The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Related Content

• What Do I Set Before Your Eyes?
• Lyre
• Art is Weeds
• Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Starchitecture
• Where We Live

Certain works of art stick in your mind. It’s as though, when the guards weren’t looking, pleasure momentarily got the better of rectitude, and something real got slipped through the door. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to figure out what gives certain objects the staying power they have in my head, but I feel like acknowledging them, not just to pass word along of their existence but to signal to the makers that whatever they went through to make them was worth it--that their work made its way across gulfs of loneliness into the memory of another human being. Some things like this you encounter serendipitously...others you’re drawn towards, as to the strains of a beautiful piece of music heard from two rooms away.

One thing lodged in my memory like this isn’t even an official work of art but a couple of pieces of furniture--what in the lingo of public art today are called “amenities”--a pair of benches that I saw a few years ago on the grounds of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh (the design is the work of Tom Merriman, a teacher at Carnegie-Mellon’s College of Fine Art). The skies were grey and drizzling the day I saw them but it was obvious from the ghostly circles their wheels had traced on the concrete that they could rotate, so you could, if you wanted, when the sun was out, sit upon one of them with your face always turned towards the sun. Pivoting about its axis, the bench can pan through the whole compass of its world. The design’s three elements, a plank, a cylinder, and a wheel, are presented simply and directly--three chunks of materialized Euclidean geometry. Unforced, intellectually elegant and spare, the works charm, but without pandering. Counterposed as a pair, they seem engaged in a kind of dialogue, even while each orbits only around itself. Purely mechanical in design but not dourly conceptual, they were unexpectedly alive.

Another work that enlivens the inert is a sculpture titled “Metalmatic,” by the artist Kari Ann Reardon. A commanding presence about thirty feet high, it stands by itself in the far corner of a field at the Franconia Sculpture Park (at the junction of Highways 8 and 95 in Shafer, Minnesota). The sculpture is sprung ingeniously out of a large industrial coil of band steel. Each spiral turn of the coil has been pulled telescopically out from and spot-welded at an angle slightly skew in one way or another to the one below it. The work seems to have wriggled its way up out of the ground, and looks as though it is seeking, in its irregular, off-kilter ascent, to generate more of itself. As you walk around and look at it from all sides (it is truly a work in the round) a figure emerges from the abstraction, a colossal female form wound head to toe, rump, bosom, and all, in a continuous, mummifying ribbon of steel. Leaning forward as if about to set forth or already in stride, clearly headed in one direction, titanically comic and powerful, she looks like she means business. Whatever she means, whatever theory you wrap around her, the point is, she means something, expressively embodies something unmistakably alive in or underneath the steel. The work is not a dull conceptualist’s inventory of materials and specifications, but an instrument of metaphor.

Metaphor. . . now there’s a concept.

***

“Conceptualism,” as I imperfectly understand it, was and in part still is an effort to put the creation of art beyond the coercive and enslaving reach of commodification, beyond its traditional collusion in the production of precious objects for conspicuous consumption. The earliest works of conceptual art were born not from gushing, people-pleasing paroxysms of imagination but generated instead by a set of dry accountant’s directives—Sol Le Witt’s three-dimensional grids of steel, for example--and they were not exactly meant to excite the senses. Confronted with the slapstick and disorder of reality, the uninflected matrices of Sol Le Witt, the rectilinear severities of Donald Judd, and the austerities of Carl Andre all sat there poker-faced. They expressed nothing—no thing. Refrigerated in the chill white precincts of museums or left for tumbleweeds on haj to the holy desert city of Marfa, they left one standing before them feeling empty, stupid, clueless, but trying not to show it.

Looking at these works today at the Walker, they seem the memorabilia of an endgame in which there was nothing left but brute implacable fact—ostensibly a true account of the real, which we were supposed to have the courage to face in a spirit of ascetic, principled renunciation, neutered but brave in our exhaustion, having flung aside the crutches of metaphor, the fakery of mimesis, the infantile training wheels of craft. It was a cruel moment in art, but it was thought necessary by the movement’s high priests for exorcising that old devil hunger for voluptuous saloon paintings. If the unsmiling ideological rigors of this made you want to find your way to the nearest saloon, if you found yourself still prisoner of a desire to lay your eyes on things more overtly beautiful or at least more interestingly ugly, sophisticated people were likely to conclude that you’d fallen into the clutches of Thomas Kinkade with a fatal case of kitsch.

