Diana Al-Hadid at Columbus College of Art and Design: Invitation

Diana Al-Hadid, Head in the Clouds, 2014. Polymer
gypsum, Fiberglass, steel, foam, wood, plaster, clay,
gold leaf, pigment. 130 x 56 x 50." Courtesy of the 
artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Author photo.

Somewhere between the holiest of holies and the lowliest of lowlys, Diana Al-Hadid's gold-leaf-embellished heaps of industrial materials aspire heavenwards. They soar through our offended sensibilities to reconstruct a lost sense of awe. The material from which they are fabricated acknowledges the chaotic ugliness against which a sense of glory struggles, so improbably, to emerge. 

Put more plainly: Al-Hadid would sometimes appear to be a construction worker run amok. She uses materials like steel rods, gypsum board, mylar, Fiberglass, and plaster to create works that can appear to be literally thrown together, then disintegrated by force or time. Her major pieces in this show might be construed as collections retrieved from scrap piles where a subdivision of McMansions is rising.

This wonderful show disappears from Columbus after the 11th of October, and I regret reviewing it only now, for it's a show that should be widely seen. It's a show for Everyman, exemplary of the reasons to see contemporary work. It's shocking; it's confounding. It is fun. It stimulates one's faculty of curiosity. Any simple observation about it is bound to be right and will lead to yet more fruitful questions and observations. People who think they don't like or understand contemporary art will find that there is nothing to fear in this ultimately accessible work. Why spend time at home with a crossword puzzle, with this show to keep eye and mind lively and acute?

Diana Al-Hadid, detail, Head in the Clouds,
2014.

Fontains Abbey, Yorkshire. Photo by
draGnet, on shothotspot.com/blog/6

I was drawn to Head in the Clouds, this droopy-winged, skeletal angel perched atop the most humble of pedestals (in fact, it sure looks like a particularly nasty, big, black mushroom to me). Certainly not a creature of the flesh, this celestial being seems to have failed the transformation to pure spirit. Or, it could be that it requires the gradual dissolution of the body to become angelic? Or, maybe angels have a lifespan too, and this one has seen better days? I suppose, given the title Al-Hadid has left us with, that the head in the clouds—and, indeed, the head retains its form—might signal a valuing of spirit over substance. 


However one wishes to interpret this sculpture, though, there is something awe-inspiring about it. The gold-leaf imparts an unquestionable sense of precious value despite its decrepit form, and the definition by multiple, slender vertical lines certainly suggests Gothic architecture—the upsurging shafts, piers, mullions, and pinnacles. The angel's body is like a deserted, derelict abbey, on which 18th century English authors built the gothic novel—or William Beckford built his own romantic monument to impossible verticality, Fonthill Abbey. 

And a sense of the Romantic resides in all of Al-Hadid's work in this show. It is grand in gesture and use of space. It is histrionic, theatrical, madly demonstrative. In the clarity of its contrasts and the extremes of its positions, it actively invites engagement and interpretation.

Diana Al-Hadid, Sun Beard, 2014. Polymer gypsum, Fiberglass, steel, plaster, gold leaf, pigment. 44x 96 x 6."
Collection of Dave and Nancy Gill. Author photograph.

Diana Al-Hadid, Sun Beard, detail

Another reason that Al-Hadid's work is riveting is that her own extraordinary level of engagement announces itself in every work. The artist's high levels of idea and self-awareness don't cancel an almost naive abandon with which she seems to attack her work. Sun Beard is an almost-two dimensional panel; the surface sits on a wooden frame, and the surface has the depth created by accumulated layers of heavy materials. On the top of it all, she has painted, in the upper left corner, a radiating sun in golden tones. Opposite, there's what I take to be the traditional image of North Wind, whose black "beard" is the blast of cold breath he blows. Here, the two elements appear forcefully to compete against a scrim of…icicles? rain? shadows in cosmic regions?

Diana Al-Hadid, Sun Beard, detail.

The painting supports the intensity of the conflict by its utter lack of finesse. The sun, in the first place, is placed where children often put it to shine down on the scene below. It's quartered, serving as stage-lights that insure the visibility of the normal scene below. She has painted it at high speed, without mixing colors, in big, sloppy strokes, as if she just wanted to get the job done: "There it is. Finished: The Sun. Next: The Wind." And then on the opposite side, the old man with the beard is devised in the same manner: simply placed, no mixing of colors, no time taken with the drawing. She's satisfied that we recognize him, and that's enough.

