Review | Her infinity nets re...

Generated on 2023-12-22 03:01:23

Result #1

In the end, all this questioning of conceptual and pictorial space at the center of Lisbers art serves to underscore that since her work is composed of disparate elements, all of which come together into one composition, there is no relationship between the parts. This is a perfect example of the viewers having to move through the works, which have been arranged in such a way that their elements overlap one another, allowing the viewer to wander through the pieces without ever being seen through or translated into other visual or verbal forms. No matter how much it is known, in a subjective way, about the relationships between the parts of Lisbers sculptures, or how much it is known about the actual spatial relationship between the parts, it is impossible to trace any real physical relationships between them. Its as if we have never found the unity we are looking for. Lisbers sculptures are the result of a linear process, a simple set of conditions that we have to find for ourselves, but it is up to us to discover them.

Result #2

There is an almost immediate whiff of scare to this show: the noise of all the art packed into the same space, the simultaneous smell of noise and of flesh.The walls were covered with small rooms. Each room contained at least one work, an entirely different object. The difference between the rooms was in the arrangement of the objects: one room had a prominent, triangular piece of wood on the floor; another had a red-purple piece of wood in its corner; a third room had a rectangular piece of wood, like the last one, on the floor. This meant that the work was spread out, separated from its original context, from its aesthetic content. It was like what my mother would say: It is a museum, and as such it is our home. The room was completely furnished with the last object in the show. Two different pieces were mounted on the walls: a painting by an American artist (A. B. Albers, though I was told by Albers that the name was from Alberts paintings) and a piece by a Swiss artist (David Vetter), both of whom were exhibited as a series in the show. In each case, the artist had placed the last piece in a corner, allowing it to decay or disappear as it passed through the space. Their work has a glazed look, a matte finish that is another way of saying, If we do not use it, we lose our connection to it. So it is alive, but not alive, alive to the isolation of an enclosure. The paintings in the exhibition were also detached from the history they reproduce: the abstract pieces on the walls were from the 20s and 30s. If these are works of art, they are still firmly in the period of reproduction. If they are like images, it is a period of assembly; there is nothing left to do but to go and find it.

Result #3

The thought is absurd. The more you think about it, the more unbelievable it seems.The problem with this painting is that it too easily puts us off the track. Despite its grandiosity, it is too derivative. It is like painting a masterpiece, a great painting. It doesnt dare to question itself and it doesnt dare to doubt itself. This is why the paintings are so derivative and so exciting.

Result #4

Her infinity nets remind me of projects earlier in this course where we put tiny dots of complementary color on top of an opposite color field. I wonder if I would find walking into an infinity room disorienting, as if inside a hallucination. There was a lot of anticipation for this project, in fact, all this razzmatazz—the precision of the work, the lack of handwork. The labor involved in the design and operation of the display was something to be worried over, given the immense challenge of making this gigantic work. To some extent the resistance in this show is as much about physical and structural concerns as about design. One of the great strengths of the show was the diversity of materials, in style and in materials. An array of metals, from cold-rolled steel to papier-mâché, was on display. A carpet of polyurethane (p-foam) sheets were put to good use. Elegant pliable plastic helped to give the piece its long name, while the two-by-four-foot planar piece, resembling a construction board, was called an electronic work. The smaller works on the floor were held together with ducts and straps and further reinforced with metal straps, as if to give the installation a sense of mass. The piece is a kind of heavy-metal sculpture that performs as a supporting system for the larger works. The heart of this work is the roof, a huge, large piece of metal construction for the ceiling. And the most remarkable piece, was a kind of blue polyester resin-foam roof that extends over one side of the piece, like a flat roof. All the objects seemed to be hanging there, as if suspended in midair.One of the more interesting pieces was a set of plastic protuberances from the ceiling of the gallery. The protuberant stands as flat, green walls with plastic tubes hanging like a stalactite, with a little purple metal collar attached to one end. The sound of the wire that wraps around the wire went very quiet.

Result #5

Her infinity nets remind me of projects earlier in this course where we put tiny dots of complementary color on top of an opposite color field. I wonder if I would find walking into an infinity room disorienting, as if inside a hallucination. The little dots are on the floor, beside us, beneath us, just as in the past—but no longer in a state of that deep dreaminess. It is all to the front of your head.This summer, in a section entitled (In)visibility, I gave a talk titled Natures Vision and Other Essays on This Concept, the titles of which are of the order, sensuous and elegantly flowery, of a sort of blossoming tree, or an idyllic spring. The object of the talk, which was a scale model of the inner workings of an accordion-like organ, was to allow you to hear its shapes, to hear its sound, to see its motion, and to hear its tone. At the end of the last room, at the end of the chamber, was a phonograph record, and the sound produced there, much more than the sound from the models in the concert hall, was deeper and more disturbing. Sounds were twisted, confused, frozen, drawn out and drowned in the sonic blur of the sound, a kind of depth and depthlessness. The sound of the record, the sound of the live piece, was fully conscious. All the sounds that were only whispered, I could not hear them at all—I was frozen in a world where the sound was by far larger and more disquieting than any one sound ever produced by the accordion. I had never heard a sound so terrifying. What I did hear was what I felt, the sound of the record, and the sound of the record alone, isolated from anything else. Like the musicians in the concert, the sounds were not part of the overall arrangement, but in contrast to the live piece, they were inextricably present.The artists that had not yet acquired a sound system in 1965 were invited to play in this world.