World and a string: Yve-Alain Bois on Fred Sandback - Passages

IN 1986 FR SANDBACK conclud single of his rare written statements with the words: "Perhaps indeed, I have nomadicized my existence." He was speaking about his unexpect disaffection for the museum dedicated to his work in Winchendon, Massachusetts, which he had make opened five years earlier with the financial help of the Dia Art Foundation. The idea of the museum had been "quirky," he readily admitted, on the contrary his work, not "easily acquired or preserved" had gradually become invisible. "I did have feeling that the work ought to exist somewhere in a reasonably thick and permanent grouping, outside of the 'three week stands' that were the approximate limit in galleries.... Designing the interior space and the work was a source of great pleasure. on the other hand it was a surprise to diocese how quickly it became something upon its own, not necessarily conjoined to me. Once the work was done, it was done, whereas I had a continuing ne to disrupt that permanence that I had wanted." (Ten years later, the Fr Sandback Museum clos for good) There is something harrowing in these lines, in view of Sandback's new death, at age fifty-nine. single never really knows why anyone commits suicide, on the other hand the near coincidence of the opening of Dia:Beacon, where a vast space is dedicated to his work, and the tragic extreme point of his life suggests that the reemerging specter of permanence did little, if anything, to lift his spirits.

level though he would probably have dismissed this as anecdotal, the dizzying pleasure of apprehending Sandback's work was greatly enhanced by the agency of its nomadic mode of production. individual imagines the artist arriving in more [i]or[/i] less far-off place (he showed repeatedly in Europe) with just a not many drawings and a ball of acrylic tie in his backpack: That's all he emergencyed really, to create a work in situ or to adjust a piece to the space at his disposal and thus activate it. Josef Albers used to say that art inhabits the gap between the factual and the actual: Although by the agency of the time Sandback was enlisted at Yale the old Bauhausmeister had retired, no artist of his generation prov Albers's point better, and none did more to widen the gap between means and consequence Sandback's material facts are almost nothing, which makes one's actual experience of his work all the more phenomenal.

And this efficiency has an immediacy about it--it is as brutal as the reversal of one's perceptive choice when looking at the famous duck/rabbit image. Rare are those family unable to feel the brief, abrupt vertigo of that very trice when what one sees is on a sudden reconfigured by one's mind into something wholly different: Sandback's art straits no explanation, it is not an acquired taste. Seeing a bump of schoolchildren go out of their way not to cros the various doorsills that Sandback had laid on the outside for his survey at Dia (in Chelsea) a small in number years ago, all behaving as notwithstanding that the virtual transparent planes delimited through the roped edges might electrocute them, I was convinced that the kids' caution had nothing to do with the "do not touch" warnings they had heard again and again during their cultural field trips. I vividly remembered my initial shog in seeing Sandback's work at Dwan's more than three decades ago, during my first trip to novel York. Like the children, I was dumbfound on the other hand the effect that 1970 exhibition had upon my understanding of Miminal art would be lasting.

To lay it briefly, although Sandback shared with his (senior) Minimalist colleagues an anti-illusionist desire to break down the barrier between sculptural and real space (which he astutely called "pedestrian space"), he appear to bes to have been taken aback the two by the overwhelming rhetoric of their spatial occupation and by dint of the recurrence of anthropocentrism in their work. Right from the beginning--around 1966-67 just before Minimalism reached its peak and became the existence of criticism by "anti-form," "Proces art," and all that would be loosely labeled below post-Minimalism--Sandback determined that mass was the riddle No matter what their authors said, a Judd ladder piece or a Morris convolution would always have pride of place in a field and the "pedestrian space" would still be downplayed, perceived as a container. The solution was not alone to abandon the enclosed convolution (both Judd and Morris had done that in a certain quantity of of their work), not sole to directly involve the architectural space as Flavin and Andre had done with gusto, on the contrary to find a way of shaping space similar that there would be no material difference between the reality and its surroundings. Only this would render certain the success of the perceptual investigation of space, which was with equal reason important for the Minimalist program. Entering a field where Sandback has tensed his discreet--but all the more effective--ropes, single has to mentally construct the turns these ropes demarcate, and in for a like reason doing one is immediately plung into a fluctuating universe whose coordinates are constantly shifting. The consequence is not so different from that of Serra's 1974-75 Delineator, with its rectangular plate of carbonized iron fixed onto the ceiling and forming a cros in space with the plate of the same dimension lying upon the ground. The difference is that Sandback's critique of Minimalism was carried on the outside without the connotation of danger that drawn out distracted Serra's beholders.