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Delaware Art Museum April 19 - July 7, 1991
What It Is To Be There
by Carter Ratcliff
From the Minimalist sculptors, Robert Stackhouse learned the strengths of right-angled form. Yet one would never mistake his work for theirs. Minimalism's founding fathers -- Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt -- gave geometry an air of sternness. Their cubes, oblong boxes, and gridded floor pieces have become thoroughly familiar over the years, yet they still look walled-off and aloof. Minimalist closure rejects us. Stackhouse rejects Minimalist closure. His works are inviting. Built from slats and beams -- standard, squared-away products of the lumberyard -- their carpentry teems with engaging detail. These sculptures have limber shapes and their lattice-work opens them to the light. Where it goes, vision follows. So, sometimes, do we. Stackhouse's big A-frame sculptures invite us to enter, to see how slatted patterns of light fall across our bodies. He wants us to walk across his low-lying works, to feel the large-grained texture of their tilted decks, and to sense how gracefully space is compressed and released by the airy walls of a piece like Blue Diviner (1988-89).
Stackhouse belongs to the wave of sculptors who appeared just after Minimalism was recognized here and abroad as the first thoroughly American way of making sculpture. The style's ascendancy was short. Fully developed by 1965, Minimalism had become a narrow orthodoxy by the end of the decade. Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and many others throughout the United States and Europe still work within its limits. One sees evidence of those constraints in sculptures standing before the office towers of two continents, for Minimalism is the nearest thing we have to an official style of public art. In I969, when Stackhouse showed his work for the first time, his departures from the right-angled propriety of Minimalist form looked like signs of reckless courage.
Stackhouse studied painting at the University of Florida, Tampa. He remembers the training as good but eventually frustrating. "We were encouraged to be eclectic, to keep up with the latest developments as they appeared in Arts magazine and Artnews," the artist said in a recent interview. "Every painter was to be our teacher. It was fun. It was educational -- I learned a lot -- but I had no personal identity as a painter." At the University of Maryland, where he received his Master of Arts degree in 1967, Stackhouse "got interested in the object, it seemed that objects were more honest, less the eclectic exercise in style that paintting had become for me." The nascent painter became a sculptor guided by a single rule: materials were to be used as found, ready-made.
Assembled from building supplies and hardware, Stackhouse's early apprentice sculptures had Minimalist forms and a Pop flavor. He made one piece from lengths of gutter. Another employed artificial grass cut into uniform squares. Rearranging the givens of our manufactured environment, Stackhouse showed wit and energy. His art implied that nothing was unworthy of attention. Even the form of a gutter deserved scrutiny. Guided by an egalitarian esthetic, Stackhouse made points that had already been made by Marcel Duchamp's found objects earlier in the century and, more recently by Robert Rauschenberg's combines. A larger purpose began to appear only when Stackhouse broke his self-imposed rule against shaping his materials.
In 1969 he carved a thin, curving sculpture from lengths of oak wood. "I thought of myself as a Minimalist then" he says, "and I wanted this to be a sculpture like a pencil line. It became a snake because it insisted on it." The objects, presence is undeniably serpentine, as the artist acknowledged by calling it Great Rain Snake. Until now, Stackhouse had been a literalist who saw strips of gutter as strips of gutter. Finding a trompe l'oeil representation of
living grass ready-made in a patch of artificial turf, he left it unmodified. With Great Rain Snake, his literalism gave way to the oblique tactics of allusion and evocation. Stackhouse became a conjurer, an artist who summons meanings from elusive sources.
During the early 1970's, the smooth, rounded shapes of his wooden sculptures looked less serpentine than nautical, though there is room for argument here. A mast and a snake have formal affinities of a kind that Stackhouse was learning to encourage, though some works in the Journey series of 1972 show an unambiguous resemblance to ships' hulls. Others look more like the struts and beams of a hull's interior. Allusions had begun to multiply. When a sculpture of this period suggests an elbow joint, it also recalls the detail of human anatomy that gives its name to this structural device. With their approximately vertical postures, Stackhouse's sculptures of 1973-74 evoke walls, though they may allude to fences. Or possibly the theme of the curving hull persists in the sculptures from these years. Stackhouse doesn't say which interpretation is right, or even that there is a correct way to read his works.
