Renee Rohr: Rubber Song
By Fred Camper
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Rohr, a French sculptor living in Belgium and showing in Chicago for the first time, arranges rubber forms on metal frameworks. “The flexibility and the elasticity of the rubber [are] sensually linked to the rigidity and the coldness of the steel,” she writes–but in many of her works both are black, and one can’t tell the rubber from the steel at first. And her gridlike arrangements on a rectangular frame are often unclassifiable: neither painting nor sculpture nor installation, they insinuate themselves uncomfortably into one’s consciousness. Looking a bit like discarded industrial materials or a structure meant to support something else, they nevertheless have no obvious function. Too flat to be sculptures and too three-dimensional to be paintings, these repetitious arrangements–also found in the paintings–suggest an unaccountable obsession.
On the Road is transgressive in a different way. Two grids of crisscrossing rubber strands are placed one in front of the other; looked at head-on, one set is convex, the other concave–one pushes toward the viewer, the other recedes. By simply adding opposing curves, Rohr undercuts the presumed endlessness of minimalist grids. The title’s reference to travel is reinforced by the way the two grids suggest approaching and receding landscapes. But the title of AIDS Action is more obscure: a single horizontal bar, suspended between the frame’s sides, supports a number of black rubber strips, tied in the manner of the AIDS ribbon, and some hinged metal parts. Whatever the work’s meaning, these two elements clash on a visceral level: the elegant ribbons have an open feel while the metal pieces are snapped shut, solid, confining. Indeed, Rohr frequently evokes emotional dualities without specifying a context, so each work will be somewhat different for each viewer.
If Rohr’s work has a peculiar heaviness, partly because of her materials, Garrett’s seems almost weightless, airy and oriented upward. And if what makes Rohr’s work powerful is the questions it raises–“What am I looking at?” the viewer is encouraged to ask–Garrett’s pieces are lighthearted, less introspective. His almost decorative work lacks the divided, self-doubting angst of the best modernist art; for him, a change in materials is playful–it may change the mood but doesn’t require a change in form. Thus Falls has a companion piece, Nocturne, whose overall shape is little different but whose darker colors have a more brooding, inward quality. Indeed, by repeating similar forms in slightly varying patterns over the whole surface, Garrett almost empties the work of meaning: his unassertive, gently repeating patterns have no apparent cosmic significance.
