RICHARD VAN BUREN
AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY Graduate Center recently a mini-retrospective of Richard van Buren’s work. At the Paula Cooper Gallery, new pieces. Questions about development. How does one evaluate an artist’s work? In terms of newness relative to the overall art scene? Or in terms of a personal evolution? Or both?
Van Buren’s freestanding fiberglass pieces made in 1974 seemed the strongest to me. A work like Rack. Literally a skeletal structure. Two green resin backbones rising parallel from the rear to the middle where they bend downward apart to the front. Each standing on eight pairs of spindly fiber-filled legs which loop in centipede formation to their webbed feet on the floor. Resting on top, six clear sheathes of plastic, encasing their woving, rib between the two spinal cords in the back. In front two longer pink-tinged tubes balance across the supports. The whole is frozen in animation. A series of contradictions. The wobbly boniness of the structure, the spidery legs which almost dance on the floor, hinting at an anthropomorphism which contrasts with the glassy brittleness of the material. Similarly, the diffusion of light through the pale hues of the resin combining with the tracery of shadows ghosting the form to predicate a fragility, a lightness, which belies the actual weight of the piece. Mentally one can calculate the heaviness of the crossbars from the thick fiber of the supports, necessary to counteract the gravitational thrust. Visually, however, the clear plastic verges on transparency and thus denies its physical weight. One sees the piece as perched, almost hovering there, although one senses the tension of its construction.
But having said all this, where am I? How does this differ from the plethora of eccentric objects which pockmark the SoHo galleries? Hodgepodge recollections: idiosyncratic forms in plastic or latex or string or cloth; variations on process, on materiality, on ephemerality, on incongruity. No direct equivalents. And yet a sense of familiarity, of something expected. Still not derivative. How to explain a kind of felt personalness which at the same time approaches a conventionalized expressiveness?
Perhaps if I backtrack to Van Buren’s earlier work. Throughout his New York career Van Buren has been involved with color and light in terms of material. Even in his fiberglass-covered wood beam pieces of 1968 (not shown), he was concerned with the color filtering through the plastic. Explaining his shift away from these “primary structures” to more irregular forms and a more direct emphasis on color, Van Buren noted,
It was hard to reconcile the wood as a color because it was so much a part of structure. And for me, those pieces had a lot to do with color. But wood being wood, it’s a building material and you relate to it in a structural way. A viewer would see the color, but then get into what’s happening structurally.1
So Van Buren turned to fiberglass as his basic material, although he mixed various ingredients with the resin to attain different coloristic effects.
The earliest work shown at the Graduate Center, Hofstra (1970) reflects this transition. Five elongated, ragged fiberglass shapes hang from the wall. A kind of nonhierarchical series where one accepts the arrangement as simply the outcome of a way of working. Each segment built up in micalike layers. Different densities of polyester, different combinations of additives, piling into a whole. Pouring and then hanging. No formal composition, no analytical part-to-part relationships, just there.
A bit of art history: 1969 was the year of the Whitney show “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials.” And, although Van Buren was not included in that exhibit, his work relates in its nonordered construction and more particularly in its emphasis on physicality. For the blues, grays and whites of Hofstra are the hues of their material—the chalk, charcoal, ground glass, and plaster mixed with the resin. Color functions not as painterly illusion but as a physical property determined by its substance and the amount of light transmitted by the resin. And yet visually does this matter? Is Hofstra maybe a fragmented painting materialized into object-hood? Well, there is its tangible presence. The rough relief of its surface. The colors simply there as a product of its making. No associations, no metaphorical references. Still, I have nagging doubts about estheticism. Are the decisions involved arrived at through notions of art-making? Is the work just an eclectic rearranging of what is known rather than found?
