KAREN WILKIN
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crisp linear wheel, flat plane, sturdy support, and the intervals between
them. It is possessed of a sculptural and material physicality that paradoxi–
cally makes method less important than result, so that the image becomes
metaphorical, rather than literal.
According to the catalogues' rather fulsome essays by Michael
Brenson, one of Abakanowicz's most ardent admirers, multiplicity and
contradiction are the key to these works. He tells us that the
Hand-like
Trees,
enormous hollow bronzes like blasted olive-trunks with a nod at
the myth of Daphne and Apollo, are "sorrowful yet priestly, bereft yet
aristocratic, barren yet beginning to sprout." He is equally inventive in his
associations with the earliest work in the show,
Embryology, (1978-81;
seen at the 1980 Venice Biennale and the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago, in 1982), a mammoth spill of stuffed brown sacks, somewhere
between giant potatoes, a rockfall, and a beach full of basking walruses.
I'm
afraid I kept thinking more about Giuseppe Penone's cast bronze
potatoes and Oldenburg's soft hamburgers than the cosmic issues Brenson
found.
Seeing Abakanowicz's works shortly after having seen the sculpture at
the Guggenheim helped to situate her. She is certainly an artist to be
taken seriously, but there's an extremely European preciousness about her
pieces that allies her more with the elegance of a figure sculptor like
Manzu, say, than with the anxious self-effacement of Giacometti or the
raw intensity of Smith or Picasso. (This is not to deny the potency of her
massed installations of small, vulnerable, confrontational bodies.)
Abakanowicz's large-scale "tree trunks" are more problematic, just as
Henry Moore's large-scale "boulder" figures are: the sculpture is never
quite as good as the original natural object. For me, Abakanowicz's elabo–
rately worked bronzes with their giant, cropped fingers failed to turn
Marlborough's sculpture terrace into a sacred grove.
The politics of the art world being what they are, I suspect
Abakanowicz's being a woman and from Eastern Europe contributes to
the enthusiasm with which she is received. (Is it churlish to point out that
despite the obvious difficulties of life in Soviet-dominated Poland,
Abakanowicz has traveled extensively to install her exhibitions, is widely
collected, and has received numerous prestigious awards?) The perception
of woman as victim, however, seems essential to the reputation of a fe–
male artist, at the moment; witness the vicious reviews of Helen
Frankenthaler's print retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington,
D.
c.,
versus the glowing tributes to Joan Mitchell's last works, seen at
Robert Miller Gallery.
Frankenthaler, of course, has never presented herself as a "woman
painter," but simply as a practitioner who expected her inventive, some-
