Two Reviews: Rosemary Mayer and Erin Shirreff

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Closing out 2021 with reviews of two recent exhibitions: the Swiss Institute’s excellent, if incomplete survey of Rosemary Mayer’s fabric sculptures and temporary monuments; and Erin Shirreff’s presentation of sculptural photographs and photo-based sculptures.

Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching
Swiss Institute, New York
September 9, 2021 – January 9, 2022

Though she was a lifelong New Yorker, this exhibition at Swiss Institute is the first survey of Mayer’s multifaceted oeuvre in her hometown, or anywhere. Featuring nearly eighty works spanning her most prolific period, from 1968 to 1983, “Ways of Attaching” encompasses conceptual texts, fabric sculptures, and related drawings, watercolors of billowing drapery, mixed-media collages, and plentiful documentation of her performative public art projects.

Mayer’s writing—as a critic, essayist, and translator—was often entwined with her art, so it is fitting for this show to begin with a series of text-based conceptual experiments from 1968–69 that register fleeting phenomena like firecrackers heard and cigarettes smoked.

Read the full review at Art in America.

Erin Shirreff: Sculptures and their shadows
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
October 29 – December 18, 2021

We experience most art through photographs, and that was true before the days of virtual installations, online viewing rooms, and Instagram. As we learned during the past two years, with limited access to museums and galleries, that’s not always such a bad thing. But what is lost in translation from object to image, and can anything be gained? Erin Shirreff has been wrestling with such questions for 15 years, with interdisciplinary projects that merge photography, sculpture, and video. Without passing judgment on the restless images that have proliferated around us, she examines and mobilizes what she calls the “space of not-knowing”—the missing information inherent in any photograph.

Read the full review at Sculpture.

One Work: Diane Simpson's "Two Point Enclosure"

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Diane Simpson, Two Point Enclosure (2020), installed in Point of View at JTT, New York (September 9 – November 13, 2021). Photo: Chris Murtha.

I recently wrote a “One Work” piece for Art in America on Diane Simpson’s old-but-new-again sculpture, Two Point Enclosure (2020). The work is one of three the artist produced for her current exhibition at JTT in New York, Point of View, from drawings made between 1980 and 1981, at the outset of her late-blooming career. Originally realized as part of a series of cardboard sculptures but never exhibited, Enclosure is here revived in a new material—the sturdier but equally utilitarian particle board.

Read it over at Art in America.

Point of View is on view at JTT through November 13, 2021.

Double Documents: Imaging and Installation in Sturtevant’s “Duchamps”

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Installation view of Sturtevant, Studies for Warhols’ Marilyns Beuys’ Actions and Objects Duchamps’ Etc. Including Film, November 16 – December 13, 1973, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Photo: Robert Lorenz, Everson Museum, Exhibition Archive.

My son turned three-years-old just days before the pandemic brought New York City to an eerie standstill in March 2020. With him out of daycare, and galleries and museums closed for months at a time, I didn’t manage to see much art in person this past year. That did, however, enable me to focus what little time I had on completing my master’s thesis and graduating from Hunter College. Thankfully, I had already completed the bulk of my research, so I mainly needed to write, write, and write. (I really feel for my fellow colleagues who had to conduct research with severe limitations on travel, libraries and archives closed to the public, and only digital resources at their disposal.)

When I started work on my thesis, I only knew that there remained much to unearth about the body of work that American artist Sturtevant (1924–2014) produced in the manner (and image) of Marcel Duchamp.* In the mid-1960s, Sturtevant became known for paintings and sculptures that were meticulous and exacting, but inherently different, recreations of works only recently produced by her peers. My research began as an investigation of Sturtevant’s Duchamp 1200 Coal Bags (1973), an installation partially informed by Duchamp’s contributions to the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, which transformed Paris’s posh Galerie Beaux-Arts into a cavernous spectacle. Sturtevant initially presented the installation as part of her 1973 exhibition at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, and restaged it in various iterations over a dozen times between 1992 and 2011.** Despite its apparent importance to the artist, there had yet to be a full accounting of this major project.***

Sturtevant’s darkened and spotlit installation featured her own versions of Duchamp’s most famous Readymades—originals of which were absent from the Surrealist’s 1938 exhibition—arranged beneath an imposing dropped ceiling fully lined with coal bags. It was, however, a pair of works that Sturtevant included in the Everson presentation but omitted from later iterations, which captured my attention. These two works, a projected image and a sculptural display of photographs that referred to more obscure aspects of Duchamp’s project, were exemplary of the central and entwined roles of installation and photography in Sturtevant’s broader practice, and as such steered the course of my research.

