Concentrations
51
mark handforth March 23–September 24, 2007
Even the seeming of a summer’s day, Is description without place. It is a sense To which we refer experience, a knowledge Incognito, the column in the desert, On which the dove alights. —Wallace Stevens, Description Without Place For a specific site in the Dallas Museum of Art’s Sculpture Garden, Mark Handforth has created an enormous, lively, and surreal sculpture standing over fifteen feet tall. Made by “braiding” or “interlocking” basically three industrial found objects—an I-beam found at a demolition site, a working red-lighted lamppost, and huge anchor chains (each a foot long)—the work is perceived as a giant cobra snake, uncoiling and dancing, its red head reaching above the garden walls. In his proposal to the Museum, the artist stated, “The chain snake is an oversized readymade, an aggrandized piece of folk art—the kind of thing you might put your mailbox on, but of catastrophic proportion.” 1 Absurd and elegant, figurative and abstract, Handforth’s Dallas Snake animates the space, conversing with and taking on the large “formal” sculptures nearby, such as Tony Smith’s Willy (destroyed in 1962; fabricated in 1978), which is comprised of black geometric forms. Barely containing a pulsating energy, the snake seems to pull itself together, building up the necessary momentum to “climb” over the walls and escape the “prison yard.” 2 Rising above the walls and peaking through the trees, its red-lighted head watches life on the other side of the walls, both night and day—passersby, high-rise buildings, and even its boring cousins, the everyday streetlamps along the sidewalk. The snake is both a voyeur and an assertive playmate, watching and wanting to take on the Museum’s Mark di Suvero (Ave, 1973), made from I-beams, and the masterpieces of modern sculpture in the Nasher Sculpture Center across the street. Similar to other works Handforth has made from the detritus, or readymades, of urban life— bent freeway and roadside signs, Vespa motorbikes layered with candle drips, curved working street lamps (a sly homage to his one-time teacher Martin Kippenberger’s tragicomic street lights), and Dan Flavin–like fluorescent lights, for example—the artist’s snake for the Dallas Museum of Art seems to draw on the most radical innovations in the history of sculpture. For centuries, beginning in the 17th century with Bernini’s staged dramas of twisting and turning figures in marble to the 20th century with Anthony Caro’s welded metal assemblages, artists have tried to make their materials transcend their tangibility and invoke the intangible. Whether their work was created for a church altar, gallery, museum, or garden, sculptors have attempted to make their art “move,” to step up and out, to conquer space. But it’s a sculptural preoccupation to try to get things off the ground— to make heavy objects float. It’s a soulful thing; when we have great thoughts or strong feelings we transcend the material of our bodies. Bernini’s St. Theresa levitates. Caro’s Prairie floats on the wind.3 Handforth’s large-scale sculpture is informed by many key artists and art movements, especially in the 20th century, which witnessed a vast expanse of materials and more direct methods of creation. Of course, Marcel Duchamp’s use of found objects, or readymades, such as a bicycle wheel, shovel, and bottle rack (a strategy that instigated conceptual art and
the importance of context in defining a work of art), resonates. In the way it is assembled, Dallas Snake points to the Russian Valdimir Tatlin’s constructed collages of tin, wood, and plaster, what he called “real materials in real space.” Other artists who inform Handforth’s work include Pablo Picasso, Julio Gonzales, and David Smith, whose industrial welding technique created the idea of three-dimensional line and planes. Claes Oldenburg’s oversized objects from everyday postwar life bear similarities to the monumental scale and surreal aspect of the snake This work deals with scale. On the one hand, everything in the sculpture is readymade, nothing here is blown up or down, yet the whimsical manipulation of these heavy, heavy things renders them light. The links of the chain snake are anchor chain, each link a foot long, and are in and of themselves an absurd play on scale whether I do anything to them or not.4 Creating gesture, subjectivity, and imagery and combining supposedly opposite notions of figurative and abstract as well as conventions of drawing and sculpture to carve out space, the Dallas Snake appears to parallel the work of postminimalist and process artists such as Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson. Connections can be made between Handforth’s choice of materials and Robert Smithson’s belief in entropy, a scientific theory or social doctrine of eventual decline and degeneration within a close system that underlined his monumental earthworks such as Spiral Jetty (1970). For the artist, who has lived and worked in Miami since the early 1990s (arriving right after Hurricane Andrew), the city “itself is the great entropic landscape. Anything you leave in your garden will be devoured in a very short time by the lush vegetation. Nature takes over and swallows everything; new objects quickly become urban debris.” 