Rebecca Smith Tape and Steel

NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL

JUNE 3 – AUGUST 7, 2010

Reposted from Brooklynrail.org

Installation view, Tape and Steel: Sculpture and Tape Drawings by Rebecca Smith (2010). Foreground shows “Pink House” (2009) and “Orange Animal” (2009).

Tape and steel are the constituent materials of Rebecca Smith’s sculptural practice, and now they are the subject of her exhibition at the New York Studio School. Almost as if to emphasize this fact, Smith has titled her exhibition after these materials with an ironically complex machismo ring that evokes the Modernist sculpture of her father, David Smith. This exhibition strives to interlay the two previously segregated yet related material concerns, but best elucidates Smith’s painting-sculpture hybrids, which are punctuated by linear elements created by various types of tape. Preciously arranged, genteelly self-contained, beautifully crafted, these sculptures function, like paintings, as discrete objects. Even installed at wall scale, they sit on the architecture rather than becoming part of it.

In the exhibition catalog Smith states, “The grid is certainly the way the human-made world is set up, yet we deviate from it all the time. I had thought that the last thing I would ever want to work with was the grid, because it seems so tired out as a concept.”

Smith’s visual structure extends the legacy of Modernism yet also perverts, by degrees, the order in, say, Mondrian’s grid paintings. The sculptures’s titles often refer to the natural world—the glacial ice shelf, insects, plants, and animals—yet their materiality points to their components’ utilitarian applications: urban window guards, automobile interference paints, fire escapes.

Tape in Smith’s studio functions as a sketching tool for visualizing forms that will be fabricated in steel. Tape has also been the poetic, calligraphic, and elegant gestural subject of several of Smith’s more exploratory installations. In these works, it has been treated without economy or boundary, playfully engaging and layering the entire architectural space. However, in this exhibition, tape feels circumscribed as a connector of liminal space between, as well as, in the service of the sculptures, becoming a literal gesture of connection rather than an aesthetic encompassment.

In dialogue, with the various directions and impulses over Smith’s career, combining these materials feels like a necessary step. I sense a restrained Post-minimalist theatrical sensibility at play: in the catalog interview, Smith discusses stacking or interlocking several floor pieces in the rear gallery; this idea, however, is unrealized, which is a disappointment. I wonder how a denser installation might have engaged the viewer, both visually and physically, as well as complicate the works’ individual objectness. I also wonder how it might have invited more interaction and interconnectedness among the exhibition’s individual pieces. There are glimpses in some interstices, such as the white tape running under “Green Insect” (2009) and rippling into a ribbon-like form, and I am curious to see these materials more exaggeratedly placed, layered, and ordered (or disordered, as her sculptures demand of the Modernist grid). Perhaps, then, the experience will further transcend its intrinsic materiality of tape and steel.

Gedi Sibony

Reposted from Brooklynrail.org

GREENE NAFTALI GALLERY | OCTOBER 22 – DECEMBER 4, 2010

“The Cutters, From The Center, Her Trumpeted Spoke Lastly,” 2007 / 2010. Canvas, paint, wall, hollow-core door, matted drawing reversed in frame. 137 × 164 × 13 inches. 348 × 416.6 × 33 cm. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Since the railroad-style building next door to my apartment is adjacent to a parking lot, I can see its entire inside wall as a façade rather than a continuous row of houses. This bleached yellow vinyl siding is attached in foot-wide, horizontal striations that span the entire length of the building. This pattern has a satisfying order, in a Modernist ethos. It lends a sense of stalwart permanence to the otherwise flimsy structure. In the past couple months, though, a wind storm has dislodged two adjoining strips of a car’s length, causing the wobbly material to flop away from the building in a loopy arch along the lot’s sidewalk.

At first I felt compelled to return the siding to its original position. Its refusal to behave as intended, though, has become surprising and provocative. As I’ve stared from my desk window into the parking lot, I have fixated on this proposition of urban neglect. It occurred to me: Gedi Sibony would love this wonky, displaced vinyl siding. I can imagine Sibony, who is a known hoarder of things, lovingly ferrying the vinyl segments to his studio. In an exhibition, he might install them in an eloquent gesture recalling a Robert Morris felt piece—draped from the wall, cascading to the floor.

