KAREN WILKIN
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completely; the meaning of what had come before was called into
question. The dance became obvious and trivial.
A lack of confidence in the potency of materials plagues a great
deal of recent art. Bleckner is not alone in wanting to hammer his
audience with "meaning." But faith in the expressive powers of one's
medium is no guarantee of success, either. The Jannis Kounnellis
sculpture exhibition that preceeded the Bleckner exhibit at the Mary
Boone Gallery was a textbook demonstration of the failure of or–
dinary objects to transcend their previous existence, no matter how
carefully chosen or how elegantly displayed. The gallery's walls were
lined with a series of virtually identical constructions, symmetrically
organized assemblages of large steel plates, vertical beams, bags of
dirt, and rocks of more or less uniform sizes . The structures were
evidently heavy, perilously balanced, and adjusted with effort . You
marvelled at the mechanics of the undertaking. How had Kounnellis
managed to hold the six mini-boulders in place on each of the plates?
Would the bags of dirt slip? How were they held on the wall?
Beyond this kind of sideshow curiosity, the sculptures yielded
very little. I had expected more of Kounnellis, whose work usually
has a spare elegance and a visual impact that overwhelms the anec–
dotes of its making. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
the history of a sculpture's making usually seems inseparable from its
visual qualities; the smoke smudges from the flame of a welding
torch used in assembling a piece become drawn elements on the wall
that supports it, for example. When Kounnellis's work is most suc–
cessful, the tension between his sturdy industrial materials and the
implied impermanence of elements like smoke smudges becomes ar–
resting, enriching. The installation at Mary Boone produced
another sort of tension, this time debilitating. Kounnellis's construc–
tions had a superficial appearance of having been scavenged. They
seemed to draw upon discarded, brutal stuff, impolite and perhaps a
little bit dangerous. Yet it was mere appearance . Longer inspection
made the sculptures look increasingly elegant and precious. Their
air of streetwise toughness was all style; roughness had been turned
into an expensive, sanitized commodity.
James Wolfe's ribbony steel constructions, painted in cool
neutral tones, were, ironically, far less commercial-looking than
Kounnellis's corporate
art brut.
The witty sculptures Wolfe showed at
the Andre Emmerich Gallery in September owe something to Gon–
zalez, but in general they are less overtly about the figure and less
delicate in scale than the work of the Catalan master. For once , the
