The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: Jackie Winsor: With and Within

Winsor

Jackie Winsor: With and Within Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart October 19, 2014, to April 5, 2015

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Jackie Winsor: With and Within

The only journey is the one within.

–Rainer Maria Rilke Outside and inside are both intimate—they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility.

–Gaston Bachelard1 To be with is to be “together in one place” and to be within is to be “inside something.”2 Both perfectly encapsulate the hyper-acute sensation of experiencing a Jackie Winsor sculpture: being at once together and inside.

With and Within is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition since 1997, bringing together ten works from her Inset Wall series, begun in 1988; Painted Piece, an influential performative sculpture from 1979–80, along with a series of photographs recording its creation; and videos and photographs documenting the origination of Fifty-Fifty (1975) and Burnt Piece (1977–78).

Together, they demonstrate Winsor’s ongoing commitment to making sculpture at the intersection of Minimalism and feminism, informed in equal parts by personal history, technical ingenuity, and unparalleled craftsmanship in order to evoke a singular vitality.

Winsor’s early sculptures were task oriented, involving routine actions over intensive periods of time—from hours to months—that incorporated both organic materials like rope, hemp, wood, branches, and logs, and building materials like nails, plywood, copper, concrete, bricks, sheetrock, plaster, wire lathe, cement, and glass. Later, these were combined with acrylic paint, watercolor, colored pencil, gold leaf, and powdered acrylic pigments. The titles of her pieces often describe the actions engaged in—or their results—the materials utilized, or the shapes implied. The weight of the early pieces ranged from hundreds to thousands of pounds and their heft was testament to their strenuous construction. She focused on elementary, symmetrical forms (sphere, cube and pyramid) chosen partly for their regularity, with the cube selected to a certain extent for its relation to the frame of a painting and a wall in a room. This progressed into combinations of the two shapes—all body scale—which evolved into stepped pyramids, resting on the floor and, since the late 1980s, sunken into the wall—all communicated through the simplest of means: an absoluteness. She accounts for her persistent investigation of the cube as stemming from a concern for holding one element in the sculpture still, as a means to see where the impulse to movement would lead in order to discover hidden possibilities within the form by “going deeper” over a protracted duration of time.3 The middle child of three girls, Winsor spent her youth divided evenly between the dramatic Canadian coastline of Newfoundland and New Brunswick and the New England academic center of Cambridge. Her father, a steam engineer, and her mother, a hard-working home manager, were early and significant influences, as was her itinerant childhood—she grew up in more than a dozen houses before the family finally settled in the Boston area when she was eleven.4 These many interiors instilled in Winsor an awareness of the “walls around her,” and she recalls a favorite family story about her parents’ first house, designed, measured, and cut board by board and drilled nail hole by nail hole by her father during the winter, and then assembled plank by plank by her mother over the long days of summer, portraying her father as having an infallible “eye” (for level planes and perpendicular angles) and her mother a hard-won resilience.5 Winsor inherited her father’s exactness and her mother’s resolve.

Winsor began her formal art studies as a painter at the Massachusetts College of Art. She started to experiment with sculpture in graduate school at Rutgers University, which she attended from 1965 to 1967. Her first sculptures were made in clay and later in polyester resin, and her instinctual innovation won her a teacher’s assistantship in an undergraduate ceramic class, and later her first full-time position at Greenwich House Pottery in New York,

Burnt Piece, 1977–78 Courtesy of the Jackie Winsor archive

Painted Piece, 1979–80 Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from Donna and Donald Baumgartner and Mrs. Helen Herbst in memory of her father Samuel C. Herbst by exchange, M1993.79 Photo: Courtesy, Milwaukee Art Museum

where she stayed for five years. Winsor moved from Greenwich House to Hunter College in 1971 and a few years later to the School of Visual Arts, where she has remained since 1974.

Winsor began to exhibit her work in 1968 and in 1970 participated in the Sculpture Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, soon followed by her first one-person exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1972. She was included in the 1977, 1979, and 1983 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum. In 1979 The Museum of Modern Art presented a mid-career retrospective of her work—the first for a female artist in MoMA’s department of Painting and Sculpture since 1946—that traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas.