In Sun Beard, then, we see Al-Hadid doing something very different than she did with Head in the Clouds. The similarities of materials and signature appearance are obvious. But in this work she shows her consummate confidence. I like the revelation of this childlike aspect of her artistic persona. She will do what she wants to, needs to, feels immediately the urge to do. It suggests that sophistication is not what she's promoting, but vision.  

Diana Al-Hadid, Nolli's Orders, 2012. Steel, wood, polystyrene, plaster, polymer gypsum, Fiberglass, alumninum foil, silver leaf, paint.
122 x 264 x 288." Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Author photo.

The jaw-dropping Nolli's Orders commands center stage in Al-Hadid's CCAD show. Solid cascades fall from level to level, as water in a great, natural field of slate—or as in it's opposite, a monumental, baroque fountain. The draperies that form a platform between the watery event and the "underground" structured, gothic galleries, are infused with pigments. These come across as sylvan, with pastel rose and leaf green dominating in soft, irregular patches against the white—as if this huge, theatrical structure sits on a mossy bank.

Theater it is, both set and drama. The audience provides the action in moving around and around, peering into, up and down at the amazing variety of perspectives and elements of the work.

 Nolli's Orders refers to a famous map of Rome made in 1748, made by the architect, Giambattista Nolli, so the title confirms the reference to Rome's grandeur, its monuments, and even to its partition, since Nolli's map was made to distinguish the different areas of the city. But Al-Hadid clearly doesn't want to leave anything unmixed. In the view to the left, one could be a spelunker deep inside a cave, entirely forgetful of the seeming abbey cloisters from which the whole form arises.

Yet across Al-Hadid's landscape are draped the naked forms of men in the lounging or curled poses familiar from classical sculpture. But Nolli's Orders does not rise to the climax of the Trevi Fountain's commanding figure, Ocean, before which the others are supine. The monument builds to anti-climax, in a joke about itself.

Those figures (hollow at the back, one finds) are also exceedingly disproportionate adding to the general feeling of screwy perspective and weirdly layered meanings.nate to the the layers they are draped across, adding to the general feeling of screwy perspective and weirdly layered meanings.

Are humans overwhelming the natural landscape? Are they causing the collapse of civilization? Their civilization, founded on the galleries of the Renaissance, has bloated and crumbled. Is it our task now to begin again redefine art and nature? Or, perhaps, to reintegrate them?

Al-Hadid's work, seeming at first so overwhelming, is at heart wide-open. Her world of reference is vast: The Church; art history, disappearance and resurrection (Head in the Clouds); nature and pagan folk tales (the North Wind in Sun Beard); classical antiquity and its heirs; deterioration in Nolli's Orders. And this is only half the show, loaded with more significant, unique works.

I love this show. It should be the whoop-it-up emblem for the slogan, Fear No Art. Diana Al-Hadid clearly works as hard as a construction worker, but with the fever of an artist whose mind is an explosion of ideas. This woman seems to be receptive to everything that has ever come her way, and is capable of putting any bit of experience or knowledge to use. The multiplicity of meanings we can derive from her work is bracing. The humor and poignancy; the ideas and materials brought from high and common culture alike—everything makes us wonder why we've been content with boxes when flow works so well. She strips the flesh off and lets the structure support the ideas; she lets her intentions fall into one another and sees what happens at the next level. Simply by observing her work, trying to follow the flow, we can't help but feel ourselves loosen and lighten up, to begin blending what used to be so clear, so captive.

"Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor," at the Akron Art Museum

Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor, installation view, Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries,
Courtesy of the Akron Art Museum

Abstract Expressionism was a movement of painters, and Adolph Gottlieb was not the least of them. But I hadn't known that Gottlieb had also turned to sculpture late in his career (during the '60s and '70s) until I saw the handsome show that runs until February 17 at the Akron Art Museum. Organized by the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, it presents Gottlieb's small sculptures, showing his cardboard maquettes through wooden templates to the finished steel objects composed of flat, painted shapes. The completed pieces are collections of circles, arrows, rectangles, arcs, and "bursts." The simple shapes are those one imagines a child would cut from construction paper. These shapes are well known from his paintings of the same period, but they give the sculptures a special air, suggestive of—but not the same as—the whimsicality of Calder and the brightness of Matisse cut-outs. They feel different from his paintings, in which shapes assume a weight of significance that seems lacking in the steel versions.

