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PARTISAN REVIEW
conception. The sense of "madeness" of the pieces, along with their uniform
smallness and slimness, turned them into models, rather than ends in them–
selves, and craft, rather than sculpture, came to the fore. A single bronze, like
a doubled-back version of the "fuselage-wing" pieces, turned vertically, was
similarly small and polite, and seemed precious, rather than intimate. The
constructed forms, with their fragile skeletons and subtly colored, translucent
skins, have enormous possibilties, but Hunt, unfortunately, seems to have
backed away from them, at least for the moment.
William Boepple's retrospective exhibition at Bennington College's Su–
san Lemburg Usdan Gallery in April spanned twenty years.
It
was fasci–
nating to see Boepple's steel constructions of the 1970s, when he was much
influenced by Caro, together with the quirky wood and steel sculptures he
has been making for about the past five years. I've written here before of
my enthusiam for Boepple's recent "ladder" sculptures, pared down to pylon–
like drawing or loaded and fattened almost to the point oflosing the generat–
ing form. The most recent ladders are the most audacious yet, dissected and
reassembled. Some become virtually anthropomorphic, without losing either
their essential abstractness or their resemblance to everyday, vernacular
objects; they engage in surprising acrobatics, waving schematic limbs in the
air and balancing their fellows aloft. Seeing these together with the steel
pieces revealed unexpected likenesses between them, but also made it clear
that Boepple's recent work is his most personal and most provocative.
There isn't much to be said about Julian Schnabel's show ofthree-di–
mensional objects at the elegant new Pace gallery downtown . There's a little
of everything - wall reliefs, monoliths, complex assemblages. The wall
pieces, described by one reviewer as "so resonant with emotion that they
could be a postmodern version of the Medicis' last resting place," are both
portentous and pretentious.
As
for the rest, if you happened on Schnabel's
vaguely Oceanic trifles in an airport gift shop, made of cheap materials at
knick-knack scale you would have dismissed them as unappetizing
tchatchkas
and deplored the erosion of culture that produced them. Schnabel, however,
has the means to realize his Trader Vic's fantasies at monumental size, in
bronze. These were combined with amphorae of recent vintage, placed on
tables with bases equally fraught with references and the whole ensemble,
apparently, taken quite seriously. I suppose it was no more empty or talent–
less than Schnabel's painting show, earlier this year - although, at the time, I
thought that represented a new low - but I found it more offensive, perhaps
because more effort had gone into producing such schlock. Two thoughts:just
because something is large, free-standing and useless doesn't mean that it is
sculpture and, if our society really credits such dispiriting stuffwith aesthetic
value, things are worse than I feared.
