Group exhibitions are wonderful because they allow one to make invidious comparisons. The artists in them are directly competitive. Every piece in a solo exhibition can be fitted into a pattern of development, and so counts for something; a group exhibition reminds us that works of art do not exist on friendly terms, that they cannot all be fitted into some grand harmony. They differ physically and ideologically, and the differences can’t be reconciled or dismissed in the coy terms of pluralism.
There were two main groupings of sculpture in this show, those that can loosely be described as reductivist and those that are figural/narrative. Typical of the former were the pieces (one each) by Kent Floeter, Daniel Johnson, Sal Romano, and Nene Humphrey, while typical of the latter were those by Tzvi Ben-Aretz, George Grant, and Cynthia Short. Of the former, Romano’s black pool of moving water with sticks has a certain inevitable charm; it is minimalist luxury art at its best. Of the latter I most liked Short’s piece, with its melancholy little animals going for their feeding; a powerful provincial isolation is evoked, especially by the globe suspended above the feeding place. Short’s consistency of material and surface and her alignment of figures work to good unconscious effect.
But none of these works was quite strong enough to cancel out the others, and so they all failed. They existed in innocent disarray rather than deliberate discrepancy. The strongest works, those in greatest conflict, were those by Kazuko and Jack Sonenberg, both of which made environmental claims and tried to take over the space. Kazuko’s rope ladder with interwoven branches, which was hung over the staircase to the second-floor exhibition space, had powerful effect, especially as one moved under it. Sonenberg’s raft of vestigial chairs, cubes, and right angles, in raw and refined wood, was all the more a theatrical tableau by reason of its uncertainty as to whether it was sculpture aspiring to be architecture or architecture decayed into sculpture. (Gail Swithenbank’s monumental structure of houses on “stilts” has the same aspiration, but not the same means.) The Kazuko and Sonenberg works existed in a standoff, although the one took possession of the ceiling, the other the floor.
These two works force upon us a choice we are unwilling to make: that between Minimalist-derived and maximalist-aspiring mentalities. Sonenberg’s piece, with its “furniture,” seems to be giving us a life-world, but it is quite austere—a hermetic peak of purity on which there is little air to breathe but everything is crystal clear. The Kazukowork brings us down from the peak, swings us through the jungle, demands a certain rough-and-readiness for adventure. Sonenberg is arctic, Kazuko tropical; we spoil ourselves by wanting to be both. The alternative to pluralism is not renunciation but schizophrenia, in which we vacillate between two unrealities. But the critic’s split consciousness, reflecting a desire abandoned to its terror before its true object—the indecisiveness of critical desire being perhaps its last strength—matters less than the irreconcilability of the objects of that desire.
—Donald Kuspit
