Nathan Mabry
Cherry and Martin
Through February 12th
(Re-printed from Artslant.com)
After placing a solid, heavy Michael Heizer-ish hunk of rusty sculpture in the first gallery in the shape of a hand, Nathan Mabry has done an odd thing with the center gallery of Cherry and Martin. He has built a temple. In the foreground, he has placed a copy of Jacques Lipchitz’s Figure, 1926-30, set on a bed of gravel, crying with streaming water possibly to be used for ablutions. Deeper into the gallery stand three attendant goddesses around a central figure. The three sculptures are variations on Baga D’mba fertility shoulder masks atop bases painted entirely black but based on Donald Judd 1980s Swiss works. They surround the Deity of the space, an impressive sculpture The Week of Kindness, 2011, melding the famous Etruscan Romulus and Remus with Rauschenberg’s Odalisk, 1955/58 and Monogram 1955/59.
In Mabry’s temple, there are several simple registers. The contrast between the black totems and the white of the central Deity is striking―darkness, light, void, fullness, famine, fertility, chaos, order, these engrained, primal concepts wander into the room. However, their gravitas gets handled with a sense of humor. There is something funny about these objects, the Baga D’mba masks smirk cattily at you with their phallic facial features, they seem to strut atop the Judds like Rauschenberg taxidermied chickens. Mabry’s The Week of Kindness is equally absurd as Monogram . All the lofty theories about Monogram become utterly ridiculous in the face of what it is―a tire with a goat through it. Mabry’s take on Romulus and Remus is equally devious, sexual, and disarmingly funny.
The first time I wrote of Mabry’s work, I mentioned that they felt like jokes to me, that they were funny, that they played a loose hand with history. Since then, although I’ve gotten to know Mabry and his work better, the humor has remained the central issue for me.
Laughter can be a tricky thing. It can stem from Dada (destructive chaotic forces, nihilisitic, counter to order of any fashion, and detestable even when it’s aim is to bring down structures that are detestable) or from the absurd (an awareness of structures, seeing the full validity of multiple life paths and amused by that multiplicity’s inability to get along and by the strange frissons that arise). This second laughter grasps fullness instead merely enacting itself because it has nothing better to do in the emptiness. To me, this distinction is very important.
I’ve debated with myself about which side of this equation Mabry is on. For instance, when I see Lipchitz piece crying, I think of sculpture as laughing at people who genuinely believe in the embedded spirit in things, who believe that a water spot under a bridge in Chicago is the Virgin Mary or that a crucifix can bleed real blood. Mabry maybe suggesting that Lipchitz’s strenuous beliefs in modernist form and its ability to tap into the primitive power of other cultures was bound to have a short shelf life. Mabry’s piece laughs thus like an Onion article or a seconds long bit on the Simpsons about a cheese wedge that looks like Elvis. I don’t think that Mabry believes things are this simple, but history, belief, and sculptural symbols come across a hodgepodge of tectonic pieces that seems to talk past each other in this work. It comes across as a Dada form of laughter.
But then there is The Week of Kindness, such a zany mixture that it transcends any big ticket tectonics. The tire, Romulus and Remus, the white box in the middle, the baskets on top, it is unclear how these works interrelate though their interrelations are highly suggestive and fascinating. The origin myth of the Etruscan statue, mixed with the sexual connotation of the tire, and the fact that both elements create the base or the platform from which the piece grows and sustains itself, gives the piece a sense of fertility in and of itself. The baskets are both jokey and add to the mix, a basket being a place for Easter Eggs, for Spring Picnics, for some, a metaphor for female genitalia. There are no competing ideologies here instead elements taken from multiple cultures that add up to a strangely full, frisson of oddity that is genuinely funny. All the parts retain their meaning and that retention makes The Week of Kindness an extraordinary object.
A few months back, Cherry and Martin had a group show of artists from their gallery and the show included a couple of Mabry pieces that I had never seen before that, along with The Week of Kindness, may be a premonition of things to come. The two works featured the same base/top dichotomy that we’ve come to expect from Mabry, but this time the base, welded metal tubing melded into a lyrical hand-sculpted work that recalled for me, the souvenir soap stone sculptures of gazelles or embraced lovers that I brought home from Africa. The rough hewn but simple rigor of the base and the handled quality of the top piece made the work so dynamic and strange that neither the base nor the top could be quantified as anything specific. I was fascinated by the work, it continued to open up and provide new avenues to explore. It was also funny.
Mabry is an important sculptor, and I think he’s capable of both the Dada gesture as well as the more edifying, less easy to parse out and to simplify, presentation of the absurd. I, for one, like the later works better, and this seems to be the direction that Mabry’s heading. I am looking forward to more.
