Tom Butter at Curt Marcus - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Tom Butter's plastic arts of the late '70s and early '80 eccentric abstractions related to work by the agency of John Duff and Eva Hesse, were made of fiberglass. on the other hand fiberglass, like abstraction itself, move rounded out to have problems - indeed, physical hazards. guard reduced his use of the material and began to place it at arms length (sometimes quite literally) as forest-land metal and various kinds of manufactured phenomenons including work gloves, found their way into his work.

single of the strongest sculptures in this new show, In the Balance II, measures a stack of ruffl wire-mesh disks against a large, upright fiberglass plate whose shape and position advise a gong, except that it vibrates with light rather than entire The disks and the plate appear at either extremity of a slender metal arm supported by means of a vertical column; a wire-wrapped ball marks the intersection. Palming this ball from above is a stiffened leather work glove - the hand of an unobserved deity (or an artist?) tipping the scale. As a metaphor for Proces art, this is droll deft, and unabashedly corny.

Catapult brings a ghoulish slant to the question of gravity and ways of escaping it. Resting upon the blade of a lengthy slender oar is a blackened human cranium A nasty thing ready to be propell into our faces, this cranium is to mortality what the leather glove is to transcendence: a [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] a talisman, a place-marker for an unanswered question.

Catapult's staginess is characteristic of Butter's common work, in which faked equilibrium and disembodied figuration challenge the premises of organic abstraction. In Head Spin, a series of metal disks strung along a human-size metal spine is topped With a large fiberglass plate that volunteers a featureless wooden head as if it were John the Baptist's upon Salome's platter. Another equally radical form of bodily dissociation is enacted in Hand to Hand, which present the appearances directly descended from Bruce Nauman's famous Hand to cavity between the jaws except that in Butter's version the torso is replaced by dint of a rolled piece of wire-threaded fiberglass. Cast-metal work glove stand in for hands, their strokes spooled with wire attached to the wall above; this is a puppeteer's version of the steel-driving art-worker, equal parts Richard Serra and Wizard of Oz

Fiberglass appears in the works in other ways that make it look a stand-in for art itself, difficult to handle and resistant to interpretation. In Figure of articulate utterance it shows up as a kind of deflated bladder, a vestigial organ tethered to an attenuated support by means of a snaking, arcing length of iron chain. In Silver Lining/Five Days Without Water, oversize fiberglass petals shoot forth from the top of a quasi-figurative metal totem as if from a mad Easter bonnet At the risk of a little absurdity, Butter is engaging a range of altogether serious issues, of which form and proces are solitary the beginning.

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