Still, the minimalist ideal--divine economy, the feeling of zero--is a state to be striven for...it’s sort of what Zen and yogic practice aspire to...the antidote to bloat. The problem is that art, even art as cryptic and dehydrated as so much minimal art was, necessarily remains mired in the realm of things. It may be flailing around trying to find some traction in the sand, but that is no reason to cop out. “No ideas but in things,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams. Minimalism’s stark rules of engagement, however, precluded taking too much pleasure either in the making of things or the taking in of them with your eyes. It was art as castor oil. This is why the sculptor Martin Puryear said that he “...never did Minimalist art...I got real close. I looked at it, I tasted it, and I spat it out.” Other than a few funereal curators, most of the world has little interest in it either, because it is inert, it has no pulse.

***

I look for things with a pulse–-they help sustain the throbbing of my own. You come upon them in the strangest places. Swede Hollow, the mysterious gash in the landscape just east of downtown St. Paul, is a ravine that runs behind the abandoned Hamm’s brewery.  Biking south through the hollow a short way beyond the brewery’s derelict old brick buildings with their boarded-up windows you come to a weedy mound about a hundred yards across. On it is arranged a circle of stones. Some of them are arc-shaped chunks of old architectural stonework—and irregularly interspersed between these, completing the ring, are some boulders. At the center of this circle there stands a monolith of rough grey granite about six feet high, about the height and width of a man. This pillar is in its own way sculpturally perfect, in its stance, its proportions, in the quirks of its rough carving and its crookedly upright resistance to absolutely straight up-and-downness. Cut through it near its top like the eye of a crude needle is a narrow vertical slot of a window. Looking through this slot to the north, it frames a smokestack and a silo that had a hawk atop it looking back at me; looking through it to the south, it frames the ravine, the bike path, weeds.

What’s with this stone? Is it the observatory of a vanished civilization? Something to do with beer? I have no idea how it got there. Maybe it was trundled to the site by ironic art-school students; or levitated and lowered to the spot by ancient Druids; or it could be just a remnant of some construction project...no art involved in it at all--who knows? It’s an enigma to me and probably a bigger one to the four busted-up drunks who come stumbling down the path as I stand there wondering about it. It would make a fine cyclopean tombstone to sleep it off against or to molder underneath.

***

A little further down this path (which is known as the Bruce Vento Regional Trail) you get to a strange pair of tunnels, actually two long semi-cylindrical cavities which side by side form the arches of a wide bridge overhead. Built in 1884, the exotically engineered arches are constructed of rectangular stones which, mathematically calculated to achieve maximum strength, are laid-up in a highly unusual spiral pattern, making the tunnels appear to have been rifled out. The helicoidal pattern makes it seem that the tunnels are spiraling or screwing through space. Negotiating one of them drunk could give you the whirlies. The masonry, artfully laid-up a hundred-and-twenty-five years ago, is still strong as the backs of turtles.

***

Then there is the hallucinatory wood flooring of the Hennepin Historical Society, a place that feels otherwise constructed of dust. Two of the ivy-choked old mansion’s rooms have floors made of extravagantly figured boards of hard southern yellow pine pegged and dovetailed together with inlaid, bow-tie shaped “butterflies.” Optically, the liquid figure of these pieces of wood all but makes the floor quiver like puddles. This is wood harvested in another era, when it was thought that trees that yield wood like this would be there for us forever. They won’t be. To walk on this floor today is to traverse a mirage.

***

The figure trying to figure something out at the top of this post is the work of a young artist named Tom Coben. His metamorphosis of a fork into Hamlet caught my eye at the Highland Art Fair this summer. It isn’t every day that you run into someone who can twist cafeteria forks into sculptures of people with things on their minds. Coben’s website is under construction but he may be reachable by email: tomcoben@comcast.net.