fabricated by UK sculpture professor Garry Bibbs. The 15foot iron cauldron is filled with large pieces of Kentucky coal, which will eventually disintegrate, leaving a residue that will change the works appearance.
Last May, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis completed a two-year collaborative
project with Metro Academic Classical High School. Students from a Metro art class
planned, designed, and built a site-specific sculpture on school grounds. Their circle of
clay seats surrounded by bamboo and grasses was inspired by Maya Lins work, which
was part of an initial research course on public sculpture. Students then worked with
artist-in-residence Ilene Berman, Contemporary staffers, Metro administrators, and architects to make their final design and site choices, master the construction process, and
complete their addition to school life.
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ANATSUI: COURTESY ART MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY / METRO PROJECT: SARAH CARMODY / 1890 CLASS: LEEDS MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (HENRY MOORE INSTITUTE ARCHIVE) / 1950 CLASS: COURTESY NATIONAL ARTS EDUCATION ARCHIVE (TRUST), BRETTON HALL
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Top left and detail: Roger Hiorns,

Seizure. Left: Rachel Harrison,
Indigenous Parts, IV (detail). Top:
151189 Harper Road

London
Roger Hiorns: Seizure
Through October 18, 2009
Hiorns, who is heavily favored to win
this years Turner Prize, uses unusual
materials to effect startling transformations. He makes fire emerge from
storm drains, permeates metal with
perfume, and turns abandoned spaces
and industrial objects into gardens
nurturing unexpected growth. Seizure,
the installation that propelled him
onto the Turner shortlist, marked his
first urban intervention. After pumping 75,000 liters of copper sulfate
solution into an anonymous council
flat in south London, he left it to
work its magic: a strangely beautiful
and somewhat menacing crystalline

accretion blossomed across walls,
floors, and ceilings, turning the space
into a cavern of rich blue. For Hiorns,
the crystalline works are not about
beauty (which he finds a bit banal),
but the autonomous evolution of the
material, a process that, once instigated, takes him out of the equation.
Tel: + 44 (0) 20 7713 140
Web site <www.artangel.org.uk>
Les Abattoirs/Mas dAzil Caves
Toulouse
Dreamtime
Through November 11, 2009
Dreamtime, a unique partnership
of contemporary art center, residency
program, and archaeological park,
Claude Lvque, Intrim. Above:

David Altmejd, Untitled (detail).
Both works from Dreamtime.
has sent more than a dozen artists

underground to the prehistoric wellspring of human expression. David
Altmejd, Miquel Barcel, Mark Dion,
Delphine Gigoux-Martin, and Victoria Klotz were among those invited to create site-specific projects for
the Mas dAzil cave complex in the
Midi-Pyrnes, site of some of the
earliest known Paleolithic drawings.
Interacting with the caves remote
human traces, natural geology, and
historic adaptations (refuges for
early Christians, heretical Cathars,

and hunted Protestants), these new
installations build metaphorical and
temporal bridges between past and
present, inspired by the Aboriginal
concept of dreaming the world.
Tel: + 33 (0)5 34 51 10 60
Web site <www.lesabattoirs.org>
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard
College/Hessel Museum of Art
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Rachel Harrison
Through December 20, 2009
It is no surprise that Harrisons twopart survey adopts the title of David
Foster Wallaces Consider the Lobster
And Other Essays. Like Wallaces
fiction, Harrisons sculpture blends
critical methodologies and encyclopedic profusions of information into
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HIORNS: MARCUS LEITH / HARRISON: CHRIS KENDALL, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GREENE NAFTALI, NY / LVQUE AND ALTMEJD: A. MORIN
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Right: Eva Hesse, Studiowork. Top

right and detail: Su-Mei Tse, Floating
Memories. Bottom right: Patrick
HESSE: ABBY ROBINSON, NY, THE ESTATE OF EVA HESSE, COURTESY HAUSER & WIRTH ZRICH, LONDON / TSE: JEAN-LOU MAJERUS / DOUGHERTY: PERRETTI & PARK PICTURES, COURTESY THE SAN FRANCISCO ARTS COMMISSION
Dougherty, The Upper Crust.
enigmatic structures that follow

their own compelling logic. With a
deluge of cultural debris including
canned goods, celebrity magazines,
fake fruit, wigs, mannequins, soft
drinks, and taxidermy animals collected into forms of often monolithic
scale, she conflates painting, installation, sculpture, and photography,
while combining abstraction and
figuration, the biomorphic and the
architectural, the readymade and
the handmade. In the CCS Bard
Galleries, Consider the Lobster,
presents 10 years of Harrisons flamboyant and witty works; for And
Other Essays, at the Hessel Museum
of Art, she collaborates with Nayland
Blake, Tom Burr, Harry Dodge, Alix
Lambert, Allen Ruppersberg, and
Andrea Zittel to rehang the contemporary art collection. Like Harrisons
work, this project suggests that
there is no one, true methodology
for looking at, or making, art.
Tel: 845.758.7598
Web site <www.bard.edu/ccs>
Fruitmarket Gallery
Edinburgh
Eva Hesse
Throughout her career, Hesse produced curio-sized, experimental
objects alongside her large-scale
sculptures. Executed in a wide range
of materials, including latex, wiremesh, Sculp-metal, wax, and
cheesecloth, these so-called test
pieces come in a variety of forms.
The 50 works featured in Studiowork, which was curated by groundbreaking Hesse scholar Briony Fer,
proposes that these small creations
are more than simple technical
explorations; instead, they radically
question conventional notions of

what sculpture is and what an artwork can do in our culture.
Tel: + 44 (0) 131225 2383
Web site
<www.fruitmarket.co.uk>
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Boston
Su-Mei Tse
A classically trained cellist, Tse
works in a wide range of media
photography, sculpture, video, and
installationmerging sound and
image into a single poetic form.
Often compared to haiku, her work
combines a pared-down, minimal
aesthetic with an emotional charge
while searching for balance and
harmony in spartan simplicity. NeoSurrealist strategies of symbol and
metaphor support the immediacy
and resonance of her materials, displaying a deep appreciation for craft

and gesture. In Floating Memories,
the 2003 Golden Lion award-winner
reinterprets the Gardners collection
and history through sound, sculpture, and video, reflecting on the
passing of time, distant memory,
absence, and longing.
Tel: 617.566.1401
Web site
<www.gardnermuseum.org>
Joseph L. Alioto Performing Arts

Piazza
San Francisco
Patrick Dougherty
Through November 2009
Dougherty arrives at a new site with
no preconceptions. Using locally
gathered natural materials whenever
possible, he draws inspiration from
the surrounding environment to
design temporary, large-scale constructionstypically made of lashed
saplings, branches, and twigsthat
evoke nests, cocoons, or fantastical
architecture. The Upper Crust is a bit
of a departure from his recent work.
The conical willow sapling forms are
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woven into the tops of the piazzas

sycamore trees, where they form a
kind of secondary canopy. Since its
installation earlier this year, The
Upper Crust has changed with the
seasonal cycles of its living supports; visitors this fall can catch the
autumnal colors.
Web site
<www.sfartscommission.org/
pubartcollection>
_________
Kunsthaus Zrich
Zrich
Mircea Cantor
Cantor uses his work as a means
to infiltrate everyday life and destabilize rote patterns of perception.
Through subtle, sometimes almost
invisible gestures, he upsets expectations and safe assumptions while
avoiding clearly definable statements. The reality that he stages
remains in constant flux, resistant
to categorization and determined
only by uncertainty. He uses a range
of media, including video, photography, objects, sculpture, and installation, as well as more ephemeral
genres such as events and newspaper advertisements, to take up a
host of social and economic issues.
Despite the post-Duchampian
conceptualism and the emphasis on
political content, the finished work
Above: Mircea Cantor, Seven Future

Gifts. Top right: Sabine Hornig,
School, from Ease and Eagerness.
Right: Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
The Children of Jacob H. Schiff.
reveals an extraordinarily poetic

formal vocabulary.
Tel: + 41 (0) 44 253 84 97
Web site <www.kunsthaus.ch>
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Wolfsburg, Germany
Ease and Eagerness
Ease and Eagerness gives Modernism a healthy prognosis for continued relevance, based on the work of
seven up-and-coming young artists.
Duncan Campbell, Marcel van
Eeden, Friederike Feldmann, Sabine
Hornig, Julian Rosefeldt, Tatiana
Trouv, and Sascha Weidner have
proven their ability to cut through
the confusing maze of current
approaches by developing the disciplines of painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video. Each
artist questions reality through his
or her workoften presenting it as
a construction or fictionand
sets traps for perception. While they
adapt the formal conventions of
Modernism, they add literary, socio-
logical, and theatrical narratives to

the mix in order to deconstruct and
reconstruct its gestures. Universals
are replaced by the intriguing
uncertainties of imagelessness and
placelessness, history and fiction,
recollection and falsification.
Tel: + 49 (0) 5361 2669 0
Web site <www.kunstmuseum___________
wolfsburg.de>
_______
Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
The Met owns some 45 works by
Saint-Gaudens, the Beaux-Arts artist
who rose from humble roots to
become the greatest American
sculptor of his day. The collection
encapsulates the full range of his
production, from early cameos
to innovative, painterly bas-reliefs,
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CANTOR: COURTESY THE ARTIST AND YVON LAMBERT, PARIS, NY / HORNIG: COURTESY GALERIE BARBARA THUMM, BERLIN & TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NY, VG BILD-KUNST, BONN 2009 / SAINT-GAUDENS: COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NY
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Above: Bob Trotman, detail of

Business as Usual. Right: Ai
Weiwei, Ton of Tea. Far right: Isa
TROTMAN: KEVIN REMINGTON / AI: FAKE STUDIO / GENZKEN: COURTESY MUSEUM LUDWIG, KLN
Genzken, Hospital (Ground Zero).
from character-penetrating portrait

busts to statuettes after public
monuments. Tracing his development from apprentice cameo cutter
to student at the cole des BeauxArts in Paris to independent sculptor in Rome, where he created
his first life-size marble, this show
demonstrates how he vowed to
astonish the world. That first marble daringly interpreted a Native
American subject, Hiawatha,
through a neoclassical lens. Back in
the States, this fusion of old world
artistic pedigree and new world
ambition made him the Henry James
of sculpture, an artist capable of
capturing Americas growing wealth
and power, while enhancing its
competitive cachet on the cultural
stage.
Tel: 212.535.7710
Web site <www.metmuseum.org>
Mint Museum of Art
Charlotte, North Carolina
Bob Trotman
Trotman combines the visual frankness and warmth of wood with an
emotional atmosphere of dislocation and alienation. The three figurative tableaux featured in Business as Usual are meant to be
experienced theatrically. Viewers

encounter shifting interactions
among the figures as a web of questions about power, corporate relations, and the psychology of everyday life. While Trotman sees his
sculptures in relation to 19th-century carved religious figures, ships
figureheads, and so-called show
figures, his works are undeniably
contemporary, inhabiting a world
in which tragedy and comedy constantly vie for the upper hand.
Tel: 704.337.2000
Web site
<www.mintmuseum.org>
Mori Art Museum

Tokyo
Ai Weiwei
Over the last few years, Ai has
achieved an international reputation
as Chinas most visible and prolific
art star. A wide-ranging creator, he
has engaged in a huge range of interdisciplinary projects, everything from
sculpture and installation to architecture, design, publishing, and curatingnot to mention politically
volatile blogging and other activist
endeavors. Best known for his conceptual re-use of Chinese antiques,
he has executed many acclaimed
projects, including the Fairytale performance at Documenta 12 in 2007
and the Birds Nest stadium for the

2008 Beijing Olympics (created with
architects Herzog & de Meuron).
According to What? features 26
works (six made especially for the
show) that demonstrate his ability
to adapt history and tradition while
questioning the future.
Tel: + 81 3 5777 8600
Web site
<www.mori.art.museum>
Museum Ludwig
Kln
Isa Genzken
Genzkens assemblages create suggestive spaces that explore individual responses to the built environ-
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Left and detail: Wim Delvoye, Torre.

Right: Antonio Lombardo, Lucretia.
ment. Beginning in the 1970s with

aerodynamic, incised wooden sculptures through recent delicate spatial installations, she has created
a body of work that symbolizes the
tightrope act that we all perform,
National Gallery of Art

Washington, DC
Tullio Lombardo and High Venetian
Renaissance Sculpture
Venetian sculptors of the High
Renaissance, like their better known
contemporaries in painting, went
beyond traditional commissions
for altarpieces and household devotional images to develop new art
formsimaginative evocations of
ancient mythology, poetry, history,
and philosophy made for a sophisticated audience of private collectors.
Like Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian,
Tullio Lombardo created a new
vision of beauty, shaped by a poetic
approach to classical antiquity seen
through a 16th-century lens. A brilliant carver, he devised his own
innovations, blending the natural
and the idealized, the ancient and
the modern, the sacred and the secular to create highly sensitive works
in which marble seems to come to

sensuous life. This exhibition gathers 11 sculptures by Tullio and his
closest followers, focusing on two
mysterious and atmospheric double-portrait reliefsworks that captivate with their technical prowess
as much as they intrigue with their
allusive subject matter.
Tel: 202.737.4215
Web site <www.nga.gov>
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Venice
Wim Delvoye
In Delvoyes work, opposites attract:
the divine merges with the secular,
past meets present, and ornament
overcomes function. His ongoing
Gothic series applies traditional
craft and folk art practices to industrial objects, such as gas canisters
hand-painted with blue Delftware
motifs and Caterpillar excavators

perforated with tracery. The newest
work in the series, however, marks
a departure. Torre, a stainless steel
Gothic tower, complete with ogival
windows and turrets, seems devoid
of paradox. The necessary opposition comes from its contextthe
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18thcentury classicizing structure on
the Grand Canal. Torre conjures the
eclectic exoticism of pre-Renaissance
Venetian style, a heady amalgam
of East and West, ephemeral surface effects and structural solidity.
For Delvoye, the Renaissance was a
world view, the Gothic was a state
of mind. The Renaissance was
a finite epochGothic was an art
outside of time.
Tel: + 39 041 2405 411
Web site
<www.guggenheim-venice.it>
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DELVOYE: COURTESY PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION, VENICE / A. LOMBARDO: COURTESY NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, DC
balancing between beauty and

destruction, grace and brutality.
With social, political, and economic
conditions constantly in mind, she
reveals the unstable, bewildering,
and contradictory sides of human
knowledge and perception by questioning things that we take for
granted. Her scrutiny extends to
the parameters of sculpture itself,
as she probes the meaning of the
three-dimensional object while
adding an emotional charge. This
retrospective gathers a selection
of more than 60 works, all demonstrating the challenge that Genzken
poses to recent sculptural trends,
as well as her unusual position
in contemporary art.
Tel: + 49 221 221 26165
Web site
<www.museum-ludwig.de>
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Top left: Eva Rothschild, Cold Corners.