Although Winsor had only learned how to use electric tools in her New York studio after graduate school, she was no foreigner to hand tools. She recounts an indelible memory of her father handing her a paper bag of nails and a hammer to secure floorboards to a wooden porch frame when she was a young girl. As her father’s dedicated assistant, following his instructions dutifully, she used every nail—”a large bag of nails with about twenty times too many for the job.”6 Nail Piece (1970) is reminiscent of this story, created over the course of three months by systematically hammering thousands of nails into nine seven-foot pine planks until the weight of the nails equaled the weight of the wood.

Daily rigorous callisthenic exercises were a part of Winsor’s elementary school schedule, as students were trained to focus not only their minds, but also their bodies.7 Winsor’s sculptures are body-oriented. She points out how twisted ridges of four-inch rope resemble the shape of “engaged bicep muscles,” evident in what she refers to as the “muscularity” of her early sculptures.8 Rope Trick (1967–68) also reveals her affinity for balance and measure.

Winsor inserted a steel armature into the sturdy girth of a heavy rope so it stood at just over six feet, close to Winsor’s own height. She regularly acquired reused heavy shipping rope from a huge warehouse along the East River of Lower Manhattan, noting that she would select specific bundles that “had a certain color, a certain worn texture, a certain weight” and bore “naturally occurring marks” inflicted by applied force and pressure over time.9 During this period, she created a series centered on the action of binding trees, branches, and logs together with hemp, forming a hand-spun grid in Bound Grid (1971–72), or forming a square in Bound Square (1972). Four Corners (1972), weighing 1,500 pounds,10 was made over six months and was achieved by wrapping hemp around the four corners of twenty-five-inch logs until the rope met, creating tightly wound balls that pressed together at the center. As with the rope pieces, the strength it took to produce the piece was secured tightly within. These works successfully located and harnessed energy and the ensuing tension and spatial magnetism were equalized with precision and restraint.

At the same time, Winsor began to employ wood lathing to realize square and cylindrical shapes such as Cylinder Lattice (1971) and used bricks and concrete to accomplish Brick Dome (1971), completed over three thirteen-hour days on-site,11 which became the centerpiece of critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard’s legendary Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists at The Aldrich.

Winsor met choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer while at Rutgers and attended many of her performances when she settled in New York with Keith Sonnier in 1967, noting of particular import her pioneering Mind is a Muscle (1968).12 It is no wonder that Winsor had an immediate attraction to Rainer’s practice, as they shared a kinship for exact, concerted, and intensive repetitive movement. Winsor’s own practice at the time entailed precise manual rhythmic actions such as hammering, drilling, gouging, binding, bundling, hatching, and cutting, and later mixing, pouring and scoring. For her, this repeated skilled and extremely focused work afforded her a kind of introspection, enabling an organic transference of sustained activity to occur in the completion of the pieces.

The consistent use of what Winsor says “can be found behind the walls”13 also evidenced her sensitivity to what one doesn’t see but knows is there. This interest in the inside and underside of built structures and her desire to know the unknown and the unseen was informed by memories of settling (and building) and resettling (and more building) as a child.

This impressed upon her an awareness of the structural and the fabricated space around her.

Other artists at the time were also mining the ways in which we respond to our immediate environs, most famously the Minimalists, but also in particular the younger Anarchitecture group founded in 1973 by artist Gordon Matta-Clark, famous for his “cuts” into derelict and forgotten buildings that allowed alternative views and opened up sight lines to vistas beyond.

Matta-Clark, who was a friend, was involved with 112 Greene Street Gallery, where Winsor was invited to conceive her first and only performance.14 Up/Down Rope Piece debuted on June 29, 1971; twenty minutes long, it involved what Lucy Lippard described as “A ton of 4” rope...hauled up from one floor to another, through a hole, by a ‘long, lean male’; below was a ‘soft, rounded female’ who was feeding it up to him...the action reversed and the rope was lowered onto the curled-up female until it covered her completely.”15 Winsor’s emphatic choice of participants, a male and a female with stereotypically equivalent gendered bodies in direct proportion to one another, were invited to carry out a rudimentary Sisyphean task

