reviews heather rowe
HeAtHer rowe: on returning
D’a m elio terr as, New York
9 Novem ber – 23 Decem ber
On Returning, 2007 (installation view), mixed media, dimensions variable. courtesy the artist and D’amelio terras, New York
Modernism has long suffered certain negative connotations due to its of the original without quite memorialising it. The syntax of Rowe’s piece
ideological commitments and for its aesthetic proscriptions. Yet most of is dominated by the white stucco beams and quadripartite columns which
its exemplary markers have been enshrined in the museums, which makes gave the Michaels House its distinctive geometry. But within this matrix
them easier to control and offer for ritual sacrifice to the artists and critics one finds bits of stapled-up veneers, broken windows, shag carpeting and
who still need the power of the negative to get their creative acts under other minutiae that telescope one’s attention away from considering the
way. But such is not the case with what we generally call late modernist form as any kind of reconcilable whole.
work: art and architecture of the 1950s, 60s and 70s which held fast the For Rowe, On Returning is meant to manifest an incomplete or
ideals articulated by previous generations in the face of art’s expanded emotionally reconfigured and possibly fictional memory – which is exactly
field. That it was late meant it was less important and thus its fate would how most of us approach Modernism itself. This is not a creative reimagining
remain uncertain. of a specific architectural work, but an allegory of our fraught relationship
Though time has come to favour certain works of late modernist to an aesthetic legacy which, for many of us, could only be learned rather
art – especially paintings, such as those by Morris Louis, Jules Olitski than lived.
and Kenneth Noland, which have seen renewed critical and commercial In this, Rowe’s work takes its place next to a growing number of
attention – late modernist architecture has been less fortunate, especially projects that reassess the legacy of modernist architecture but which
if it’s by Paul Rudolph. Rudolph’s important yet much maligned work are less interested in critical negation than in some sort of productive
– ‘brutalist’ is a term of derision for many of his buildings’ occupants and renovation. And at the moment, the architectural folly appears as this
neighbours – has come under attack recently from developers who feel the practice’s favoured vehicle. Rowe’s logical counterpart here is Monica
land is more valuable than the designs or the history sitting on top of it. Such Sosnowska, whose 1:1 (2007), installed at the Polish Pavilion for last year’s
was the case for the signature Michaels House in Westport, Connecticut, Venice Biennale, rethought the pavilion’s 1930s architecture by literally
designed by Rudolph in 1972, which was razed in January to make way for cramming it with the steel skeleton of a postwar-reconstruction housing-
new construction (presumably something the developers thought would block factory. Both Rowe and Sosnowska play architecture’s memory
be more, well, ‘modern’). card, but they recognise that this memory – Modernism’s memory – is
Enter Heather Rowe. For her second solo show at D’Amelio Terras, necessarily a collective one with which we’re perhaps only now coming to
Rowe has adopted the vocabulary of Rudolph’s now demolished Westport terms. Jonathan T.D. Neil
home and created an architectural folly that evokes the forms and materials
Artreview 120
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