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The sculptural installations of Carol Bove draw together found and made objects into thoughtfully constructed assemblages that explore both historical misapprehensions and modernist modes of display.

Bove has long addressed the social dynamics of the late 1960s and early ’70s through the presentation of objects, looking at, as she says, “the tiniest details to think about history and to think about history to reflect on the present moment.” She began by drawing portraits of women who appeared in issues of Playboy from 1966 to 1972, a period when she observed a “calculated ambivalence” in the women being photographed. Bove’s engagement with the era resulted in sculptural arrangements of its cultural artifacts; she employed furniture such as Knoll tables as settings for books, magazines, and objects that suggestively, albeit indeterminately, tie together various histories. Bove often put wall-mounted shelving units such as those designed by George Nelson and Poul Cadovius to similar ends. Innerspace Bullshit is one such wall-mounted shelf with an arrangement of books, objects, and ephemera, including Gregory Battcock’s conceptual art anthology Idea Art (1973), a small-press magazine called Grope, a collection of Michael McClure’s poetry called Ghost Tantras (1964), a rock from Marfa, and a pseudo-cubist sculpture. Bove’s meticulous arrangement further encodes the objects to project the aura of the ’60s, both the decade’s utopian impulses and its failures, creating a system through which history can be reevaluated in the present.

Bove’s shelf-based arrangements of books and objects are an early signature trademark of what has developed into a unique and important sculptural practice. Innerspace Bullshit contains all the hallmarks of this practice and points to Bove’s evolution, providing a crucial link between her early drawings and her more recent expansive installations. This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s diverse holdings in contemporary sculpture, especially works that reference the practice and legacy of integrating found elements, also seen in the works of Taylor Davis, Rachel Harrison, and Roni Horn.

2015.26

Sculptor, feminist, and influential artist Louise Bourgeois has produced a distinctive oeuvre over her seventy-year career, combining abstraction and figuration and a wide array of media to explore such themes as the body, trauma, and sexuality.

One of several major sculptures by Bourgeois in the ICA/Boston collection, Untitled is one of the artist’s early carved and painted-wood totemic sculptures, which she refers to as “personages.” Starkly vertical, thin, and luminescent, Untitled is an abstract, almost tusklike form that suggests the fragility of the upright human figure. The influence of the surrealists on Bourgeois is apparent in this work, in which the tension between the familiar and unfamiliar becomes paramount as the figurative adopts a new form.

Since introducing Bourgeois to Boston audiences in a 1953 group exhibition, the ICA has featured her work in a number of exhibitions, including the major 2007–08 solo show Bourgeois in Boston. This work joins the ICA’s rich collection of sculptures by Bourgeois and adds to the holdings of figurative sculptures by such artists as Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith.

2015.10

Faith Wilding is a multidisciplinary artist whose works often focus on the sociopolitical history of the body. Born in Paraguay, Wilding emigrated to the United States in 1961. Her life and work have been influenced by the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Frequently discussed in relation to feminist art, Wilding’s sculptures can also be seen as an exploration of the expanded possibilities of drawing through her deployment of linear thread.

Crocheted Environment is a sculptural installation referred to as “womb room.” This piece was originally part of the 1972 exhibition Womanhouse, organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program. The exhibition was staged in an abandoned mansion in Hollywood and one of the rooms included Wilding’s Crocheted Environment. At the ICA/Boston, the viewer experiences this piece in a small chamber with black walls. Suspended from the ceiling and enveloping the space is a large crocheted, weblike composition. The threads are simultaneously dense and open. Viewers may stand or sit in this enclosure, suggesting contradictory sensations of security, entrapment, serenity, and danger. About this work, the artist says: “Our female ancestors first build themselves and their families round-shaped shelters. These were protective environments, often woven out of grasses, braches, or weeds. I think of my environment as linked in form and feeling with those primitive womb-shelters, but with the added freedom of not being functional.”

Crocheted Environment is an important installation in the ICA’s collection of fiber works, including pieces by artists such as Eva Hesse, Françoise Grossen, and Sheila Hicks, and marks the museum’s commitment to examining the relationships between craft-based media and contemporary art.

2012.20

Californian artist Kaari Upson uses found objects and narratives as starting points for her work. Upson is interested in issues of identity, familiarity, and domesticity. In 2007, she initiated the long-term Larry Project that involved the collection and rearrangement of abandoned objects, photographs, and personal ephemera she discovered at a burned-down house in her neighborhood. The project was an intimate and at times manic investigation into the life of a stranger, resulting in a large body of work that included video, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and performances.

For her 2011 installation at the Overduin and Kite gallery in Los Angeles, Upson recreated a cast figure of Larry, which she subsequently burned in a room-sized box. For this same exhibition, Upson presented a series of charcoal tablets that preserved her bodily motions. To produce these works, she mixed charcoal dust with resin and performed movements over flexible metal sheets, such as dragging, contracting, and pouring. The sheets were altered by the corporeal weight of the artist, capturing her gestural actions. In Charcoal Tablet 6, the artist pressed her fist into the material, transcribing the sexual act of fisting and creating a work that blurs the lines of performance, sculpture, and painting.