The artist had carved Great Rain Snake. He built the first of the wall-like pieces of 1973-74 with carpenter's tools, then gave them coats of graphite and charcoal. Having built Ghost Dance (1974) the same way, Stackhouse applied no finish. Reinstating his original rule against altering the nature of his materials, he arrived at his characteristic style of fabrication. After cutting lumber to the proper length, he nails and bolts it into place, then leaves the newly constructed work to weather its surroundings with no protective coating. Since the late 1970's he has sometimes painted his wooden pieces, an infraction of his one rule. Still, these coats of paint are not so much finishes as ways to reinforce the links between sculptures and the paintings that echo their forms.
The Minimalists showed him how the shape of a room can clarify the form of a right-angled sculpture. Inverted, this is a lesson in how to generate ambiguity: substitute complex curves for the simplicities of right angles, as in Ghost Dance, and, no matter how wail-like the object looks, it will make no formal allegiance with a gallery's interior architecture. It will seem out of place. Only by providing themselves with their own environment would Stackhouse's sculptures be at home. This meant that they would have to enclose space, which they did by doubling themselves. The wall-like singularity of Ghost Dance became the two walls of A-frame works like Running Animals/Reindeer Way (1976), Niagra Dance (I977), and Dance at Cranbrook (1978).
These temporary installations are the first of Stackhouse's major works. Niagra Dance stretched for 112 feet across a field at Artpark, in Lewiston, New York. Constructed by hand from innumerable slats, it was a marvel of carpentry -- immense and startling. No sculptor had ever made anything like his A-frame sculptures, yet they didn't seem alien because they recalled much that is familiar. From the outside, they looked like Indian Iong houses or gigantic versions of children's huts. Inside Running Animals/Reindeer Way, antlers nailed to cross beams reinforced the allusion to Indian culture. There was also a suggestion of an unfinished American attic's sharply pointed interior. Of course light never enters an attic in the amazingly intricate patterns that one finds upon entering a Stackhouse A-frame. As it reveals patterns of slat and gap, the play of light and shadow creates baffling variations on these structural details. Here, wooden form looks less palpable than usual, light more so. These are such ambiguous places that they sometimes feel like exteriors patches of douse, light-splashed, strangely regularized forests.
At the 1987 Sao Paulo Bienal, Stackhouse built an A-frame called Ruby Birth. Hanging on the wall behind the sculpture was a massive painting of a coiled serpent. A-frame and painted image shared the same vivid scarlet. They also had skeletal structures in common, but this was not so blazingly evident, for the serpent's backbone is looped and the sculpture's roof beam was ruler-straight. The snaky suppleness of Niagra Dance helps one to see that an A-frame's roof beam is always analogous to a backbone. If its lateral slats are vertical, they count as ribs. Architecture is a variation on anatomy. In 1977, the year of Niagra Dance, Stackhouse built another A-frame at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. With the name of this sculpture, Shiphall he suggested we read these structures not only as buildings or serpents, but as hulls overturned. Thus the roof beams -- or backbones -- of the A-frames could be seen as keels. Watching these allusions appear, vanish, and reappear as Stackhouse's art evolves, one gathers the fragments of a narrative about voyages, struggles, and transformations.
The artist is the protagonist, yet he invites each member to stand in for him, to enter a long passage, an interior suggesting an overturned ship, the massive emblem of an extended and dangerous voyage -- again, a passage -- that brings the voyager face to face with terror. Stackhouse has said that, for him, serpents are fearsome and symbolize all that he would rather avoid. Instead of retreating, the voyager confronts whatever repels him, and becomes it. Like the serpent, he sheds his skin and turns into himself again, but transformed -- like Jonah coughed up by the whale, for the enveloping ribs of a Stackhouse sculpture can be understood as those of a leviathan.
In 1984 he made A Drawing for Deep Swimmers, which shows the body of a whale stretching across a sheet of paper nine feet wide. Stackhouse says that "the parallel lines in the whale's belly turned into structure" -- the parallel beams that give the sculpture called Deep Swimmers (1984) a vague but unmistakable resemblance to a house. Organism becomes architecture. Because his symbols permit so many readings, his narratives move in several directions at once. Likewise, his sculptural forms develop along complex lines. There is no steady incremental advance. Following his progress, we go backward in time as often as we go forrward.