This fantasy of aesthetic possibility raises central questions of context, process, and intention in Sibony’s work. Does the sculpture require a white cube in order to be meaningfully experienced? Is his work simply one of selection or does an actual transformation occur in his contextual displacement? Irreverence toward a material’s original function (and context), preciousness in its preservation, and fetishization of its form (divorced from its original function) are central to Sibony’s sensibility, and apparent in his current exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery.

Sibony’s deeply mediated presentation determines that the amount of space surrounding a rickety, two-by-four-lumber-based structure in “Asleep Outside The Wall” (2010) (suggesting a Trojan horse from one view and an oversimplified, third-world slum shanty from another) constitutes aesthetic or semantic clout, suggesting that the less information he gives, the more meaning he creates. Also, by hanging a reversed carpet on the wall, as in “The Center, and Skinny Legs, Satisfying The Purposes Completely, Her Trumpeted Spoke Lastly” (2010), Sibony disrupts the way we read cues of conventional display—that paintings hang on the wall, while rugs go on the floor. He also drapes irregular, unstretched shapes of raw canvas from the gallery corner in “Who Attracts All That is Named” (2010).

Post-Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon essays, I am extremely reluctant to use the word beauty in discussing Sibony’s sculptures. I don’t think Sibony intends to engage in any overt politics, at least as Hickey explains politics. Nonetheless, this show has challenged my expectations of what level of material transformation constitutes aesthetic experience. If Yves Klein pursued the immaterial through an audacious dematerialization of the art object, then Sibony is striving for something somewhere in between what is aestheticized and what is poised to appear aestheticized by cues external to the art object, such as theatricality, placement, and appearance. Also, the real time experience of a body in space is important in Sibony’s work, leaving the photographic documentation of the exhibition alluring, yet ultimately hollow.

I’m not sure if the resulting effect is poetic. Sometimes Sibony’s work feels transformed beyond its material means, such as in the James Turrell-esque room of light; sometimes a sofa with a cut-out deer silhouette and scattered sheets is just that. Except in a gallery. And the sofa is hovering above the floor. As a matter of fact, the titles’ obtuse and obscuring sensibilities seem anti-poetical in their refusal, like the sculptures themselves, to tell you anything beyond indeterminate impressions. Or is that a certain brand of poetics? Sibony’s titles sometimes appear to be a product of a Dadaist assemblage and other times verge on a saccharine sort of sentimentality, as in “The Brighter Grows the Lantern.”

Sibony’s care with words also applies to his craft. Meant to appear roughly cut, jagged and haphazard, the construction of “The Cutters” (2007–2010) is as intentional and meticulous as the draped-canvas framing of the hollow-core door on the rear wall. (Sibony is particularly adept at composing views with architectural elements in space.) To say this piece of craggy, unfinished wall was a send-up of Gordon Matta-Clark would be missing a distinction in their varying engagements of process. Urs Fischer’s 2006 Whitney Biennial interior alterations behaved in a way similar to Sibony’s architecture constructions. In Sibony and Fischer, their aesthetic ends defeat their means, unlike Matta-Clark’s engagement in urban, socio-economic issues.

Although his work has been tirelessly compared to the Arte Povera movement, environmental concerns and politics are noticeably absent here (even if Sibony is said to be anti-institutional in his shoddy touch). Discussing Sibony with regard to Postminimalism accounts for neither his pathos of degeneration in terms of material identity and function, nor his pseudo-preservationalist stance vis-à-vis what is sometimes plainly garbage. Robert Rauschenberg’s cardboard box pieces, currently on view at Gagosian, are striking precedents for Sibony’s transformation of materials, though Rauschenberg aestheticized these boxes comparatively little, even while they both translate materials with precious, miniscule steps, or none at all. Rauschenberg’s cardboard sculptures are more generous, less homogenizing, and display material curiosity rather than withholding it.

All of this said, my thoughts ultimately return to the readymade Sibony in the outside world. What does it say if something can resemble a Gedi Sibony? For all his strategies for not making a “Gedi Sibony,” does this suggest he has in fact packaged his moves for this exhibition? I’m not sure it really matters: after all, it’s not a Gedi Sibony sculpture until it’s placed in a gallery. This is the world in which his work challenges our visual endurance and tolerance for what constitutes meaningful aesthetic experience.

YVES KLEIN With the Void, Full Powers

Reposted from Brooklynrail.org

THE HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN | MAY 20 – SEPTEMBER 12, 2010

Installation view of “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” (2010). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Lee Stalsworth.

In his Hirshorn retrospective, French artist Yves Klein (1928 – 1962) is presented with theatrical and retinal abandon. Klein’s brief (less than 10 year) career arc encompasses a number of approaches, from performative and conceptual modes to materially-bound painting.  The degree to which Klein pushed his experimentation with ideas and materials is both shocking and perplexing for a time when conceptual practices were not common. From eccentric, prankster-like exhibitions-as-performance and performance-as-painting to his optically arresting monochromes, Klein’s multiple strategies were randomly magnificent.

While on the beach with two friends at age 19, Klein declared “signing the sky” his first work of art. He tended to view his biographical narrative with such imaginative, outré vision, from his interest in judo, to votive offerings to the Order of Saint Sebastian. This sensibility grew into conceptual work that attempted to capture the immaterial.  In his “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,” Klein sold empty space (the Immaterial Zone) for various amounts to collectors, who were presented with a receipt. To complete the transaction, Klein exchanged the purchase amount for gold leaf, which he tossed into the Seine River. The collector then burned the receipt, leaving no record of the transaction, although some photographs contradictorily remain as documentary evidence. It may be a stretch to say that this tendency towards collaborative recognition of the intangible in art foreshadows the relational aesthetics of the 1990s. Yet, Klein clearly wished to negate, or at least complicate with a Marxist tinge, the ritual of collecting. Also, by discarding the material of gilding, which dates back to Egyptian and Ancient Greek sculpture, he ultimately suggested an impulse toward the dematerialization of the art object.

I found it difficult to keep in mind that this is the same Klein who in the 1950s patented the visually seductive “International Klein Blue,” a simple mixture of ultramarine and resin binder.  This was done with considerable entrepreneurial savvy. He declared it was an alternate way of attaining the immaterial through evoking the elemental blue of water or sky. International Klein Blue found its way into Klein’s monochromes, painted with rollers and sponges, creating a series of electric, hovering retinal experiences with pure color. These applicators (Klein wished to remove any trace of the hand by use of brushes) also became beautiful sculptures in their own right. Displayed in clusters in an alcove, they’re weird, otherworldly, readymade remainders of the monochromes. Some are fashioned into flowers; others stand on their own pedestals glowing lusciously in your peripherals, serendipitously placed against the reciprocally curving white walls of the Hirshhorn’s second floor.

Klein’s sense of theatricality and drama translated in an eccentric array of mark making in his paintings. Perhaps his most signature move involved painting nude female bodies (“living brushes”) and directing these models to create blue, woman-sized Rorschach-like abstractions (he called “Anthropometries”). Klein also explored a variety of other approaches: He sprayed the outlines of splayed female nudes on canvas with water and scorched the canvas with assistants dressed as firemen, strapped a painting to a car roof, liberally and loosely applied gold leaf to canvases (“monogolds”), and buffed the surface of stainless steel. The exhibition is punctuated with video projections of Klein executing most of the work in each section of the gallery, which is particularly informative in understanding the relationships of the performances to the objects.

While visiting the exhibition on a Sunday, I watched a toddler run directly for a wooden tray in “Pure Pigment Blue” (re-creation of 1957 and 1961 pieces), dip his finger into the dry pigment and wave it excitedly for his parents, who, along with the museum guards, were a little confused and distraught. To the child, the sculpture must have looked like a huge, inviting, blue sandbox. This incident struck me as a sensational act and I think Yves Klein would have approved of it. His work invites eccentricity, impulse, and acting out.

The wide sweep of Klein’s production, via both actions and objects, left me mulling over his influence on contemporary artists. It would be too facile and formal a comparison to mention Brice Marden’s monochrome paintings of the 1960s and 70s. In terms of exploring new methods of mark making, I think specifically of Janine Antoni’s “Loving Care” (1992), in which she used her hair as a paintbrush to mop the gallery floor, thus reclaiming the female body from the male gaze, which Klein could easily be accused of exploiting in his “Anthropometries.” Terence Koh’s installations, which often reveal his obsession with all things white or nothing at all but light, come to mind when thinking of Klein’s pursuit of the immaterial.

While not exactly contemporary, Gordon Matta-Clark’s impalpable fake estate pieces, conceived largely through maps, deeds, and bureaucratic documentation rather than physical occupancy, echo Klein’s idea of the Immaterial Zone. Uncannily similar to Klein’s “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” is Spencer Finch’s “Sunken Treasure” series (2006). After determining precise GPS readings of three locations on the Gowanus Canal, Finch submerged one ounce gold bullions at each one and created corresponding minimal drawings of the exact coordinates in invisible ink. In order to read the coordinates and retrieve the gold, the drawing’s owner would have to heat (and thus destroy) the drawing. Through placing more emphasis on the latent and potential image of the drawing, Finch’s piece heightens an awareness of time, place, and a multidimensional interpretation of value in a work of art. In addition, with the recent Superfund designation, by the Environmental Protection Agency, of Gowanus Canal for extensive decontamination and cleanup, the possibility of dredging the canal could result in an unintentional shifting of location, meaning, and control in the piece.

The toddler’s removal of pigment allowed a remarkable realization: although the tray appeared to be a few inches deep, the layer of International Klein Blue was only a thin dusting over white sand. Maybe the child knew it was actually a sandbox, or maybe he was just as seduced by the brilliance of the pigment as the rest of us. This sculpture is read like a monochrome painting on a floor, its picture plane seemingly infinite. Like the “Leap Into the Void” (1960) photograph depicting Klein jumping from a roof into an empty street, it’s our desire to believe in the work that completes it, despite the fact that the image is an impressive invention of the darkroom (now standard practice through Photoshop or digital matte painting in film). Klein’s work is about this magical illusion and our willful suspension of disbelief in experiencing it.

Robert Grosvenor

Reposted from The Brooklyn Rail, April 2010

Robert Grosvenor at Paula Cooper Gallery Feb 5- March 6, 2010

Robert Grosvenor in the Whitney Biennial Feb 25 – May 30, 2010

By Greg Lindquist

To make a sweeping generalization about Robert Grosvenor’s choice of materials across his career would be difficult or near impossible. There is little material continuity in his work, but rather conceptual outgrowths through material explorations. His work is characteristically about material unsameness, humorous contradictions and seemingly absurd paradoxes. His recent exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery alongside the opening of the Whitney Biennial, which includes one of his sculptures, encompasses the gamut of his wide conceptual and material concerns, as well as the importance of the context in which his sculptures are displayed.

Amid the horrific political issues depicted in many of the works in the Whitney (from the Afghani self-mutilation photographs, to the lobotomy patient video, to the disfigured American soldier portraits), one could make some overly literal interpretations of Grosvenor’s plush velvet bridge and ornamental welded metal fence: bridges and boundaries span the political, social, economic and so on. However, this work is among the few funny pieces in this biennial. It defeats its function. The bridge, with its flimsy material lushness, doesn’t appear able to hold weight, and bridges aren’t meant to be enjoyed the way one sits on a couch. And the fence, in a similar way, isn’t meant to delineate a perimeter or contain anything—it’s simply a two-dimensional screen, like a see-through painting. In these ways, Grosvenor’s sculptures simply and impishly disregard utility.

In Paula Cooper Gallery’s cavernous Chelsea space, three Grosvenor sculptures from the late 1980’s and 1990’s are displayed. Never shown before together, theses pieces drive home Grosvenor’s reluctance to use any one material. Conceptually consistent, these works are about balance, utility (or the lack thereof) and the absurd. Furthermore, however, his material choices evoke the industrial—its detritus, machinery and production. And, like other works of the late 1990’s, his use of rocks and chunks of concrete calls to mind Robert Smithson’s interests in prehistoric/futuristic geology.

