Eccentric Space: Sculpture
James Biederman
Since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the collective unconscious of world culture has sought to re-enter a state of perfect unity and safety. Spatial enclosure has been the realm of this desire. Caves, monastic retreats, and weekend hide-a-ways have served as the architecture for the individual to regain a sense of place and spiritual purpose. Of course, this idealism has run amok, as it has met with the gravity of human frailty and greed. The contained space within which to dwell with the family and self has become threatened by the anxiety of new economic and social pressures. The central town square has become the superstore jammed with the remnants of consumer desire spurred by advertisers’ lures. The disillusioned individual seeks something of substance to hold and to be held within. The acute juxtaposed angles of Schwitters’ Proun Room is a more salient model of spatiality than Judd’s imperialist, minimal spaces. Space, the raw material of sculpture, becomes crushed, distorted, twisted and renewed. The turned and twisted container becomes a signifier of our emotional and cultural ideals and failures. Each of these sculptors, within the framework of their own cultural expectations, reinvents precepts of special complexity within their individual eccentricities.
David Hatchett’s altered Duchampian readymade is in denial. An ordinary shopping cart has been encased in metal flashing rendering this container of processed produce useless. Morphing into a sci-fi object from a road warrior film, the familiar has become foreign and almost threatening. The space has been sealed and is no longer accessible. Hatchett has embalmed our weekly groceries into a time capsule containing an unknown cargo.
Fritz Buehner’s Lilliputian world depicting a series of sinking trailer homes has been caringly carved from a Brooklyn Sycamore tree. An invention of a 1950s post-war idealism, the mobile home promised the American dream to everyone. In comfort and style, we could escape urban clutter. Alas, Buehner’s house is sinking: its aspirations of family, freedom and safety expired and questioned. Vicariously and reluctantly we enter this sinking everyman’s Titanic.
Splayed across Galeria Janet Kurnatowski, Diana Puntar’s tableau of early 20th century furniture design reconsiders the function and form of human space. The symmetries of natural form and post minimal design are transferred to furniture scale sculpture. Puntar uses the materials of the manufactured world. A world of direct body contact: body architecture. This polychrome world invites us to enter, yet we remain as voyeurs.
Katsuhisa Sakai, born in an underground shelter during the American bombing of Japan, brings a sense of traditional Japanese wood joinery and architectural spatiality to his intuitive sculpture making. A demi-world of spirits and ghosts coexist as one travels the curved linear forms. The geometric and biomorphic are intertwined, slowing and accelerating our visual journey. Physical matter is exposed; a hidden desire lingers within the suggestive space.
Narrative content is no longer pejorative. These works are intuitive self-sustaining, hand crafted and discrete objects: visual yet restrained. With their formative years based in minimalist and conceptualist dogma, these sculptors have expanded our understanding of the sculptural tradition at Galeria Janet Kurnatowski located in Brooklyn.