Upson’s Charcoal Tablet 6 enriches the ICA/Boston’s collection of works by artists, such as Mona Hatoum and Sophie Calle, who explore the intersection of sculpture and performance to examine issues of trust and intimacy.

800.13.06

Keith Sonnier’s work debuted in Lucy Lippard’s famous 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, a pointed response to the end-game strategies of minimalist sculpture. Minimalism’s geometric, machine-made, and unified forms were countered by Sonnier and other so-called postminimalist artists working in downtown New York in the late 1960s—including Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Richard Tuttle, and Jackie Winsor—with diffuse forms, a process-oriented approach, and performative elements. Though Sonnier studied painting, early on he moved into three dimensions, the use of neon, and the integration of movement in the form of video art and performance.

Depose II is one of Sonnier’s rare inflatable sculptures. Using the unlikely combination of neon lighting, metal, and nylon sailcloth, Sonnier balances a readymade aesthetic with painted geometric elements. The metal forms that pinch the inflatable are based on extruded found material, such as the rebar commonly used to build cement structures. The gestural neon shapes derive from the artist’s drawings. The inflatable assumes an anthropomorphic form that, when filled with air from the blower, suggests a living being. Initially a limp sack, the sculpture must breathe and expand to assume its final form. The title references the act of being deposed, wherein a person is required to give oral out-of-court testimony. The person being deposed is often asked exceedingly personal questions. Perhaps the pinched or pressed inflatable alludes to the feeling of duress that might arise from having to tell the truth in a compromising situation.

Depose II is the first work by Sonnier to enter the ICA/Boston collection. It is a unique postminimalist sculpture that integrates fabric, a medium the ICA collects and exhibits in depth. It joins a number of important sculptures made of repurposed materials by such artists as Tara Donovan and Rachel Harrison.

2013.12

In 1969, Robert Rohm’s manila rope reliefs were included in three important group exhibitions: Lucy Lippard’s 557, 087 at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Seattle; Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and String and Rope at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. These three presentations defined the emerging movements of conceptual art, process art, and fiber art, respectively. In his rope reliefs, Rohm united the three currents by giving equal weight to issues of idea, process, and material. Knotted into grid shapes and darkened with a brown, oil-based wood stain, these netlike structures were nailed directly onto the gallery walls. Rohm then performed a sequence of simple, minimal interventions that drastically altered the appearance of the original grids.

Rohm divided his rope sculptures into three categories based on the gestures he executed. He made the first set by stretching or relaxing the rope; the second, by cutting it; and the third, by piling it. Gravity is the common denominator in the three groups. Untitled, 1969, is a knotted grid that exemplifies the first body of work. For this piece, Rohm tacked a rectangular net along its perimeter to the wall and then removed the nails along the top and right edges. He had anticipated that this would result in a crisp diagonal as with folded paper; instead, the rope slouched into an asymmetrical catenary curve. As it so often did, the material behaved contrary to Rohm’s prediction, introducing the element of chance.

Chance was also a factor in Rohm’s second and most influential series—rope grids he cut at predetermined points, such as Untitled, 1970. These cuts nearly always followed a logical pattern he had plotted on a preliminary diagram. Paradoxically, these methodical, orderly cuts caused the loose ends to dangle and droop into irregular, and at times even chaotic, new compositions. Rohm created a tension between rationality and randomness; after the grid’s connections were severed, its organized, geometric pattern devolved into disarray, illustrating the law of entropy that preoccupied many American artists during the 1970s.  The configuration of each sculpture provides the viewer with enough visual information to identify where Rohm sliced the grid and to mentally reconstruct the trajectory of the rope’s descent. “Visually, if it’s clear enough, one would read that that’s what happened,” he explains in an Artscanada article. “It’s not an illusion, it’s what actually did happen.”

Due to the ephemeral, disposable nature of Rohm’s early media, most of those early pieces were recycled or discarded soon after they were made. Like many important examples of conceptual and process-based works of the 1960s and ’70s, these two Rohm sculptures exist as instructions until they are realized in rope. Working with Rohm, and later his widow, Candy Adriance, the ICA/Boston obtained both the specific instructions for the works and recommendations of rope type. These works join other sculptures in fiber in the collection by artists such as Françoise Grossen and Sheila Hicks that appeared in Fiber: Sculpture, 1960—present, organized by Jenelle Porter, former Mannion Family Senior Curator, and enable the ICA to give a more complete art-historical story about approaches to process and material in sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s.

2015.29

In 1969, Robert Rohm’s manila rope reliefs were included in three important group exhibitions: Lucy Lippard’s 557, 087 at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Seattle; Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and String and Rope at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. These three presentations defined the emerging movements of conceptual art, process art, and fiber art, respectively. In his rope reliefs, Rohm united the three currents by giving equal weight to issues of idea, process, and material. Knotted into grid shapes and darkened with a brown, oil-based wood stain, these netlike structures were nailed directly onto the gallery walls. Rohm then performed a sequence of simple, minimal interventions that drastically altered the appearance of the original grids.

