Robin Peck
"Robin Peck" by Dion Kliner, Fall 2007, pp. 148-49
Is this what it comes down to for Robin Peck, A Shallow Flight of Stairs? After more than 30 years of making sculpture, does it culminate in eight pieces of clear four-by-eight-foot Plexiglas laid flat on the floor, one long side abutting the next in a shallow, stepped rise from one-sixteenth of an inch above the floor to one inch above it? Since Peck has been making sculpture for more than three decades, he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Should we be interested to know that these are the eight standard available thicknesses for four-by-eight foot Plexiglas sheets? Should we be interested to know that unlike the measurements of other materials sold in four-by-eight-foot sheets (like plywood and Sheetrock, whose dimensions are consistent), the measurements of Plexiglas tend to be fluid, more like suggestions—like traffic laws in New York? Should we pay attention to how it meticulously fits the room? Does it find meaning through mathematics— the magic of numerical relationships, proportions, ratios, a mystical idea that the universe can be put right through ordering and placement? Or do we admire how it reflects what’s around it, including the people observing it in the gallery?
In the main, the answer to all of these questions is no, at least for Peck. When he looks at his shallow flight of stairs, he doesn’t just see Plexiglas. Consider the list of things that seemed important to Peck when he was planning A Shallow Flight of Stairs: transparency (as in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes); waterfalls, rivers, rapids, riffles, ponds and wading pools; Robert Smithson’s Mirror Stratum; Smithson’s essay Entropy and the New Monuments; Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library staircase in Florence; Duchamp’s The Large Glass and Nude Descending a Staircase; Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (often referred to as The Wreck of the Hope); Donald Judd’s 100 Untitled Works in Aluminum; the movie Flatland, based on the novella by Edwin A. Abbott; the monumental stairway in the amphitheatre at Pompeii; Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven; steppes; stream terminology; mining terminology.
In its associations, A Shallow Flight of Stairs is almost infinitely expansive, like the space and scale of the Constructivist sculpture and painting to which it is related. The quandary is that if we look at the sculpture, we don’t see the sculpture. To do that, the eye has to turn inward in a flight of fancy—to see the depth of its shallowness is unfathomable.
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