SIDNEY GORDIN’S NEW WORK
THOUGH SIDNEY GORDIN’S NEW STYLE, as seen in his recent exhibition in San Francisco, has been the preoccupation of two years, the pieces shown were mostly from the last year. The style has been a progressive and growing thing, almost unrelated to the serial attitude which has been a dominant mode recently. Not, in other words, a decision followed by the production of uniformly similar improvisations on a theme, but a working, pragmatic approach which grows out of the process. A board is sawed on the jigsaw; the artist is not sawing to a line, he is creating a curve as the blade moves; the shaped board is tentatively attached to the flat rectangular picture plane, and there are other boards there to relate it to; paint is applied, but the board is removed, leaving the hard edge of paint which describes the board’s pattern. Each picture has grown under the hand. The changes have been all but obliterated, but are apparent on close inspection, and add to the interest of the surface.
The work includes both low flat reliefs and paintings, some of the reliefs painted a matte white. Some are half painting and half relief, and still others are entirely two dimensional paintings. The shadow or edge of a shape in the constructions are very important; the lighting changes these shadows, and multiple shadows are cast by several sources of light in the paintings there are black lines imitating the shadows of the reliefs, but also wide black shapes denying the shadow function of black, and giving greater drama and variety to a picture which is nonetheless closely related to its sculptural relatives.
The relief constructions remind some viewers of the flat relief phase of Arp’s work. But Gordin points out that Arp worked with abstract forms with poetic and literary suggestions which imply that the work was formed according to some predisposition, whereas Gordin is more concerned with the poetry of pure abstract form. Because of the direction his work has taken, he has developed a greater appreciation of kindred pieces by Arp, but his use of forms which tend toward the biomorphic have a spring tension contour distinguished from the more pneumatic suggestion of Arp’s forms, and Gordin’s forms often have a geometric side opposing the organic, or, the organic might turn into a sharp cornered form.
His growing interest in the fixed view with which one sees a painting was already a part of his thinking, while making the cut-out metal sculpture of the style immediately preceding this work; it, too, was essentially two-dimensional. He wanted constant relationships, and the changing view of sculpture destroyed the internal relationships which he sought One of the recent constructions is a framed picture plane, but the parts jut out, planing this way and that to the single piece which projects straight out of the picture. (A man who was standing immediately in front of this piece looked a little like a Steinberg cartoon of a very concrete verbalization coming from the onlooker’s mouth.)
Some of the reliefs which project the farthest are deeply framed; the most monumentally broad of these is unframed, and the shadow of the parts along the top edge are more starkly formed by the shadow on the wall than in the plaque. The picture which is most clearly a painting (the forms are freer, there is an occasional feather edge, the colors most varied––somber mauve, black, intense red, and no white), is without a frame and needs none.
Gordin had attended a technical high school in New York City, and it was there that he formed his views about developing out of process: one does not invent even the most mechanical complex with inevitable certainty, but changes the resolutions with each addition, often coming to brilliant paradoxes which give the work new life and meaning almost by accident.
He was originally a painter, but in the late forties it seemed natural to translate the illusion of things in space as they are in painting, to a sculptural entity. With this insight he fell back on his technical training and began making precise rectilinear constructions which, despite great carefulness and accuracy, were very free and open, and were idealized symbols of modern structure.
Next he became aware of the potential of metal to curve and twist, to branch out and soar, and the structure which had been geometrical and architectural began to take on the delineations of trees and branching forms, but not just representations of trees. Gordin has always been true to the nature of metal, and now maintained a great interest in the surface of the metal rods. From there the forms were flattened and hammered; a multiplicity of small pieces fused together into growing and extending plant-like forms. But the forms broadened, and it was here that the two-dimensional character of his sculpture began to lead him back to painting. This two-dimensionality was to remain in metal for several years, being explored in for.ms cut out by acetylene torch, welded together into ideographic images akin to the forms of calligraphy. Each change in the style was based on a different aspect of process; thus we might say that they were not styles imagined “a priori,” but were the result of using new tools and procedures.
It is clear that Gordin is that unusual artist in our midst, the independent. When the art world was giving its enthusiastic attention to the automatic brushwork of the Expressionists, he was building precise and formal architectural armatures; when the modish work of art was generally growing to fantastically large scale, his sculpture was becoming almost miniature, and now that painters are abandoning the wall for sculptural form or are using canvases that, though still two-dimensional, are vari-formed, he is turning to a more painterly posture, almost meeting his fellow artists who are escaping the picture plane, but going in the opposite direction, toward painting. But this is not an arbitral)l radicalism, but the natural growth of a free man, liberal, open, and not harried by taboo ideas or the conventions of the period. He is interested in producing art, not living the artistic life. Each work is a continuation of an evolutionary process.
––Knute Stiles