Bottom left: Toms Saraceno,
3X12MW/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City,
from Footprints. Above: Peter
Randall-Page, In Mind of Monk.
ROTHSCHILD: SAM DRAKE/TATE PHOTOGRAPHY, THE ARTIST / SARACENO: ANDERS NORRSELL / RANDALL-PAGE: JONTY WILDE
giant scribble, explores new relationships between volume and mass,

surface and structure. The territory
that it maps is not without its effect
on visitors: viewers become explorers as they decide how to navigate
through the anarchic terrain.
Tel: + 44 20 7887 8888
Web site <www.tate.org.uk>
Tate Britain
London
Eva Rothschild
Rothschild may not be a household
name (yet), but she has met the
challenge of the Duveens Commission with a dramatic and ambitious
new work that colonizes the neo-
classical galleries at the heart of

Tate Britain. Although Cold Corners
possesses minimal materiality, it
stretches to nearly the full length of
the space, undermining 70 meters
of grandiloquent and rational architectonics with energetic chaos.
Like all of Rothschilds objects, the
aluminum form, which has been
likened to a lightning strike and a
Wans
Knislinge, Sweden
Footprints
As the question of humanitys relation to nature gains increasing
urgency, artists are no longer content to address the issue in the
abstract. This years exhibition of
site-specific works at Wans reinforces the foundations commitment
to sustainability and features projects that demonstrate how art can
add new perspectives to the environmental debate, beyond political
and economic arguments. Tue Greenfort (Denmark), Henrik Hkansson
(Sweden), Tea Mkip (Finland) with
Halldr lfarsson (Iceland), Toms
Saraceno (Argentina), and Nilsmagnus Skld (Sweden) investigate
a range of subjects, from agricul-
ture and cultivated nature to animal behavior, the fragility of modern Western systems, and blueprints for radical change.
Tel: +46 44 660 71
Web site <www.wanas.se>
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
West Bretton, Wakefield, U.K.
Peter Randall-Page
Through Spring 2010
Randall-Page is fascinated by the
complex relationship between biology and geometry. The patterns and
sequences vital to the emergence of
life find expression in the carefully
articulated and regularized surfaces
that he carves into found glacial
boulders and sourced marble, granite, and limestone. This exhibition,
his most comprehensive to date,
features more than 50 indoor and
outdoor works, including two monumental sculptures made especially
for YSP. Among other new works are
a series of six terra-cotta wall pieces
and an installation of 18 glacial
boulders, in which the carving adapts
to the irregularly eroded forms.
Exploring the dynamic tensions
between order and randomness,
these works give permanence to
evolutionary transience and fuse
the natural world with artistic
vision.
Tel: + 44 (0) 1924 832631
Web site <www.ysp.co.uk>
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commissions
Jaume Plensa
Dream
St. Helens, U.K.
Pre-cast concrete, 20 meters high.
that visitors will] sit and enjoy looking

at the landscapeand that people say to
one another, Lets meet at Dream. That
is when I will know it is a success.
Josefine Gnschel and

Margund Smolka
Heads, shifting
Berlin, Germany
As Josefine Gnschel and Margund Smolka
explain, Thought, research, synthesis,
openness, and the ability to change ones
point of view are all fostered by education. Heads, shifting, at Humboldt University in Berlin, reflects the same qualities.
Supported by lofty pedestals, the two
monumental heads are segmented horizontally, which enables them to rotate in and
out of recognizable human form as the
individual plates spin. The artists developed a five-hour-long repeating program
for the kinetic heads that allows passersby
to watch them moving: Very slowly they
change their expression, their position
in relation to one another, and thus their
effect on the surroundings. Changes on
the mostly impassive faces are caused by
small, subtle movementsoccasionally
the form of each head dissolves, becomingan abstract form that eventually
returns to its original starting position.
Gnschel and Smolkas identical,
androgynous heads also echo stratified
rock layers, computerized topographies,
[and] interference on television.
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PLENSA: STUART RAYNER
Top and above: Jaume Plensa, Dream, 2009.
Located on the site of the former Sutton

Manor Colliery, Jaume Plensas Dream symbolizes St. Helens regeneration, ambition,
and respect for its coal-mining past. The
1.88 million project required the collaboration of myriad organizationsthe St.
Helens Council commissioned the piece,
the Channel 4 Big Art Project brought visibility, Arts Council England and several
other groups provided funding, and the
Liverpool Biennial curated the projectbut
the most significant contribution came from
a group of former miners who selected the
site, awarded the commission to Plensa,
and advocated for its progress. The ex-miners intend the work to commemorate the
mine (in operation from 1906 through
1991) that once defined their town while
attracting new visitors and inspiring plans
for St. Helens future.
Gary Conley, one of the ex-miners, said
that after they reflected on what art can
mean to a communityWe wanted something that was more than just another mining monument. They were excited by the
prospect of Plensas work, which the artist
describes as first and foremost about celebrating life and the human experience of
standing in between past and present, present and future, knowledge and ignorance.
Dream, a 20-meter-high head of a young
girl, is elongated into a columnar shape.
The shimmering white form, created from a
mixture of Spanish dolomite and concrete,
rises from a low, 17-meter diameter plinth,
which refers to the tags that miners wear
for identification. The girls eyes are closed,
and her face projects a restful calm in keeping with the wooded surroundings. (After
the mine closed, the Forestry Commission
acquired the land and planted thousands
of trees.) Dreams south-facing orientation
means that the sun changes its appearance
throughout the dayit is sometimes dramatically shadowed and sometimes moonlike or spectral. Plensa is pleased with the
work, saying, The site at Sutton Manor is
a high point with amazing views[I hope
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Above: Two views of Josefine Gnschel and Margund Smolka, Heads, shifting, 200408. Reinforced
plastic, electronic motors, computerized controls, and steel, 6.95 meters high. Right: Joseph Hillier,
GNSCHEL AND SMOLKA: : JENS KOMOSSA / HILLIER: TONY GRIFFITHS
In Our Image, 2009. Steel and paint, 16.7 meters high.
These contemporary heads, which are

installed at Humboldts new Adlershof
campus in southeast Berlin, also allude
to two classicizing monuments on
the universitys central campusone of
Wilhelm von Humboldt, the schools
founder, and the other of his brother,
Alexander von Humboldt, a natural scientist. While Gnschel and Smolka developed Heads, shifting, in part, to refer
to the statues on the main campus, the
effect is notone of classical sculpture:
[the heads] neither represent a particular
person nor are they static. They challenge
the traditional intentions of such sculptures and playfully transfer them into the
present. Activating the entrance to the
Adlershof campus, which houses the universitys science and math facilities, the
heads address the nature of relationships
between people [and] refer to the process
of researching, discovering, and learning.
Joseph Hillier
In Our Image
Newton Aycliffe, U.K.
Joseph Hilliers In Our Image pays homage
to manufacturing and industry, and to the
human effort behind them. As the cagelike steel form rises above the landscape, it
transforms from a lower portion reminis-
cent of industrial scaffolding into the outline of a human figure. As Hillier describes
it, The huge figure is rendered as a grid
and a number of [laser-cut steel] smaller
figures appear to be constructing the piece
itself. I am interested in how we read the
human body as a whole; the silhouette is
the most pared-down and theatrical way
to do this. In Our Image is located near a
highway exit to Newton Aycliffe Business
Park, a development of office and manufacturing spaces. Hillier selected the site
because the work would emerge from the
treesand have a more poetic relationship
with the landscape. He saw this sculpture emerging from the roadside utilitarian
architecture, which we often see but rarely
contemplate[but] unlike the lampposts
and signs that stand close by, these pieces
of steel have a very different purpose.
Hilliers 16.7-meter-high sculpture embodies his appreciation for human workers
and their struggle to create. The project
itself represents the kind of large-scale
effort that requires collaborative engineering and fabrication. The smaller worker
figures were modeled on specific individuals who helped with the sculpture, but the
scaffolding bust is intentionally anonymous
and generic. In Our Image refers to the act
of creation, conflating religious, artistic, and
manufacturing associations. Hillier feels
that the making of large figurative sculpture
can be potent. Although the title refers to
the biblical phrase, God made man in his
image, he says, I guess I would argue
it is the other way around. In Our Image,
which offers Hilliers reflections on individuality, interaction, and productivity, will
continue to challenge and fascinate viewers
in Newton Aycliffe, perhaps inspiring them
to additional acts of creation.
Elizabeth Lynch
Juries are convened each month to select works for Commissions. Information on recently
completed commissions, along with quality 35mm slides/transparencies or high-resolution digital
images (300 dpi at 4 x 5 in. minimum) and an SASE for return of slides, should be sent to:
Commissions, Sculpture, 1633 Connecticut Avenue NW, 4th Floor, Washington, DC 20009.
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ACHIM KUKULIES, COURTESY SIES + HKE, DSSELDORF
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I Want Your
Imagination
Kris Martin
A Conversation with
BY KARLYN DE JONGH
Opposite: Vase, 2005. Chinese porcelain and

glue, 225 cm. high. Above: Assistance,
2008. Found object and ink on paper, 83
x 103 x 5 cm.
Time is the primary motive in the practice of Belgian conceptual

artist Kris Martin. Convinced that material can carry thoughts,
Martin uses well-known or everyday objects in a defamiliarizing way. For instance, in Mandi VIII (2006), he gives us a
Laocon in which the source of pain has been removed, leaving
the three figures to struggle with an invisible, and perhaps
imaginary, enemy. With these little gestures, he tries to infect
the brain of his audience. He considers himself an observer
and attempts to show us things in ways that we have never
seen before and to change our attitudes toward objects. Open
for many interpretations, Martins work generates an emptiness,
a space to reflect on the complexity of life. Martin lives and
works in Ghent, Belgium.
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Karlyn De Jongh: In your work, you make references to

time and encourage viewers to reflect on its meaning.
Why is time so important to you?
Kris Martin: Time is important because it is so difficult
to deal with. For this reason, it is an important theme
throughout my work. Rather than a subject, time is a
motive: something ongoing that returns each time I
create a work. There are several definitions of time. So
far, the most interesting one that I have come across
is St. Augustines: If you ask me what time is I do not
know, but if you do not ask me I know exactly what it
is. In visual arts, time is problematic. It is a dimension that is hard to represent; time becomes frozen.
Everything is time and time is everything, but you
cannot grasp what it is. Time is fluid; it constantly
escapes. To give a visual piece a notion of time is a
big challenge, and that is why I am doing it.
KDJ: You live in the beautiful, historical city of Ghent.
Does the fact that you are surrounded by history affect
your work?
KM: Absolutely. Living in an old city has a great influence: when I go out the door, I am in history.
Although I cannot say how, the notion of time and
the constant contact with time must affect my
work to a great extent. It is just a coincidence that
I was born and raised here. Were I raised in Los
Angeles, I am sure that my notion of time would be
different. Environment determines a large part of
what I am doing.
I am generally very attracted to matter. Material has the fantastic ability

to carry thoughts and feelings, as well as time. It survives us. Matter itself
has no meaning, but you can give it meaning. Sometimes I make work with
found objects. Recently, for instance, I found a cannonball that was shot
during the Napoleonic war, here in Flanders. We do not know which cannon
fired it, just that it was fired. Years later, at a flea market, I was holding it
in my hand. The cannonball is here and now; I could not make it any better.
I need a good reason to intervene in an object, to change something. It is
about choices, generally. Putting this object in another context is not about
displacementwe have seen that. Simply in my hands, it became art. Not
that I am a wizard, but I did have the thought that the cannonball is here and
now. It is a silly idea, but it infects your brain. And that is exactly what I am
trying to doinfect the brain. You see something in a way that you never
saw it before; afterward, you cannot help seeing it in another way.
KDJ: Many of your works seem to be based on the idea of continuation after
your own death. For example, 100 Years goes beyond our physical time. Its
designed to self-destruct after 100 years.
KM: Everyone puts a stamp on life to show that I was here. This is one of
the clichs on which I touch. I am ambitious, of course; but at the same time,
I try to see my existence as something relative. I am 99 percent certain that
I will be forgotten in 100 years. There is a one percent chance that people will
take care of the work and then it will happen: Martins bombs will explode.
The work plays with time and mortality. I enjoy flirting with clichs.
KDJ: Your work also references icons of art and literary history.
KM: Yes, I like doing that. I dont pretend to make anything new. I make work
that is particular: I am an individual. You do things in a particular way because
you are you. There are classical themes in art history, such as the skull, that
every artist should create. It reveals a lot about you, about your time, about
how you look at death. Still alive (2005) is the first skull in art history made
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Left: Ad huc, 2008. Cannonball, 14 cm. diameter. Right: 100 Years, 2004. Mixed media, 20 cm. diameter. Bomb will explode in 2104.
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from a living person. Formerly, death was

a precondition for making the skull visible;
now, it is simply done by scanner. Nobody
touched the skull, but it is a skull and it is
definitely mine.
KDJ: You want your work to live beyond
your death, but, at the same time, you
have made works that are self-destructive,
such as Vase (2005) and 100 Years. These
works show a continuity that seems finite.
KM: I am a product of my time. I prefer to
be formally boring and interesting in terms
of content, rather than vice versa. Sometimes my work is self-destructive. Maybe
that is a part of me, but it is also about
creating: when something breaks, it might
be the condition for something else. It may
be the condition for creation in general.
Every time I smash a vase and glue the
pieces back together, it is turning into
something else. It is not a beautiful vase
anymore, but something different. The
original form is taken away and replaced
by thoughts.
KDJ: The continuity of objects through repetition and slight changes seems to question the end of things. For example, in End
Points (2004), you removed final full stops
from a number of books. These open ends
put classics, such as Dostoyevskys The
Idiot, in a new perspective. How do you
understand this change? What do you
think happens to these narratives? How
do you look at the end? Can you speak of
an end?
KM: I often wonder about that. It depends
on your perspective, of course. If you see
life as linear, then you can speak of a beginning and an end. If you imagine that it is
circular, then you are part of a continuity.
Because of our mortality, we constantly
deal with the end. But the end could also
be a condition for a beginning. End Points
is, in fact, ongoing. When I read a book
that is important to me, I cut out its endpoint and fix it on a sheet of paper. The
piece indicates the importance of literature in general: a good book changes you.
The end is an opportunity to reflect. Only
after you have gone through the story does
it start; it starts after the full stop.
KDJ: If it starts only after you are finished
reading, would you say that these full stops
are both end and beginning?
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Above: Still alive, 2005. Silver-plated bronze, life-size skull of the artist. Below: Self-portrait (Club
Med), 2008. 2 found pin boards, 132 x 255 cm.
KM: Yes, after the full stop, you may have thoughts that you never had before. This
means that the book changed you: you are not the same person that you were before
reading. It is these slight differences that I try to provoke. Not more than that, though:
I am quite realistic.
I try to give a certain emptiness with my work, a space to look or think. At the beginning of my career, I made a picture of an empty box that I had found on the street.
It was a sort of terrarium. I showed nothing, on purpose, but people were looking at the
picture without being bored. Viewers were able to fill inor notsomething for themselves. I capture this ability and use it in my work. It is not out of humility that I claim
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not to make more than 50 percent of my

work; the other 50 percent is fulfilled by
the viewer. In that way, the object lives its
life. It is impossible to complete something.
An open end can be a beginning.
KDJ: How do you see the future for your
work?
KM: Better and better as I grow older:
although a man of 35, which I am now,
is not able to say things as interesting as
the words of a 70-year-old who has seen
more of life. That I see my future positively
also has to do with content. The pieces
I made eight years agowhen I started
making artare much weaker. I am proud
of them, because they were made by the
mind of a 20-something. But I hope that
when I am 45, I will have the same opinion.
KDJ: You often use the title Mandi, followed
by a number, which seems to indicate a
sequence or series. How do you understand
these numbers? How do they stand in relation to the name?
KM: I force myself to title every piece.
Untitled is too easy. It is sometimes difficult to name a work: the title may be too
loaded, it can change your focus or make
you think differently about the piece. I
dont want that. One of the titles that I
use is Mandi, which is a greeting. I learned
this by coincidence in Friuli, a region in
the north of Italy. I was there to make the
flip board (Mandi III, 2003). In the evening,
I went to a pub. Everyone who left said,
mandi. Someone told me its meaning:
man comes from mano and di from dio
in the hand of God. It is a farewell; you use
it when you dont know whether you will
see each other again. I thought it was
beautiful. Mandi: there is a destination,
there is a time, but you give it out of your
hands. It is a red line throughout my work.
Whether it is a flip board or another piece,
Mandi covers the content.
KDJ: You have mentioned that your flip
board does not show information, but to
me it does. The absence of information
on the flip board is information, too.
KM: Yes. That is the gap that I show. Within
this gap, you can fill in something of yourself. That is the best example of my attitude toward the audience. In this piece, it
is very clear that I need your imagination,
your time and effort to reflect. I dont give
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Above: The life of Kris Martin, 2008. Found object, 25 cm. diameter. Below: 1+6, 2008. Dice, 1.8 x 1.8
x 1.8 cm.
much; I just give a frame. I dare to touch the big questions of life, because I dont oppose
you thinking in a certain direction.
To create a work is a big responsibility. If I decide that this pen is a piece, then people
will consider it to be a piece. When the pen is sold, I praise myself as lucky, but the pen
will haunt me later. One day, someone will come up to me to ask what it is about. If I
cannot explain the work at that very moment, I am in trouble. When do you decide
that something is a piece? This is a great responsibility. On the other hand, you need
the work to be made in a spontaneous way. The responsibility and the need to be spontaneous are in fact in a constant fight. You constantly need to think and re-think your
attitude. It is only attitude. I never have the feeling that I make something. I always
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have the perception of something happening through meI feel like a medium. I
am not a writer and I am not a text. I am
a pen and I act like a pen. The only thing
I can do is make images.
KDJ: You see your position as an artist
mainly as a medium. Does that mean
you have the same importance as your
materials?
KM: Yes. I am just observing, taking something, and giving back. Maybe in a different form or a different context, maybe
with other connotations, but that is all. I
am an observer. I dont have the feeling
that I make something. It is more about
discovering and choosing things: you have
one million objects, and you extract one.
Therefore, I am really happy with an objet
trouv or a readymade, because I dont
have to touch it, it is like the cannonball.
KDJ: One could say that you touch these
objects with your thoughts.
KM: Yes, with my mind. That is what I try
to do. Something happens between people, provoked by my little gesture. Idiot IV
(2007) is very important to me because
it shows a lot about my religious feeling.
The cross seems to cover its eyes. It is as
if it is saying, I dont want to see it anymore. Give me a break, I am just human.
The piece is shocking because I used an
icon. It is far more difficult to use this icon
than the Laocon. I mean, billions of times
people have done something with the
cross. And it still happens in contemporary art. This simple gesture of covering
the eyes makes the cross a key piece. Is
there a God? You are left deciding for yourself whether there is a God or not.
KDJ: If one did not know that you were a
religious person, this piece could also be
about disbelief or the death of God. The
work is open for contradictory interpretations.
KM: Yes, absolutely. Maybe Nietzsche
would have loved it. I am fine with that.
Both interpretations are good. Normally,
images do not work in so many directions.
That is what I am trying to force myself to
doto make an image that can work in
many, many directions. The complexity is
dealing with the complexity. Allowing it
and not making it easier by simply focusing
on your own little opinion.
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Thirteen Idiots, 2008. Iron and magnets, 45 x 27 x 11 cm.
KDJ: We have now discussed several aspects of time, such as the time of history, the
time of the artwork, your lifetime, and the time on the clock. Are they all the same
for you, are they different?
KM: Maybe it is all the same. We try to understand time and capture it, but it is simply
not possible. As a consequence, time is so interesting and so beautiful. Everything that
we can control becomes uninteresting; the things that we cannot control are still the
most beautiful ones. You cannot control the sunset, but everyone likes it. With time,
it is the same. Everything is time, and we are just part of it. I am a product of my time.
Karlyn De Jongh is an independent curator and writer from the Netherlands.
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Tripartite, 2006. Still with

