“If it wasn’t magic, it was merchandise”—that was the artistic credo of the American sculptor Christopher Wilmarth (1943-1987), whose work is on display at Betty Cuningham Gallery. The implication is that aesthetic experience is beyond the reach of money. In this era of overpriced art and proud opportunism, Wilmarth’s sentiment can seem naïve. Artists have catered to authority from time immemorial. What’s important is how fully a work of art sustains itself as an independent entity. The Sistine Chapel, for example, may have been contract work, but it’s also infinitely more than that. Wilmarth was right: Magic is exactly what we should expect from art.
The Wilmarth exhibitions that Betty Cuningham has mounted over the past 20 or so years, both in her own gallery and for other venues, have been frustrating largely because they haven’t given the sculptor his due. Ms. Cuningham’s devotion to Wilmarth’s art and his memory is exemplary—it’s that our museums haven’t seen fit to mount a proper retrospective.
Given some of the overinflated reputations our institutions have devoted attention to, it’s something more than a shame and something less than a sin that Wilmarth hasn’t been among them. You can get some feeling as to why that might be from the beautifully installed array at Cuningham Gallery. Delicately modulated, Wilmarth’s glass and steel sculptures are unspectacular: Their considerable ambition is realized with uncommon reticence. Wilmarth wasn’t a showman.
Wilmarth’s sculpture bears some comparison with Georges Seurat’s drawings currently on view at MoMA: They share a sense of elegance, severity and unnerving quietude. Like Seurat the draftsman, Wilmarth conjured forms that are simultaneously immovable and evanescent, forever on the verge of dissipating. Wilmarth’s achievement is remarkable given the obdurate matter-of-factness of Wilmarth’s medium of choice—he was, after all, a sculptor.
Creating ghostly effigies from industrial materials seems an impossible pursuit, but Wilmarth pulled it off with startling eloquence. Heir to both the nuts-and-bolts verities of Constructivism and the take-or-leave-it Minimalist aesthetic, Wilmarth built upon the former and enlarged the latter. Thick planes of glass, augmented by sharp and fast runs of wire, arc from the wall or are fitted within burnished steel armatures. Tension is elicited through tightly honed diagonals and the underplayed use of frosted glass, a medium that both promises and obscures transparency.
As true as his work is as sculpture, Wilmarth was, in important and sometimes stealthy ways, a pictorial artist. Mesh (1971), Second Roebling #2 (1974) and the haunting Portrait of a Memory (1985), for example, are wall pieces. But even in a freestanding piece like the magisterial Invitation #1 (1975-76), you see Wilmarth employing planes, lines and touch (broad sweeps of a brush appear on some of the glass panels) in a painterly fashion. You can feel Matisse within Wilmarth’s broad areas of incident, Diebenkorn in the steadying draftsmanship in the use of wire and, most evocatively, Rothko in the yearning sonorities.
The odd piece out is Everly (1969), a floor sculpture composed of 18 etched glass discs through which a single steel rod has been laced. Divining how this loosely choreographed, wheel-like contraption pays homage to the Everly Brothers doesn’t seem worth the effort—the sculpture is deadened by material literalness.
In other words, Everly doesn’t have the magic—there’s no metaphorical takeoff. But neither is it merchandise. One gauge of an artist’s worth is how his failures possess their own aesthetic integrity. There wasn’t an artificial bone in Wilmarth’s body. If the current exhibition doesn’t testify to the oeuvre’s breadth, it does point to Wilmarth’s implacable and lyrical gift. For that we should be grateful.
“Christopher Wilmarth” is at Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, until Jan. 19.
Brusque Wit
There’s next to no way of telling from the career-spanning exhibition of Stuart Davis’ drawings at Hollis Taggart Gallery that he’s the greatest American painter of the 20th century. The “amazing continuity” of his “colonial cubism”—to quote two signature canvases—can be partly gleaned from the work’s brusque wit, downplayed sophistication and relentless, searching rigor. Visitors will delight in an early, Ashcan School–type drawing of two fashion plates at the Met, and then be surprised by a 1933 sketch that presages Saul Steinberg with uncanny precision.
“Dynamic Impulse: The Drawings of Stuart Davis” is at Hollis Taggart Galleries, 958 Madison Avenue, until Jan. 12.
Romantic Streak
Ted Kurahara’s diptych paintings, at Walter Randel Gallery, mine stringent turf—symmetrical geometric structures that admit little wiggle room for the vagaries of individuality. User-unfriendly, you might think, but the longer you stick with them, the more a tight-lipped sensuality makes itself felt. Brooding colors predominate, but it’s the scumbled pinkish tones in two single-panel paintings that divulge Mr. Kurahara’s romantic streak. A self-effacing touch is most overt in ruled lines defining form with topographical specificity.
“Ted Kurahara: Facing the Wall: Recent Abstractions” is at Walter Randel Gallery, 287 Tenth Avenue, until Jan. 12.
Bull Session
The New York Times dubbed as brilliant Tino Sehgal’s This Situation, a performance work at Marian Goodman Gallery, but its sole redeeming factor is that it’s silly. Step into Goodman’s back room and six people will, in unison, greet you with a cheery “Welcome to this situation,” whereupon they walk backward and begin pontificating like college sophomores drunk on Philosophy 101. Mr. Sehgal doesn’t participate—a set of players does the metaphysical heavy lifting for a daunting eight hours a day, six days a week. Mr. Sehgal just thinks up the stuff.
This is anti-commodity art, I guess: If something isn’t there, how can you buy it? Mr. Sehgal presumably avoids careerist trappings—he doesn’t allow the work to be photographed and doesn’t indulge in press releases and invitations. Anonymous purity of intent is the goal, but the more Mr. Sehgal exempts himself from the proceedings, the more he calls attention to himself. There has to be more to art than shameless self-aggrandizement.
“Tino Sehgal: This Situation” is at Marian Goodman. 24 West 57th Street, until Jan. 10.
