Arts & Culture Magazine - January/February 2008 - (Page 69) Heizer, a private man, came to prominence in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s as one of a group of artists that called themselves Earth Artists. The movement can be understood as a protest against the artificiality and plastic aesthetics dominating American art at the end of the ‘60s. Inspired by Minimalism and Conceptualism, and by the work of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), Earth Art revolutionized the very notion of architectonic sculpture. Often the materials used by these artists are earth and stone at site-specific outdoor locations. Heizer’s City is a case in point. Located in the remote desert of Nevada, it consists of five phases, each composed of a number of structures that the artist refers to as “complexes”. Regarding City, Heizer remarked, “I’m interested in making a work of art that will represent all the civilizations to this point.” Begun in 1972, and still in process, City’s monumental scale is daunting. The first three original structures were demolished in 1995 and rebuilt in 1996. “Complex Two”, the largest complex of Phase One, is estimated to reach 70-80 feet in height and a quarter mile in length. Phase Five is a complicated structure of wedges and shapes named “45°, 90°, 180°”. The sculpture is a play on Brunelleschi’s perspective, distorting its conventions. In a New York Times Magazine article (February 6, 2005), Heizer referred to “45°, 90°, 180°” as a “defracted gestalt”. The overall dimensions of the five complexes of City are one and a quarter miles long by a quarter mile wide. “From the ground,” said Heizer, “you grasp the size but can’t make out the shapes—the opposite of what you sense from the air—and your perception changes as you move around.” Citing safety and artistic reasons, Heizer, who owns the property, will not allow visitors to the site while work is in progress. Perhaps no other sculptor of the ‘70s drew as much inspiration from architecture as Gordon Matta-Clark. Because of his early death from cancer at 35, his activities spanned barely a decade. His work, however, introduced new methods of exploring and subverting urban and social environments. His ideas and experiments continue to influence architects and artists, both in the United States and Europe. Matta-Clark trained as an architect at Cornell University. He is best-known for carving into buildings, dissecting them, slicing into and opening them up with chain saws, sledge hammers and the like, creating gravity defying, profoundly disorientating walk-through sculptures, the scale of the carving determined by the building. In Bronx Floors: Thresholes, 1972, he cut through walls and floor in an abandoned tenement in the Bronx. His cutting into and consequent rearrange- ment of a suburban house in New Jersey, known as Splitting, 1974, is iconic. The building, owned by gallerist Holly Solomon, was due for demolition. The artist cut it in half and dug away some of the foundations, so that the building started splitting. British sculptor Rachel Whiteread makes the space in and around domestic objects and buildings solid. Converting negative space into physical form, in Monument, 2001, she transforms an empty gray granite plinth in Trafalgar Square into a work of architectonic sculpture by surmounting the plinth with an inverted clear-cast resin reproduction of the plinth itself. This novel approach to sculpture is best demonstrated in House, 1993. Whiteread cast the outside walls and interior spaces of a Victorian terrace house in Bow, East London. Its effect on the art community was instant. Some saw it as a masterpiece, others an eyesore. The irony of this piece is that the same year the work was made Whiteread was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize—the first woman to be so honored—while on the same day as the award ceremony, Tower Hamlets councilors voted to have the sculpture demolished. Whiteread’s temporary installation Monument in Trafalgar Square is difficult to read in the sense that it contravenes our notion of public sculpture. It is transparent; therefore it is never stable in the visual sense. The work is a monument to the plinth—vacant of its historical meaning, it draws attention to the realization of ideology and public persuasion through aesthetics. High civilizations are produced in the brief moments of harmony between tensions. It is this cultural equipoise that makes them so attractive. Some would say we are hardly living at a high point of civilization. However, in the specific context of contemporary architectonic sculpture, there is much to intrigue and enthrall the public. In its relation to architecture over the last hundred years, such sculpture has proven itself to be among the most inventive and rewarding. It remains to be seen if this reciprocal momentum of recent history will continue. “What the cutting’s done is to make the space more articulated, but the identity of the building as a place, as an object,” said Matta-Clark, “is strongly preserved, enhanced.” arts and culture magazine : : 69
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