horse head, barn, and
blindfolded performer from
8mm black-and-white
sound film. Inset: Tripartite
(detail). Fiberglass resin and
glass eyes, 2 elements, 16 x
8 in. each.
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A Conversation with
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Casey McGuire
MOBILE
HOMES
BY MELINDA BARLOW
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STILL: ANDREW BUSTI / BOTH: COURTESY THE ARTIST
Casey McGuire combines moving

imagery of her own body, often in vulnerable positions, with architectural and
animal forms to create installations whose
atmosphere is both alluring and disconcerting.
An Honorable Mention recipient in the International Sculpture Centers Outstanding Student
Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards for her
Sand Mandala Series (Sculpture, October 2005), McGuire
was an Artist Intern-in-Residence at the Franconia Sculpture
Park, in Minnesota, in 2002 and a resident at the Institute of Art
and Design in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic, in 2007. In the summer
of 2008, her work was featured in two exhibitions in Colorado: a solo
show at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder and a group show at
the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities in Arvada. A native
of Shrewsbury, Vermont, and an assistant professor at the University of
West Georgia in Carrollton, McGuire received a full fellowship award
for a month-long residency in May 2009 from the Vermont Studio Center
in Johnson, in the northern Green Mountains.
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Melinda Barlow: For your recent exhibitions in Colorado, you created two very
different installations about transience.
The Levitating Quality of Light, Through
Closed Eyes included two house-like structures and used video projection, while
Slow As featured six portable video monitors stacked in a dog sled pulled by bicycle
wheels. While the former generated a powerful sensation of temporary shelter, the
latter seemed more concerned with aging
technologies and modes of transportation.
What inspired each work?
Casey McGuire: I grew up on a farm with
lots of animals, in a mountain town of
1,100 in central Vermont. The surrounding
area is full of lakes, rivers, and gorges and
inhabited by ducks, wild turkeys, moose,
and deer. Swimming, fishing, and hunting
are popular activities, and taxidermy is a
common profession. I bring elements of
this outdoor environment and its associated
architectural structures and cultural pursuits into my indoor work, often alluding
to water, constructing small buildings, and
casting models of fish or parts of horses.
The Levitating Quality of Light, for example,
consisted of two wooden ice shanties on
16-foot ski runners elevated on concrete
blocks; an aluminum replica of a childs
inflatable swimming pool with a nylon polyester screen stretched across its interior;
and a lawn chair re-woven with thin vellum
and suspended from the ceiling. Twelve
fishing poles of different sizes fitted with
light sockets were mounted on the walls,
hovering over the installation. In one shanty, a brown plaster-cast trout was displayed
near a hole cut out of the floor.
Shanties are temporary shelters: they
protect you during long days of ice fishing,
and clustered on Lake Champlain, they
resemble tiny communities. My father and
I have gone ice fishing and trolling together
since I was little, and all the poles in this
work were from his collection, including the
one I used as a child. The lighting design
evoked the way we hang gas lanterns over
the sides of the boat during night fishing,
to attract fish to the surface. Ideally the
light functioned as a lure, drawing visitors
into the space.
MB: The lighting was strikingit came
from both incandescent and fluorescent
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The Levitating Quality of Light, Through Closed Eyes, 2008. 2 wooden ice shanties, aluminum swimming
pool with video projection, lawn chair, and 12 fishing poles with 60-watt bulbs, detail of pool.
sources. The warm glow of the naked bulbs contrasted with the cool blue video imagery
of a shadowy figure swimming in the pool, and the mood was more dramatic because
of the bright light beneath the shanties. They looked like they were about to take off.
CM: The experience of light within a darkened shanty is amazing. You can see very clearly
into the lake through the hole in the ice, and the light has an almost physical presence.
I built the shanties to scale in my studio and fitted their undersides with fluorescent fixtures so they would glow like frozen blue lakes. James Turrells Skyspaces, like Blue
(Tending) (2003), which I saw recently at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, frame
natural light within architectural environments to create extraordinary perceptual events.
The experience of contemplation generated by his works is something that I aim for in
some of my own.
MB: How did you learn to construct buildings? Do you craft most of the components
in your installations?
CM: With the exception of a few personal or found objectslike the fishing poles or the
dog sled used in Slow As, which I borrowedI make everything by hand. My parents
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MATTHEW WEEDMAN
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Left: Sand Mandala: Target, 2005. Hand-dyed quartzite sand, 10 ft. diameter. Right: Uncomfortable in My Own Skin, 2006. Steel ring, caribou hide, and
COURTESY THE ARTIST
still-frame animation projection, ring 6.5 ft. diameter.
built their own home on 10 acres of land, and I witnessed that process, which was completed by my mom after my parents divorced. But primarily, I learned to make things by
helping my dad in his shop, a chicken coop converted into a studio. A taxidermist and a
decoy carver, he now runs a check station for the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife
(where hunted deer are tagged and weighed). When I was eight, he put a stool in front
of the band saw and let me cut decoy blanks for him. Decoy carving is a fine art trade,
and it led naturally to my work as a sculpture and metalsmith technician. From 2001
to 2004, I made a lot of silver and pearl jewelry while working in sculpture and small
metals at the Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute in Utica, New York.
MB: How has taxidermy informed your work?
CM: I use taxidermy tools and techniques all the time, and references to the hunting
culture that feeds the trade also appear in my work. Sand Mandala: Target (2005), one
of a series of eight hand-dyed, quartzite sand sculptures, transforms a paper gun range
target into a three-dimensional floor piece whose piles of colored sand suggest mountains on a topographical map. For the 8mm sculptural film Tripartite (2006), shot in a
barn that I built in my studio, I modified a foam taxidermy deer head to make it look
more like a horse and then used it to cast two fiberglass resin horse heads that I wore
on my hands in the performance within the film. For the installation Uncomfortable
in My Own Skin (2006), I animated 100 photographs of myself in sequence on top of one
another to create the impression of several struggling figures and projected the resulting
video onto a 50-year-old caribou skin, which I stretched within a steel ring, like laying
out a deer hide to dry. In the video Predator or Prey? (2007), which was rear-projected
onto an antique window set into the wall of a gallery, I re-sculpted my own body,
affixing glass animal eyes to the side my

face, at once transforming myself into prey
and de-idealizing the female form. In the
video projection included in the installation Haptic Wake (2007), I strung myself
upside down from a gantry, a device used
to hang and drain deer and other livestock.
The difference is that while traditional
taxidermy is fueled by a desire to create
an artificially perfect natural world by
exercising complete control over an animals appearance, my work uses taxidermy
practices to question those essential
premises, especially the search for control
and physical perfection. I often place my
body in vulnerable positions to relinquish
control, sometimes to an unsettling degree.
Like any sculptural material, the body is
a site that can convey emotion without
words. My more discomfiting installations,
such as Haptic Wake, have been influenced
by Marina Abramovic,
who aggressively
explores the limits of her own body, and
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Predator or Prey?, 2007. Video with performer

and prosthetic eyes rear-projected onto antique
window frame, window 3 x 2 ft.
expresses some frustration at this, but being housed in such containers also lets me ride
in the sled. The monitors I chose have been obsolete since 2000, so there is a commentary
on video history coming into play.
MB: You also used obsolete technology, the carousel slide projector, to create images
for Haptic Wake. Trees are projected upside down on the walls behind the tilted chicken
coop and to the right of the video in which you hang from the gantry. Plaster-cast fish
heads with gaping mouths swarmed in front, forcing visitors to move through a narrow
space. How did you come up with this configuration, and how did people respond to it?
BOTTOM: MATTHEW WEEDMAN / ALL: COURTESY THE ARTIST
Louise Bourgeois, who creates what I would

call softly violent sculptures by mixing
smooth and sharp textures to startling
effect. Spider (2003) is one of my favorites:
large steel spider legs impale a small pink
fabric female figure.
MB: The video sculpture Slow As is different in tone from a contemplative installation like The Levitating Quality of Light or
a disquieting one like Haptic Wake. While
clearly concerned with transience, Slow
As seems to be a quirky commentary on
video historyShigeko Kubotas Duchampiana: Bicycle Wheel series from the early
1980s, or Frank Gillettes Track Trace (1973),
although that was a live feed/tape delay
piece.
CM: Those particular works are new to
me, but some histories get handed down
through sculptural vocabulary, whether
you know them or not. What I was thinking
about in Slow As was that the dog sled
is another mobile home structure. Like an
ice shanty, it travels on runners, supports
life, and serves as a container for the body.
Vermont is a horse and sleigh state, so I
borrowed an old-fashioned wooden dog
sled lashed with sinew and animal hide
from a musher in Leadville, Colorado. I
removed the brake and footboard and put
four portable television sets on a step that
I built into the basket, which is normally
used for carrying equipment, and two on
the back. That bicycle wheels of various
sizes rather than dogs pull the sled makes
the whole thing more whimsical.
Two looped DVDs running at four slowmotion speeds on the TV sets show imagery
in which I am contorting my face and
thrashing back and forth while reading
from Michael Martinezs poem Heredities
(2007). In lines such as as light/shaped
by trajectory/wind settles in the body,
the body becomes a container, which fit
my overall theme. My image is contained
within the monitors, and my performance
Right, top and bottom: Haptic Wake, 2007. Wooden
chicken coop, 35-mm slide projections of trees,
and plaster cast fish, 2 views of installation.
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MATTHEW WEEDMAN, COURTESY THE ARTIST
Slow As, 2008. Video, wooden dog sled, 6 portable video monitors, 6 bicycle wheels, and rope, 16 x 4 ft.
CM: Haptic Wake explored the bodys relationship to indoor and outdoor space within the
confines of the gallery. The chicken coop was the size of a twin bed. It was empty except
for a naked 150-watt bulb emitting streams of light through slats in the wood onto the surrounding walls and floor and an audio component consisting of banging and wrestling
sounds. A still-frame animation of me wriggling upside down from a chain fall hoist and
regurgitating lace appeared on the muslin screen stretched across the gantry. The slide
projections of trees reinforced the theme of inversion. The 130 fish heads on metal stands
were arranged in a way that encouraged visitors to move in a figure-eight pattern between
the coop and the gantry, alternately corralled by and creating a wake through the swarming fish. Most people were drawn immediately to the video, and then walked elsewhere, as
if unable to remain within that constricted space for too long. One man told me that he
became acutely aware not only of his own process of experiencing the work, but also of
others as they went through the same thing, becoming sensitive to precisely how, and
why, they were moving through the installation and feeling both intrigued and uneasy. I
felt similarly while walking through Richard Serras Torqued Ellipses (1998), so it pleased
me that visitors were so attuned to the spatial and emotional dynamics of Haptic Wake.
While my parents were building their permanent house we lived in a small mobile home
on our property. I used to hide in our two chicken coops, turning them into private sanctuaries. When I created Haptic Wake, I was thinking about how houses are transitory structures. In The Poetics of Space (1958), Bachelard calls the house an artificial paradise that
provides protective enclosure, especially in winter. In Haptic Wake, you couldnt enter the
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house, which was slightly askew and inhabited primarily by ominous sounds. There
was a longing for, but absence of, soothing enclosure, which was heightened by my
vulnerability in the video. That I am throwing up lace is another way to de-idealize
and reject a material associated with traditional femininity, and yet witnessing
an image of a struggling woman can be
disconcerting.
MB: This part of the installation reminds
me of 19th- and early 20th-century spirit
photographs of female mediums exuding
ectoplasm from their mouths and navels.
Those images are also provocatively disconcerting. What are you working on now?
CM: At the Vermont Studio Center, I am
working on two new installations. For the
first, I will construct a series of mechanical toy horses, cast from plastic and fitted
with taxidermy coyote teeth and tongues.
They will have long, sweeping tails and
manes and be mounted on pipes installed
at different heights. Each horse will spin
freely, set in motion by an exterior kinetic
element, maybe large industrial fans, which
will provide a natural sound.
The second installation is loosely derived
from Miranda Julys short story The Swim
Team (2008). I rarely take inspiration from
fiction, but this story was so visual that it
left a lasting impression. In it, a woman
describes her experience as the coach of a
group of octogenarians in a landlocked city
without swimming pools. She teaches them
to swim by having them dive off desks onto
her bed. They practice strokes on her floor,
blowing bubbles into bowls of water. After
reading the story, I began drawing groups
of dressers topped by diving boards, surrounded by battery-powered Coleman lanterns. At the base of each diving board will
be a wheelbarrow, onto which shadows of
human bodies will be projected. A wheelbarrow is another mobile structure, and
a tool for human labor. Used to transport
materials, the wheelbarrow is a container,
as is the human body, and the body is
a material that carries burdens and emotional baggage. Everything I make returns
to this theme.
Melinda Barlow is an Associate Professor
at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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BY POLLY ULLRICH
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Malia Jensen has emerged from a generation

of younger sculptors who express content
through a language of hybrid objects, rather
than continuing last centurys aesthetic
exploration of art about art. Her recent
exhibition Conjunctions, at the Richard
Gray Gallery in Chicago, forged adroit combinations of materials and meanings to
fabricate sculpture of physical, conceptual,
and metaphorical depth. Wildness and
domesticity, reality and myth, humor
and melancholy, jeopardy and sanctuary,
clarity and obscurity, impropriety and elegance, mischief and tragedy, the unnerving
and the darling, the conceptual and the
handmadeall intermingle slyly and at
many levels in Jensens sculpture, which
embodies contradiction. The tension
between opposing elements causes a temporary short circuit in meanings, creating
what she calls a third thing, a new, often
unnerving reality.1
Seal + Penguin 4 Ever (2008) offers
a good example of her tongue-in-cheek
approach to coupling disparate parts for
conceptual purposes. At one level, Seal is
an outr representation of the hegemony
currently enjoyed by unusual materials in
sculpture: a polyester resin seal covered
in shiny auto body paint (symbolizing the
contemporary) straddles a penguin in
patinated bronze (representing the traditional). The work is based on a bizarre
story recently reported on the BBC: two
wildly different animals, a seal and a penguin, were seen mating. Seals blend
of impropriety and absurdity epitomizes
Jensens delight in transgression, even as
it offers up her sarcastic anger at discordant and inappropriate human dominance
over the natural world, a recurring theme
in her work.
This is sculpture that periodically skirts
an unsavory edge as it cheerfully dismantles the longstanding Western penchant
for thinking about the world in binary
termsmental/manual, intellect/body,
culture/nature, good/bad. The work represents an unmannerly critique of enduring
17th-century philosophical premises represented by Descartess I think, therefore

