Canadian Art International: Bodily Space
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Dada radicalized sculpture. Conceptualism nudged its definition further. Performance art was sculpture. Chris Burden's intentional gunshot wound was sculpture. Robert Smithson thought derelict factories and suburbs were sculpture. For Dan Flavin and James Turrell, light was sculpture too.
"Bodily Space: New Obsessions in Figurative Sculpture," at Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, wrestles with something even more intangible than light: interiority and Rodin's lasting influence. This is body as inspiration and obsession; titillation and tranquilizer. For all its modernist élan, curator Holly E. Hughes's show embraces a deeply romantic ethos: stun the intellect to free the unconscious from its bone prison. The physical is transmogrified; the external becomes internalized.
We are greeted by Ron Mueck's Big Man, a hairless "thinker" hunched morosely, misanthropically, like an ogre, in the corner of the first gallery. He stops us cold. The closer we get, the more baleful his gaze becomes. Do we cringe or chuckle at a naked, 400-pound man? Do we want any part of what he's thinking? If Rodin did indeed model his Thinker on Dante, this sculpture could be Dante's id—the irrational bottomlessness of infantile want—or is it Mueck's raging?
Nearby, in a window 15 feet above the gallery floor, Maurizio Cattelan's Mini-Me (a 12-inch-tall munchkin) perches with an air of mischief laced with mistrust. Is he studying us, or the show? Is he hanging out, or hanging over us like an unsolved problem? The figure is Cattelan himself, and he takes his place outside the exhibition, above it all, looking down on the proceedings. It is a deconstruction of the process of museum-going, a tickling of notions of display, spectatorship and art.
Cattelan isn't the only trickster at work. The curator's obsessions become ours. The body co-opts the mind and we struggle amid a sweet barrage of conflicting truths. Fourteen other artists are in the show, from brand names like Bruce Nauman and Nam June Paik to Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, Tony Oursler and Janine Antoni. There is a set of photographs by Spencer Tunick, who also staged a local August shoot of another one of his naked crowds. Each of the artists is represented by works that enrich the conversation about the body and sculpture; with each one the physical recedes, the obsession sweetens, the way out becomes the way in. Winter 2004
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