Abstract Expressionism notably thought big, and indeed the Gottlieb paintings that accompany these sculptures are reasonably large (Red or Blue, 1972, is 90 x 108 inches; Three Elements, 1964, is 96 x 48 inches). Although Gottlieb produced work for placement in landscape, the bulk of his sculpture was table-top sized. Presented here is work as large as Petaloid's 32.5 x 31.5 x 15 inches, the depth being on account of the base. (Petaloid, 1968 is featured in the foreground, above.) A lovely, chunky and otherwise articulate Untitled (not pictured), which lines up three shapes cut from wood and painted brown, is a mere 8.25 x 9.75 x 3.75 inches. Hardly heroic.

Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor, installation view, Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries, 
Courtesy of the Akron Art Museum. NB, this is reverse view of image above:
Petaloid, 1968 is seen left, from opposite side. Foreground is Untitled, 1968,
which appears from opposite end in picture above, in the background, right.

In my review of David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy at the Wexner Center in spring 2012, I noted what had gone without remark, that the celebration of his cubes skipped over the fact that a good deal of his work explores planes rather than three-dimensional shapes. Gottlieb was apparently a friend of Smith's and an admirer: Gottlieb was certainly investigating some spatial questions that intrigued Smith as well, though Smith's flat works are, I think, more challenging. They tend to lead our eyes into negative spaces that continue his positive marks. Gottlieb's sculptures are more truncated in gesture, and I found their beauties to be more centered—more aggregated in the close relationship of positive shapes. Most of the shapes are slotted into flat rectangular bases that not only secure the upright forms, but serve as horizon lines or as definition of a world in which the visual event is collected. The base is, in fact, like a different, more open kind of organizing picture plane.

But of course sculpture's not a painting. The delight of this sheet metal sculpture is that its appearance, content, and significance are protean, shifting with every move the viewer makes. The flat shapes can disappear and reappear like characters in a drama: The eye loses them whenever one's position reduces them to line.

Adolph Gottlieb was born in 1903 and died in 1974. He began his studies at the Art Students' League in New York in 1919; 1968 was the year his retrospective filled both the Whitney and Guggenheim Museums. It was during the preparations for this career retrospective, when he was sixty-five, that he undertook sculpture, gleefully, for the first time, creating the work now seen in Akron.

Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, as part of a 1943 joint statement, said,"We favor simple expression of complex thought...We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth." Both men were "post-painterly" abstract expressionists, whose work was more distant and cool than theatrical. Gottlieb nevertheless considered his work, balanced and cerebral as it was, to be expressive: "I try, through colors, forms, and lines, to express intimate emotions." This thought applied to the sculptures no less than to his painting.

Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor, installation view, Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries, Courtesy of the Akron Art Museum. Foreground, Arabesque, 1968,painted steel,
 26.75 x 38 x 12.25;" Painting, Red vs. Blue, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 108.

The generous documentation that the Gottlieb Foundation and Akron Art Museum provided as background suggest that the body of work in this show, "challenged the distinction between painting and sculpture," pointing to Gottlieb's continued use of long-perfected painting tools, such as touch, visual balance, and surface quality.

The photographs provided (individual photography was not permitted in this show) highlights the similarities between the design elements of Gottlieb's paintings and sculptures. In the view of Arabesque posed before Red vs. Blue, similarities are quite obvious in mirrored shapes, calligraphic strokes, and simplification of form and color. 

In both the sculpture and the painting, there is a tension between a sense of rest and the possibility of eminent take-off or propulsion—yet they feel very different nonetheless. Gottlieb may "challenge the distinction" between the two forms, but I think this photograph demonstrates that the challenge leaves the distinction standing firmly in place. I further think that it contravenes the notion that the sculptures might convey "intimate emotions" or "reveal truth" in a way comparable to the paintings.

Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor, installation view, Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries, Courtesy of the Akron Art Museum.
Foreground, Two Arcs,1968, painted aluminum, 26 1/2 x 37 x 24 3/4." Painting: Three Elements, 1964, oil on linen, 96 x 48."
(Back, left, maquette for Two Arcs, cardboard with pencil notes.)

I think the big difference in what these two media offer Gottlieb lies in the nature of the way positive and negative space are defined by either. In the sculpture, Two Arcs, above, the shapes cut from steel, mounted in a stiff steel base, have crisp, clear edges. Their definition is absolute. The fact that the curves are not geometrically perfect is part of the interest of the piece, but the imperfection, like everything else, is perfectly stated. Likewise, though Gottlieb hand-painted the sculptures himself, I will offer only my word (since no close-up is available) that each painted element is uniformly coated with paint. Despite the occasional dried drip, there appears to have been no impulse to let serendipity have its day, or to attempt effects through variations in paint coverage. The simplicity is based in part on disciplined definition.

Such clear definition is important for this kind of sculpture because its components are visually very light and can disappear with a viewer's movement. The sculptural elements stand on their own, supported only by their inner relationship as seen from any particular angle. Their visual background—the room, the other artworks around it—can detract considerably if the installer is not sensitive to its positional delicacy.

Paintings composed with similar shapes and colors are altogether different because they are framed into permanent environments separated from the rest of the world by the colors and edges of their backgrounds. The backgrounds, in both of the paintings pictured above, contain smaller, colored environments against which shapes are set. So even while we are asked to understand these as "flat forms" and "flat surfaces," we instinctively know they are not. As soon as there is overlapping, we feel dimension. Moreover, on the large canvases, Gottlieb has not coated surfaces in the uniform way he covered his steel cut-outs. It's easier to see (on this scale, especially) in Three Elements than in Red vs. Blue, but layered paint on canvas allows (or begs) for shadows of past color applications and gestures to show through. The definition of the space inhabited by the shapes is largely given: There are four edges they relate to.

In Three Elements, Gottlieb uses edges crisp, fuzzy, and ragged for a variety of purposes: to impart definition to shapes; to invoke dissimilar emotional and intellectual responses in us. This powerful tool—the use of edge—isn't possible, working in sheet-metal. For reasons like this in the nature of materials, the sculptures don't have enough complex or nuanced elements to satisfy like Gottlieb's paintings do.

I'm sorry that I can't include any photographs of the maquettes for the sculptures, however, for these little painted cardboard trials in fact come very close to being comparable to the paintings in emotional effect. Several of these are pictured in the show's catalogue, Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor, published by the Gottlieb Foundation (ISBN 978-0-9642065-2-6). The maquettes are, to my mind, more eloquent than the finished sculptures because they are so evidently simple, expressive of complex thought and intimate emotions. The cutting of cardboard with scissors doesn't produce exact products. Gottlieb wasn't exact or even decisive in painting them, so we see that painting history the final products lack. Cardboard isn't very strong, so some of the maquettes slump or list in a way that allows the emotion to show in the materials themselves. There is a wish—an aspiration—there is nuance in each maquette that the purity of the final, inflexible steel can't imitate. Those qualities of nuance, breathing room, or open potential exist inside of paint on canvas but around the steel cut-out sculpture. The maquettes, existing in a material world between the two, seem to participate in more of the soft virtues of painting.

I found Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor to be a delight, especially because of the way the show allows the visitor access to the artist's process, presenting all the working stages of the sculptor's design process, and coordinating examples of Gottlieb's imagery in both media during the period. Good luck for Midwesterners: Akron will have the show until mid-February. After it closes there, it will open again in Ann Arbor this fall. The University of Michigan Museum of Art will have it from September 21, 2013 through January 5, 2014.

Michael Bigger's Sculpture and the Moving Viewer

Michael Bigger, Sunstruck, 1984

After a month in Minnesota on the grounds of the Anderson Center's large sculpture garden,  I still couldn't get enough of Michael Bigger; I was drawn immediately to his several sculptures there. His work is that wonderful kind of sculpture that arranges itself anew with every change of the viewer's position. After a slow circling of every one of them, I was left thinking that I saw the world differently after Bigger's colorful, kinetic system of curves and angles intervened on my vision. 

