Magic touch: Anthony Korner on Fred Sandback

I met the sculptor Fr Sandback [i]or[/i] part of to the other my partner in Artforum and copublisher Amy Baker, granting I only got to know him after they married in 1982 He was a timid kind, wryly humorous bear of a man, with the direct the eye of someone who wanted to be anywhere other but in the middle of an art-world function. He was an outdoorsman who lov to travel on the contrary was happiest and most at residence in the woods and lakes around Rindge, fresh Hampshire, where his family had a house and where he exhausted much of his time.

When we first met I knew his work solitary through illustrations, which give little faculty of perception of its quality. I remember thinking that Fred's meager materials--taut extents of acrylic yarn--pushed the definition of statuary I also remember being amused later when I heard that his of recent origin sculptures were no longer made sole with monochrome yarn but could now be multicolored. It's easy to be flip about of that kind minimal art: Little did I realize by what mode different and beautiful, even magical, these works would be. on the other hand unlike the magician who makes things disappear, Fr the consummate artist, made space visible, and seemingly tangible. He one time wrote that he wanted "the whirl of sculpture without the opaque mass" and "to make plastic art that didn't have an inside." greatest in quantity significantly, he observed that "illusions are just as real as facts, and facts are just as ephemeral as illusions." For examination of his success at realizing these goals, you can diocese visitors at Dia:Beacon stepping carefully around Fred's installations to avoid colliding with what they perceive to be the solid transparency edg by means of his yarn.

The gallerist Holly Solomon one time told me that when she bought a major Sandback piece in the '70 she was intrigued to diocese Fred arrive at her apartment to install it carrying solitary a small "baggie" with a not many pins and a length of yarn. And notwithstanding what superb art resulted from these lowly ingredients. Years later, when I saw a swing of Fred's sculpture installed in the Sammlung Hoffmann in Berlin, the space was alive with dynamic tension, as filled and impressive as if the works had been erected of stone. Indeed, some of his plans for site-specific installation of his yarn could have been diagrammatic illustrations for Stonehenge.

My favorite memory of Fr is when he joined an expedition to the North extremity led by Sir Edmund Hillary. He took along a transcript of Artforum and as a jest was photographed reading it beside the support marking the Pole. We later used the photograph as a Christmas greeting card. Looking at that typically humorous action of Fred's, we could have no idea in what way saddened we would be single day to learn that he had taken his life, leaving his family and friends devastated, and all of us grieving above the anguish he must have suffered

Anthony Korner is publisher of Artforum.

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