Stillness & presence
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Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Nov 5, 2010; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8
Stillness & presence Installation features relationship of minimalist artist’s graphite sculptures and drawings Art Issues MALIN WILSON-POWELL For the Journal
Susan York’s installations consistently solicit praise, wellinformed responses and poetic prose from knowledgeable art writers. Against many odds, she has remarkably and carefully built an international career in an international style with her understated, intense sculptures and drawings. She is a native New Mexican, and it is rare for artists based here from birth, who still live here, to be invited into refined white cube gallery spaces in Holland, New York, Chicago, Marfa and San Francisco. It speaks not only to York’s steadfast determination as well as the maturation of the contemporary art world here. York accomplishes this with a bracing mix of fastidious aestheticism, fearlessness, modesty and intellectual curiosity grounded in four decades as a practicing Buddhist. Her characteristic mindfulness and stillness is infused with minimalism’s orientation to materiality and theatrical presence. Of course, I always want to touch the sensuous, satiny surfaces of Susan York’s solid rectangles. Sculpture naturally elicits the haptic, the sense of touch. To remind visitors that this is definitely not acceptable, the gallery has posted a sign on the front door requesting that people refrain from putting their hands on the fragile, polished surfaces. Human hands, no matter how clean, are alive with oils and acids that leave prints and smudges. York provides a small sample slab of the kiln-fired solid graphite that is her material. It is a heavy, obdurate object to hold; yet the sheen and softness and polish perceptually open the surface by simultaneously reflecting and absorbing light, in the same fashion as multilayered pearlescent paint jobs on a low-rider. In the late 1990s, after using raw pigments and oxides on floors and walls, she wanted to work with lead and its “soft mercurial beauty ... neither solid nor immaterial.” Not only did lead prove too toxic, she didn’t want to cover shapes with the smoky shine, she wanted her shapes to be solid masses. In 2004, after exhibiting throughout the Netherlands, she began to develop her process of casting blocks of powdered graphite with a binding chemical, then cooking them in a kiln. She saws the solidified graphite into columns, rectangles and slabs, and over many months and untold hours of repetitively rubbing the surface, the graphite gradually silvers. She says of what she calls her baseline material: “Graphite has a low resonant tone. It belongs to the cello — Bach’s ‘Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.’” In addition, “they are also blurred — my homage to myopia.” What is new in the trajectory of this methodically oriented artist at the current James Kelly show? York’s triumphant 2008 “3 Columns” installation at the Lannan Foundation was solely sculptural, and in 2009 her drawings were on view at the gallery in a twoperson exhibition. This iteration features the relationship of her sculptures to her drawings, along with “Untitled (Bisecting Wedge),” a 500-pound graphite slab that pierces a custom-built wall at the height of approximately 6-feet 4-inches. York is a lifelong student of Malevich. Her “Untitled, (diptych no. 1)” pairs a solid graphite sculpture of two equal parts that is bisected horizontally with a drawing of dense graphite strokes on the bottom half and unmarked paper on the top half. This diptych is installed perpendicularly in a corner, a resonant position favored by Malevich for his monochromatic paintings. The placement is a direct reference to the spot reserved for Russian Orthodox icons, objects of veneration and for reflection on the numinous. In York’s lexicon of quietude, this paired configuration of doubled up-and-down compositions, doubled again by the side-to-side positioning, and meant to be encountered by two-eyed, bilaterally designed humans, is rife with perturbations. Up close the drawings are built-up layers of many, many slightly arching horizontal strokes that read as flurries, even fevered, dark stormy patches. The horizontal line is fuzzed as if the pileup of gestures is smoldering. This and the two other larger drawings are also contained, elegantly balanced, velvety and — like the solid sculptures — silvered by repeated polishing. The largest and most engaging life-size drawing “Corner Column, no. 1,” (2008) is framed and leans against the wall. It was done in conjunction with the two wall-mounted “Corner Columns,” and the blurred pillar is the same size as the sculptures. The columns are the glue of this landscape, physical upright figures that invite one-on-one encounters as well as immersion into an affective, enveloping environment, as if they are perimeter guardians. Even after 50 years of experiential minimalism in clean white spaces, successful installations in this mode can still exert their magic of “physical intelligence” on the susceptible. Like tuning forks, York’s sculptures and drawings address the visitor with whispering dignity and grace, creating a chamber work for experiencing our constantly changing senses. York seems to know that if we stand up straighter and perk up all of our senses, we can build a new relationship to this space, to the changing light, to gravity, to weight, to the shifting valences of distance, to gaps (here, 2 inches beneath the solid sculptures and crevasses on the sides), and to the structural ceiling beam and heavy metal plates that support the whole damn place. She proposes an ongoing project of being present: to not escape the landscape by presumptions and habituation, but to actively create a more inclusive, nuanced landscape wherever we are. Minimalism has been called the last major “ism” and even though the artists never liked the word, it is an aesthetic term and a legacy that is no longer just a specific late-20th century artists’ movement circa 1965. Adapted by architects, designers and musicians, a recent article “Does Minimalism Matter?” published by “Intelligent Life Magazine” posits that it is also “a continuous element in European culture ... with us since the fifth century B.C., when Socrates declared that a wellmade dung bucket was better than a poorly made gold shield.” Although York clearly works in the art world’s wake of first-generation minimalism and postminimalism, interpretations of her work within these boundaries feels too narrow. Why not widen the parameters, soften the focus, and look at such endeavors as an inexhaustible repertoire that must innovate, as the human condition always has, and always will, continue to change? If you go WHAT: Susan York: “New Sculpture & Drawings” WHERE: James Kelly Contemporary, 1601 Paseo de Peralta WHEN: Through Dec. 11 HOURS: Tuesday–Friday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday 12-5 p.m. CONTACT: 505-989-1601
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Stillness & presence
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“(Left) Corner Column, no. 1� is a 2008 framed graphite pencil on BFK Rives paper by Susan York.
An installation view shows the Susan York exhibition, which is at James Kelly Contemporary through Dec. 11.
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Stillness & presence
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COURTESY JAMES KELLY CONTEMPORARY Susan York’s “Untitled, (diptych no. 1),” 2010, consists of a two-part solid graphite sculpture on the left and a framed graphite drawing on Arches paper on the right.
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