KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
T
HE PAST SEASON
was a good one for anyone interested in recent
sculpture-especially if you could justify a trip
to
England
to
see
Anthony Caro's work installed in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park's
new exhibition building. Still, there were rewarding shows reachable by
the New York subway: recent works by Rachel Whiteread at the
Guggenheim; an international group exhibition in Chelsea; a solo by a
relative newcomer, Anthony Cafritz, in Williamsburg; an installation by
Kim Sooja in Soho; and a two-person exhibition of sculpture by Charles
Hewlings and drawings by Ron Shuebrook in Greenwich Village. As a
group, these shows encompassed multiple nationalities and at least three
overlapping generations. They ran the gamut from "traditional"
abstract construction in steel to cast bronze and plaster
to
assemblies of
improbable components, collectively demonstrating a remarkable range
of conceptions of what sculpture could be, from confrontational masses
to fragile accumulations of line, and a lot else besides.
The survey,
Caro at Longside,
in Yorkshire, subtitled "Sculpture and
Sculpitecture" (the portmanteau word that has been attached
to
Anthony Caro's enterable structures), documented the past decade or so
of this endlessly inventive artist's preoccupation with notions of interior
and exterior. At one end of the spectrum were works like the exhibi–
tion's solemn arcade of swirling steel "steps" or its trio of linked,
stacked "towers" made of railway sleepers, which must literally be
entered. In one, you skirt curved projections and thread through angu–
lar portals, while in the other, you alternate between small, dark cham–
bers and moments of release and light. In both, the speed and direction
of passage is dictated by the structure, which transforms your normal
stride into a deliberate, formal progression. Meaning, in these sculp–
tures, is bound up with the experience of moving within them.
By contrast, in the show's selection of Caro's rigorous, masterly, boxy
steel enclosures, innerness becomes a powerfully evocative abstraction;
only visual entry is permitted by these works and even that is severely
limited. They allow tantalizing angled glimpses into their secret centers,
as though barring the uninitiated from sacred precincts within. The