I am, where the act of thinkingnot
feelingassures us of our existence and
splits the world into a superior mental
sphere of intellectual activity and a lowly
body trapped in its material nature. This
mindset has historically tainted the aesthetic status of sculpture, located as it is
in the three-dimensional, everyday world
of dumb objects.
But Jensen unifies the ways in which we
take meaning from the world: her sculpture
allows technical virtuosity and materials
to mingle equally with abstract metaphor
and linguistic play to achieve an ironic
punch. These aesthetic works echo the
cultural theorist Bill Browns call for a
comparatively new idiom, beginning with
the effort to think with or through the

physical object worldto establish a genuine sense of the things that comprise the
stage on which human action, including
the action of thought, unfolds.2 Jensen
calls her sculptures thinking tools,
adding: I think in objects, so Im interested
in a very clear language of things. Linguistically, Im interested in how ideas exist
without a language. Objects exist without
a language. Im interested in ideas that
come in through the gut, the intuition
that then rises up to the brain.
Not surprisingly, much of Jensens sculpture focuses on just what the Cartesian
cogito attempts to cast outthe animal in all of us. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, humans were given sovereignty
over the animal world. Yet, antithetically,
Opposite: Seal + Penguin 4 Ever, 2008. Patinated

bronze, polyester resin, acrylic urethane, and cat
whiskers, 20 x 42 x 67 in. Right: Bathing Skunk, 2000
08. Cast soap and microcrystalline wax, 13 x 8 x 16 in.
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En Plein Air, 2000. Urethane resin and acrylic

urethane, 6 x 9 x 13 in.
even as humans have parsed what is animal to define the human, so we have
from ancient times drawn on animal qualities of power and the supernatural to
expand our own identities. Just as Claude
Levi-Strausss epigram animals are good
to think with destabilized the boundaries
between humans and animals (they teach
us how to sharpen our perceptions), so
Jensens use of animal subjects to describe
psychological plight violates longstanding
assumptions about the superiority of
human acumen.3 Her anthropomorphic
Bathing Skunk (200008), for example,
embodies the essence of what it feels like
(for a human, presumably) to be in a quandary: its the image of a happily odorous
skunk who, disconcertedly, finds its body
cast from pristine soap and wax.
Although Jensen has lived in Brooklyn
for six years, she grew up in the Portland,
Oregon, area, spending most of her time
roaming the forests and woods. She graduated from the Pacific Northwest College
of Art in 1989 and maintains strong connections with the region and its aesthetic
traditions: a recent exhibition at the
Elizabeth Leach Gallery and the installation of an outdoor bronze sculpture titled
Pile (2009) in downtown Portland continued her dryly articulated themes of sharp
sedition.
Images of nature and animals form an

artistic foundation in the Pacific Northwest, which draws on traditional Native
American iconography and the mid-20thcentury Northwest School of painting. But
Jensens work goes further. Her animals
allow her to actualize and intensify the
sense of strangeness and familiarity, the
autonomy and otherness, that the material
world presents to humans. Dark Horse
(2008), the speculative image of a house-
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cat-sized prehistoric horse called an eohippus, is a powerful representation of opacity

and otherness.
It is significant that Jensen does not
operate within the aesthetic milieu of Rosalind Krausss Sculpture in the Expanded
Field (1979), which famously heralded the
advent of installation art. Instead, Jensens
sculpture inhabits a discretenot dispersedspace, offering a physically condensed, one-on-one intimacy of modest
Dark Horse, 2008. Polyurethane resin, 16 x 22 x 5 in.
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Above: Jam, 2008. Patinated bronze and cast cotton paper, 22 x 18 x 21 in. Right: Debark, 2008. Patinated
bronze, cast cotton paper, and watercolor, 75 x 11 x 21 in.
scale. She calls it, anti-stadium art, not

spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Jensen seeks to make smaller connections.
Its more interesting if it feels accessible.
I want the audience of one person, as
opposed to making art for a roomful of
people.
The sense of the uncanny in Jensens
sculpturewhich includes much more than
animal imageryalso sharpens its intimacy
and deftly delivered mischief. She has
called her work Northwest Noir, a semijocular description circulating among
Pacific Northwest residents, who often
blame the rainy weather for their brooding,
off-kilter cultural sensibility. Frequently,
Jensens sculptures work like visual jokes,
amplified by a stand-up demeanoruninflected and straightforward, delivering
a secondary bite after the initial chuckle.
Chopping Pillow (with nails) (200708), for
example, hand-carved from a restaurant
chopping block, serves up a funny and
alarming meditation on our assumptions
about places of safetysuch as beds. The
gorgeously waxed, nailed surface forms a
smoothly elegant location for nightmares:
you might lose your head if you sleep on it.
As in all of Jensens work, Pillows loving
workmanship and refined details seduce
viewers into close quarters, where they
find ambiguity and contradiction. Much
of what I do is a complicated obfuscation, she says.
This, indeed, is how Jensen leaves it:

stilled poise and material presence run up
against, and yet strengthen, the linguistic
drive of her sculptures. Debark (2008), a
cast paper bundle slung over a 100-pound
bronze staff, embodies a longing for departure, for escape. But the staff is ponderous,
the bundle pitifully tenuous, and, as Jensen
implies, there is ultimately no place to go.
This is the terror, writes the anthropologist Ernest Becker, to have emerged from
nothing, to have a name, consciousness of
self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating
inner yearnings for life and self-expressionand with all this yet to die.4 Jensen
lays down a new set of 21st-century conditions for how humans define themselves
within the progression of earthly events.
These eccentric, witty works suggest
that acknowledging the animal means
acknowledging the inevitable, that is,
coming to terms with the inescapable
connection linking the creaturely, the
human, and a perishing material world.
Polly Ullrich is an art critic based in
Chicago.
Notes
1 All quotations from the artist are taken from telephone and e-mail conversations with the author. Jensens solo show at Richard Gray in New York runs from
September 28 through October 30.
2 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 3.
3 Andreas Roepstorff, Thinking with Animals, Sign Systems Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2001, p. 204.
4 Ernest Becker, quoted in Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996), p. 15.
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Physical States of Being

Carole Feuerman
A Conversation with
ELLEN PAGE WILSON
BY EDWARD RUBIN
Opposite: Grande Catalina, 2007. Oil and

aqua resin, 62 x 38 x 17 in. Above: Cocoon,
1986. Marble, 36 x 32 x 18 in.
Carole Feuerman has been working and exhibiting at full speed ahead
for four decades. Over the last 10 years, with the growth of international
biennials and art fairs, her international reputation has grown by leaps
and bounds. Recently she had a double coup: her hyper-realistic Survival of Serena won first prize at the 2008 Beijing Biennale, and Olympic
Swimmer was one of 10 works selected from hundreds of entries to
represent the Beijing Olympics in the permanent collection of the new
Beijing Museum of Modern Art. Taking cues from Feuermans foreign
successesamong critics and public alikeAmerican galleries, museums,
and sculpture parks appear to be waking up to her work. The Southern
Alleghenies Museum of Art in Loretto, Pennsylvania, gave Feuerman
her first retrospective in 2001. Last year, the Amarillo Museum of Art
followed with a second. In 2010, the El Paso Museum of Art is giving
Feuerman her third retrospective, the largest to date. The museum will
show 55 plaster, resin, marble, and bronze sculptures in River of Life,
which is also scheduled to travel to Mexico, Spain, and China. This fall,
Feuerman is having a solo exhibition at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New
York. With studios in Florence and New York, she plans to exhibit two
monumental sculptures at the Piazza della Signoria in front of the
Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. As the first contemporary (and female)
sculptor to exhibit there, Feuerman will be achieving yet another
double coup.
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Edward Rubin: When did you first realize

that you wanted to dedicate yourself to art?
Carole Feuerman: As a child growing up
in upstate New York and Hollis Hills,
Queens, I knew that I wanted to pursue
art as a career. When I was five, I helped
my grandfather design and build our home
by spray-painting an outline of each room
on the lawn. In fifth grade, my teacher
asked me to give weekly drawing lessons
to my class. In high school, I sold my first
painting to neighbors, who paid me $300.
I guess you could say that officially made
me a professional. I then went on to
study art at Temple University and SVA.
ER: You started out as an illustrator. How
did you segue from the commercial sector
into the so-called fine art world?
CF: I always planned to be an artist, not
a commercial illustrator. I wanted to create
art that could interact with the viewer on
a very personal level. Gradually, my illustrations became more three-dimensional
and largersome of them were six feet
tall. I also began combining two and three
dimensions. For instance, in Self Portrait
(1973), I included sculptural legs and platform shoes beneath my painted portrait;
Gloria, a painting I made for Gloria Steinem
in the same year, also has three-dimensional elements.
ER: You said that you studied drawing,
painting, photography, printmaking, and
art history, but never sculpture. How did
you learn to do what you do?
CF: I wanted to work in resins, but I didnt
know how. I went to some mannequin
companies and asked if I could work for
nothing and learn how to lay up resin. They
said no. I was buying my resin at Canal
Plastics in those days, and they offered to
explain how to use the materials if I came
at 7 a.m. before the store opened. I also
had a friend, a realist sculptor named Ben
Bianchi, who worked with resins and molds.
He posed for Duane Hanson as the artist.
He gave me lessons. After Bianchi taught
me how to cast, I made my first sculptures,
the erotic series. Panda, my very first erotic
piece, was a little bit of my hip, a very tiny
fragment with two male fingers on it.
I did 13 erotic sculptures, all realistically
painted. In each one, I used fragments
taken from two people. I showed the series
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Above: Employee Shower, 2008. Painted bronze, cedar shower, and mixed media, life-size. Below:
Summer, 2009. Oil and resin, life-size.
in my first gallery exhibition, Rated X (1978), in Fort Worth, Texas. When I flew
down for the opening, the gallery owner told me that Fort Worth was in the Bible Belt,
so they couldnt keep the show up. Three years later, Malcolm Forbes bought
all 13 sculptures at my second solo show at the Hanson Gallery in New York. He spied
them in the back room of the gallery. He also bought my first swimmer, Snorkel.
ER: Your most popular works are your hyper-realistic sculptures. Is it difficult to work
like this in the current contemporary art environment?
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BOTTOM: ELLEN PAGE WILSON
sculpture
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ELLEN PAGE WILSON
Madonna, 2002. Bronze, 31 x 16 x 5 in.
CF: Physicality is a huge part of my work. The hyper-realistic style

creates the physicality for which my sculptures are known. The
realism stems from my desire to portray real emotions and physical states of beingfrom peaceful serenity to energy, from equilibrium to vigor. I make my sculptures about people who are comfortable in their own skina sound mind in a sound body, in other
words. This is one of the defining aspects of my realistic style. Forty
years ago, showing healthy, intelligent women was a radical departure in contemporary art. Now it is a widely accepted ideal, yet
most contemporary artists dont explore itat least not in figurative art.
ER: You are best known for your sculptures of female bathers and
swimmers and your technique of creating hyper-realistic water
droplets that cling to their bodies. Survival of Serena (2007) shows
a young girl resting languorously in an inner tube. In Catalina
(2007)for which you won an award from the city of Florence
we see a scantily clad woman emerging from the water. And
Employee Shower (2008), your permanent installation at Grounds
For Sculpture, features a young woman taking a shower. How
did water become such an important aspect of your work?
CF: Water can be very calming and peaceful, which goes well with
the tone I desire for my work. I play with the idea that ordinary
activitieslike cleansing or swimmingcan put an individual in
touch with deeper sentiments. The water droplets help to create
a very physical presence in my sculptures. Our bodies are made
up mostly of water. It is crucial for lifethe earth could not sustain itself without water. Water connects all of us through this
universal necessity. It has spiritual qualities. My poured-bronze
works are also related to the theme of water and flowing liquid.
The process that I use to make these liquid metal pieces, like Zeus
and Hera, which is also at Grounds For Sculpture, has been called
painting with fire.
ER: What role does sexuality play in your work?
CF: I believe that my figurative sculptures represent an awareness
of inner self. I think that this is a very sensual thing. This is apparent in my nude female figures, like Employee Shower. Sensuality
dresses the womans outer form, but there is a deeper, underlying
emotional aspect to the work. The fantasy occurs not only in the
creation of the sculpture, but also in the viewers mind. As viewers look at the figures, they develop their own back stories about
what they see. A lot of this stems from the voyeuristic aspect of
catching the subject in the middle of a private or sensual moment.
ER: After decades of working in wax, plaster, resin, and marble,
what made you start working in bronze?
CF: I liked the idea of working with liquid materials. Bronze is
similar to resin, in that it is a liquid that turns to a solid when
you pour it. I was searching for another material to use, and the
organic aspect of pouring the metal appealed to me. I started
working in bronze when I turned 50 and turned a corner in my
life. I had to search for a foundry that would let me work with
the metals myself. I wanted to melt them and pour them above
ground, not in a ceramic shop. My first four bronzesall female
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Above: Survival of Serena, 2007. Aqua resin and patina, 38 x 84 x 32 in.

Left: Balance, 2008. Oil and resin, 36 x 32 x 18 in.
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BOTTOM: ELLEN PAGE WILSON
goddesses (1999)were named for the four elements: earth, air,

water, and fire.
ER: Tell me about your technique.
CF: I create my poured bronzes by free-pouring, dripping, and
layering bronze and other molten metals into sand molds. This is
an incredibly sensory process, with an exciting and mysterious
effect. One thing I love about sand casting is that I maintain con-
trol and involvement through the entire process. In traditional

lost wax casting, the artist only creates the maquette, which
goes to a foundry where they finish the process. In sand casting,
I maintain contact with the sculpture throughout. I pour the
metals. I determine exactly how each unique sculpture will
come out. Although pouring materials into a mold is the technique I used in my earliest resin sculptures, the freedom to pour
several molten metals of various colors at one time allows for
gestural possibilities that produce layered surface characteristics.
ER: How much time does it take to make one piece?
CF: Each piece, whether resin or bronze, is different and evolves
at its own rate over timea piece may be completed within three
months or take up to two years. Because of scale, intricacy, and
concept, the progress of some pieces has spanned over a decade.
ER: Are your sculptures created using models?
CF: My figures, whether male or female, are never the result of
one simple direct life cast. Often, I combine castings of different
models and parts, such as hands and feet, which may require
hand-sculpting from imagination. Each part receives special attention as an integral element in the sculptures story. The work
always starts in my minds eye and revolves around a theme.
I choose models who are able to pose for those gestures that
express the feelings and messages that I want to communicate.
The emotion and willingness can come across in the casting of
the live models. I do not always directly cast from live models,
though; sometimes I observe a posing model while sculpting
with clay or plaster.
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ER: In the past few years, you have been

revisiting your hyper-realistic resin works
from the 80s and re-creating them in
larger-than-life versions. What brought
about this change in scale?
CF: It was all about location. I created my
first two monumental sculptures in 2006
for an exhibition at the Paradiso Caf, just
outside the gates of the Giardini della
Biennale in Venice. With so many things
vying for attention, I wanted to catch the
eye of visitors. I knew that a figure presented at an unfamiliar proportion would
invite a moment of disbelief and force the
viewer to step outside the comfortable
boundaries of reality. It was a success.
Grande Catalina and Survival of Serena
became popular photo-ops. People lined
up to have their pictures taken with them.
ER: Your Amarillo Museum of Art retrospective, curated by director Graziella
Marchicelli, was quite an eye-opener. Along
with your fun-loving swimmers, bathers,
ballet dancers, and classical bronze sculptures, you included a number of darker,
psychological works. This was quite a
surprise. Are these works autobiographical?
CF: Those 14 sculptures, which I did in
2006, were inspired by memories of my
life, and they express my views about
the world as I see it. They speak about
cover-ups, not being heard, womens
rights, childrens rights, sexuality, womens
growth, and being forced to do things
that one does not want to do. Her Party
draws from bits of my childhood and adult
life. When I was young, I was never
allowed in our living room except when
we had company. My mother covered all
the upholstered furniture in plastic, and
we were never allowed to sit on it. When
my brother and I were grown and my
mother moved away, we disposed of the
furniture and realized that the silk had
disintegrated beneath the plastic. I brought
one of the silk benches to my studio. At
this point, having matured and survived
breast cancer, I decided to take life as a
blessing. I wanted to celebrate my good
fortune, so I sat down on this plastic-covered bench, and it didnt matter that I
couldnt sit on the fabric. Her Party makes
a statement about toasting life and the
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Her Party, 2006. Resin, mixed media, glass, and paint, 60 x 50 x 42 in.
simple things that we all take for granted. Its about being in the moment and enjoying
all that you have.
ER: What do you see on your horizon?
CF: Id love to get more pieces in public locations, but it is really hard to get started
in public art in this country. It has been easier for me in Italy. Next year, I am going
to show my largest works to date in the Piazza Signoria in Florence, where the copy
of Michelangelos David is located. I am using a type of urethane that is good for outdoors. One sculpture will be a fragmented, 12-foot-tall, young girl blowing bubbles. In
August 2010, River of Life will open at the El Paso Museum of Art. I plan on taking my
water theme to another level with projections of water, fire, air, and earth over and
around my sculptures. I love the idea of immersing the viewer in a total theatrical experience. That is the direction that I am heading towardcreating whole new worlds.
Edward Rubin is a writer living in New York.
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Relay, 2008. Detail of mixed-media

installation.
Nina Levitt
RE-PRESENTING
ENIGMATIC WOMEN
BY MARGARET RODGERS
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Camp X Radio, 2008. UV inkjet print on canvas,