Bigger died in 2011 in Minneapolis, where he was an emeritus professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He had settled there after he undertook architecture studies at Miami University in Ohio and sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. He taught at the Atlanta School of Art, the University of Manitoba School of Art, and the Massachusetts College of Art as well as in Texas and Maine before settling in for a long teaching career in Minneapolis and almost a half-century of exhibitions and commissions (Embarcadero Center in San Francisco; Vassar College; Cincinnati Zoo; Oakland Museum of Art, California; and many sites in San Antonio, Texas and in Monterrey, Mexico).

Sunstruck, moving to the right (view 2).

I found Bigger's sculptures irresistible because he hit my simplest visual desires with exact, perfectly executed blows. First, each brilliant work stood out in the natural environment. It virtually screamed, "I'm not nature! I'm that other thing, and I'm not even trying to fit in. Don't pretend you don't see me." It commanded the viewer to come look. 

Sunstruck, all red, sits all by itself on a plot of ground with no adornment of trees or landscaping at all, but it is so arresting and, once the viewer is caught, so absorbing, that it is, literally, its own environment. 

If you first see Sunstruck in the view above, it seems almost like a Chinese character, a bisected parallelogram with two angled, light strokes cutting through it. It's a little unstable; something more triangular in shape would be less unsettling, for the legs seem to be listing to the right, and I'm left wondering if this is dynamic or rickety. 

Moving around it to the right, though, I find a completely new presentation (view 2). Yes, only two of the legs are parallel, but only the short one, to which least is attached, seems to be at right angles to the earth. From this angle, it seems like a still frame from a film of a structure exploding, its components shooting in every direction: Geometry doesn't seem to be the point, but an early-stage demonstration of how structure becomes chaos.

Sunstruck, view 3

By the time I've moved around to stand behind the tallest beam (view 3), I find that the short beam is falling over; and it finally occurs to me that the two thin rods may not be parallel after all. Now I've begun to doubt my senses about the bottom I-beam. Look closely at its intersection with the upright beam: How is it possible for two straight beams to intersect at so narrow an angle, yet leave so much room at the top? How is it possible to look up that bottom beam and see both sides?

Sunstruck, view 4

It seems that Bigger has introduced at least one subtly twisted beam into the heart of Sunstruck (see view 4, center). I must confess that from different viewing angles I have identified different beams as being "the one" that appears to be bowed—or that is bowed. 

Is the central, horizontal
beam curved?

Whatever one sees, or thinks one sees; however many times one returns, looks again, or revises judgment of former perceptions: the sculpture is a terrific success. Bigger has made something big and substantial and declarative that eludes every effort to be described or pinned down. Set out as plainly as possible on a bare plot of earth, it forces the viewer to become a wasp, swooping and attacking from every side, investigating, doubting, and trying to find the place where the pulse—the answer—is next to the skin. It's food forever, and I think that I was around it just long enough to get started. All the big beams seem truncated to me, and the redness aggressive, making the curving roof almost a satire of shelter. It's a big-time game, a place for the mind and senses to play at something I can't imagine getting enough of. 

Michael Bigger, Cat's Cradle, 1985

In writing about Bigger's sculpture, I praise it especially for the pleasure I take in its irreducibility, in the fact that it can't be captured in one view or described in any simple way. I'm very aware that the first photo I choose to introduce a work with will bear the weight of "defining" three-dimensional art that can be approached from any direction. So I will follow this first image of Cat's Cradle with several more, hoping to leave my readers with a more dynamic or complicated idea of the work. Maybe this is an idea available only when one writes about sculptors who are not world-famous. I was extremely aware that sculptures become defined for us by photographers when I wrote about David Smith. For those of us who never see sculptures in person, we know them only by one or two famous, documented views. We essentially know them as two-dimensional images.