Inset Wall Piece Two Inch Diagonal Cut Concrete Color Painted Grid (side view),, 2000 Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

involving a singular durational action ultimately about resistance. The impetus for the piece was Winsor’s memory of hauling hulking shipping rope up five flights of stairs to her Bowery studio. But it also held greater socio-political concerns as a commentary on the ongoing struggle for gender equality at the time.16 By the mid-1970s, Winsor began to test the limitations and boundaries of sculpture, creating a series of three pieces over five years that she subjected to various elements of chance: burning, dragging, and exploding. At The Aldrich, the current exhibition opens with a toscale black and white photograph of Burnt Piece (1977–78), the completion of a work by means of a destructive act. Winsor methodically constructed a thirty-six-inch cube with six windows to an interior cube (a recurrent element introduced in 1976) out of wood and wirereinforced concrete, brought it to a city dump at the edge of Brooklyn, and set it ablaze.

It burned for more than five hours, until the wooden elements were completely destroyed and the concrete structure was all that was left intact. Winsor used one of the most potent natural agents, fire, to incorporate radical change and risk into her process. In a work that was just as much about the making as the unmaking, her process wedded the acute precision of a thoroughly researched and skillful execution to an unexpected force of combustion, fate, and endurance. A sculptural “ruin” or performance “relic,” it retained its elegiac form, testament to its maker’s ability to build it to ultimately survive.

Inset Wall Piece Two Inch Diagonal Cut Concrete Color Painted Grid, 2000 Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

The production of the sculpture Fifty-Fifty (1975) attests to the precision and artistry of a Jackie Winsor sculpture. To compose it, she assembled a forty-inch cube using 756 pine wood strips combined in fifty-four layers to form an intersecting grid that incorporated more than 40,824 nails and 40,824 pre-drilled holes.17 Here, Winsor was attempting to “capture space”18 and evoke an experiential effect by creating a circle in the center, compelling the viewer to peer inside. Within the galleries, the tranquil introspection of the Inset Wall pieces is disrupted by the sounds of Winsor drilling and hammering, assisted by three women, in the video footage by Liza Béar, documenting the creation of Fifty-Fifty.

Painted Piece (1979–80) is a groundbreaking work exemplary of Winsor’s revolutionary approach to making sculpture. Set within the center of the exhibition space and surrounded by six Inset Wall pieces, its formation required the layering of fifty coats of hand-applied paint, ranging from pink to blue to yellow to red and so on, onto the inside and outside of a thirty-one-inch plywood cube (also with a cube interior); the concluding color application was a neutral shadowy grey. Winsor then towed it behind a moving car—alternating on all six sides and now and then sitting atop the cube—along the cobblestoned street outside her Mercer Street studio. The damage that ensued was the means to expose the colorful layers hidden underneath, showing scars and scratches, and embodying at once history, circumstance, and catharsis.

With the freestanding sculptures, the viewer moves around the piece, peering into its intimate

interior. In the Inset Wall series, the wall becomes part of the piece, containing the viewer within its space. These pieces are hung at heart level, the scale of a person’s head or torso, piercing the gallery walls. The vitality is contained within the work’s core, inviting the viewer’s gaze to penetrate deep within. Like mandalas, they emanate out from the inside, and although measured in scale, fill the white space around them, transmitting outwards like an aura.

Winsor traveled extensively during the 1970s, from Mexico City to Peking to Tehran.

She relates that during her visit to Machu Picchu in 1974 she had an astounding experience full of awe and synchronicity. While standing alone atop the deserted ancient Incan site at sunrise, “she found herself between the full moon at the pinnacle of a peak and the full, radiant orb of the sun on the opposite horizon, a human sundial.”19 The sublimity of this event sunk deeply into her psyche. Much later, an echo of this occurrence manifested in her works Open Cube (1983) and Yellow Inside Out Piece (1984–85), where a cube was constructed and broken apart to expose stepped edges where the walls pulled away from each other. Later, in 1987–88, Winsor made three stepped-pyramid sculptures, Open Pyramid (1987), Closed Pyramid (1987), and Pink Piece (1988), which were not the result of a building process, but were intentional pyramids with a deep well (or bowl shape) in the center. These pieces seemed to provide the transitional step to the Inset Wall pieces initiated in 1988 and still on-going.