108 x 188 in.
Inspired by the heroic women who worked

in intelligence during the Second World
War, Nina Levitt has produced a trilogy of
related works, beginning with Little Breeze
(200204), an installation based on Camp
X, a secret wartime facility for training
intelligence officers in Oshawa, Ontario.
From this work, she has expanded her project into two related, but distinct installations, Thin Air (Koffler Centre, 2008) and
Relay (Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2008).
A Quonset hut, some suitcases, simulated
transmission towers, and a parachute all
signify time and place, calling up memory
and emotion, which become amplified by
an onslaught of facts coaxed from recalcitrant archival material, written accounts,
and the memories of participants. Through
research and artistry, Levitt presents a
narrative that gives voice to women who
have either been mythologized or completely overlooked in accounts of WWII
intelligence operations.
Relay sheds light on Hydra, a manyheaded transmitting antenna that communicated coded information between Rockefeller Center, Camp X, and Bletchley Park
in England. A monumental steel tower
immediately confronted visitors at the
RMG entrance, reaching to the atrium skylight and implicitly beyond. The Arthur Erikson-designed building played a key role in
Levitts installation, blurring distinctions
between art and architecture. Continuing

within, more towers and a Quonset hut
dominated the spaces. One wall held a
canvas enlargement of the panel from a
Camp X radio, its worn knobs and well-aged
surface offering mute testimony to many
messages sent and received. Tuning knobs
and jacks show their age, the meter glass
clouded over like elderly eyes and the old
1940s RCA logo an earmark for time and
place. Scattered about were vintage suitcases containing electronic devices that
activated various audio and visual components. Latched and leather-bound, these
evocative time capsules were mustily redolent of old movies and years spent in attics
and basements.
In Levitts installations, viewers become
agents, picking up the cases in order to
activate transmissions that vary in each
instalment. Little Breeze focuses on Violette
Szabo, code-named Louise; the title plays
on Maurice Chevalier singing every little
breeze seems to whisper Louise. Lifting
the lid of a suitcase initiates the projection of a clip from a postwar film about
Szabo, her face dissolving into the features of other female spies. In Thin Air,
audio clips from an interview with Vera
Atkins are emitted. In Relay, visitors open
the cases, expose their inner mechanisms
to light, and in so doing, send messages
into another gallery space, where, in cryptic telegraph style, a ribbon of text streams
across a slide projection showing images
of women doing war work. In stark contrast to the still images, the band of telegraph text slowly moves across the screen,
telling the fate of one woman. Levitt
has deliberately slowed down the moving
image in order to mimic the action of an
Quonset Hut (for Vera Atkins), 2008. Galvanized aluminum, Plexiglas door, 3 video projectors, 8 vintage
suitcases with custom-built electronics, and computer running MAX/MSP and videos, 17 x 10 x 8 ft.
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Relay, 2008. Detail of mixed-media installation at

Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario.
actual telegraph and to emphasize the

gravity of the message.
The narrative is heart-wrenching. Viewers
learn that Vera Leigh, a courier in France,
was arrested in a Paris caf, interrogated,
tortured, and killed by injection; that Diana
Rowden delivered messages by bike in
France, was betrayed by a double agent,
and killed by injection at the Natzweiler
concentration camp in July 1944. She was
29. Another woman was executed by firing
squad at age 30. By the end of the exhibition, some of the valises are silent, their
inner workings exhausted, batteries dead,
mute, and ironically imitating some of
the stories that Levitt worked so hard to

unearth.
Levitts research included e-mailing with
former Bletchley Park radio operator David
White. Their correspondence appears on
wall-mounted panels, providing a firsthand
account of Whites work in England where
he received messages from the Oshawa
relay. Filtered through decades of memory,
he recalls that no women worked at Camp
X. Other sources contradict this information.1
The beeping codes and tower lights in
Relay are eerily resonant. While the towers are handsome as sculptural entities,
they are also intensely stimulating mnemonics for channeling their perilous times and
for evoking Hydra, the famous wartime
transmission system. Like the Quonset hut
and the suitcases, they are not totally
accessible to viewers. Merging with the
architecture, they exist, by implication,
beyond ones gaze, standing in for secrets
sent and received, for effort and power.
Exhibited as part of both Thin Air and
Relay, the Quonset hut becomes a giant
light box. Its Plexiglas doorway is a screen
emitting signals activated by the suitcases
and video projections relating to Levitts
explorations. Thin Air uses sequences from
a 1946 RAF film, while in Relay, the hut
provides a surface for the projection of the
1941 Women and Children at War: WRNS,
from the Imperial War Museum, London,
as well as Morse code audio and wave form
video.
Thin Air centers around two Jewish
women working for British military intelligence and involved in parachuting into
enemy territory. Hungarian-born Hannah
Senesh, who was arrested, tortured, and
executed after infiltrating occupied Hungary, is represented by excerpts from her
Below, left and right: Parachute (for Hannah
Senesh), 2008. Nylon, vinyl, fans, and motion
sensor, 24 ft. diameter.
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own writing, and Vera Atkins, through

audio interviews. The latter, thought to
be the model for Ian Flemings Moneypenny, was responsible for all operatives
sent into Occupied Europe; after the war,
she worked on finding out the fates of
agents such as Andre Borrel, the first
woman to parachute into France. Thin Air
includes a room-filling 24-foot parachute,
which expands and collapses periodically.
RMGs glass atrium ceiling made it an
appropriate location for the first part of
Relay. Throughout the trilogy, Levitt exposes
a lack of acknowledgement and minimization of the work done by women in WWII.
David White says that women were considered to be better at concentrating for long
hours than men and therefore more suited
to be radio intercept officers, a reminder
of systemic attitudes toward female work
and workers.2 Feminist theorists point out
that in the past, women were taught
needlework in the interests of developing
patience.3 Apparently it paid off.
In Levitts work, sculpture, photography,
video, sound, and interactive electronics
are deployments of a compelling narrative
in which visual impact is equal to its subject. [N]arratives overruling power is a
pertinent consideration for this contentheavy work.4 WWII is a collective cultural
trauma, and Levitts objects resonate in
both public and private terms. The stories
are poignant, riveting, and, in their eloquence, in danger of overriding the artistic voice. Levitt successfully balances this
inherent narrative strength through scale,
particularly in the implicit enormity of the
steel structures in Relay, but also in the
parachute, Quonset hut, and radio enlargement. Her first installation, Little Breeze,
which relied heavily on the workings of the
suitcases and their relationship to a Hollywood movie about spies, can be regarded
as a seed piece for the enormous range
achieved in the two later works.
Levitts art amplifies the facts, opening
a way into a visceral, experiential under-
Radio Tower 1, 2008. Steel, lights, and relay

electronics, 34.1 x 9 x 9 ft.
standing of the well-researched content.

Paradoxically, the viewer is both diminished
by the breadth and scale of the works and
empowered as activating agent. In emphasizing personal experience, Levitt successfully creates a suggestive narrative
rather than a historical document. And by
including viewers as agents, she incorporates a potent dynamic. Each piece resonates with associations. The suitcases,
while not fragments of a personal narrative, cannot be assumed to be neutral
objects. By opening them, visitors become
involved at a personal level beyond the
dazzle of innovative technology: the click
and lift of the latches, the slightly clandestine act of seeing whats inside, a memory
of similar suitcases, of long-ago vacations
or visitors, the smellmusty, maybe a
hint of old cologneand instead of pajamas and a bathing suit, electronic devices.
Levitt not only calls up wartime intelligence
information, but also establishes a sense of
authenticity, an illusion of knowing from
one time into another, and for some, a reality remembered, a relay from the past.
Recently Levitt mounted Headlines, a
storefront window installation that reflects
on trash journalism and its obsession with
sexuality.5 Thematically consistent with
her work on wartime agents, this installation re-presents another kind of female
representation. In describing her work,
Levitt states that for the past 22 years,
my art practice has addressed the ways
women have been imaged and imagined
in popular culture. My art production often
involves the recovery and manipulation of
existing images and textsI have created
work that resurrected lesbian pulp novel
covers (the late 1980s), that used excerpts
of television broadcasts and feature films
for installations about women and space
(the mid-1990s), and that integrated archival documents and feature films on female
spies (200108). These wide-ranging

investigations examine the function of
codes within images, language, social
conventions, and other cultural signifiers
in relation to womens experiences and
popular culture.6 Moving through
research material and into the realm of
popular culture as it exists today, Levitt
leaves a substantial body of work in her
wake, and much anticipation for what
will emerge next.
Margaret Rodgers is a writer, artist, curator, and educator in Oshawa, Ontario.
Notes
Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988). See also Judy Chicago and Lucy Lippard.
1 Linda Jansma, Stories in the Shadows, in Nina Levitt/And She Was: Installations Inspired by Women in WWII,
4 Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois Spider: the architecture of art-writing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
exhibition catalogue, (Toronto and Oshawa: Koffler Centre and RMG, 2008), p. 20.
Press, 2001), p. 10.
2 Quoted in Jansma, op. cit., p. 25.
5 The work was installed at Convenience, 24/7 window gallery in Toronto, <www.conveniencegallery.com>.
3 For example, Jane Aaron, On Needlework: Protest and Contradiction in Mary Lambs Essay, in Romanticism and
6 Nina Levitt, e-mail July 11, 2009.
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Random
Observations
Regarding
Futurist
Sculpture
BY FRED LICHT
Futurism is 100 years old this year, yet there is barely a sign of the rambunctious movement having mellowed with age. Exhibitions in
Paris, Milan, Venice, and London celebrating the centenary have only added to the many open questions that still remain to be answered.
The following is but a preamble to a hoped-for, and long-overdue, re-examination of Futurist sculpture. I have focused on only three
of Umberto Boccionis sculptures and added for good measure some random observations regarding Giacomo Balla and Fortunato
Depero as sculptors.
The historical importance of Futurism, especially of Futurist painting, is assured. Yet of the many artistic movements from the astonishingly fertile period between 1900 and 1914, only Futurism retains much of its original energy and remains as fascinating, and irritating,
today as it was in the days of its birth and triumph. We understand and admire Fauvism, Cubism, and the various branches of
Expressionism as successfully concluded styles with a well-charted position in the history of Modernism. Futurism, on the contrary, strikes
us as an intriguingly unfinished story and continues to bother us in the 21st century not only because of its achievement (not nearly as
significant as that of Cubism), but also because of its unresolved contradictions, its weaknesses, and, above all, its ability to speak to both
an art-loving elite and the entire range of contemporary society.
The reckless nature of Futurist enthusiasm was so great that it overrode logic, decorum, and common sense. The artists willingness to
take risks, to leave questions open-ended, is perhaps more clearly evident in sculpture than it is in painting. The best Futurist paintings are
faits accomplis. They stand before us as fully matured images, admirably accomplished expressions of the artists intent, and we are free
to enjoy or ignore them, make them our own or reject them. Futurist sculpture is far more enigmatic, surrounded as it is by any number of unresolved questions that challenge us to find answers. Perhaps it is also in the
field of sculpture that the aims of Futurism reach their apex. Painting is always a
Above: Giacomo Balla, Sculptural Construction
two-dimensional abstraction, immediately perceived as an artifice that exists apart
of Noise and Speed, 191415. Aluminum and steel
from the three-dimensional world. Sculpture interpenetrates far more directly with
on painted wood, 40.13 x 46.5 x 7.9 in. Opposite:
palpable human realities, and it is precisely this amalgamation of art and life that
Fortunato Depero, Campari, 1925. Wood, 65 x
forms Futurisms noblest ideal.
46 x 27 cm.
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Above: Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity

in Space, 1913. Plaster, 116 x 86.7 x 39.8 cm. Below:
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. Bronze.
There is a basic contradiction that bedevils Futurism and the art of sculpture. In
spite of the daring and frequently successful attempts apparent across Europe from
1900 through 1930 to dematerialize and
destabilize sculpture (e.g., Duchamps
Large Glass, Bellings motorized sculptures,
Archipenkos jointed wood sculptures,
Calders wire works, Severinis articulated
cutouts, and Gabos celluloid works), the
traditional characteristics of sculpturestability, density, massive displacement of
spacepredominate in mainstream pre-
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World War II sculpture (Matisse, Maillol, Picasso, Brancusi, and Gonzlez). Futurisms
ambition to abolish the fundamentals of European sculpture, exhilarating as it was, was
never realized. The sculptural masterpieces created by Boccioni, Balla, and Depero open a
new direction and achieve a greatness of their own, but they never negate the essentials
of traditional sculpture. In some ways, Medardo Rosso was more successful in this respect.
Rosso, the only predecessor openly admired by the Futurists (who had an almost manic
desire to present themselves as uniquely independent of all preceding art), didnt quite
realize all of his ambitions either. Yet he did produce a number of works that are fully persuasive of daringly advanced, contemporary perceptions, including the fragmentary and
fugitive nature of vision, the negation of gravity, the interpenetration of mass and space,
a pars pro toto presentation of palpable or imagined forms, the direct involvement of the
viewer, and an acceptance of the mutability of forms. All of Rossos proposals and conjectures became part of Futurisms theoretical baggage.1 Yet the Futurists, while inspired by
Rosso, were unwilling to relinquish the power of a finished sculptural form. This obstinate
desire to eat their cake and have it too is one of the featuresboth endearing and exasperatingof the Futurist program. They want to propagate Italys glory without admitting the
grandeur of its cultural tradition. They want to be la page, but they refuse to admit their
dependence on events in Paris ateliers. They want to extol factories, but they despise the
commercial aspects of the new industrialism. They have nothing but contempt for the
philistine bourgeoisie, yet they make every effort to woo the ever-more-powerful middle
classes by means of shock tactics.
Our lack of information about much of Futurist sculpture only adds to its mystique.
Just to begin, we do not know where Boccioni intended his sculptures to come to rest.
According to Futurist theory, sculpture was to serve higher ends than aesthetic pleasure
in homes or (horror!) museums. But where? And how?
Which brings us to the heart of the matter: every cast that we have of Boccionis sculpture is posthumous, so we really cant be sure that what we see is true to his intentions.
The model produced by a sculptor in his studio does not necessarily represent the finished
work. In Boccionis case, for instance, we have no way of knowing the final color of the
patina or degree of polish. Nor can we be sure of the dimensions in which he wanted his
model to be cast. In the case of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, these become particularly significant questions. The flame-like forms have an entirely different effect depending
on their dark or bright, burnished or matte patina. And while the plaster model is very satisfactory when seen in the ambience of a museum, it does not necessarily satisfy Boccionis,
or Futurisms, goals and ambitions. No undue effort is required to imagine Continuity on
a high pedestal out of doors, twice the size of the plaster model, a dimension that could
easily have been achieved by any decent foundry following the artists instructions.
Much the same can be said for Development of a Bottle in Space. It may strike us as
bizarre to think of a still-life arrangement of bottle and dish as a public monument, but if
one remembers Davide Camparis wish to have his grave marked by a gigantic bottle of the
famous aperitif (label and all), a monumental still-life seems a far less perverse idea. In
fact, looking at the lower part of the sculpture, one cannot help but perceive the dish as a
kind of terracing that mediates between the bottle and the ground on which it stands.
Such a reading is far more persuasive than the idea of a table; there is no sign of the table
or tabouret that supports similar Cubist still-life compositions, the obvious inspirations for
Bottle. Unlike traditional plinths, the plinth of Bottle is irregular and without an easily recognizable axis. It suggests a terraced ground far more than a rigidly defined tabletop,
a notion confirmed by its seemingly random compositional relationship to the bottle.
Because of its majestically slow rhythmic development, Bottle has all the monumentality
of a tower standing in a landscape. We, who appreciate Oldenburgs gigantic Clothespin,
need not be surprised at Boccionis Bottle possibly being a missing link between
traditional and Pop sculpture.
The ambiguity of the bottles placementon terraced ground or on a tabletopbrings
us to a problem as old as the art of sculpture itself: all sculpture, being three-dimensional
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and subject to the downward pull of gravity, must perforce have the attributes of all the
welter of objects that fill our world, yet it must simultaneously appear to belong to a distinctly higher, more significant realm. Thus, the delicate juncture between sculpture and
the surrounding world demands special attention from any artist intent on conveying a
meaning beyond physical presence. For medieval sculptors, the problem resolved itself
almost automatically. With very few exceptions, medieval sculpture is ecclesiastic. Situated
above the altar or placed on the faade or pillars of a church, it pertains to the realm of
God and is consequently of a higher order. With the Renaissance, sculpture begins to
detach itself from its architectural surroundings (Donatellos Magdalen) or derives its
meaning, at least in part, from a civic space expressive of communal values (Donatellos
Gattamelata or Michelangelos David). In some cases, sculpture is given a subordinate
architectural setting that exalts its supra-material essence (Michelangelos Medici tombs),
a strategy perfected in the Baroque period. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the
pedestal as a hinge between the real and the metaphysical worlds becomes constantly
more problematic (Rodins varied projects for the placing of his Burghers of Calais, Brancusis
creation of pedestals as sculptures) until Calder opens the way to pedestal-less sculpture.
For the Futurists, the pedestal presented special problems, because motion at high
velocity was a primary aim of their program. In at least two of Boccionis sculptures, Continuity and Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses, forward motion is expressed with
great persuasive power. In Continuity, muscles expand into surrounding space, their gradually diminishing terminal points (perhaps derived from anatomical drawings) resembling
wind-swept flames. In Horse, the staccato juxtaposition of cardboard, wood, metal, and
streaked pigment creates a breathtaking impression of the animals gallop through city
streets. Boccioni has transmitted to us not only the speed of a body in motion, but also
the strenuous resistance of the atmosphere through which that body moves. For all their
passionate exploration of motion, neither Giambologna nor Bernini ever came close to
suggesting the inevitable opposition of the air. Yet when we concentrate on the origin of
the motion that impels Continuity and Horse on their forward course, that is to say, when
we look at the base that joins sculpture to world, the effect breaks down.
Earlier sculptors faced with the same problem of describing forward motion in a stationary work anchored to a pedestal found any number of solutions, all of them minimizing
the points of contact between sculpture and base. Giambolognas Mercury barely touches
Zephyrs breath with his big toe, while the forward-stepping foot of Mochis colossal St.
Veronica is obscured by the spiral upsweep of her gown. Both artists directed all of their
ingenuity to making the point of contact between statue and base as tenuous as possi-
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ble. In comparison, it is astonishing to find