Cherry and Martin
Through February 12th
(Re-printed from Artslant.com)
After placing a solid, heavy Michael Heizer-ish hunk of rusty sculpture in the first gallery in the shape of a hand, Nathan Mabry has done an odd thing with the center gallery of Cherry and Martin. He has built a temple. In the foreground, he has placed a copy of Jacques Lipchitz’s Figure, 1926-30, set on a bed of gravel, crying with streaming water possibly to be used for ablutions. Deeper into the gallery stand three attendant goddesses around a central figure. The three sculptures are variations on Baga D’mba fertility shoulder masks atop bases painted entirely black but based on Donald Judd 1980s Swiss works. They surround the Deity of the space, an impressive sculpture The Week of Kindness, 2011, melding the famous Etruscan Romulus and Remus with Rauschenberg’s Odalisk, 1955/58 and Monogram 1955/59.
In Mabry’s temple, there are several simple registers. The contrast between the black totems and the white of the central Deity is striking―darkness, light, void, fullness, famine, fertility, chaos, order, these engrained, primal concepts wander into the room. However, their gravitas gets handled with a sense of humor. There is something funny about these objects, the Baga D’mba masks smirk cattily at you with their phallic facial features, they seem to strut atop the Judds like Rauschenberg taxidermied chickens. Mabry’s The Week of Kindness is equally absurd as Monogram . All the lofty theories about Monogram become utterly ridiculous in the face of what it is―a tire with a goat through it. Mabry’s take on Romulus and Remus is equally devious, sexual, and disarmingly funny.
The first time I wrote of Mabry’s work, I mentioned that they felt like jokes to me, that they were funny, that they played a loose hand with history. Since then, although I’ve gotten to know Mabry and his work better, the humor has remained the central issue for me.
Laughter can be a tricky thing. It can stem from Dada (destructive chaotic forces, nihilisitic, counter to order of any fashion, and detestable even when it’s aim is to bring down structures that are detestable) or from the absurd (an awareness of structures, seeing the full validity of multiple life paths and amused by that multiplicity’s inability to get along and by the strange frissons that arise). This second laughter grasps fullness instead merely enacting itself because it has nothing better to do in the emptiness. To me, this distinction is very important.
I’ve debated with myself about which side of this equation Mabry is on. For instance, when I see Lipchitz piece crying, I think of sculpture as laughing at people who genuinely believe in the embedded spirit in things, who believe that a water spot under a bridge in Chicago is the Virgin Mary or that a crucifix can bleed real blood. Mabry maybe suggesting that Lipchitz’s strenuous beliefs in modernist form and its ability to tap into the primitive power of other cultures was bound to have a short shelf life. Mabry’s piece laughs thus like an Onion article or a seconds long bit on the Simpsons about a cheese wedge that looks like Elvis. I don’t think that Mabry believes things are this simple, but history, belief, and sculptural symbols come across a hodgepodge of tectonic pieces that seems to talk past each other in this work. It comes across as a Dada form of laughter.
But then there is The Week of Kindness, such a zany mixture that it transcends any big ticket tectonics. The tire, Romulus and Remus, the white box in the middle, the baskets on top, it is unclear how these works interrelate though their interrelations are highly suggestive and fascinating. The origin myth of the Etruscan statue, mixed with the sexual connotation of the tire, and the fact that both elements create the base or the platform from which the piece grows and sustains itself, gives the piece a sense of fertility in and of itself. The baskets are both jokey and add to the mix, a basket being a place for Easter Eggs, for Spring Picnics, for some, a metaphor for female genitalia. There are no competing ideologies here instead elements taken from multiple cultures that add up to a strangely full, frisson of oddity that is genuinely funny. All the parts retain their meaning and that retention makes The Week of Kindness an extraordinary object.
A few months back, Cherry and Martin had a group show of artists from their gallery and the show included a couple of Mabry pieces that I had never seen before that, along with The Week of Kindness, may be a premonition of things to come. The two works featured the same base/top dichotomy that we’ve come to expect from Mabry, but this time the base, welded metal tubing melded into a lyrical hand-sculpted work that recalled for me, the souvenir soap stone sculptures of gazelles or embraced lovers that I brought home from Africa. The rough hewn but simple rigor of the base and the handled quality of the top piece made the work so dynamic and strange that neither the base nor the top could be quantified as anything specific. I was fascinated by the work, it continued to open up and provide new avenues to explore. It was also funny.
Mabry is an important sculptor, and I think he’s capable of both the Dada gesture as well as the more edifying, less easy to parse out and to simplify, presentation of the absurd. I, for one, like the later works better, and this seems to be the direction that Mabry’s heading. I am looking forward to more.