In 1978, Winsor visited China with the Arts Workers Coalition. Part of her interest in China related to a favorite subject of hers from the third grade—the Yangtze River and the underground houses that were built either by carving straight down into the earth, creating a courtyard with enclosing rooms, or incised into a cliff.20 These pre-Westernized underground houses were in poor condition and not a government-sanctioned tourist destination, although they could nevertheless be seen by Winsor in transit through train windows. The Inset Wall pieces share a commonality with these underground houses in that “both contain the body within an intimate corporeal space, generating an awareness of sensations of touch, smell, and color.”21 Such spaces are familiar to Winsor from her early impressions with the musty coolness of the underground root cellars commonly found in Newfoundland backyards.

These Inset Wall pieces are entrancing works, oscillating between painting, sculpture, and object as a means to obfuscate the meaning and method of their conception. Are they inset into the wall, as their titles imply, or do they only appear to be so? What is it we are not seeing? The Chinese underground houses that interested Winsor appear like geometric shapes cut into the horizon, sculpted reliefs whose apertures open up to a world we can never fully see. The Inset Wall pieces are made from wood, cast concrete, or plaster (involving an experimental form of chemistry); some are painted or scored with grid or diamond patterns; some have stepped interiors or Plexiglas inserts to devise optical plays and pulsating centers. All are the result of an organic outgrowth of the “windows” featured for more than ten years on her freestanding sculptures. Here, Winsor explores both the depths of the void and the interminability of the grid, using optical effects to both draw us in and pull us back.

Taken as a whole, this exhibition contemplates the dynamic interplay of opposing but complementary power sources animating a practice that spans five decades. From the tough vitality of the early work to the calming rumination of the later, Winsor marries the primary with the alchemical, incorporates the deliberate with the serendipitous, to ultimately create a provocative body of work that considers the discernible and the unexplained, the routine and the mystifying. It is this supple interplay and its ensuing tension that makes the observation of a Winsor work an adventure, an encounter predicated on an inwardness, as the viewer moves thoughtfully around, stepping up close to examine within. This very interactivity, the physical

Inset Wall Piece White Face One Inch Grid with Grey Stepped Inset, 1995 Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

insistence on the body shifting, is why her sculptures are so expressive; one wants to be enclosed by them, be transported through time.

As Jackie Winsor so poetically summarizes: “the early works are about energy, force, resistance, they are full of life and potential, and the later works are quieter, more introspective, more experienced, with colorful, vibrating or infinite centers, that attempt to keep something still, pulling you into a space of quiet, echoing the softness of a dreamer’s breathing.”22 What singularizes her work is its undeniable concern with the condition of actuality wedding the ordinary with the confounding in order to survey the breakdowns and buildups of existence.

Amy Smith-Stewart, curator Jackie Winsor was born in 1941 in Saint John’s, Newfoundland, and lives and works in New York City.

Works in the Exhibition All dimensions h x w x d in inches Painted Piece, 1979–80 Plywood, fifty layers of acrylic paint 31 x 31 x 31 Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from Donna and Donald Baumgartner and Mrs. Helen Herbst in memory of her father Samuel C. Herbst by exchange, M1993.79 Inset Wall Piece White 2/10 Inch Graphite Grid with Stepped Inset, 1995 Plaster, pigment, graphite 18 x 18 x 5 Inset Wall Piece White Face One Inch Grid with Grey Stepped Inset, 1995 Plaster, concrete, pigment 17 x 17 x 5 Inset Wall Piece White with Four Color Spectrum Drawing, 1995 Plaster, color pencil 18 x 18 x 4 1/2 Inset Wall Piece 1/2 Inch White Painted Grid, 2000 White concrete, Plexiglas 14 x 14 x 5 Inset Wall Piece Minor Cut Blue Lines, 2000 Black concrete, Plexiglas 14 x 14 x 5 Inset Wall Piece One Inch Diagonal Luminescent Painted Grid, 2000 Wood, paint, Plexiglas 18 x 18 x 4 3/4 Inset Wall Piece One Inch Gold & Two Inch Luminescent Painted Grids, 2000 Wood, paint, Plexiglas 17 x 17 x 5 Inset Wall Piece Two Inch Diagonal Cut Concrete Color Painted Grid, 2000 Concrete, Plexiglas 14 x 14 x 5 Inset Wall Piece Two Inch Diagonal Cut Blue & Graphite Grid, 2000–2001 Reddish black concrete 15 x 15 x 7 3/4 Inset Wall Piece Two Inch White Cut Diagonal Grid, 2000–2001 Black concrete 16 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 7 Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Liza Béar Jackie Winsor Work in Progress, Part 1: Fifty-Fifty, 1975–76 U-MATIC 3/4 inch video converted to digital file, video, black and white, sound; 15:01 minutes