More to the point. Hanza, a later wall piece, from about 1972. Three large amorphous shapes in a rainbow of colors. Brightly hued folds and splatters of plastic. Sparkles of glitter or metallic powders. All collaging into the whole. I think of John Chamberlain’s metal pieces, gestural Abstract Expressionist sculpture. Yet the process more explicit here. Van Buren’s color is not an adjunct to the material, but a part of it. It flows with the polyester, and the density of the resin becomes a determining factor in its opacity. Is it strange then that I reflect on Lynda Benglis’s poured latex or polyurethane works? The differences are telling. Benglis’s gesture is more dramatic, a fling or a plop; Van Buren is less demonstrative, slower in timing. And while there is an element of funky vulgarity to Van Buren’s riot of saturated color, unlike the day-glo intensity of Benglis’s hues, his is diffused into translucency through the resin. What strikes me as similar is an increasing focus on the iconic quality of the material object. Van Buren’s units, each an eccentric figure on the wall, asserting its significance as in its existence. Benglis’s later knot pieces come to mind. Is it the idiosyncrasy of Van Buren’s forms then that diverts one from reveling in the array of radiant color? Or, is it the readability of the process and the actuality of the material? Yet again the temptation to submit to sensation, to the beauty of the colors shimmering through the plastic. The jewel-like object. A preciousness incipient here, more dominant in Van Buren’s 1974 wall pieces.
Nagin. Two flattened V folds of slightly bubbled resin converging at right angles. The top a clear pink, underneath a tinge of yellow, to the side a sliver of greenish blue. The delicate hues almost transparent, catching the light in varying amounts through their glassy substance. Echoes of pink and yellow reflect on the wall, reiterating the interchange between color and light. I find myself enveloped in the painterly loveliness of the piece. But why is this a criticism? Are the colors too tasteful? The crystalline quality of the plastic too self-consciously artistic? Or is it that one loses the sense of personal meaning in the midst of what is acceptable as beauty?
But what is personal? Do I just mean eccentric?
A digression to Van Buren’s recent drawings. Framed in clear plastic. Inside a sheet of acetate marked on both sides with black felt-tipped-pen lines and washes of ink. Beneath this a piece of aluminum foil, also drawn on. The marking is sparse, the lines randomly placed. The space is ambiguous as visually the drawing hovers between the frame and the foil. The whole somehow tentative, suggestive of an intuitive searching for language. Yet the handsomeness of the metallic surface glosses the work into a finished image. Is the content the tastefulness of the picture? Or, is it the process of making through marking? Or, is it something else again?
To return to Van Buren’s freestanding sculpture. The earlier works like Lincoln and High Yellow more a jumble of color and form. Leaflike fiberglass tentacles opening out from their half-cylinder cores. Piling over, under, next to long hollow tubes of plastic. The surfaces roughly textured in uneven pourings of resin. The colors,thickened almost to opacity, separating the units. Low-lying creatures which seem to depend on their oddity for meaning. Does the strangeness of these pieces make them more expressive than the wall works? Or, is the assertiveness of their fantasy just as precious as a hypersensitivity of taste?
The slightly later works like Rack. Are they simply more refined versions of this? Or are they any closer to a felt subjectivity? Hemis Dance. Clear casting resin. Three backboned appendages, spidery legs crawling up and down from the ground. Poised on top, connecting the segments, a long tube thickened with its woving. A demonstration of tension between weight and support. The forms functional and at the same time whimsical. Maybe that’s why these later works seem the most personal to me. For the wavering linear structure and the delicacy of the colors set up a fragile vulnerability which counterpoints the physical stresses holding the piece together. The animism of imagination becomes credible in this balancing of natural forces. So that while the artist’s choices remain private, one accepts them as more necessary than arbitrary.
Perhaps this is the answer to my original questions. That despite the inevitable references to Eva Hesse, in these late works one comes closest to who Van Buren is. And, if newness in some sense is contingent on a finding of self, then what becomes significant in Van Buren’s new sculpture is that the pieces begin to belong to him.
—Susan Heinemann
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NOTES
1. Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Richard van Buren,” Artforum, December, 1969, p. 56.
