| The catalogue for the last gallery show during the lifetime of well-known sculptor Lawrence Fane is especially interesting. A book he wrote, M.T./L.F.: A Sculptor’s Dialogue with Mariano Taccola, Fifteenth-Century Italian Artist-Engineer, details the evolution of inquiry, inspiration and methods that ground his Purifiers and related pieces shown recently at Zabriskie Gallery. Fane drew and sculpted his dialogue with Taccola, his discovered “ancestor,” who was known as the Sienese Archimedes, a hydraulic engineer whose drawings are at the same time utilitarian and whimsical, and whose first recorded sculpture captured human faces in heads on choir stalls. Fane travelled from science to art. |  |
Ursula Schell
The catalogue for the last gallery show during the lifetime of well-known sculptor Lawrence Fane is especially interesting. A book he wrote, M.T./L.F.: A Sculptor’s Dialogue with Mariano Taccola, Fifteenth-Century Italian Artist-Engineer, details the evolution of inquiry, inspiration and methods that ground his Purifiers and related pieces shown recently at Zabriskie Gallery.
Fane drew and sculpted his dialogue with Taccola, his discovered “ancestor,” who was known as the Sienese Archimedes, a hydraulic engineer whose drawings are at the same time utilitarian and whimsical, and whose first recorded sculpture captured human faces in heads on choir stalls. Fane travelled from science to art. While preparing successfully at Harvard for medical school admission, he declined that training in favor of art school, eventually apprenticing under sculptor George Demetrios. A dedicated teacher, Fane taught at the Rhode Island School of Design for three years, and at Queens College for more than three decades.
When professor Fane ventured into a debate dear to art critics and philosophers—Must form and function share identity, or is form merely style, while content is something more “essential?”—he bypassed debate and investigated directly, using wood and concrete. His wall-hung Purifiers are made largely of wood, some of it found, some purchased as lumber. A couple of pieces incorporate plastic tubing. The larger tabletop and freestanding pieces are of both concrete and wood, among them Collector (2005), and Pot, made in the same year, and for me, the most beautiful piece in the show.
These materials were the tools of his imaginative process, which was two-fold. Fane was playfully working as a fanciful engineer and as an artist concerned with form, balance, color, and texture. Sometimes using tools of his own fashioning, he experimented with the very notion of invention. Cut-away concrete reveals the interior in the manner of a schematic two-dimensional sketch. As three-dimensional diagrams that an imaginary engineer might consult, each piece indicates such things as “inserted here” and “flow will be there.” His materials suffice in the finished sculptures to show imagined contraptions (or kidneys, for that matter) that collect, funnel, direct, combine, or vent fluids, distillates, and gases. As art, each assembly of rough-hewn and cut-off wood and concrete comprises a pleasing and interesting whole.
Fane strives with the seriousness of a scientific inventor while simultaneously offering insouciant commentary. When he hacks off a Purifier’s pipe, it’s like Fane’s saying, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” In Paola Mieli’s video, which played in the gallery, An Object of No Name in the Act of Doing Its Job, Fane says that as he discovered himself shaping lumber to look like found wood and found wood to look like machined pieces; deception became a game. The “broken” concrete of Pot and Collector opens their voids for inspection; one ruminates about purpose, while appreciating texture and color. As if they could carry and contain water or an essence, his solid wooden bowls and beakers, truncated branches and dowels, and “broken” cisterns, do carry the denotation and connotations of invention, craft, and function.
The artist was tantalized by transparent concrete he saw at an architectural show, and regretted it was not available in a form an artist might use. He openly revealed his relatively new envy of painters and their pleasure in color. Some years ago, he began to use dyes on his large steel sculptures to mimic the transient colors that occur during welding, and in his recent Pot the stubbled concrete is brushed over with the subtly variegated turquoise of copper tarnish. Despite his successful use of trompe l’oiel to give some of his wooden supports the illusion of being weathered, Fane said that he had only begun to school himself in color. Regret though we may that he did not have the chance to explore further, we might be amazed—were there ever a retrospective—at the range he did achieve.
Lawrence Fane said simply, when describing the process of creating the Purifiers, that he was having fun. Fun! With these Purifiers he has purified and distilled debates on form and content, function and aesthetics, engineering plans and art, all with his small, humble-looking assemblages of “found” objects and “crudely” fashioned conduits, spouts, and containers.