If the first A-frames can be seen as overturned ships, then the Prudential Installation of 1980 righted the Stackhousian hull. With its keel underneath, its ribs began to flatten. The hull was turning into another part of the ship, a development noted in the title of RedDeck (1983). There was a flurry of these works from the late 1980's -- among them St. Louis Bones (1987), East River Bones (1987), and the 200-foot-long Les Os du Quebec (1959). The metaphorical bones of a ship, its ribs, had become bones of a different kind -- those of a leviathan's fossil, perhaps, or of the earth itself. Yet the aura of nautical architecture lingered. One could walk on these flat sculptures, as on a ship's deck, if they weren't severely tilted. Les Os du Quebec, for example, reaches down a steep hillside.
Oliver Ranch Bones (1989) is a deck that grew legs. Its bulk raised off the ground, this piece has a resemblance to the house-like Deep Swimmers. With the help of the interior view given by a painting of Oliver Ranch Bones, one sees that this sculpture is not only a long-legged deck but an A-frame. Each of Stackhouse's works is a variant of several others. Each launches the imagination on the stream of Stackhousian narrative at more than one point. Of a large bronze piece called On the Beach Again, the artist says, "You could see it as a beached hull, the end of the journey. It could also be a beginning. A beast crawling back into the water" -- presumably to take its next evolutionary step. In Stackhouse's art, these developments are quick and reversible, as a painting called Blue Tripych (1988) shows with elegant concision.
The three sheets of this charcoal and blue watercolor painting are each nine feet high by five feet wide. The central image is a foreshortened rendering of East River Bones. It raises the possibility of reading the Bones sculptures not only as decks and flattened hulls, but as massive, wide-ribbed leaves of the kind that flourish, presumably, in the jungles inhabited by Stackhouse's serpents. To the left is Blue Gokstaad Ship, which shows a Viking serpent boat. In this painting, ribs curve backward to form a hull a concavity facing away from the viewer. To the right, in Blue Naja Melanoleuca, ribs bend forward. Sheathed in reptile skin, these bones support the head of the serpent who faces us with a placid and relentless stare. With these swift modulations of form, Stackhouse's art advances the calm, contemplative unfolding of its meanings.
To grasp those meanings, we need no specialized knowledge. Stackhouse is among the few contemporary artists who call directly upon our common stock of knowledge and our familiar feelings about enclosure and openness, about light and carpentered form and landscape. He puts no obstacles of style or art-world reference between our imaginations and the allusions that drift around each of his sculptures like the atmosphere that gives a particular day its distinctive mood. His art is accessible. Yet it developed out of the Politics of style and anti-style that agitated the American art world two decades ago -- politics that Stackhouse thoroughly mastered -- so it is helpful to see his art against the backdrop of that history.
Once established, Minimalist authority inspired rebellions. Commentators noted them as they occurred, but somewhat distractedly, for rebels like Stackhouse did not form a tightly knit band. When he, Keith Sonnier, Lynda Benglis, and others rejected the rigidity of Minimalist form, they rejected as well the Minimalist tendency to share basic premises. These young sculptors had no wish to join in the invention of a post-Minimalist style, though the art world would have liked nothing better. Critics, curators, and collectors were asking, impatiently; what the next new art movement would be. Before the '60's were over, they had an answer: conceptualism.
Tile formal simplicities of Minimalist sculpture had prompted much commentary, some of it complex. The most sophisticated criticism drew its terms from the sculptors' own statements, especially Morris's and Judd's. The artists who came to be known as conceptualists argued that theory is the foundation of art, and sufficient in itself. No more sculptures or paintings need be produced. There was a rough art-historical logic in this dismissal of the object, and a touch of justice as well, for Minimalist sculptures often seem to convey a distaste for their own physicality.
Conceptualism gave the art gallery the look of a leftover place. For a few seasons, space itself had a residual feel to it. Sculptors continued to work, yet many in the art world had begun to wonder if sculpture's palpability rendered it excessive and unnecessary. Paintings, too, looked pointlessly tangible. Then, inevitably this suspicion of the object vanished. Because we are embodied, we take up space. Therefore we take an interest in art objects: in roundabout ways, their physical presence's mirror our own. Of course, works of conceptual art provide no such reflection. Nor do most of them count for much as writing. So conceptualism fluttered to the peripheries, leaving the authority, of the Minimalist monument to be challenged by monuments - and anti-monuments - in other styles.
Few sculptors wanted to abandon the geometry that had received an American stamp from Minimalism. Yet many, including a few Minimalists, felt that unrelieved formal clarity had become oppressive. Minimalism gave objects a frozen look. There was a wish for a thaw, for a new flexibility of form. With large rectangles cut from gray, industrial-weight felt, Robert Morris preserved geometric simplicity but gave it curves by folding his material and letting it hang freely from walls. With scatter pieces -- bits of wood, metal, felt, and other materials strewn across a gallery floor -- he dismantled the Minimalist monument. Carl Andre made scatter pieces for a few seasons, and so did Keith Sonnier. A young artist named Barry Le Va specialized in them.
