reviews STUBBORN MATERIALS
stubborn Materials
PETER BLUM ChELSEA, NEw YORk
29 JUNE – 25 AUGUST
The ‘stubborn’ in Simone Subal’s excellent group
show Stubborn Materials signifies more than mere
recalcitrance; it is also meant to imply something
of the selected works’ general reticence, or more
forcefully, their absolute refusal to speak.
Nick Herman’s sculptural pieces are perhaps
the most wilfully silent, while no doubt having the
most to say. With Halves (all works 2007) Herman
has modelled the heads and front quarters of a sheep
and a wolf in fibreglass-reinforced plaster, a pairing
which suggests that the two figures, bound by the
antagonism of predator and prey, remain incomplete
without the other. And a second piece, Part, a partial
cast of a rock face, hangs on the wall bearing the kind
of mute self-evidence with which Jasper Johns’s work
greeted its public half a century ago.
With these works, what one would call brute
material (be it geo- or ecological) is invoked rather
than presented on its own terms, and it is a strategy
that the artist team of Jonah Freeman and Michael
Phelan follow as well with their large-scale scans
of variously and vigorously crumpled sheets of
aluminium foil, though here the technology itself is
given body by the odd, seemingly liquid digitisation
which arises at a certain depth of field.
Ian Pedigo and Larry Bamburg offer a
different set of strategies, ones which focus more on
the dry and mundane. In Untitled Variable Bamburg
has created a hanging carousel composed of webs
of monofilament and the kinds of odds and ends
– tape, twist ties, paper clips, a bug carcass – that
populate the spaces under couches and behind
bookcases. Though larger in scale and less lyrical,
Pedigo’s castaways – insulating foam, newspaper and
magazine pages, a straw mat – appear a bit more
daring, insofar as they seem to ask how few moves
one can make before this plain and meagre stuff
registers as something other than itself.
Rosy Keyser is the sole artist in Stubborn
Materials working resolutely within the space of painting, and it is to her credit that her pieces stand toe-to- Stubborn Materials, 2007
toe with those of Jutta Koether, the only other works in the show that make a run at two dimensions. Both
(installation view).
Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York
artists approach the vertical plane as a repository, but whereas Koether continuously uses material to mine
(and undermine) the conventions of painting (and always, it seems, using liquid glass and the colour black),
Keyser, in Untitled (birds) and Sad White Music, may be seen to draw to the surface Koether’s unacknowledged
fascination with painting’s unique purchase on matters of flow and stasis.
This is a lesson Linda Benglis taught in the late 1960s and early 70s, and the promise of Benglis’s practice,
and its moment, weighs heavily on Subal’s grouping. But Stubborn Materials points a way beyond the present
anxiety about thinking and rethinking artistic ‘material’ in general. The artists here are getting down to specifics,
demonstrating that the work will speak for itself, even when it refuses to speak up. Jonathan T.D. Neil
129 Artreview
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 15 7/8/07 15:51:15
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