Cat's Cradle, view 2

Cat's Cradle seems to have a more forthright task than Sunstruck—it seems to be a tour de force of balance and poise—but while it is less playful, it is more breathtaking for its confident mastery. Bigger appears to have successfully set out to accomplish opposites simultaneously. At the simplest level, he has made a heavy, horizontal work with massive plates balanced on the lithe, curved, dancing black stems, the only parts anchored in the ground. Lines lift planes. Yet, if you come at the work from another direction (view 2), it's like a box that's being broken down—all flat surfaces at angles to one another, with strings still coming detached. One facade disguises the rest of the sculpture from view. Now Cat's Cradle is about surface slabs, not the strength of line.

View 3

Because of the great size of the red slabs and the generous, broad swathes cut by the arcing black lines, there is sense of great space and of simplicity about this sculpture,the opposite of fussy in the materials used, their size, and their proportions to one another. The balancing act is brave and dramatic: There's something fundamentally manly about the work. Yet simultaneously, Bigger offers calligraphic grace to the viewer who moves to inspect the sculpture close up (views 3, 4). It's not a matter of scrutinizing red paint, but all of the windows and the the dynamic passages he's created. Where the whole appears immense and like an engineering feat of balance; close up, it's modern and rushing and graceful, with busy knots of motion and lines sending the eye off the runway into...well, into places you'll know when you arrive.

Cat's Cradle, view 4

A piece from 2000, La Centinela (The Sentinel) is a departure (of fifteen years at the least) from Sunstruck and Cat's Cradle. It is smaller, and it is nestled into a grove of dramatically tall locust and pine trees, skirted by young river birch, in September turning golden and shedding their bark in singular mops of papery curls. 

Michael Bigger, La Centinela, 2000

By his own avowal, Bigger was most interested in the physical presence of sculpture—he thought of himself as a builder rather than as a storyteller. La Centinela nevertheless calls to my mind a scene at least, of a sentinel tower rising over the moonlit roofs of a hillside town. It's not a picture I can literally describe or point to, but something the variety and relative weights of the forms bring to mind for me. I find the compactness of the whole, anchored on the embracing circular form, closed at the top by the crossing of the swooping lines very secure. Yet the sentinel rises and the swooping lines that complete the sense of safety continue to provide a connection with the sky beyond; to give a sense that the brilliant yellow is connected with sky—with moon glow or with the sun.

La Centinela, view 2

View 3

The size and the shapes, cut and plied from sheets, lacks the industrial swagger of sculpture fashioned from beams. There's an excellent match between size, shape, and material that adds to the comfort of this piece. It's brilliant yellow color, too, illuminates the shady grove in which the work is so well sited. Were La Centinela located like its fellows, out in the open, it could be blinding in yellow, and the color might actually reduce our sense of its size and impact were it . As it is, its color, its tower, and its thrusting curves all call attention to and use the shade and the great height of the lovely grove that surrounds it. 

View 4

The shady setting delivers complex shadows that complicate and soften our views of the sculpture as well (views 3 and 4). The unmitigated sunshine that falls on Cat's Cradle and Sunstruck are part of the geometry of the works, reflecting, highlighting, and incorporating themselves into Bigger's very designs. In La Centinela, the shadows are filtered through the trees and rest lightly on the surface, calming the color and decorating the surfaces with filigree. While some of the trees are evergreen, others are not, so I imagine that there is a seasonal sequence of surface design that adds to the pleasure for the habitual passerby.

Bigger's Monterrey Express is shown in the Starr Review post of September 17, 2012.

Environmental Sculpture at the Anderson Center, Red Wing, Minnesota

Looking Forward, Vincent Donarski, 2002

The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Red Wing, Minnesota offers visitors the pleasure of a sculpture garden situated on fifteen acres adjoining reclaimed grass prairie on one side, and a cascade of ancient burr oak forest descending sharply to the Cannon River on the other. The sculpture park itself is planted with rows of young oaks of several varieties, helpfully identified with markers, just like the sculptures are. “Art and nature thus allied…” are equally married. This was the intention of the Center, which developed the garden in 1996 with the assistance of the Red Wing Environmental Center and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.  

Young oaks at the Anderson Center nature walk

During my September residency at Anderson, I refresh myself, staled from my writing, by strolls in the sculpture garden to enjoy the sweetness of the environment’s transition to fall, and to consider the impressive variety of monuments designed to be viewed outdoors. 