5 Although Handforth’s sculptural works are highly informed and seem to embody benchmarks in the history of sculpture, most particularly of the 20th century, his process is quite intuitive, fluid, and organic. He knows in depth the conventions and vocabulary of sculpture, but only to break them. Handforth is a sculptor’s sculptor and likes to “make things and put them out in the world.”6 He is not timid and does not defer to his materials. Just as “we live in the world and take it on,” the artist takes on his materials, moving, twisting and bending them “according to his will.”7 Additions and changes from his initial model and preliminary drawing were made in his studio; a red crowbar, a black stake, and an aluminum pole were added and most of the work was painted an industrial yellow often used for big farming and construction equipment. Once the work arrived and was installed in the Sculpture Garden, Handforth decided to paint the additional aluminum a day-glo pinkish red. With each addition and change, the energy and movement of the work was turned up another notch; connections between life in and outside the garden walls were made more dynamic. In a sense, the artist creates a drawing in space. His ideas are not translated as in painting but are worked out in a more direct process as Handforth twists, bends, and paints the materials he has gathered from demolition sites and shipping ports. Like a masterful minimalist filmmaker or writer, Handforth acts as an astute editor, manipulating his (visual) vocabulary and conventions to create a rhythmic, lyrical, and poetic image. Bending and turning, his snake makes the passage of time physical or tangible. It triggers the imagination and points, as the great Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky once said of the cinematic or filmic image, “to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity; a pointer to life.”8 And parallel to a movie or book that is filled with the hard realities of life yet can be uplifting because of the clear, waste-not-a word way the story is told,
Handforth’s huge sculpture, while composed of used and abandoned fragments of urban life, does not leave the viewer with feelings of despair. Instead, with its clarity, assertiveness, and high energy, it seems to point to the endless possibilities of sculpture, perhaps the oldest form of creative expression if one looks even further back from Bernini to the Venus of Willendorf (28,000 BC) or Nike of Samothrace (c. 190 BC). Filled with seemingly endless references to the history of sculpture and its surroundings, to art and life, the Dallas Snake creates a landscape that must be traversed both physically and mentally. It is from and in our world. It is a thing in the here and now, a thing to be reckoned with. Through our past experiences, thoughts, and memories, the Dallas Snake becomes what it is meant to be.
It is possible that to seem-it is to be, As the sun is an example. What it seems It is and in such seeming all things are. Suzanne Weaver Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Dallas Museum of Art
—Wallace Stevens, Description Without Place
Notes 1. From the artist’s written proposal, n.d. 2. In a public conversation with the artist on March 22, 2007. 3. Written proposal. 4. Ibid. 5. Mark Handforth, Mark Handforth, catalogue for exhibition held at the Kunsthaus Zurich February 25–April 17, 2005 (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich, 2005), 16. 6. Public conversation. 7. Ibid. 8. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections in Cinema (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986), 68. 9. Handforth, Mark Handforth, 16. Selected Biography Mark Handforth was born in Hong Kong in 1969 and currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, and the Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Stadelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He has had solo exhibitions at the Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland (2006); Fondation Vasarely, Aixen-Provence, France (2005); Gavin Brown’s enterprise (2005); Kunsthaus, Zurich, Germany (2005); Roma Roma Roma, Rome, Italy (2004); the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California (2002); and a Public Art Fund commission, Lamppost, at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York (2003). Selected group exhibitions include The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2006); 5 Milliards d’Années, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006); La Force de l’Art, Le Grand Palais, Paris (2006); Light Art from Artificial Light, ZKM Museum for Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2005); Whitney Biennial 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York (2004); and It Happened Tomorrow, Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France (2003). Checklist of the Exhibition Dallas Snake, 2007 medium credit
Concentrations 51: Mark Handforth is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. Concentrations exhibition support is provided by the Donor Circle membership program through leadership gifts of Claire Dewar, Nancy and Tim Hanley, Caren Prothro, and Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. Air transportation provided by American Airlines. The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Images: Cover: XXX Inside: courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise