sculpture

One of Calvin Tompkins' Bachelors has shuffled off stage left. As the New York Times obituary makes clear, Rauschenberg's impact on the Visual and Performing Arts is pretty much incalculable.

I can't remember when I didn't know of Rauschenberg's work, having probably been exposed to a few pieces in my teens on a weekend getaway to the Art Institute of Chicago, but one of my favorite experiences that encompasses Rauschenberg and his cadre of New York pals was seeing the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform at Lincoln Center in 1999. There in one place--literally and figuratively--were Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman, Bob Rauschenberg and, as something of a weird bonus Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gavin Bryars and Jim O'Rourke.

The Library for Performing Arts actually has a DVD of one night that I attended in addition to other videos and printed material relating to Rauschenberg's work with the MCDC as well as his experiments in Performance Art. In addition, the Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs has a plethora of material outlining Rauschenberg's entire career.

Goodbye 20th century!

Did you visit the Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years exhibition at MoMA? The museum’s website continues to offer the exhibition in audio and video. Most of show’s audio was Richard Serra’s voice supplying histories of the process of the art.
Starting on the sixth floor I was captured by the choice of the first piece overhead. Look up or you miss it and I think some did miss it: a huge steel plate imbedded in the ceiling. Further on, the materials such as vulcanized found doors evoked a lost industrial New York as well as the artist’s opportunistic eye.
The room quartered by Circuit II, composed by four 10ft high sheets of Cor-Ten steel supported only by the room’s corners, corralled viewers in the room’s center. After Circuit II, One Tom Prop ( House of Cards), and Floor Pole Prop, I was left with questions. Are these sculptures displayed on the West Coast unwelded? Not sure. Is physical insecurity intentionally induced by Serra’s work? You betcha.
The immense scale of the elliptical undulating forms of his more recent works, Sequence and Torqued Torus Inversion, with their slanting walls disoriented and unbalanced my progress. Meanwhile the textures of velvet or scaly rust tempted fingers. Somehow I doubt anyone could wander through this exhibition without being puzzled, intrigued, and amazed.
CG 11/7/07
The exhibition catalog Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years. by Kynaston McShine, Benjamin Buchloh, Lynne Cooke, John Rajchman, Richard Serra. MoMA : New York, 2007 JQF 07-1864.

New York Times Installing Richard Serra
ART21 See and hear Richard Serra as well as other artists in this PBS series
KQED with Richard Serra
fSerra at Bilbao Snake