The factor that has struck me the most is the generic quality of the garden setting and its effect on individual works. In other words, I’ve come to think that environmental sculpture might do best when it’s designed for a particular place, not simply to be placed outdoors without specific reference to surrounding landscape or architecture. This is a thought in process, however, because I like some of the sculptures very much just for themselves, and others I don’t enjoy for similar reasons of design, materials, or concept. What is the relationship of my taste to my assessment of siting? I’m not sure I can (or necessarily should be) able to answer that, but it’s a substantial something to chew on.

Looking Forward, another view. Note the sweeping arc shadow.

Environmental sculpture works at least two ways. First, as a significant (not always enormous) event that one studies in its shadow, circling, perhaps touching, considering its materials, components, construction, and relationship to one’s own size and body. It is also an event that can be come upon from any direction and seen from any distance; something that relates to its environment in many ways apparent and disguised. In this sense these sculptures are literally environmental—they are integral to the world they are in, not simply artifacts deposited in it. 

Vincent Donarski's Looking Forward is one of the sculptures I delight in, for being a piece that invites attention from every angle, and sits on its plot with grace. It's scale is not overwhelming; it's taller than a human being, but is composed of knees and curves, books and spades that all bring to my mind human bodies and work. I love the balance of dynamic and stable forms and their relationship, which harmoniously changes as one moves around it. Its aspects are very different, but I never lose sight of the impulse that it came from. From every angle, it stands against distant trees that provide not only background but reinforcement for our sense of its proportion. We know where and how it fits. I love the sculpture, I love the shadows it describes, and I love the ease and stimulation I simultaneously feel around it.

Physical Tension, Megan Madland, 2003

Close to Donarski's work sits Megan Madland's 2003 Physical Tension, composed of two large sheets of a composite, stone-like material with iron supports. Rather than circling the work, one walks between the plates as through a canyon's ancient topography. Compared to a piece like Looking Forward, it's difficult for me to understand Physical Tension in its context. It's interesting to walk the narrow canyon between the plates, and to imagine the by-now-trampled path to be the base of the profound, dark, and somehow sacred place that's created inside. 

Inside Physical Tension

Once inside, the sculpture creates its own environment. But that doesn't obviate the fact that the piece is primarily exterior, and that it does indeed stand in relationship to the natural environment that surrounds it. As such, I find it as sorry on the outside as it is intriguing on the inside. It is supported on each side by two rusted beams that are themselves anchored by rods. The beams are attached to the concrete in a utilitarian way that fails to add, to this eye, any utilitarian aesthetic. So nothing on the exterior has its own beauty or relationship to nature—that's all inside. Which, granted, may be part of Madland's intended point, and a good one. But as an addition to a nature center, I think it's a poor choice. This, like several other pieces, would be clarified and its importance greatly enhanced in a setting less natural and inherently competitive with content about the earth and manmade contrasts to it. I'd put this in  the city, where it could be heard.

Erik Legrey, The Grand Couple, 2003

The Grand Couple by Erik Legrey is another appealing sculpture that seems lost on the prairie. It's a light-hearted work that would seem to be right for a small garden-like setting, to be seen where one pokes about of a fine afternoon. A basically flat work badly needs close surroundings to create the little room for it to stand in. The Grand Couple gets lost as soon as one moves away from it, or from any position that is not frontal. Even against the dark green of the distant oaks, this one grows a little faint; from the side, there's almost nothing to see, and upon approach, it's smoke only. This sculpture needs a good home.

Hiding among the trees, The Grand Couple

Several of Anderson's sculptures appear as if the were made to be where they are though: They are commanding and celebrate the opportunities of their plots and the particular landscapes they form parts of. They are as integral to their sites as any thing rooted to it.

This is a conclusion I've come to with grudging admiration for Michael Bigger's Monterrey Express, surely the sculpture with pride of place over all the others in Anderson's collection of over thirty contemporary pieces. Monterrey Express stands between the north-south four-lane state highway and the depth of the Center's sculpture-nature park. From the road, the view is arresting, of mown green grass with Bigger's flat, rust-red arch; then, ranges of tall golden prairie grasses; and the ranks of burr oaks swaying in the wind beyond.

