Seven Artworks
Scott Burton, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Hunt, Robert Motherwell, Unknown Artist (Luba)
Scott Burton. Healing Chair (prototype). c1989. Steel (59%)
St. Louis, MO: Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Apparently Burton made this chair while dying of AIDS. The posture it puts its sitter in is supposed to be salubrious for someone suffering from the disease. Had I been able to sit in it, I would have experienced it differently — perhaps as a better artwork — than I did. Use might have integrated (in terms of my experience) its medico-diaristic component with its physical structure. But as it was presented I only got to take it in optically, as a sculpture. As a sculpture, it's handsomely weighted but fails to make much of a structural argument. Perhaps this is because the four legs of its base are unenclosed, emphasizing its functional aspect (it's a chair) at the expense of unifying its positive-space rectangles with its negative-space triangles (it's also an arrangement of shapes). Burton's best sculptures twirl their functional and their "formal" dimensions around each other in a way that this piece fails to. At least, it fails to do so optically: again, use might have placed my sculptural gripes beside the point.
Scott Burton. Café Table. 1984-1985. Verde Fontaine granite (76%)
St. Louis, MO: Pulitzer Arts Foundation
As with the excellent Mahogany Pedestal Table, this furniture-sculpture of Burton's begs the question, "What does the work gain from its conceptual dimension?" — its conceptual dimension being the sculpture/furniture (art/nonart) slippage. It begs the question because of how fully this piece's artistic quality seems to rely on (though not solely to consist of) its physical structure. Sure, once you begin relishing the poise with which that cap sits on and, just by a touch, extends out over the edges of its base, you start considering the object's usability, which in turn makes you wonder about the difference between the functionality of quotidian objects and the nonpurposiveness of art. But were this a regular-looking table rather than a stripped-down Brancusian obelisk wearing the mask of a table, pretty soon all your cogitating would run aground as so much conceptualist navel-gazing — Burton's schtick, when it works, starts and ends with traditional sculptural considerations, not with ideas. And besides, contemplating the bounds of art is something all good art makes us do, "conceptual" or no. I have a hunch, though, that using the table as a table would've clarified some things — and this is why Burton was interested in performance — but alas I saw this in a museum and I wasn't allowed to touch it, let alone to eat a bowl of cereal off the top.
Helen Frankenthaler. Focus on Mars. 1976. Acrylic on canvas (53%)
Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art
There's a rightward thrust to all this painting's marks that works against the open bigness of its big blue expanse. Not much besides this touch of directionality, though, justifies how utterly that blue swath is structure-swallowing. The overall arrangement of the marks doesn't do it (diffuse), nor does the particular character of any individual one of them (scratchy, noncommittal). There's a touch of orange in the upper right corner chirping across the canvas at a bit of tanned yellow within blocks and bars at left, but the form that conveys this chirp — a graduating undular band of marine pushed against the picture's upper edge — is way too demure in its relationship with the huge blue field beneath it; this makes the cross-canvas color-play which the band is meant to facilitate seem like a cute effect rather than a structural necessity. Sans that band, though, orange and yellow would've been shouting at each other across an unbridged gulf of aqua. This might have seemed tragic and been to the painting's benefit.
Richard Hunt. Glider. 1966. Welded aluminum (75%)
Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
Hunt's art's heyday was the sixties, after he'd moved on from the wrought surfaces and complexities of his youthful phase but before the high-minded prettiness of his long maturity. Glider is a good example of his classical in-between style: compact but not constrained, exuberant but not overextended. The rub with this sculpture is that every one of the movements it makes moves back in on itself; this focuses the piece, directs all its weight inward. Those tendrils coming off that stretched limb do this by reaching back towards their point of origin; the glider-form itself does this with the way its slight cradling curve holds that wedge of scrunched metal — the sculpture's real focal feature — just so. Sure, there's a pompousness at play in Hunt's forms, but he (mostly) gets away with it by subordinating each individual mass to the sense of centeredness which Glider conveys overall. He'd lose the ability to do this sort of subordination later in his career.
Robert Motherwell. Ile de France. 1952. Oil on masonite (41%)
Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art
The fucking toilet tones... those light fecal browns, that green stain bottom-right... all too squishy for Motherwell to have been able to get any kind of a handle on, structurally. He tried and failed, though, and the result is a painting about as overdetermined as a painting can be. The repetition of rectangles plus the unmoored little semiotic elements here and there (clover form, arrows) are compensation for how resistant these colors are to any order at all. (And not only resistant, but just plain awful to see — though one ought to get some credit for trying to layer hues of mustard on mustard.) The big black central band is like a schoolteacher, verge of tears, shouting at her classroom to settle down and clean up. I guess Motherwell's streaky application, in that black band and everywhere, is sort of the painting crying about all the things it’s failing to do.
Unknown Artist (Luba). Memory Board (lukasa). late 19th-early 20th century. Wood, beads, metal (94%)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
The backside of the device curves out and is ridged, so it's handheld. The face of it — set off so so nicely by those spikes at each corner — has two, like, planes or fields or depicting zones: one that projects outwards, made up of affixed beads; one that goes inwards, comprising marks incised straight into the wood. These are like two completely separate and self-sustaining pictures, glancing off each other here and there. (This glancing resolves itself into five convex ridges at center.) Beads constellate atop the wood surface and either do or don't interact with the cuts beneath them. For instance, a stacked double-diamond shape recurs at the top and the bottom of the board; in the upper instance it's accented by a dot at each diamond's center, below a bead just grazes its edge. Elsewhere the beads cluster and breathe, sometimes drip; the incisions are all stiff runic structures. Unconscious, conscious. The device was used to record historical events.
Unknown Artist (Luba). Memory Board (lukasa). late 19th-century. Wood, beads, metal (68%)
St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Art Museum
The truly surpassingly great Luba memory boards (MBs) have much less apparent order than this one, which looks a little ornamental to me, indulgent. Also, the wood support's narrowness (relative to other, better MBs I've seen) forces the arrangement of beads upon its surface into a bit more density than the maker, it seems, had the decorative capacities to make good on. The artistic quality of MBs as a form, though, does not consist in decoration or ornament: it consists in the way two spatially coexistent but operationally separate decorative schemes — that of the beads atop and the engravings into the wood — stand apart and aloof, but only till the moments when they congeal uncannily. To that end, here, there're the disarrayed colors of the bottom bead-cluster butting up against the board's raised-bump waistband, and there's the asymmetricality of the bedecked parabola-pair up top. Both effects are too ordered, but there's a lack of precision to them that points at what's great about great MBs.
Welcome to Substack!