that Boccioni attaches Continuity to two
dense, immobile blocks that inhibit the figures advance. Here again, we come up
against our ignorance of his intentions. Did
he really want those ugly blocks cast in
bronze? Or are they present in the original
plaster only because Boccioni, like every
sculptor, needed to stabilize his figure while
working on it? As far as anyone can tell,
the decision of the heirs to cast the entire
plaster after Boccionis death is not based
on anything more than their pious and
laudable desire to preserve the work as
Boccioni had left it. Another consideration
that may have a played a part in their
decision is the salability of the sculpture
at its present size.
The peculiarly neglected Horse presents
a similar situation. The sculpture has every
right to be considered the most important
of Boccionis three-dimensional works, if for
no other reason than that it combines
a variety of ignoble materialsone of
Futurisms most fateful innovations. But
critics have objected to the work because of
uncertainties attached to its condition. We
are told that the sculpture was damaged,
because Marinettis daughters say that they
used it as a hobbyhorse. The anecdote is
attractive as an illustration of the offhandedness with which Marinetti treated art.
But is it true? Is there a mother so careless
as to allow her children to sit on so perilously fragile a mount? Is it plausible that
Left: Umberto Boccioni, Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912. Bronze, 15 in. high. Right: Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912. Bronze.
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children would want to play with something that is, from a childs point of view,
totally unappealing? A recent, scrupulously
careful restoration has demonstrated that
the sculpture is in much better condition
than was supposed. Considering the fact
that this is the only case in which we can
be sure of the size and color of a Boccioni
sculpture, it seems odd that Horse has
never entered the canon of early 20th-century sculpture.
What we cannot be sure of is the mode
in which Boccioni wanted it to be displayedhow he intended to insert it into
our space. Photographs of Boccionis studio
show the sculpture displayed against a wall,
and the fact that the back of the work shows
little or no elaboration reinforces the idea
that it was intended as a relief. Yet at some
point before his fatal departure for the army
in 1915, Boccioni attached a vertical stick
and a wooden base to the bottom of the
sculpture, an addition that turns the relief
into a freestanding sculpture.
Or does it? Could Boccioni have added
the stick and the base as a temporary
device to hold the sculpture steady while
he continued to work on it? In that case,
he would have removed both elements on
completion of the sculpture. A cursory
glance at Horse tells us instantly that the
vertical stick contradicts and impedes the
horses gallop from right to left, but in all
later photographs, and indeed in all but
one of its subsequent installations, it has
appeared atop its clumsy stick. The ethical
code of museums demands that all elements of a composition left behind by a
great artist be preserved. But need they be
exhibited? In a temporary exhibition focusing on Horse, stick and base were hidden
inside a specially designed pedestal, and at
last, all the fluent velocity of the sculpture
became evident.
Additional questions, though of lesser
importance, have also prevented Horse
from taking its place as the most significant
surviving example of Futurist sculpture. The
most vexing of these is the question of
color. The great piece of heavy cardboard
that constitutes part of the urban background against which the horse is seen has
a rather unsightly, dull tan cast that one
cannot help but associate with age-yellowed
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paper, and it may very well have been white or off-white when new. The wood, too, has
probably darkened to a degree that we cannot determine. Worst of all are the tiny metal
elements that Boccioni attached at the horses snout. These fragments now appear oxidized and without luster. Were they always tarnished, or were they polished to give the
sculpture a flash of light at its most forward, and dramatic, point? Whatever the answers,
Horse remains the most surprising and most fully expressed incarnation of the Futurist
concept of sculpture.
Because of the extravagance of Boccionis talent, as well as his highly charged enthusiasm, he was and still is the undisputed hero of the Futurist adventure. His best paintings
and all of his remaining sculptures are masterpieces essential to even a cursory understanding of modern art. His panache, his reckless inventiveness, his willingness to make
bold mistakesfrom which he was also willing to learn important lessonstend to put
the qualities of the other Futurists in the shade. Yet Giacomo Ballas work is of such high
quality that one feels justified in placing him ex aequo with Boccioni. Ballas work is more
carefully considered, less swashbuckling than Boccionis. He was a more scrupulous critic
of his own work than Boccioni. And his beautifully pondered compenetrations offer persuasive proof of a more intellect-based creative urge.
Boccioni, like Degas, was one of those very rare artists whose talent was closely balanced between painting and sculpture. When he deals with sculpture, he puts his experiences of painting resolutely out of mind and thinks exclusively in terms of mass, space, volume, and contour. Since perfect equilibrium in these matters is impossible, it is justifiable
to think that his talent for sculpture exceeds by a small degree his talent for painting. His
last and perhaps greatest masterpiece, Materia, may very well be the most sculptural
painting since the days of Michelangelo. With Balla, this situation is reversed, and one
Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses, 191415. Gouache, oil, wood, cardboard, copper, and coated iron, 112.9 x 115 cm.
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must keep in mind that he was first and

foremost a painter. Plane, line, and color
are his primary concerns, even when he
turns to sculpture.
Another particularly significant difference between the two artists emerges from
their attitudes toward the principles of
Futurism. Boccionis conception of velocity
is that of a forward-moving mass forcefully
displacing the surrounding air and absorbing the urban environment into its orbit.
For Balla, velocity and dynamics in general
are linear, nearly weightless, disembodied
forces. His best-known sculpture, Il pugno
di Boccioni, is emblematic of his aspirations. While the sculpture develops in
depth, it is the frontal plane that bears the
burden of the vigorous composition. Just as
different is the way that Balla discharges
the energy inherent in his composition: not
by setting mass in motion, but by a lightning-like, linear flash. Color is equally
important. For Balla, it is not a matter of
giving the surface greater visual appeal, it
is an integral part of the composition. The
mere thought of Boccionis Fist cast in
bronze is grotesque unless one thinks of
the bronze as disappearing under a coat
of rousing red paint.
Boccionis Fist may be Ballas most appreciated sculpture, but his reliefs such as
Complesso plastico colorato di frastuono +
velocit (1914) reveal his most prophetic
and revolutionary experiments.2 This
recently rediscovered sculpture not only
successfully expresses all of Futurisms
ideals, it also serves as an important
adjunct to the experiments in European
sculpture of the period. Besides using
ignoble materials (cartons and tin), it
also eliminates the traditional division
between freestanding sculpture and relief.
More daring still is the abolition of a passive ground, an essential element of earlier
relief sculpture. In Ballas Complesso plastico, there is no ground: all parts of the
sculpture participate in the energetic agitation of forward-surging forms. The space in
these non-reliefs is continuous with our
own. Whereas earlier relief sculptures automatically guaranteed aesthetic distance
by means of one-point perspective, Ballas
handling of space allows direct contact
with the world around us so that we partic-
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Left: Giacomo Balla, Lines of Speed and Forms of Noise, 191314. Chromed brass on painted metal
base, 78 x 49 x 12.5 in. Right: Giacomo Balla, Il pugno di Boccioni (Boccionis FistLines of Force II),
191617. Painted brass, 31.5 x 30 x 10 in.
ipate in the dynamics of the sculpture. While Boccionis Continuity still refers to the muscles of a human figure, Ballas relief arrives at the representation of movement as a universal phenomenon. Line and mass, geometric form, and organically fluid voids all merge
with one another in animated rhythms.
Lighthearted, but by no means frivolous, Fortunato Depero is highly appreciated in
Italy but barely known abroad. Unlike Boccioni or Balla, Depero did not create a selection of masterpieces with a place in the lineage of European art. The importance of his
work is quite different: he was the first artist to devote himself to the creation of a new
branch of what used to be called applied arts and is now known as design. Since
design has become a decisive cultural force in its own right, Deperos production has a
historic impact whose importance has not yet been measured.
It is perhaps more correct to speak of Deperos productions as objects rather than
as sculptures. His objects are born of fantasy rather than of practical considerations.
Whereas Boccioni and Balla, following Marinettis hymns to the detritus of industry, use
discarded commonplace materials, Deperos constructions and assemblages move toward
the creation of cheerful, witty industrial products in which materials become irrelevant
and disappear under bright colors. His was an attitude that rose to still greater significance
in the 1920s with the Bauhaus. In Italy, Deperos influence is strongly felt in the applied
arts of the 20s and 30s. Even after World War II, serious designers such as Bruno Munari
drew much encouragement and inspiration from Deperos work. Now, thanks to the international success of the Casa dArte Futurista Depero in Rovereto (part of the Museo di Arte
Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto), where much of Deperos best work is
on permanent view, it is likely that his contribution will be recognized on a global scale.
Fred Licht is curator emeritus of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Notes
1 In regard to theory, Rosso is without doubt the weightiest influence on Boccioni. When it comes to concrete compositional considerations, however, the
ridiculed Bistolfis extraordinary ability to dynamize mass is the sine qua non for Boccionis sculpture, just as Previoni is for his painting.
2 Complesso plastico is brilliantly analyzed by Giovanni Lista in the journal Ligeia.
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sculpture
isc
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student
awards
The International Sculpture Center
2009 Outstanding Student Achievement

In Contemporary Sculpture
Awards
The International Sculpture Center is proud to present the winners of the 2009
Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards. This years
program attracted a record number of nominees from university sculpture programs
in North America and abroad. From a pool of 441 nominees from 176 schools, the jury
selected 11 winners and 10 honorable mentions. Jurors for the program were Willie
Cole, an artist from New Jersey; David McFadden, curator of the Museum of Arts and
Design in New York; and Jeanne Jaffe, professor and chair of fine arts at the University
of the Arts in Philadelphia. This annual award was founded in 1994 to recognize
young sculptors and encourage their continued commitment to the field of sculpture,
as well as to recognize the award winners faculty sponsors and their institutions. The
Sculpture departments of universities, colleges, and art schools

with current ISC University Level
Memberships are eligible for the
program and may nominate up to
three students currently enrolled
in a sculpture program. For more
information about University
Level Membership and the 2010
nomination process, contact the
ISC Membership Department
at 609-689-1051, x301 or e-mail
<membership@sculpture.org>.
________________
To read more about the ISC
Student Awards program, visit
<www.sculpture.org>.
11 award recipients will participate in Grounds For Sculptures Fall/Winter Exhibition,

in Hamilton, New Jersey, from October 10th, 2009 through January 10th, 2010.
2009 Honorable Mentions

Adrienne Vetter, Faculty Sponsor: Michael Rodemer, University of Michigan; Ryan Brewer, Faculty Sponsor: Anthony Aziz,
Parsons The New School of Design; Carlos Rosales-Silva, Faculty Sponsor: Margo Sawyer, University of Texas, Austin;
Michael Beitz, Faculty Sponsor: Reinhard Reitzenstein, SUNY Buffalo; Samantha Medellin, Faculty Sponsor: Cory Wagner,
University of Houston; J. Neil Lawley, Faculty Sponsor: Jay Sullivan, Southern Methodist University; Reva Castillenti,
Faculty Sponsor: Wendy Wischer, Ringling College of Art and Design; Wei Zhong Tan, Faculty Sponsor: Brian Christensen,
Brigham Young University; Nina Leo, Faculty Sponsor: Reinhard Reitzenstein, SUNY Buffalo; Tracy Michele Bochniak
Kirchmann, Faculty Sponsor: Marya Roland, Western Carolina University.
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Left: Luke William Achterberg,

Relative, 2009. Painted steel, 90 x
168 in. Below: Matthew Boonstra,
Manufacturing Sympathies, 2009.
Iron chips, magnets, mannequin,
steel, motor oil, DVD projection,
and plaster, 52 x 180 x 108 in.
Luke William Achterberg
University of Kentucky
Faculty Sponsor: Garry R. Bibbs
My work explores relationships between fine art and the subcultures of hot-rodding, graffiti, and street artall of which display
extremely high craft values developed outside of academia. I identify with these values and am diligent in my attention to quality.
In accordance with the subversions of street art, I paint ceramics
in order to overturn the longstanding obligation to glaze fire. I
continually play with balance, both physical and aesthetic, creating
a visual smoothness or sleekness, what I would call Super Sleek.
Mat thew Boonstra
Michigan State University

Faculty Sponsors: James Lawton & Laura Cloud
Manufacturing Sympathies results from research and studio activities investigating the struggles of auto and industrial workers in
the current economic environment. I experimented with industrial
materials such as motor oil and steel, while exploring the physical
and psychological displacement of workers. I intend to continue
this investigation, creating works that reveal how industrial
decline negatively impacts people and how it might provide the
potential spark to rebuild relationships.
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Kandace Collins
Southern Oregon University

Faculty Sponsor: Marlene Alt
Top to bottom: Kandace Collins,

Critical Mass, 2008. Wax, 17 x 22
ft. overall. Sharon Kirby, Original
My current work responds to repression. The

mind can only be controlled for so long before
a critical moment is reached, when memory or
impulse must be released through repetitive
process in the studio. Hands pour wax obsessively,
as internal fear and anxiety become external
manifestations. Liquid becomes solid, as the
multitudes of hands fill the enclosed space of the
gallery, producing a psychological space where
viewer becomes voyeur. That which has been
ignored is now confronted.
Gray Intendo, 2007. Mixed media,

3 x 4 ft. Robert Loring, Delftware
Sharon Kirby
2009, 2009. Ceramic, dimensions
University of West Florida

Faculty Sponsor: Valerie George
variable.
A new culture has arisen from entertainment

technologythe video game culture on which
my work is based. I focus on questioning the
human relationship with video games, whether
symbiotic or parasitic. My paintings and sculptures mimic video games and their consoles,
some contemporary, others considered nostalgic
by my generation. I use found objects, spray
paints, and stencils for their immediacy, intricate
detail, and propagandist nature to make playful,
interactive, and color-saturated pieces that often
take on ominous overtones.
Robert Loring
SUNY Oswego
Faculty Sponsor: Fredrick Bartolovic
My recent work investigates the moral and ethical implications of aesthetics and how they influence us. After slip casting the shells of snapping
turtles and hermit crabs, I visually and physically
manipulate them through a series of kiln firings.
While the individual elements in Delftware 2009
resemble the traditional (and overly familiar)
mass-produced blue and white pottery, they produce new questions and meanings.
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Right: Casey Lynch, Levitas, 2008. Mixed

media, 48 x 48 x 24 in. Below: Sanford
Mirling, Brandi, Won't You?, 2008. Oak
and vinyl, 87 x 34 x 30 in.
Casey Lynch
Rhode Island School of Design

Faculty Sponsor: Ellen Driscoll
My installations and text pieces draw on various religions, sciences, and

continental philosophies. Recently I have been conflating physics with
Zen Buddhism and post-Structuralism, focusing on the invisible nonthings that we use to fill the gaps in our beliefs and theories. Formally
the work is indeterminate, offering an immediate experience and allowing for open interpretation. I continually question the idea that perception is reality. My work inquires into that which is not perceived, if and
how it affects the human condition, and what the approach toward
nothing creates in its wake.
Sanford Mirling
SUNY Albany
Faculty Sponsor: Edward Mayer
I have inherited the male gaze and embraced it. It fills me with a guilt
that I enjoy. I recontextualize flesh through the use of animal hides,
leather, and synthetics. By placing handmade furniture forms in environments of conflicting sexual tension, I expose and exorcise my need
for physicality and carnality. My work serves as a catalyst, recharging
memories degraded by repetitive use.
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Left: Ryan Schwartzkopf, I Don't Know Whether

To Kill Myself Or Go Bowling, 2008. Fabric and
mixed media, 79 x 83 x 108 in. Below and
detail: Justin Shull, Porta Hedge, 2009. Mixed
media, 240 x 48 x 72 in.
R yan Schwartzkopf
Justin Shull
Claremont Graduate University

Faculty Sponsor: David Pagel
Rutgers University
Faculty Sponsor: Gary Kuehn
I want to explore the raw basics of human existence. My inflated objects

and scrap-wood structures come with a distinct history of use to which
I add: for instance, dragging a piece around a baseball diamond where I
played as a child. My activities are difficult, enjoyable, and absurdmicrocosms of life. The structures are familiar, but also strange, and they have
a complicated relationship with the inflated forms. The bloated skins (partially
developed bodies with no real faculty of their own) are tragic and funny,
playful and pathetic, intellectually and emotionally engaging in their vulnerability.
I aim to disrupt conventional social patterns by questioning how we use

land, how we assign meaning to spaces, and how we interact within those
spaces. I have come to understand that land use, and its accompanying
social and ecological ramifications, is as much social as aesthetic, so my
work has taken on aspects of public engagement. My interactive sculptural
projects, which function as stages for performance, approach my goal of
creating art engaged in both social and aesthetic dialogue.
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Caelie Winchester
University of Oklahoma
Faculty Sponsor: Jonathan W. Hils
Life casting is my vehicle for self-exploration and expression, capturing moments in

exquisite detail and magnifying them. Life-sized, with their flaws unaltered, these objects
give a more truthful image than any photo. Creating duplicates, and manipulating their
physical interactions, generates a context and a deeper message than a single body or
pose can express alone. Using my own body as a model allows me to see beyond the
mirror, while displaying these portraits allows me to reach out to an audience without
hiding.
Rachael Wong
Alfred University
Faculty Sponsor: Brett Hunter
Communication, play, and experience form my work. I establish concepts through

process. I try to capture the shifting reality of daydreams in installation, expanding possibilities. Imagination, memory, and emotion take hold. Color occupies space; the intangible
demands physical attention. Shadow is a marker of what was, what could be, what may
come. I give it power and permanence, shifting the reality. Glass solidifies movement,
and a moment becomes embodied in the object. The work is a manifestation of experience, a physical remnant, and, therefore, not merely representation.
Left: Caelie Winchester, Totem, 2009.