Monterrey Express, Michael Bigger, 1998

Bigger's sculpture, though not entirely alone on its flat, mowed lawn, nevertheless claims the space in the way a paterfamilias welcomes the guests on New Year's Eve. My photograph truncates this aspect of it, but to walk beneath it, one feels the sense of making an important entrance. Though the air on one side may appear to be a lot like the air on the other, the presence of the big red sculpture changes everything around it.

I am sorry to find fault with the sculpture's supporting legs, fashioned of ordinary, unmodified beams fixed to concrete slabs. "Look to the sky!" is my consolation, for all the interest and, indeed, great flights of fancy are there. I do find it disappointing, though, that the legs appear to have been given no particular thought, as if we aren't supposed to notice that they are there; that we are to suspend our disbelief until we focus elsewhere. 

But above us, Bigger uses sheet metal in poetic ways. The rusted swoops and tines 

are the contrails of swallows, the elements of well-worn rakes, mowers, and scythes. The sense of wear and tear that is part of the formal dynamism is exhilarating; the way that Bigger extends it in a long, loping, arched line lifts the spirits.

Monterrey Express through prairie grasses

The really special siting effect of this piece is when it's seen from the prairie side. Not only are the unfortunate legs disguised by the beauteous grasses, but the span floats over the grass like a wonderful reminder of the human in the natural. Anyone who has been with children for a nature walk in the woods knows that they will all leap for the empty soda can or the smashed ballpoint pen incongruously lying among the mayflowers. Signs of human life always call, and they certainly did to our prairie-traveling ancestors. Bigger's sculpture makes me think of those encounters—of the welcoming land, and the welcoming of the few people who got there first. 

Kamus, Peter Lundberg.

This sculpture, Kamus, by Peter Lundberg, is my favorite on the property. Its material, if it is not constituted partially of clay, looks a lot like the clay for which this district is well-known. The Red Wing Pottery still operates five miles down the road, and enormous clay deposits have been worked to the benefit of local people for millennia. (All the roofs at the Center are covered with tile.) 

While the sculpture appears to be merely a rough, red ring, it grows more and more complex—and fun—the longer you walk around and look at it. One thing I Iike is that it looks so hastily constructed, as if a giant child made it in nursery school and Mama Giant reinforced it with ribbon to make it last. The surface is pocked and poked and scratched for a miscellaneous look—or, whoops:  Maybe they are the marks of an ancient people and this has been carefully preserved by archeologists so that we may ponder the runes!

One of several alternate views of Peter Lundberg's Kamus.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this wonderful sculpture, though is that it is in the right place. It's big enough and the right shape for its outdoor spot. The winds can blow through it. It's the color and texture of the earth it stands on. The metal reflects the sun and eerily turns dull gray and disappears when it's rainy or cloudy out. 

But when it's sunny, it has a special property that I've never seen before and take childish delight in. In the photo to the left, you will see that it casts a very clear shadow: a roughly oval ring. But you will notice, too, that from that angle, the intersection of the sculpture's line forms two 

loops from the materials. As the viewer circles the sculpture, its form at every different position creates different combinations and shapes of single or double loops. Yet the shadow remains constant—the sun doesn't change her point of view. I really love this shadow-watching game, dreaming that at some point I will outfox that shadow and catch it twisting out of a position it snuck into, trying to imitate the many forms of the sculpture. But I probably won't. 

There is such a variety of sculptures in the Anderson Center's collection that any viewer can have a holiday reaching their own conclusions about the suitability or unsuitability of this or that piece for its location, stretching the imagination to find a better placement, rearranging monuments as a giant redecorating a gallery space. I definitely like it when the natural space with the addition of the sculpture add up to more space than there was at the beginning. I don't want to walk away—or around—feeling like the addition of a sculpture has caused the implosion or loss of a good place to look at the sky and trees.

Feather by Brian Unger.

Also on the Anderson property, closer to the residence, are a couple of fine examples of fortunate sitings. One example, Feather, by Brian Unger (right) is a secret like a pinecone or beetle can be, still and dark, arrested in motion.

Still, it mustn't be forgotten that the Anderson Center Sculpture Garden and Nature Walk brings the stroller to a very great deal of perfectly situated nature too. The prairie grasses, tree barks that peel and climb, ravines and plains: All sometimes distract from the art...