Grosvenor’s sculptures, with their stubborn “untitled” titles, invite an even more extreme degree of ambiguous and negotiable context. Breaking away from the Minimalist movement in the late 1960’s, Grosvenor’s work shook the material sameness and conceptual homogeny that characterized many of those artists. Around this time, Robert Smithson, one year younger than Grosvenor, followed a similar idiosyncratic and divergent conceptual path.

Writing about artists who deviated from Minimalism proper in “Entropy in the New Monuments,” Smithson noted, “They bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov’s observation that, “The future is but the obsolete in reverse.” Smithson called Grosvenor’s floating beams, with sci-fi  hyperbole, “Grosvenor’s hypervolumes in hyperspace.” At Paula Cooper, a corresponding strangeness and alien-like intensity permeates these sculptures’ material assembly and conceptual conveyances. I have scribbled on my checklist in three different places, “What is this shape?” and, while I have generated some associations, I have no distinctive idea, which I think is his point. While Untitled (1991) and Untitled (1994) deal more with monumental balance in a totemic, stela-like way (invariably recalling fragments of architecture), Untitled (1986-87) evokes a bivouac or archaeological site for entropy and absurdity. A plastic canopy with cutout steel discs shelter a chunk of concrete, which rests on a blue tarp. The steel discs seem to be Calder-like wheels and the blue tarp is like an Yves Klein color-field.

In toto, this work is pretty funny in its illogical language and placement. Inside of Paula Cooper’s presumably structurally sound warehouse space, Grosvenor is sheltering an industrial architectural fragment (from what?), quarantining the chunk of raw concrete from the gallery’s polished concrete floor. Again, Grosvenor is a master of the nonfunctional. I wonder if he is fetishizing the entropic, or reconfiguring the semantics of entropy, or if he even cares.

After all, Joseph Masheck has pointed out that in Grosvenor’s earlier works, his fractured beams related to Smithson’s entropic ideas, “Smithson, in Partially Buried Woodshed, stopped when the roof beam broke… Grosvenor’s works begin with the fracture of the beam.” Ultimately, though, it’s Grosvenor’s obdurate semantic and material indeterminacy that paradoxically keep his work meaningful and together. Thus, the context and placement of his sculptures make them a bit chameleonic or adaptable to circumstances, at the least. I’d be curious to see the Paula Cooper pieces swapped with the Whitney Biennial work and then re-write this review.

Stuart Shils, Privileged Vistas

The Farm House Again, Late Summer, Strong Sun, 2008

Reposted from March, 2010 The Brooklyn Rail

Stuart Shils’s intimate, easel-sized landscape paintings were suitably installed in Coleman Bancroft’s Upper East Side walk up living-room-converted-gallery-space, whose grand fireplace mantel was absorbed into the exhibition’s arrangement. Ambitiously wistful, poetic, atmospheric, these paintings exude grandeurs of specific light, atmospheres and environs directly observed from landscapes in Italy, Ireland, New York and Philadelphia.

A plush touch and superfluous, incision-like pencil lines, along with decadent vistas such as Castle Near Corciano, Pieve del Descovo (2008), suggest landscape as a kind of touristic (view) and domestic (scale) luxury. Grace Glueck once declared about Fairfield Porter’s work: “Neither abstract nor representational, but existing in a light struck  zone between, these [are] beautiful, well-mannered, WASP-y records of domestic felicity.” Glueck’s objections about Porter’s work encapsulates the second thing that bothers me about these landscapes: they are simply too beautiful and well-mannered. Each pencil mark (an understructure of the painting or overlaid garnishment?) is tastefully placed rather than determinedly hard-won. In The Farm House Again, Late Summer, Strong Sun (2008), a Fairfield Porter-like postcard of summery repose, foliage is carefully dabbed and blended as perpendicular lines timidly accentuate architecture and suggest omitted detail.

Of the suite of a dozen or so paintings, the most captivating are those depicting pure atmosphere. In these works, such as in Clearing Sky, Strong Blue over the Village Trees (2006), Shils moves beyond architecture along with its cultural and social signifiers and into an untethered,  unselfconcious realm of abstraction. Unrestrained by realist conventions Shils appears to take more risks and liberties with both color and brushwork. In Rain Passed, the Bay with a Touch of Sun (2007), the only indication of the painting’s source is in its title, recalling otherwise—in its blurry striations of muted purples and greens—a Gerhard Richter squeegee painting.

Yet the majority of these Shils paintings could be easily imagined as souvenirs commemorative of a largely European tour. Suggesting mainly scenery of the privileged and pastoral, displayed in a neighborhood of Manhattan’s elite, it’s difficult not to view these paintings as also inapposite, luxury objects amid a recovering economy. In a present world of devastating natural disaster, entropic decay and environmental injustice, Shils’ paintings answer the questions “Why an idyllic brand of landscape painting now? What do these views say?” with only anachronistic sensibilities and subjects.

Deconstructing Maya Lin

Reposted from the October issue of The Brooklyn Rail

“Maya Lin: Three Ways of Looking at the Earth” at Pace Wildenstein Gallery

September 10 – October 24, 2009

“Maya Lin: Wavefield” at Storm King Art Center

By Greg Lindquist

Maya Lin Installation view: Blue Lake Pass and Water Line

Maya Lin’s current exhibition is difficult to view without questioning how its specificity of materials and forms describe her environmental concerns. “Three Ways of Looking at the Earth” at Pace Wildenstein displays three sculptural pieces central to her traveling museum exhibition “Systematic Landscapes,” whose last stop, fittingly, was in Washington, D.C., where twenty-seven years ago this November Lin’s Vietnam Veterans War Memorial was dedicated.

Each work is based on particular landmasses, formations or features, most from specific locations. Occupying a footprint of 1,900 square feet, 2 X 4 Landscape (all works 2006) articulates an elegantly swelling hill with two-by-four wood boards that resemble computer pixels, while vertical sheets of particleboard in Blue Lake Pass create box-like forms whose topographical ridges represent contours inspired by Southwestern Colorado. Water Line is a network of aluminum wire suspended at eye level, generated from research with scientists to visualize the ocean floor of the Mid-Atlantic ridge.

A maker of works that often fall into or between the genres of public art/memorials, studio art and architecture, Lin views the earth through the diverse lenses of computer technology, science, mathematics, and environmentalism. Inspired by “how incredibly beautiful the world is” and a “strong respect and love for the land,” her sculptures intend to evoke not only this beauty but also environmental subjects such as fertilizers, deforestation, sustainable lumber, green turtles and river dams. However, the specificity of these gallery works is not in their geographical inspirations or their embedded environmental messages, but rather in their polished, reductive material structures and forms. These structures inform an idea of what you are looking at but not the details of an actual place.

Paradoxically, Lin has not included information indicating the environmentalist concerns reflected in these pieces, but rather chooses materials suggesting issues such as the use of Sustainable Forestry Initiative certified wood (2 X 4 Landscape) and formaldehyde-free particleboard (Blue Lake Pass). Thus, Lin’s sculptures are more akin to generalized yet highly refined icons, billboards, or signifiers of these environmental issues or ideas.

Lin’s lack of specific visual description or geographical reference implies a reductive minimalist aesthetic, as in the serial arrangement of the box-like Blue Lake Pass, which recalls Donald Judd’s grid of wooden boxes on permanent view at Dia: Beacon, Untitled (1976). This minimalist sensibility is even more apparent in much of Lin’s public art and memorials, which can approach Richard Serra’s forbidding austerity. Coincidentally, her outdoor sculpture Wavefield at Storm King rests near Serra’s Schunnemunk Fork (1990-91), whose triangular slice recalls the shape of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. Kirk Varnadoe once said that Maya Lin’s memorial is “indebted to the aesthetic of minimalist sculpture” because of its “vocabulary of ambiguity.” This ambiguity also echoes a sense of ambivalence, indicating changes in cultural perceptions of the public monument of which Lin’s memorial was at the forefront. James Young, in his book At Memory’s Edge, describes these changes as “a metamorphosis of the monument from the heroic, self-aggrandizing figurative icons of the late nineteenth century celebrating national ideals and triumphs to the anti-heroic, often ironic, and self-effacing conceptual installations.”