Two-page spread from Sturtevant’s exhibition catalogue Sturtevant (Stuttgart: Württembergischer Kunstverein, 1992).

Two-page spread from Sturtevant’s exhibition catalogue Sturtevant (Stuttgart: Württembergischer Kunstverein, 1992).

While Sturtevant’s installation strategies have been well documented, far less scholarly attention has been paid to the collective effort of her photographic activities. When the artist began incorporating photography into her process, it was typically necessitated by her source material, whether Duchamp’s role-playing portraits and Readymade miniatures, Eadweard Muybridge’s locomotion studies, or Joseph Beuys’s actions. Yet, Sturtevant consistently employed the medium across all aspects of her practice. As an artist concerned with the imagery of others, Sturtevant was keenly aware of how images define the public perception of an artwork and can even supersede the object itself. She thus employed what we would now refer to as imaging to guide and frame the reception and documentation of her artworks, exhibitions, and performative reenactments. As a result, much of her output involved photographic operations, whether or not the work itself was photographic.

My thesis, “Double Documents: Imaging and Installation in Sturtevant’s ‘Duchamps,’” examines more broadly the body of work Sturtevant produced in the manner of Duchamp and more specifically the photographic maneuvers and installation strategies she employed to present, reproduce, and reconfigure these works, thereby shifting the emphasis from the objects themselves to the framing structures that help define them as artworks.

My inspiration wall.

Notes

* It should be noted that Bruce Hainley included thorough and insightful analyses of several of Sturtevant’s most crucial works after Duchamp in Under the Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant’s Volte-Face (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013).

** Less than a year after including Duchamp 1200 Coal Bags in her solo exhibition Push and Shove at New York’s Perry Rubenstein Gallery in 2005, Sturtevant presented it at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. All other re-presentations of the installation occurred in Europe.

*** Hainley provided the most comprehensive account of Sturtevant’s Everson Museum exhibition, but he did not address the numerous re-stagings, or repetitions, of the Duchamp 1200 Coal Bags installation. Hainley, Under the Sign of [sic], 274–308.

Robert Rauschenberg: Night Shades and Phantoms

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Installation views of Phantoms (all 1991) in the Chapel, the artist’s former studio. Robert Rauschenberg, Night Shades and Phantoms, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, NY, March 14 – July 19, 2019. Photos: Chris Murtha.

Over the past year, I had the opportunity to research, plan, and develop an exhibition at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation with my Hunter College colleagues, Daniela Mayer, Lucy Riley, Joseph Shaikewitz, and Melissa Waldvogel, under the guidance of our distinguished professor, art historian and curator Emily Braun.

The exhibition, which opened on March 14 and will close on July 19, is the first to exclusively focus on Rauschenberg’s Night Shades and Phantoms, two distinct but related series of “metal paintings” from 1991. Produced on brushed and mirrored aluminum panels, these silkscreens are composed exclusively of the artist’s own photographs, which were captured on travels at home and abroad from 1979-1991. Rauschenberg’s photographs replaced those he previously appropriated from mass media print sources, shifting the frame of reference in his paintings from the public realm of current events and popular culture to one more defined by the artist’s personal experiences.

The Night Shades are distinguished by Rauschenberg’s application of Aluma Black, an oxidizing agent that immediately tarnished the aluminum surface, revealing and concealing the artist’s matter-of-fact images. In the spectral Phantoms, the faint screens compete with the transient reflections that enter the frame, which inherently include the viewer. Produced on the heels of three separate retrospective exhibitions, these ethereal works allude to Rauschenberg’s artistic past and, by conjuring the foggy realm of memory, address the difficulties of looking back.

My essay “Photosensitive Rauschenberg,” which examines the centrality of photography to these works and much of the artist’s creative output, will be included in the forthcoming exhibition catalogue.

Update: The Rauschenberg Foundation has made a digital version of the catalogue available here.

Installation view with Vanities (Night Shade), 1991. Robert Rauschenberg, Night Shades and Phantoms, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, NY, March 14 – July 19, 2019. Photo: Chris Murtha.