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PARTISAN REVIEW
Ibero-centrism. Still, the show was full of marvelous sculptures. And
Smith looked like the giant he is.
Either by chance or careful planning, exhibitions of Magdalena
Abakanowicz's sculptures at Marlborough Gallery and P. S. 1 overlapped
Picasso and the Age of Iron,
affording interesting comparisons and suggesting
a wealth of sources for the Polish artist's work. Giacometti's elongated
1950 figure on a wheeled chariot, on view at the Guggenheim,
was
echoed in the husk-like creatures balanced on iron wheels and posts
in
Abakanowicz's Circus series. Yet one of these, a row of little girls on a
wheel-mounted beam, in the lobby of Marlborough's building, read less
as an allusion to Giacometti than as a rationalization of the Smith
Wagoll
at the Guggenheim, with its line-up of animated, zig-zagging shapes,
balanced like flattened acrobats. Abakanowicz's weapon-like War Games
pieces at P. S. 1 unexpectedly looked to me like organic versions of some
of Smith's threatening constructions. Her papery, molded child-like torsos
have always made me think of those poignant casts taken from the im–
prints of fallen bodies preserved in the compacted ashes of Pompeii, and
by extension, of all those twentieth-century Italian sculptors inspired by
them, so the connection with Smith surprised me.
Oddly, Abakanowicz doesn't seem to have a really sculptural sensibil–
ity. She's not so much an inventor of eloquent three-dimensional forms
as
a maker of tableaux. By sheer accretion, her phalanxes of mute, headless
torsos, arms pressed tightly to their sides, can be extremely moving, as her
blurred, mask-like heads are when they are seen in groups. Small varia–
tions in the "mass-produced" figures and heads become more visible, the
spaces between them become charged, the difference between concave
black and convex front becomes something other than expedient. Her
isolated figures on wheels and plinths were less convincing; their side and
back views often seemed unconsidered. I kept longing for the vital pull of
limb against limb in Degas's magical
Little Dancer Fourteen Years Old,
a
sculpture I'm sure Abakanowicz knows and perhaps even evokes deliber–
ately in her preadolescent female torsos, although she doesn't seem to
have absorbed it fully.
(It
may be that she knows her sources best from
photographs, which could explain a lot.)
In a few of the Circus series, the hollow figures were animated by
compression and arching, creating welcome tension between molded
figure and four-square support, and offsetting the emphasis on craft (a
possible legacy of Abakanowicz's history as a weaver) that sometimes
dominates. This tension was most intense in one of the best sculptures,
Furgon,
1992, where a headless, armless male figure faces a cage-like
wheel from the end of a narrow, flat steel bar, balanced like an acrobat
about to vault.
Furgon
depends on dialogue among blunt molded torso,