In the late 1960's and early '70's, Allan Saret made evanescent anti-monuments from tangled coils of chicken wire. Lynda Benglis poured tinted polyurethane into puddles and heaps. Displacing Jackson Pollock's drip method from canvas to three-dimensional space, she turned action painting into action sculpture. These artists had released form from its Minimalist strait jacket but, for Stackhouse, this was not enough. He felt the need to liberate form's power to generate symbols and, from the play of symbols, narratives. The Minimalists had insisted that the best sculpture refers not to the human form, not to architecture, not to anything but itself. Having cultivated this literalism in his earliest sculpture, Stackhouse abandoned it to find his mature style. The subtleties of his Ghost Dance make symbolic interpretations inevitable, and we cannot look at his A-frames or his flat works without imagining more than we see. This imaginative surplus was anathema to the Minimalists. For Stackhouse, art succeeds by generating it.
Sonnier's neon and latex sculptures evoke subtropical nights on America's gulf coast. The works of Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, and Siah Armajani imply a more temperate zone. Borrowing the techniques of carpentry, they built sculptures that comment on the landscape, actual and cultural, where our generic styles of domestic architecture developed. Stackhouse's carpentered forms do the same. His white-painted beams recall frame houses in sunlight and his blues suggest nuances of sky. Caught in Stackhouse's wooden nets, light flickers and glows. Myth gives way to oblique reminiscences about the weather and landscape of the East Coast of North America. His allusions to boats imply boathouses, piers, and jetties -- landmarks on the way to the sea where we launch ourselves on the imaginary voyages that lead us into the transforming presence of the serpent or the leviathan.
Of the artists who challenged the founding fathers of Minimalism, only Robert Smithson was as willing as Stackhouse to let narrative infiltrate his forms. With gallery pieces and then with earthworks built in the desert and at the sea shore, Smithson spun tales of entropy -- the slow, inevitable loss of form that will eventually return the universe to undifferentiated chaos. He was a Romantic in reverse, an artist who sought the sublime not in a creative ecstasy but in intimations of absolute destruction. Stackhouse's stories are more elliptical and more optimistic. Also, his attitude toward narrative is different froth Smithson's, who made it so central to his art that he may be less a sculptor who wrote than writer who elaborated his arguments with sculptures.
Stackhouse, of course, has never transcribed any of his narratives, which are powerful in part because he doesn't insist that we attend to them. They belong to the climate of his art, and we may notice them or not, as we choose. Or we can make up stories of our own. In 1982 Stackhouse built a piece called Toronto Passages. The site was a park in Toronto, a place conducive to idling. Among the idlers was a man who stopped to watch the artist at work and, after a few minutes, felt emboldened to say that the piece "was like the Canadian economy. You're trying to prop it up, but it looks like it's about to fall down." In familiar, Stackhousian terms, Toronto Passages was an A-frame alluding to ribs and hulls, mythical beasts and voyages, yet the artist finds this fiscal interpretation as legitimate as any other. Since it is our responsibility to make sense of his works, the sense that we make receives no challenge from him.
The artist recently said that his themes "arrived intuitively. I never made an effort to link ships and serpents with the image of a Viking serpent-boat. The link happened as I worked. For about a year, there have been no new images. I've come to the end of that evolution." Stackhouse does not find this a troubling development, for he feels no difficulty in elaborating sculptural structures. He has always been unflaggingly inventive, and now invention is proceeding with less than the usual impetus from narrative energies. "I suppose this means that my works are getting more architectural, though they have had that quality all along, and I am not sure I like that word. I want to make a place, in Barnett Newman's sense. He said he intended his paintings to be places, not things
Literally of course, a painting is a thing. What Stackhouse has taken from Newman's comment is an idea about the way we perceive our surroundings and inhabit them. Where are we and what is it to be there? The Minimalists insisted on answering this question literally: one was wherever one happened, in fact, to be, and sculpture's job was to clarify that fact as fully as possible. They assumed that if sculptural form were geometrically simple and unobscured by subtleties of interpretation -- if, in other words, form were absolutely perspicuous --then its setting would assume an equal clarity. One would have the literalist grasp of one's situation that leads to the only reliable kind of knowledge, according to Minimalist theory. Yet in Stackhouse's understanding of Newman's comment, a place is not just an arrangement of physical facts. For an artwork to be a place, it must let us see it as more than a tangible thing.
