Diversities of Sculpture/ Derivations from Nature curated by Bonnie Rychlak Diversities of Sculpture/ Derivations from Nature curated by Bonnie Rychlak April 28 thru October 6, 2012 Ronald Bladen | Anne Chu | Brian Gaman Jene Highstein | Judith Shea | Daniel Wiener Installation of new work in the gardens and Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature is made possible with the generous support of the Johnson Family Foundation, Barbara Slifka, Cowles Charitable Trust, and Vital Projects Fund. Art in the Gardens is funded in part by Suffolk County under the auspices of the Office of Cultural Affairs, Steven Bellone, County Executive. Diversities of Sculpture he miscellany of sculptures by six artists in relationships between them. Their distinct ideolo - TDiversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature gies and approaches to making sculpture reveal is a gathering of pioneering, idiosyncratic, and tra - shared traces to minimalism, conceptualism, and ditional works and practices that have no sweeping feminist art trajectories. Many of the artists found basis in common except for a tenuous connection paths to their work through definitions of sculpture to a web of historical tenets. Some of these sculp - that were dismantled several decades ago while tures were designed for display inside architectural others were pioneers on these freeways, breaking structures, white box galleries, and museums while down definitions and conventions and laying the others were conceived to be specifically situated groundwork for further changes, investigations, and outdoors. All are now sighted at the LongHouse Re - advancements for subsequent generations of serve gardens so as not to intrude or trespass, po - artists to explore. Still others look further back to sitioned as compliments and foregrounding their classical conventions and narrative traditions from natural surroundings. other cultures to advance their practice. The selection, inclusion, and orientation of these Ronald Bladen leads the charge among these six works into the grounds of LongHouse for a brief five artists as one of the acknowledged fathers of Min - months may, in fact, be their only actual similitude. imalism. Influential, Bladen died in 1988 and unfor - Although closely located to one another and shar - tunately and erroneously, continues to be popularly ing the LongHouse gardens as their collective linked to the more hard-core minimalists like stage, the sculptures included in this exhibition are Donald Judd and Robert Morris . Early on, however, conceptually varied and manifestly dissimilar in ap - Bladen rejected many of these artists’ anti-anthro - pearance but their physical differences don’t nec - pomorphic attitudes. As a professed romanticist essarily tell the whole story. with strong beliefs in the importance of nature for Ronald Bladen , Anne Chu , Brian Gaman , Jene artistic inspiration, Bladen was also concerned with Highstein , Judith Shea , and Daniel Wiener are dis - the human body, its gestures and expressions. playing objects that confirm some broad historical Even his somewhat indirect, fanciful processes of E s t a t e o f R o n a l d B l a d e n , c o u r t e s y o f L o r e t t a H o w a r d G a l l e r y Ronald Bladen beside museum staff during the construction of X, 1967. Scale as Content, the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Washington DC. 1967. production can be seen as expressive. Bladen took painted plywood that seemed to take over and re - great pains to construct and conceal infrastructures organize the space they occupied.” Highstein’s and elaborate frameworks for his geometric forms work is a bridge of sorts, straddling the minimalists’ that in fact were structurally unnecessary. As Irving project with a more material based practice, moving Sandler points out in a catalogue essay for an exhi - sculpture toward an “in-betweeness,” or “between bition of Bladen’s work at the Jacobson Howard geometry and gesture” as Richard Armstrong titled Gallery in 2008, “Bladen used a form of expres - his essay for a sculpture survey exhibition at the sionism, inventing a rich variety of volumes and Whitney Museum of American Art in 1990. shapes, many based on the upward aspiring diago - During the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, nal, the heroic diagonal—a metaphor for transcen - Highstein’s artistically formative years, post-mini - dence.” Bladen himself noted, “to reach that area mal sculpture focused on materiality and process of excitement belonging to natural phenomena such and Highstein’s early trajectory is clearly connected as a gigantic wave poised before it makes its to process as well as the anti-form discourses of fall....The drama is best described as awesome or that time. His critique focused on the understand - breathtaking.’’ ing that an object’s meaning was to come solely Long before his New York art world ascendancy, from its own presence, without reference to transcendence through art was a philosophical as - metaphor, biography or any other outside circum - piration in Bladen’s worldview. As early as 1941, stances. Highstein’s work, over time, has moved he was establishing spiritually oriented thinking that between employing the geometric constraints of eventually led him to engage with East Asian minimalism and organic, asymmetrical forms that philosophies. It was at this time that he experi - he integrates or builds into empty architectural mented artistically with earth and plants, investiga - spaces or landscapes. Whether interjecting and tions that would subsequently lead to a series of constructing masses of concrete into delineated drawings, The Earth Drawings , which, together with environs in gardens, parks, and public arenas or the poems by Allen Ginsberg , would be published placing stones in relational conversations, indoors in the journal, The Ark , in 1947. or out, Highstein’s concern for the materiality and processes of art making have remained fundamen - Jene Highstein , who probably owes more than a tally important to him. mere nod to the renowned minimalist, succeeds Ronald Bladen historically. Highstein once noted The hand hammering of the stainless steel Flora that his “…first memorable show was Primary Tower , although not visible as a technique, is nev - Structures at the Jewish Museum in the mid- ertheless a palpable gesture as one explores the 1960s. I saw the work of Ronnie Bladen and others mysteriously beautiful surface of the tower’s mon - who made very large abstract constructions in umental presence. Equally compelling is the 1 Irving Sandler, Ronald Bladen Sculpture of the 1960s & 1970s, Monumental & Garden Scale Outdoor Sculpture, Working Models and Related Drawings, exh. cat. (New York: Jacobson Howard Gallery, 2008), 2. residue of the carving process on Dangerous Ob - tures of geometry), the cosmos (globes and plan - jects (External and Internal) , as the pitting and tex - ets), and, to principals from the classical Japanese turing of the hard stones remain as residue of their garden manual, Sakuteiki , that literally defined the creation, mimicking the tactile qualities of the art of garden making, where composed arrange - ground beneath them. ments of stones imitate the intimate in landscapes and bring the garden viewing experience into an un - Continuing to follow this historical thread, Brian expected focus. Gaman’s iron and steel “globes” can be loosely tied to Post-minimalism, as they both imitate the serial - More biotically inspired but no less out of the post- ity and disrupt the pure rationalism of minimalism minimalist trajectory is the work of Daniel Wiener while continuing to emphasize the contingency and whose anti-form sculptural process is free flowing literality of the art object. Gaman’s work is more and organic. His sculptures at the LongHouse Re - closely linked to Highstein’s early influential “pipe” serve seem eager to disappear in the vegetation pieces from 1973 than to Bladen’s idealized and rather than be situated naked on gravel. Wiener’s confrontational structures. However, Bladen and sculpture, flipping between functional object sug - Gaman do share the conviction that the image of gestions and a transmogrified botanical experiment, their sculptures and the objects themselves are appears to be outwitting the rational predisposi - congruent. tions of the viewer while allowing access to the Any relationship between Highstein and Gaman, artist’s unconscious mind. Confronting Wiener’s however, may rely on the intrinsic strength and ma - exotic hybrids in a genteel garden environment, vis - teriality that their objects convey to the viewer. itors brave the animus (female perhaps) of the Gaman’s Untitled sculptures, like Highstein’s Dan - artist and the cartilage-like framework of an alien gerous Objects (Internal and External) , express a mushroom form. sense of monumentality without in fact, being Two of the six artists, Judith Shea and Anne Chu , monumental, contingent on the viewer’s physical are showing cast bronze sculptures that are figura - relationship to the object to establish the phenom - tive and ostensibly traditional. Their sculptural prac - enology of its bigness, a relationship that is cer - tices harken back to sculpture as a narrative tainly more visceral than in Bladen’s The X container. Anne Chu insists on exploring a range of Garden . materials and craft techniques while invoking the If however, one can put the lineage of art history history of figuration across cultures and eras to cre - aside, there may be other shared references in the ate sculptures that address ritual, storytelling, and art of these three sculptors to bigger propositions. mythology. Chu has traveled extensively, looking to To look just below the surface readings, there are find inspiration from the terracotta warriors of clearly allusions to metaphysics (invisible struc - China, the medieval friezes in Europe, classical 2 Laura Mattioli Rossi, Jene Highstein Lines in Space , (Milano and New York: Charta Books Ltd., 2008), 16. 3 Richard Armstrong “Between Geometry and Gesture,” The New Sculpture 1965-75, exh. cat. (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), 12.