Two years ago someone named “Sky Brown” wrote a letter in response to my favorable review of Richard Tuttle, who makes art using junk materials like cardboard. This reader reviewed the alley behind his or her apartment: if one lets one’s “preconceptions fall away” in this setting, such a work as “‘Rock’…might not be…a stone at all, but quite possibly a slightly dehydrated dog dropping.” The letter writer also satirized the idea that looking at art deepens one’s seeing of rawer stuff as well.
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While it’s possible to imagine how these forms might have been created, the fun of many other pieces is their enigma. Many are decades old, their creation part of a distant and anonymous past we cannot know. Tree Burl Surrounding Arrow is a piece of knotty wood wrapped around a rusty metal arrow: how did this happen? The surreal Tray of Glass Eyes is a box of 50, each colored and shaped a bit differently, their ovoid shapes surprising. The owner thinks this was once a salesman’s sample kit, but the eyes don’t seem to be arranged in any order. Equally strange is Porcelain Doll Legs (circa 1920), limbs of all sizes mounted on Peg-Board. Was this part of an obsessive collector’s trove, or was its maker haunted by fantasies of dismemberment?
Certain items I’m certain I would have passed by in a used-clothing or junk store. But mounting the anonymous Handball Glove in a gallery makes one see an almost humorous elegance in the spiral stitching on the palm, a seeming target for the ball–a talismanic hint of the glove’s function. The hangers in Collection of Clothes Hangers (1800s to 1940) are more functional: twists and loops and rectangles of wire have been added to accommodate different types of clothing. The hangers’ functionality doesn’t make the shapes any less wonderful.
The plastic Light Guides, a few of which are displayed, are especially beautiful. Used to funnel tiny light bursts from sheets of scintillation material to round photomultiplier tubes, which convert them to electrical signals, these begin at the top as a long rectangle, which then diverges into multiple strands, each of which twists about and reconverges at a circular area at the bottom. The “designer’s job,” the booklet tells us, “is to convert the rectangular shape at the scintillator to the circular shape at the photomultiplier while retaining as much light as [possible]”; the elegant twists transforming a rectangle into a circle make that task visible.
Here the artist’s intentionality diminishes the power of his materials. There’s real visual excitement in the surfaces of Gerding’s wood and stone, especially if you look with the same active eye you use in “Found” and “Virtu.” But the form as a whole looks all too much like the decorative, easy objets d’art found in the living rooms of many homes. Though the human imagination can soar to spectacular heights, it can also slip into more predictable modes, reenvisioning raw stone as baubles, as the adornment of costume jewelry.