With Great Rain Snake and other sculptures of the early 1970's, Stackhouse learned to de-emphasize brute fact without weakening it. His works are not in the least ethereal. On the contrary, they have a sturdiness that we usually find only in well-made houses and boats, in durable trellises and fences. They have not only that degree of sturdiness, but that kind, so we see them as house-like or boat-like. We approach them as if they were fences or piers or
decks, and enter them as we would enter a trellis. Having persuaded us to experience them in this fashion, through metaphor, they are entangled in our imaginations and memories. Because we project something of ourselves onto these structures, we can no more take them as merely physical objects that we can take ourselves that way.
At its most extreme, the Minimalist esthetic invited viewers to assume the rigidity and blankness of Minimalist sculpture. Object and body were to be experienced in the same numb, literalist manner. The work of art was understood as a cluster of facts and members of the audience were to count in the same way, thus ridding themselves of the complexities that humanity displays in its more familiar states. The possibility that art might have this dehumanizing effect was only an implication of statements that Morris, Judd, and Andre made during the mid - 1960s. It was an implication easily missed, yet I think that Stackhouse must have understood it, not from the Minimalists' writings, but from their works. His intuitive understanding appears to have driven him away from Minimalism, pointing him in the direction of his first major sculptures. If the Minimalist object addresses the audience with the cold data of uninflected form, Stackhouse's objects would warmly encourage the imagination. If viewers were to borrow an oddly inhuman factuality from Minimalist coldness, Stackhousian warmth would increase viewers' humanity -- I mean, lead them to a fuller consciousness of the speculative, responsive powers that each of us possesses.
So, instead of asserting themselves as the facts that they undeniably are, Stackhouse's sculptures offer themselves to us as presences in need of meaning. We give them meaning when we spin out a Stackhousian tale of a transforming voyage, or by following our curiosity about the details of form to an intuition of the way a sculpture inhabits its site --
when, for example, we feel that Les Os du Quebec embraces the ground or Eau Claire Sailings (1979) lurches toward the sky. Primarily they are fieIds designed for the play of the audience's faculties. They are places in the sense that they provide sites for that interpretive play.
"I make sculptures to give myself something to paint, " Stackhouse has said on several occasions. At first hearing, this remark seems to demote the sculptures to the status of pretexts. This, of course, cannot be what the artist means, as the immense scale of his sculptural achievement shows. It is more likely that, when he says he sculpts so that he can paint, Stackhouse is pointing to an intimacy between his mediums, an interdependency that he creates by moving back and forth between them. From this closeness comes an understanding of disparities. Stackhouse notes that his paintings never give a straightforward representation of a sculpture. "I think of them as ideas," he says, "or as questions, not just as records of things that I built" Some of them show unbuildable forms. Thus, in painting, the artist overcomes certain impossibilities that he meets in three dimensions.
In sculpture, he overcomes the impossibility that every painter faces -- that of making a space that can be entered. His sculptures are like large, meticulous line drawings executed in three dimensions with a blunt, practical hand. Subtlety is in the structural ideas guiding his hand. Similar ideas guide him as he paints, and as he does, his hand, too, shows subtlety, becoming elegant and resourceful when it picks up a brush. To reconcile these opposed qualities, bluntness and refinement, he goes to a place somewhere between painting and sculpture. This is not a literal place nor can it be depicted. It is a virtual, imaginary place -- the place of Stackhouse's art.
It is the place where perceptions of formal evolution, no matter how quick, match their pace to one's speculations about allusion and symbol, no matter how slowly, how tenuously these progress. It is the place where the artist overcomes the disparities that divide patterns of sheer form from webs of implied narrative, and where he reconciles the tangibility of monumental objects to the intangibility of their meaning. Over the years, Stackhouse has made a series of quiet spectacles of his efforts to unify the incompatible. Though he has never said so, I believe that he intends these spectacular struggles to be exemplary. He wants us to follow him to the place they occur, and to understand that this place is unimaginable, for it is the site of imagination itself. Stackhouse encourages us to see how we arrive at this site, this unmappable place. His art prompts us to imagine ourselves imagining our way to the reconciliation of disparities, and to see how this process gives meaning to what we have reconciled. He wants us to see how we see, and he offers himself as the model of a seer.
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