Jackie Winso Work in Progress, Part 3: Burnt Piece, 1978 U-MATIC 3/4 inch video converted to digital file, video, color, sound; 18:09 minutes Courtesy of Liza Béar Burnt Piece, 1977–78 Black and white photo documenting the burning of Burnt Piece Original 35mm slide digitally printed and adhered directly to wall Dimensions variable Painted Piece, 1979–80 12 color photographs documenting the creation of Painted Piece Original 35mm slides digitally printed and adhered directly to wall Dimensions variable

Courtesy of the Jackie Winsor archive

Inset Wall Piece Two Inch White Cut Diagonal Grid, 2000–2001 Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

1

Gaston Bachelard, from “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside,” The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press: Boston, 1969), p. 217-218.

2

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: http://www.merriam-webster.com.

3

Author’s interview with the artist at her NYC studio on May 21, 2014.

4

Author’s interview with the artist in her NYC studio on May 12, 2014.

5

Interview, May 21, 2014.

6

Winsor and the author discussed this memory at her NYC studio on May 12, 2014. It was also cited in both Liza Béar’s “An Interview with Jackie Winsor,” Avalanche, Spring 1972, p. 14, and Lucy R. Lippard’s essay “Jackie Winsor,” published in Artforum, February, 1974, p. 57.

7

Winsor and the author are both on faculty in the MFA Fine Arts Department at SVA. Winsor described this to a student during a term review crit in April 2010 and cited it again in a lecture she gave at SVA for the MFA Fine Arts Dept. on November 13, 2013.

8

Béar, Avalanche, and the author’s interview with the artist.

9

Interview, May 12, 2014.

10 Anne C. Chave, “Sculpture, Gender, and the Value of Labor,” American Art, Spring 2010, p. 29. http://www.marybethedelson.com/story_boxes.html 11 Béar, Avalanche, p. 13.

12 Winsor discussed this at her NYC studio on May 12, 2014. It was also cited in Dean Sobel’s essay “Jackie Winsor’s Sculpture: Mediation, Revelation, and Aesthetic Democracy” in Jackie Winsor, Milwaukee Art Museum, 1991, p. 21.

13 Interview, May 21, 2014.

14 Interview, May 21, 2014.

15 Lippard, Artforum, p 58 16 During the May 12, 2014 interview, Winsor said she attended many early meetings organized by female artists who lived and worked in New York City during the mid 1960s to early 1970s. Winsor, who had two sisters, sought out female artists when she first settled in NYC. She characterized life as a female artist in New York at that time as akin to “being invisible.”

17 Email conversation with the artist, June 24, 2014.

18 Winsor lecture at SVA, November 13, 2013.

19 Interview, May 21, 2014.

20 Interview, May 21, 2014.

21 Email conversation, June 24, 2014.

22 Phone conversation with the artist, March 2014.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877 Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.

Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; William Burback, Treasurer/Secretary; Chris Doyle; Annabelle K. Garrett; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Lori L. Ordover; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

Cover Image: Inset Wall Piece White with Four Color Spectrum Drawing, 1995 Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

The Aldrich extends special thanks to the Paula Cooper Gallery for supporting the publication of this brochure, and to Liza Béar for granting permission to present two of her Jackie Winsor Work in Progress, videos as a part of this exhibition.

Major support for Museum operations has been provided by members of The Aldrich Board of Trustees, and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.