KAREN WILKIN
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shiny red in a single sculpture, there's danger of the piece becoming
too graphic or, worse, splitting apart, but most of the time he stays
within a narrower spectrum, as in
Sea Steps.
His polychromy is most
effective when least visible, when you are uncertain whether a color
shift is the result of a change in hue or a change in plane . Nonethe–
less , there's something playful about Wolfe's color, as there is about
his sculptures. You could describe them as immensely elegant toys
for immensely sophisticated children without belittling them in any
way . In the end, Wolfe's wit and apparent lightheartedness are what
sets his sculptures apart.
I suppose a similar description could serve for Rebecca Horn's
installation,
Art Circus,
at the Marian Goodman Gallery in October,
but lightheartedness was conspicuously absent. I went to the exhibi–
tion with high expectations. rve liked Horn's rums in the past, and I
had recently seen an installation in a group show in Toronto that
had fascinated me. Horn had placed two of her typical "machines" in
a square, stone tower room in a spectacular hillside water-processing
plant above Lake Ontario. The piece transformed her obsession
with birds and painting machines into images at once charming and
threatening. Wings made of brushes in drying racks flapped
hopelessly against a tall arched window, while a group of small can–
vases cascaded down the honey-colored stone wall, splattered from
above with cerulean blue paint. The blue of the distant lake , visible
through the windows, the waterfall of blue canvases, the blue spat–
ters on the floor all reinforced one another; the brush-bird trans–
formed the mechanical brushes of the painting machine into
something desperate and slightly sinister.
Two similar works formed part of the complex at Marian
Goodman's, but they were oddly inexpressive. They seemed flimsy
and trite in the pristine gallery, more evocative of Tinguely - and
suffering from the comparison - than of circus or performance. Nor
were the other elements more satisfying. A machine that made two
giant staghorn beetles appear to fight was more fascinating for the
shape of its beautifully made , ingenious gears than for anything else,
while the whipping machine - presumably meant to suggest the ring–
master-was simply nasty.
Only the center construction seemed possessed of the uncanny
life of its own that I expected from Horn's inventions , so much so
that it soundly criticized the rest of the grouping. A gleaming steel
pointer, alternately rising and falling as it revolved , solemnly
described the circus ring. At intervals , the pointer was frozen, but