This sense of universality, that a memorial is to gather the concerns of many people, not just one, is often distilled in the language of minimalist sculpture and the idea of the void signifying absence, loss or a lack. Interestingly, Serra also has done sculptures that serve as memorials, such as Gravity (1993) in the US Holocaust Museum. But Lin’s representational hook for the otherwise minimalist veterans memorial was  the etching of the names onto the  surface. This text carried the content, purpose and sheer impact of the memorial—the cumulative force of 58,000 names of those who died.  Conversely, these new works have been emptied  of content and detail. While text may be more appropriate in the public arena and not in a gallery context, in this instance, Lin’s minimalism seems to work against her environmentalist concerns.

How much, then, does the content in Lin’s work rely on context? Like much minimalist sculpture, the space in which it is placed largely determines how its forms are read. Inside the gallery, the works in “Three Ways of Looking at the Earth” appear conflated with a sleek yet semantically ineffectual product design sensibility, while outdoor site-specific works, such as Wavefield, appear more potent in their natural element. This overly designed look is especially true of Blue Lake Pass, whose formaldehyde-free particleboard construction, although more environmentally conscious, recalls Ikea’s constituent material of planned obsolescence.

Maya Lin, Wavefield at Storm King

Wavefield evokes the earthworks of Robert Smithson, whose earthworks and writings have been cited by Lin as a major influence and inspiration. Smithson encouraged artists to leave the isolating economic and social structures of museums and galleries in order to develop direct relationships to specific sites. Lin’s process in Wavefield is especially attuned to the particulars of the place in a way that her gallery work is not.

Fashioned out of a gravel pit that once supplied material for the nearby Thruway, the seven parallel rows of rolling peaks, landscaped with slow-growing wild grasses, were created with minimal intervention. Permission was secured from New York State’s Environmental Conservation Department to reclaim the site, and Lin worked with a landscape architect to develop natural drainage. Her collaborators also included a local landscaper and a landscape restoration expert who advised which native grasses would require minimal maintenance yet provide maximum structure for the topsoil. In an additional gesture, Lin planted 270 young trees between Wavefield and the Thruway, a number estimated to offset the amount of fuel and energy (265 tons of CO2) required to create the piece.

In the majority of his writings, Smithson was more preoccupied with the earth’s relationship to science fiction, cinema, geological history and art historical institutions than the environment’s well-being. His works were neither intrinsically didactic nor activist. However, one unpublished piece, written a year before his untimely death, suggests a new environmental activist direction, proposing the reclamation of a strip mine as a site for an earthwork that would coincide with an art education conference at Ohio State University. Smithson argued that  “Art can become a physical resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist… companies must become aware of art and nature, or else they will leave pollution and ruin in their wake.”

In her public art, Lin has explored the relationship between artist and industrialist, but has it proven more complicated and entangled than what Smithson envisioned? One can only imagine the vested interests that have donated money, and how this money can shape and often ultimately control large-scaled public works. After all, while Lin’s Wavefield was funded through the private institution of Storm King and its private benefactors, many of her public artworks, such as the Confluence Project in Vancouver, Washington, culled its $27 million dollars from federal, state and private monies. These political minefields, however, are probably familiar navigations for Lin, who serves on the Board of Trustees of the National Resources Defense Council and is a former member of the Energy Foundation.

Although artist-consultant isn’t quite the right word to describe Lin’s relationship with corporations and the environment, this trajectory of Smithson’s environmental concerns obviously has a bearing on Lin’s site-specific earthworks. One major distinction is in approach, however, which is evident in Smithson and Lin’s extremely diverging conceptions of beauty and the earth. Smithson had an entropic view, at one point paraphrasing the Heraclitus fragment, “The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.” Lin’s visual aesthetic is more informed by the “beauty of the natural world” as reflected in her largely sleek and refined minimalist formats.

Environmentalism has steadily become a part of the mainstream and popular culture since the mid-1970s. It has become an industry in itself, as Michael Pollan points out in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which describes how organic food alternatives have given us the opportunity experience lengthy, often embellished narratives about the travels of produce and poultry from farms to our tables.  Memorials could have been just as viable an industry for Maya Lin, but instead she has largely pursued a minimalist vision aspiring to an environmental ethos that paradoxically depends on the ambiguous relationship of form and context.