Hydrostone, 8.5 ft. high. Below: Rachael
Wong, Red Effect, 2009. Mixed media,
dimensions variable (largest 9.5 in.).
61
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reviews
53rd Venice Biennale
Daniel Birnbaum, director of the 53rd

Venice Biennale, titled his exhibition
Making Worlds, thereby encapsulating the entire art-making enterprisefrom the creative work of
the artist to the interpretive effort
of the viewerand embodying
the particular nature of Venice itself
and the effect of this other-worldly
place on the work created for and
presented here. The event included
Birnbaums major exhibition, presentations from 77 participating
nations, and 44 collateral events.
Toms Saracenos installation
Galaxies forming along filaments, like
droplets along the strands of a spiders web (2009), which filled the
central space of the Italian pavilion,
made it evident that, yes, we were

entering an alternate reality.
Iceland is one of the many countries that chose to locate their presentations not on the Biennale campus, but in a palazzo, rented for the
occasion. Like a deft set designer,
Ragnar Kjartansson divided the space
into two entirely different realms.
Overlooking the Grand Canal, he
created an archetypal artists studio
replete with easel, guitar, drained
wine glasses and beer bottles, filled
ashtrays, casually piled books, and
heaps of blank canvases that by the
end of the Biennales six-month run
will be filled with his daily paintings
of a live modela mise-en-scne
completely romantic in its 19thcentury presentation of artistic creation. In an adjacent black rectan-
gular room, six screens present the

artist, this time bundled in winter
garb, situated on various sites in
the Canadian Rockies, and we hear
him jamming with other musicians,
sometimes on acoustic, sometimes
on electric guitar. Kjartansson and
his collaborators play riffs that pile
on one another to create rich,
haunting music. So out of context
in a palazzo, this room is about the
kind of creativity that defines artmaking today, an embrace of technology and collaboration that combines media to engage multiple
senses.
In the Italian pavilion, Nicola
Bollas arresting Orpheuss Dream
presents a unicorn circled by a
crowd of microphones, all dazzling
in their solid coating of Swarovski
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Seventeen

Less One, 2008. Mirrors and wood,
17 elements, 243 x 178 cm. each.
crystals set into a grid of chainmail.

In the Arsenale, Chu Yun, a genius
of transformation, transmutes the
banality of the everyday into a magical realm through dislocation and
light levels. Complete darkness
masks the sources of tiny blinking
and twinkling multi-colored lights.
How could the off/on switches of
toasters, dryers, printers, computers, and microwaves be so magical
and entrancing? Francis Upritchards
cunning, carnivalesque figures,
seemingly the material residue of
last nights dream, populate an
equally fantastic palazzo space, part
of New Zealands presentation. In
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UENO NORIHIRO: COURTESY GALLERIA CONTINUA, SAN GIMIGNANO/BEIJING/LE MOULIN
Venice
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Left: Toms Saraceno, Galaxy forming

along filaments, like droplets along the
strands of a spiders web, 2008. Elastic
rope, dimensions variable. Below:
Nathalie Djurberg, Experimentet , 2009.
Clay animation, digital video, and
TOP: COURTESY TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NY / BOTTOM: NATHALIE DJURBERG; COURTESY GI MARCONI, MILAN, ZACH FEUER GALLERY, NY
mixed media, detail of installation.
any other setting, this work would

be dismissed as kitsch; here, it spoke
of history and life.
Garnering the newly minted Silver
Lion award for a Promising Young
Artist, Nathalie Djurberg of Sweden
constructs a Bosch-like Garden of
Earthly Delights where weird and
threatening plant forms dwarf viewers. Shaun Gladwell, representing
Australia, mastered the challenge of
combining video and sculpture in
his Absolute Event Horizon (2009).
We see the artist, in the video,
kneeling on the side of an outback
highway, systematically spray-painting square panels that we eventually
realize cover the adjacent wall.
What could be more theatrical
than a palazzo entry filled with
fine white sand, where, upstairs,
through darkened rooms lit only
by the blinking of colored bulbs in
elaborate chandeliers, we sense
and then see a young supermodel, all in gold, majestically
gliding on roller skates? Occasional
puffs of steam surge from a marble
mantel. Ukrainian artists Illya
Chichkan and Mihara Yasuhiro evoke
the travels of Marco Polo, which
was also the source for Disorient,
a serious and monumental video by
the Netherlands Fiona Tan, which
includes a reading of the explorers
text. Here, the present is conjoined
with the past as Tan takes on global
issues of humanitarian responsibility. The Ukrainian evocation of the
historical text, however, offers only

theater.
Another story, this one haunting
in the way that a junky mystery
novel enthralls, is the joint effort
of 24 Nordic artists orchestrated
by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar
Dragset, collaborators for some 14
years. The nearly seamless narrative
of The Collectors, beginning with
the ruse that the Danish Pavilion
is for sale and concluding with
a drowned figure in front of the
neighboring Nordic Pavilion, depicts
a homosexual writer and collector
whose home is broken apart and
destroyed, the dining table split and
library stair smashed. Might it be a
postmodern tract, a depiction of the
death of Modernism? The apogee
of Modernism, just next door to the
destroyed house, is inhabited with
references to iconic works of minimal art, beautiful young men
lounging in designer furniture, and
self-reflecting images of this carefully
constructed mise-en-scne.
This Biennale is a real winner if
the measure of success is the number of give-aways. The one million
souvenir postcards that constitute
Aleksandra Mirs VENEZIA (all places
contain all others) were printed
with images of water scenes from
around the worldviews of Niagara
Falls, Hawaiian beaches, and the
Nile, for instance, all christened
Venice. Candies, teabags, and
other products from Third World
countries are available as part of

Zambian Anawana Halobas Greater
G8 Advertising Market Stand. And
then there are the relics from The
Collectors, which render lucky visitors complicit as collectors, laden
with calendars, mock manuscripts,
magazine clippings and notebooks,
handkerchiefs, designs sketched on
mock placemats, booklets, posters,
a lighter, and a bronze pea.
The boundary between documentary evidence and art is delicately
negotiated by the Belgian representative, Jef Geys, who in Quadra
Medicinale, studied wild plant life
growing in cracked pavements and
empty lots in Villeurbanne, New
York, Moscow, and Brussels, searching for those with culinary or medicinal value. His meticulous maps,
photographs, samples, and content
analyses could never be mistaken
for a natural history display. To com-
plete this ecological study and

urgent call to arms, proceeds from
the catalogue (alas, not printed
on edible paper as the artist had
hoped) go to feed the homeless
and hungry of Venice.
What could be more real yet
metaphorically poignant than the
collected evidence of Finnish artist
Jussi Kivis lifetime obsession with
fire and firefighting? His exhaustive
accumulation of documents, toys,
games, artifacts, posters, books, cartoons, and gear speaks of the fragility
of existence and human creativity,
our ability to make fire and our vulnerability to its force. Most of the
other installations of accumulation,
and there are many throughout
the Biennale, were fabricated for
the occasion, and appear contrived.
Here, however, we have A Fire and
Rescue Museum, where the installation is matter-of-fact and the contents actual documents of history
and material culture, powerful
because of their reality.
The inclusion of fresh work by
acknowledged masters bestows a
kind of gravitas on this Biennale.
Michelangelo Pistolettos Twenty-
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Two Less Two (2009), a series of roomencompassing, gold-framed mirrors,

which were smashed by the artist
after being installed, holds a power
and formality beyond the character
of the mirror paintings he has been
making since 1961. The mirror is an
image both patently real and surreal;
the act of breaking it is simultaneously destructive and creative, resonant of the human condition. In Joan
Jonass Reading Dante II (2009), the
text is movingly recited by a range
of friends, including kids, speaking
in vernacular language, a rich confluence of then and now, future and
present. Jan Hfstrms installation
of cut-out images, a vocabulary that
has defined his Pop-based work since
the 1960s, came to life, literally and
uncannily, in a performance with
Swedish choreographer Lotta Melin.
In a grassy area beyond the Giardini,
where rows of pine trees fill some six
acres, a picnic of sorts was held late
one afternoon, enjoyed by sophisticated Swedes, dressed mainly in
black and white, relaxing on black
blankets. If this werent striking
enough, far-off figures cloaked in
Hfstrms signature black-hooded
robes, moved through the grid of
trees, erratically and slowly
approaching the revelers, halting,
striking poses, and stumbling until
they were among the picnickers.
Then they continued on and moved
out of sight. A hooded figure pulled
a coffin along the edge of the canal.
Minutes later, the sky turned black
and the rain poured.
Bruce Naumans Topological Gardens, installed in three locations,
won the prestigious Golden Lion for
the Best National Participation. This
is work we know, that has shaped
the conception and making of art
for several decades. In the new
sound pieces, Days, Giorni (2009),
disembodied voices offer a litany of
the days of the week in fugue-like
harmony. The new video, Untitled 2
(1970/2009), screened in the room
where it was filmed in the Univer-
sit Ca Foscari, is elegant, baroque

even, the patterns of the marble
floors echoing those in the nearby
Accademia. Perhaps my reading was
focused by the context, set in a city
where streets are waterways and
boats act as buses, where contrasts
between yesterday and tomorrow
shape experience.
Judith Hoos Fox
St. Louis
Gedi Sibony
Contemporary Art Museum
St. Louis
Gedi Sibonys recent exhibition at

the Contemporary Art Museum
Saint Louis invited profound intimacy
between viewer and museum by
way of a series of provisional installations. Humble gestures served as
access points, allowing viewers to
familiarize themselves with the specific qualities of the space. The
artists acute awareness of his surroundings suggested a basic unify-
ing principle, one in which conventional relationships between figure

and ground in an artwork are nearly
erased. Viewers found themselves
within the art, wholly included in
the aesthetic experience.
My Arms Are Tied Behind My Other
Arms was constructed from a repertoire of mismatched materials reassuringly lacking in pretense. The
motley Arte Povera approach to style
and substance in Sibonys installations is resolutely anti-consumerist
and antithetical to the current drive
toward spectacle. Packing and shipping materials, display pedestals,
plastic drop cloth, and leftover hardware from previous exhibitions at
the museum elevated the peripheral,
the leftover, the carried-over, and the
interim. But most profound were
the moments in which the artists
subtlety brought you deeper into
the rooms themselves.
From the start, Sibony showed us
one of his favorite maneuvers: by
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altering one area of the pre-existing

space, another section becomes visually charged, ripe for open-minded
and considered inspection. In All
Conditions Conducive, a section of
Sheetrock about the size of a doorway was cut out and left leaning just
beside the gap. Sibony physically
opened the wall itself and invited
viewers to enter mentally. A digital
collage included in Sibonys 2008
artists book offers the metaphor of
the Annunciation, with angels and
apparitions telegraphing through
walls to convey transcendent news.
(XXXX) featured two small carpet
scraps sitting face down on the floor
and cresting at the point where their
corners met. The artist affirms the
intimate overture when he refers to
this configuration in the catalogue as
the kissing carpets. A pair of silver
staples appeared on a nearby, unlit
wall. Was their presence a considered accentuation or an accident?
Is one explanation more artistically
valid than the other? These minutiae
represented a conceptual juncture
beyond which all perceptual information in the museum became part of
the art experience. Viewers giving
themselves over to the artistry of
pure perception, were rewarded with
ever more visceral traces.
Center Section, the last labeled
piece in the exhibition, consisted of
a vast white wall marked at irregular, intuitive intervals with gentle
wisps of spray paint. The ghostly
accents were not the primary experience; rather, they led viewers to
see all of what was in front of them.
The experience of Sibonys work is
quieting, but rather than a sobering
take on an impoverished circumstance, his working method is playful and experimental enough to
leave viewers feeling inexplicably
lifted by an encounter with his
orchestrated situations.
Matt Morris
Gedi Sibony, (XXXX), 2005. Carpet,
7 x 50 x 54 in.
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Mike Womack
ZieherSmith
In his recent show, Mike Womack

further explored the low-tech magic
behind his inspired, idiosyncratic
perception devices. While his use of
technology seems fiendishly complicated, the resulting images are
culled from simple stratagems, such
as hundreds of precisely positioned
mirrorssurely not an example of
automated pyrotechnics. The deliberately raw nature of Womacks
work shows us that there is still a
place for the construction of working machines that emphasize
American popular culturespecifically, in the case of this show, the
technological history of the television set. But such interests do not
mean that Womack is looking backwards; instead, he is attempting
to decode the visual possibilities
of simple materials, a process that
results in images of uncommon
complexity. Indeed, while the complexity of his three new sculptures
boggles the mind, the explanation
of their effects remains relatively
accessible.
Womacks major piece is Metronome (2008), a handmade, tour de
force mechanical television. As he
points out, the mechanical television was available some 20 years
before World War II. For this piece,
Womack brilliantly transmits
imagery of the 1937 explosion of
the German-made Hindenburgat
the time, the largest aircraft ever
built. Metronome is constructed from
complex sets of spiraling mirrors

and a single light source, while the
imagery of the Hindenburg disaster
is taken from actual film footage.
Ironically, 1937 was also the year
of mechanical televisions demise,
brought about by the advent of
broadcast resolutions that only electronic sets could handle. Womack
writes in an accompanying statement: There are multiple parallels
that unite these two technological
misfortunes, both of which peaked
in central Europe in the 1930s. In
Metronome, the Hindenburg explosion becomes a riveting experience,
rather like watching an enormous
ghost on the turning mirrors.
Womack has been able to fix a great
catastrophe in a few feet of film,
creating a warning about the limits
of technology.
Ghosting (2009) is a far simpler
contraption, powered by an oil
lamp, but it too is a representation
of a mechanical television, albeit
one functioning at a fraction
1/100,000of Metronomes speed.
Here, heat from the flame generates
the rotation of fan blades made
from a Coca-Cola can. Focused by
mirrors and lenses, the light creates
the stacked horizontal arrays of
a moving point of lightmuch like
the lines of resolution in a conventional electronic television.
According to Womack, Ghosting
does the exact same thing as
Metronome or any other TV, but
at a far slower pace.
Nothing Can Be Perfectly Empty
(2009) does not have moving parts.
Light from flashlights shines

through three hollow, mirrored
columns, where it is filtered
through found materials: red plastic
cups, green beer bottles, blue
painters tape. Focused through the
mirrors, the resulting light effects
mimic how colored light is created
by electrons firing to a cathode ray
tube, which is a partial vacuum
hence the title. By concentrating
on the mechanical problems of
early televisions, Womack gives us
a nostalgic history of an influential
medium.
Jonathan Goodman
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Mark Manders
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele
Kunst
Navigating through Mark Manderss

floor plans, rooms, landscapes, and
syntactical games, one cant help
but feel that the network of
moments surrounds an absence
a quality underscored by the title of
his recent exhibition, The Absence
of Mark Manders. The encountered
situations are fragmentary in a literary sense, in that Manderss work is
structured as a palimpsest. His exhibitions, evocative of the inner workings of the mind, have a Freudianstyle arrangement of stratified
layersconscious superimposed on
subconscious and vice versa.
Throughout this show, large sculptural works such as Writing
Machine, Notional Cupboard (2003),
and Room with Landscape and Fake
Ballpoint impersonated usefulness.
Mike Womack, Metronome, 2008.

