KAREN WILKIN
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implacable "walls" of these enigmatic enclosures are so minimally
inflected, so narrowly opened (for the most part), that you are compelled
to imagine what they might be like from the inside, using their visible,
exterior characteristics as clues; entry has been disembodied. Other
exhibited sculptures were, in a sense, even more abstract: wholly self–
contained, completely impenetrable objects whose subtly inflected exte–
riors-suavely curved or brutally four-square-at once made explicit the
volumes contained within them and reinforced their mystery.
Such works are notably unlike the linear constructions in steel that
established Caro's reputation in the early 1960s-not surprisingly, given
the nearly four decades of exploration and growth separating those
early efforts and the sculptures at Yorkshire. Yet in another sense,
Caro's concerns remain unchanged. Just as he did in his earliest abstract
constructions, he continues to test the limits of what a sculpture can be:
now claiming and activating space by firmly enclosing it, instead of, as
he once did, by loosely demarcating the key intersections of defining tra–
jectories; now coming to terms with palpable volume and mass, instead
of concentrating on the meeting of eloquently dispersed elements. Caro
began as a sculptor of chunky expressionist figures, then rejected figu–
ration and volumetric modeling-along with much else of the inherited
tradition of Western sculpture-in order, as he puts it, "to make sculp–
ture reaL" Today, he seems to be reinventing those once-taboo aspects
of tradition, in his abstract sculptures and "sculpitecture," by detaching
mass and volume from conventional associations with the forms of the
body. Yet as the selection at Longside made clear, to experience these
works is to experience a heightened sense of what Caro has described as
"what it is like to be inside the body": a preternatural awareness of the
difference between enclosure and openness, between containment and
freedom, a sensitivity to how you stand and move, a sense of your own
corporality and dimensions. The Yorkshire exhibition was evidence that
Caro's embodiments of these notions-literally, abstractly, and
metaphorically-are among the most unforgettable works of his long
career.
Caro's ambiguous meditations on insideness and outsideness pro–
vided a provocative context for Rachel Whiteread's continuing project
of inverting the familiar by reconstituting the defining planes of voids as
confrontational solids-as in the recent
Transient Spaces,
two works
derived from a building she acquired lately to serve as her home and stu–
dio, exhibited at the Guggenheim in Berlin and New York.
Untitled:
Apartment,
the larger of the two plaster structures, was a meandering
geometric block, interrupted occasionally by nondescript window