Rohm divided his rope sculptures into three categories based on the gestures he executed. He made the first set by stretching or relaxing the rope; the second, by cutting it; and the third, by piling it. Gravity is the common denominator in the three groups. Untitled, 1969, is a knotted grid that exemplifies the first body of work. For this piece, Rohm tacked a rectangular net along its perimeter to the wall and then removed the nails along the top and right edges. He had anticipated that this would result in a crisp diagonal as with folded paper; instead, the rope slouched into an asymmetrical catenary curve. As it so often did, the material behaved contrary to Rohm’s prediction, introducing the element of chance.

Chance was also a factor in Rohm’s second and most influential series––rope grids he cut at predetermined points, such as Untitled, 1970. These cuts nearly always followed a logical pattern he had plotted on a preliminary diagram. Paradoxically, these methodical, orderly cuts caused the loose ends to dangle and droop into irregular, and at times even chaotic, new compositions. Rohm created a tension between rationality and randomness; after the grid’s connections were severed, its organized, geometric pattern devolved into disarray, illustrating the law of entropy that preoccupied many American artists during the 1970s.  The configuration of each sculpture provides the viewer with enough visual information to identify where Rohm sliced the grid and to mentally reconstruct the trajectory of the rope’s descent. “Visually, if it’s clear enough, one would read that that’s what happened,” he explains in an Artscanada article. “It’s not an illusion, it’s what actually did happen.”

Due to the ephemeral, disposable nature of Rohm’s early media, most of those early pieces were recycled or discarded soon after they were made. Like many important examples of conceptual and process-based works of the 1960s and ’70s, these two Rohm sculptures exist as instructions until they are realized in rope. Working with Rohm, and later his widow, Candy Adriance, the ICA/Boston obtained both the specific instructions for the works and recommendations of rope type. These works join other sculptures in fiber in the collection by artists such as Françoise Grossen and Sheila Hicks that appeared in Fiber: Sculpture, 1960–Present, organized by Jenelle Porter, former Mannion Family Senior Curator, and enable the ICA to give a more complete art-historical story about approaches to process and material in sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s.

2015.28

Sherrie Levine is a multimedia artist who works in photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, among other materials, to create pieces that challenge deeply rooted notions of artistic authenticity, originality, autonomy, the purity of medium, and immutability.

Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) is one of Levine’s series of knot paintings (the name is a pun on “not painting”). Each of these works uses the common building material of plywood, which is composed of many thin layers of wood glued together. Plywood is often used to build crates for artworks, though here the everyday material becomes the material support of a painting. Levine paints in gold over the naturally occurring knots within the wood, a process that again conflates high and low culture, granting a seemingly banal material aesthetic relevance and material worth.

Though fitting in with her oeuvre at large in its critique of modernist concepts, such as the end of painting, Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) complements the other works by Levine in the ICA/Boston’s collection by providing a modification of her signature strategy of appropriation. This piece is also an important reference for works by other artists in the collection, including Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, artists who, like Levine, are considered part of the so-called Pictures Generation, known for their appropriation of images and critical examination of popular culture and consumerism.

2015.19

Sherrie Levine is known for appropriating the work of canonical male artists in order to deconstruct accepted art-historical concepts like originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium and suggest their inherent mutability.

Over a decade after she began reproducing works by famous male artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Walker Evans, and Willem de Kooning, Levine created a cast bronze replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, one of the first readymade sculptures, a commercially manufactured urinal that Duchamp removed from a functional context and presented as a work of art. In Levine’s Fountain (Buddha), she recasts Duchamp’s work in a critical light, challenging the nearly universal acceptance and celebration of Duchamp’s early twentieth-century radicalism. Levine subverts the everyday quality of Duchamp’s readymade by casting the work in bronze, a valuable material with strong currency in the history of sculpture. Levine collapses multiple associations within this work, as the low-culture urinal is presented as a bronze masterwork. The title points to the visual similarity of the upturned urinal with Buddhist reliquary sculptures, offering many pathways for reconsidering the original work.

Fountain (Buddha) is one of several works in the ICA/Boston collection that critique accepted notions of artistic creativity, the authenticity and commodification of the art object, and the nature of the art-historical canon.

2015.18

An important female artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of what was later dubbed the Pictures Generation, Sherrie Levine is known for her appropriation of canonical work by male artists. In the words of Douglas Crimp, Levine’s layered works draw from “pictures whose status is that of cultural myth,” as the artist “steals them away from their usual place in our culture and subverts their mythology.”

In 1983, Levine began to re-create printed reproductions of works by male modernists, raising questions of originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium. Chair Seat: 7 binds together the flatness of modernist painting, such as Frank Stella’s “stripe paintings,” with a readymade material—here a store-bought chair seat—creating an awkward combination of high and low culture, the abstract and the everyday. While modernist painting aspired to visual flatness and disdained decoration, Levine undermines both principles by overlaying abstract painting on a three-dimensional surface intended for bodily use.

Chair Seat: 7 joins other works by Levine in the ICA/Boston’s collection to represent the breadth of this influential artist’s oeuvre in terms of media and technique. This piece also complements works by other female artists of the so-called Pictures Generation, including Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman.

2015.17