LED fixture, wood, aluminum, mirrors, and motor, installation view.
Writing Machine, matte-black in

color and arranged as a series of
interconnected compartments,
bears a resemblance to a large-format camera. A lone typewriter
assigns an anachronistic fetishism
to the work. Writing Machine and
Room with Landscape and Fake
Ballpoint (1999) suggest the possibility of recording, archiving, and
freezing a particular moment in
time. The consideration of function
is prompted by the presence of
chairs, which not only suggest a
site for occupation, but also, by sitting empty, draw attention to the
absence of the physical body.
The human mind as subject is a
strong underlying theme in much
of Manderss work. Short Sad
Thoughts, consisting of two side-byside copper wires bent around two
protruding nails, appears to have
fallen victim to gravitational pull.
This poetic gesture assigns form
to an abstract conceptsorrow.
Together, Manderss works add up
to an ever-expanding self-portrait
one that can be continuously reordered, restructured, and revised.
He has been developing this encyclopedic collection of personal
memories and ideas for the last two
decades. As one moves between the
arrangements, searching for chains
of evidence to unravel the dense
layering of symbolic and historical
references, the physical objects and
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Left: Mark Manders, (left) Room with

Landscape and Fake Ballpoint, 1999;
(right) Coloured Room with Black
and White Scene, 199899. Mixed
media, installation view. Below:
Xiang Jing, Your Body, 2005. Painted
fiberglass, 270 x 160 x 150 cm.
spaces are rendered increasingly

enigmatic. While presented as a
highly personal amalgamation of
Manderss thoughts and emotions,
the work simultaneously speaks
to sculptures longstanding pursuit
of figurative (de)representation.
William Tucker once remarked
that if sculpture is to transcend
the merely physical, the merely
perceptual, or any mere tension or
interaction between them, it will
be by becoming a metaphor for the
humanevery aspect of its being
can and must be identified in terms
of human experience. Does
Manderss ever-expanding model of
the self speak to the human condition? I left this show with the lingering sense of an obsession with
self-representation. Formally,
Manderss work is evocative, reconsidering sculpture as a site for
multi-narration. Its emphasis on the
artists personal history, however,
necessitates a search for bridges
between the personal and the
shared in these private, post-conceptual, hermetic digressions.
Andrew Taggart
Shanghai
Xiang Jing
Shanghai Art Museum
There is no easy way to approach

Xiang Jings work. The Beijing-based
artist is known for uncomfortably
realistic, and often unapologetically

nude, depictions of women. Xiangs
sculptures provide a counterbalance
to the overtly sexual and vulgar portrayals of women currently saturating
Chinese art, and yet her female
figures are no less startling. In what
is arguably her best work, Your Body
(2005), a larger-than-life-size
woman stares directly at viewers,
her legs spread open to reveal her
sex. Despite its graphic frankness,
the work bears no trace of sexual
energy; nor does it serve to arouse
the viewer. The subjects body
which is thick, with pallid skindoes
not conform to traditional notions
of beauty. A prominent scar resides
on the right abdomen, and the
head is bald. The overall effect is
one of emotional fatigue.
Xiang was born in Beijing in 1968
and studied sculpture at the Central
Academy of Fine Arts there. She
came to Shanghai after graduation
to teach sculpture and kept a studio
in the city, which she shared with
her husband, sculptor Qu Guangci,
before returning to Beijing.
In Chinese art, the human figure
is not a venerated subject as it
is in Western art, so it should come
as no surprise that contemporary
artists in China, in a move away
from tradition, have wholeheartedly
embraced it. Many have jumped
straight into an approach marked
by vulgarity and explicit sexuality.

Male artists, in particular, apparently
intimidated by how the new China
has transformed and empowered
Chinese women, depict them as
brash creatures who brazenly flaunt
their sexuality. Xiang offers a decidedly different and more nuanced
image of women. Even her earlier
works show a complex understanding of the various roles that women
play. Yet Xiang is reluctant to call
herself a feminist, considering it not
only a Western construct that does
not fit Chinese society, but also
a term that marginalizes her work
in a male-dominated Chinese art
world. She says that she is more
interested in generalized human
nature, but Your Body clearly forces
viewers to confront their expecta-
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tions of the female body and their

own self-image, as inferred in the
title.
Xiangs figures are not put on
pedestals, nor are they exploited for
their sexual qualities. In works that
do blatantly address sexuality, such
as The Center of Quietude (2007),
it is apparent that sexuality is seen
from the point of view of the artist,
that is, a woman. Quietude shows
a young woman masturbating, but
her expression does not show pleasure so much as a desire to separate herself from the world. Here,
female sexuality and male pleasure
are distinct entities: Xiangs work
never addresses male pleasure. It is
no wonder, then, that critics often
label her a feministher treatment of the female figure seldom
takes into account the opposite sex.
Rarely straightforward studies,
Xiangs figures derive their power
from a self-contained detachment
and an ambiguity that is never
fully resolved by their implied narratives.
Xhingyu Chen
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sculpture
Dispatch: Toronto
Summer is blockbuster time, so in

late June, ancient Israel made its way
to Toronto. Dead Sea Scrolls: Words
that Changed the World is showing
in architect Daniel Libeskinds crystalshaped redesign of the venerable
Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) until
January 2010, and the crowds have
been bigger than expected. Visitors
have even wandered up to the second floor to witness a more contemporary take on the power of words,
which appears courtesy of some
reconstruction occurring just to the
north of the museum.
The Koffler Centre of the Arts in
north-end Toronto was recently
demolished to make way for a new
venue, currently under construction.
Consequently, the Koffler Gallery has
been using off-site exhibition venues
(including part of a department
store), and most recently, theyve
employed the ROM. Working with
the Institute for Contemporary Culture, the Koffler has used a secondfloor ROM gallery and the context of
the scrolls exhibition to mount New
York-based Joshua Neusteins first
Canadian showing, the installation
Margins. A text-based work, its profoundly sculptural, employing large,
thick sheets of clear acrylic as representative kinds of writing surfaces.
On one wall, 18 sheets lean upright
against one another. Submerged
deep down through transparent layers, the bottom sheet alone carries
a short text: Erasing his name, God/
multiplied the roads. Elsewhere, several sheets are splayed out across the
floor and overlaid with shimmering
typography, taken from the writing of
the late Jewish poet Edmond Jabs.
Other sheets are blank, while texts
appear next to them, written on
the floor as if they had escaped the
acrylic confines. On a nearby wall,
Neustein has effected the presence of
linguistic absence, erasing a central
voida silenceinto a square of
drawn graphite. A large crystal chandelier is impressed into another wall,
as if it had crashed into the surface.

Only one bulb burns. The utterances
of civilization, it might appear, still
manage to illuminate a world in a
constant state of destruction.
Neusteins meditation on the word
and world are afforded another context courtesy of a retrospective just
across the street from the ROM
at the Gardiner Museum. Bigger,
Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey
features the massive, vibrantly colored figurative clay sculptures of the
California artist who died in 2004.
Organized in conjunction with the
Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin,
this show, like Neusteins, will run
until January of 2010. Regarded as
something of a bricoleur, Frey is
known for figures like Weeping
Woman (199091), which form an
important transgression across the
line dividing fine art from craft.
Further downtown, a collective of
Toronto and Vancouver artists who
call themselves Instant Coffee spent
the summer and early fall re-imagining the Toronto Sculpture Garden
as the site for a Disco Fallout Shelter.
Theirs is a quirky take on Cold War
culture, conflating the era of 1970s
disco music with that of 1950s bomb
shelters, all to show that our cultural
responses to living with The Bomb
were (are?) broad and ever-shifting.
A short, yellow brick path leads to a
sod mound in the middle of a small,
grassy space; a set of pink steel doors
and a satellite dish mark the location
of the shelter. Back at the beginning
of the path, a small video monitor
purports to show the shelters
denizens partying it up down below
in a clever twist on the concept of
Cold War hysteria. In October, the
sculpture garden hosts Toronto-based
Dean Drevers Bear Hunt, which consists in part of a series of life-size, fluorescent-orange bears, some disappearing into the gardens waterfall.
Neusteins concept of margins
offers a good metaphor for the sculptural scene in Toronto and its environs. The Tree Museum, for instance,
is a sculptural site located deep in

the woods about 100 miles north
of the city, near the vacation community of Gravenhurts. A handful
of Toronto-based artists created the
place, and they still organize and
curate the exhibitions. In Between
opens in the fall and features new
site-specific installations by Torontobased artists Ed Pien, noted for his
massive, paper-based gallery works,
and Dyan Marie, who has created a
series of banners, a few of which
will be installed in the heart of
downtown Toronto, bringing some
of the country back to the city.
In the bedroom community of
Barrie, about midway between Toronto and the Tree Museum, Niall
Donaghy is using two locations for a
show of new and recent work that
opened in mid-September. Labyrinth
Coaster includes examples from his
series of large, wall-mounted, Spirograph-inspired geometrical works at
the Georgian College Campus Gallery,
as well as a brand-new timber roller
coaster sculpture specifically created
for the open-air courtyard at the
MacLaren Art Centre.
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Out along the eastern margins

of Toronto, in Oshawa, the Robert
McLaughlin Gallery will install
Vancouver-based Samuel Roy-Boiss
mixed-media installation Polarizer in
early November. Roy-Bois has reconfigured the gallery, creating an intimately interactive space in which visitors pass along a darkened hallway
to encounter dazzlingly lit interiors
enigmatically arranged with objects
of everyday life. Its the fall. Summer
may be the time for museum and
movie blockbusters, but nows when
the showsand the sculpture
really get going.
Gil McElroy
Above: Niall Donaghy, Superfortress,

2006. Baltic birch plywood, 13.5 x
18 x 4 ft. Right: Instant Coffee, Disco
Fallout Shelter, 2009. Mixed-media
installation at the Toronto Sculpture
Garden.
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P E O P L E , P L AC E S , A N D E V E N T S
T H E I S C R E S I D E N C Y I N SW I T Z E R L A N D
With the generous support of sculptor Heinz Aeschlimann and arts advocate, collector, and patron Gertrud Aeschlimann, winners of the
ISCs Outstanding Student Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture are offered the chance to apply for a six- to eight-week residency
in Switzerland. Bernadette Birzer of the University of Southern Mississippi and Jonathan Pelliterri of Louisiana State University recently completed the residency program in Zofingen. Both emerging artists were encouraged to take advantage of the Aeschlimanns vast network of
resources, including the sculpture facilities at Art-St-Urban, an art center in a former sanatorium on the grounds of the Abbey of St. Urban.
Jonathan, a recipient of the 2007 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award, completed his residency
in the summer of 2008, while Bernadette, a 2008 winner, just returned from her stay in Zofingen this spring. Both artists completed
several new works and represented the ISC in their interactions with the Swiss artistic and cultural communities. An exhibition and
auction of their sculptures and those of other ISC residency winners was recently held at Art-St-Urban.
In the summer of 2008, I was the guest of Heinz and Gertrud
Aeschlimann at their art center just north of Lucerne. Gertrud had
promised that the residency would be intense and unlike any
other, and it was. I was the first American resident to be paired
with a Polish sculptor, Agnieszia Stopyra (Aga), a talented woman
from a village near Krakow.
During the drive from the airport, Heinz gave me an overview
of his company, Aeschlimann AG, which specializes in the production and installation of gussasphalt, a mastic asphalt. ArtSt-Urban is the only place in the world where sculptors are able
to work with the material. Within a couple hours of arrival, I was
experimenting with melted bitumen at Aeschlimann AG. With so
many new materials at my disposal, I dedicated my residency to
experimentation. Thoughtful guidance from Heinz allowed me to
make work at an incredible pace, and I gained an immense knowledge of materials and processes that I could not have found anywhere else.
Work was broken up with trips to the Aeschlimanns picturesque
home on Mt. Ceneri, boating on Lake Lucerne, visiting museums
and music festivals, and dinners with family, friends, and colleagues. I also spent time with Canadian sculptor Sorel Etrog,
whose prolific career spans five decades. It was a thrill to hear his
insights on art and to discuss my work with him.
The atmosphere at Art-St-Urban fosters creative
energy and the fluid exchange of ideas. My experience there was unforgettable. I could make art
without the concerns of life at home and see my
work in a global context easily forgotten in my
Louisiana studio. Heinz and Gertrud provide an
enormous opportunity for the artists invited into
their lives. For their investment in my career and
their friendship, I thank them both. Jonathan
Pelliterri
This experience has given me a more professional perspective

on being an artist, showing me glimpses of different factors in
the art world. I am fortunate to have been given this accelerated,
and intense, experience of art in Switzerland.
On my first day there, I met Heinz, Gertrud, and the other resident, Wojciech Batko from Poland. Everything was fast paced and
very punctual: the next day, we went to work and were introduced
to all of the materials that we could use, especially bitumen, gussasphalt, and pbd tar sheets. We were even able to watch as highly
skilled pavers finished a sound barrier in Zofingen.
My favorite of the three materials was bitumen, which was
heated in a metal cooker attached to a propane tank. I also enjoyed
trying to hand-form gussasphalt; my goal was to make hollow
forms similar to my ceramic maquettes. I spent most of my days
working from 7 am to 5 pm in the studio, trying to improve my
metal craft in the hope of finding a new type of form to use with
the new materials.
It was not all hard work. On days off, I visited galleries and
museums. There was an auction of work by former and current residents that benefited not only the artists, but also the residency.
Heinz and Gertrud welcomed me into their home, where we
shared wonderful dinners and conversations with their wide range
of friends. They also invited me to their house in Ticino for Easter
weekend and on a tour of Cuomo.
I was faced with many challenges
some positive, some confusing, but all
valuable. My biggest difficulty was figuring out if I was a Coop person or a
Migros person, Switzerlands Wal-Mart
and Target. I am so happy to have had
the opportunity to experience not only
the rich culture of Switzerland, but also
Heinz and Gertruds awesome hospitality. Bernadette Birzer
Jonathan Pelliterri with his sculpture Twins, created

during his residency at Art-St-Urban.
Bernadette Birzer and her residency work.
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Time and History

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From the Chairman

ISC Board of Directors

I Want Your Imagination: A Conversation with Kris Martin by Karlyn De Jongh

Mobile Homes: A Conversation with Casey McGuire by Melinda Barlow

Malia Jensen: Thinking Through Objects by Polly Ullrich

Physical States of Being: A Conversation with Carole Feuerman by Edward Rubin

Nina Levitt: Re-Presenting Enigmatic Women by Margaret Rodgers

Random Observations Regarding Futurist Sculpture by Fred Licht

Venice: 53rd Venice Biennale

The International Sculpture Center 2009 Outstanding Student Achievement

St. Louis: Gedi Sibony

New York: Mike Womack

Ghent: Mark Manders

Shanghai: Xiang Jing

In Contemporary Sculpture Awards

On the Cover: Kris Martin, Mandi VIII, 2006.

Sculpture October 2009

Address all editorial correspondence to:

This issue is supported in part by a grant

Advertising information E-mail <advertising@sculpture.org>

Major Donors ($50,000+)

Chairmans Circle ($10,00049,999)

Directors Circle ($5,0009,999)

Riva Yares Gallery

Patrons Circle ($2,5004,999)

Marsha & Robin Williams

About the ISC

Friends Circle ($1,0002,499)

Professional Circle ($350999)

Eric & Audrey Lester

William Padnos & Mary

GentryShohini GhoshJohn GillMichael GodekMasha

NealStuart NeilsenJohn & Anne NelsonMiriam (Mimi)

Sculpture October 2009

Educating Sculptors: Past, Present, and Future

Left: Metro Academic Classical High School students, Untitled:

Contemporary Sculpture on Campus

Top left and detail: Roger Hiorns,

151189 Harper Road

and somewhat menacing crystalline

Claude Lvque, Intrim. Above:

has sent more than a dozen artists

early Christians, heretical Cathars,

Right: Eva Hesse, Studiowork. Top

Dougherty, The Upper Crust.

enigmatic structures that follow

question conventional notions of

and resonance of her materials, displaying a deep appreciation for craft

Joseph L. Alioto Performing Arts

Sculpture October 2009

woven into the tops of the piazzas

Above: Mircea Cantor, Seven Future

reveals an extraordinarily poetic

logical, and theatrical narratives to

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Above: Bob Trotman, detail of

Genzken, Hospital (Ground Zero).