The monster on the roof of the Met

I was not expecting to find what I did when I went to see Roxy Paine's "Maelstrom" installation at the Met. You can read my piece on it over at the Examiner.

Carol Bove review

I've put up my latest review at Examiner.com: a look at Carol Bove's "Plants & Mammals" show at the Horticultural Society of New York. I'm usually a fan of luscious materials and sensual, highly-worked surfaces, which Bove flirts with but never in an overt or focused way. She's doing something special and compelling, and it will keep your brain rolling around issues of surface.

Your diploma is garbage

They say the only part of the economy that does well during recession is education. So now that I'm jobless, I'm looking forward to the opening of the University of Trash at SculptureCenter this Sunday.

The University of Trash is an experiment in alternative architecture, urbanism, and pedagogy taking place in SculptureCenter's main space. Drawing from utopian ideals and radical urban projects undertaken since the 1960s, the artists will create an installation that functions as a temporary, makeshift University - hosting courses, lectures, presentations, and workshops. A Free Skool program will operate within the University, offering the public the opportunity to propose their own courses - open and free for all sign up and attend throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Working collaboratively with students, local organizations, activists, and academics, the artists have been gathering and researching material related to activities of the 1960s countercultural Appropriate Technology movement, experimental pedagogy, adventure playgrounds, Non-plan, emergency and low-impact design, the vernacular of informal housing, and historical sites of activism.

The LMCC has a good interview with Cataldi.

Fred Sandback's world on a string

"My work always exists in an interior space," sculptor Fred Sandback wrote in Notes from 1975.

Sandback, who currently has a show at David Zwirner until Valentine's Day, made minimal sculptures with string.

Like his teachers Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Sandback can sometimes seem cool, but he is always engaged in something very specific to a material, to a room, to a moment.

Sandback uses string to creates imaginary planes. It's so simple. It's a bit like Les Nessman's imaginary office on the sitcom WKRP only, you know, less lame.

Sandback takes a simple, playful idea and pushes the tactile and imaginary qualities as far as they will go. The black string seems to float off the floor, while red looks like it's firmly planted. He uses intervals and repetition to give and take solidity of the planes, and shadows to bend space.

This is conceptual sculpture anyone can understand and take joy in. Photos don't do justice to the architecture the string makes you start seeing.

I love that when I went, Zwirner had run out of press releases but was still giving away copies of Sandback's tips for children to appreciate the sculpture.

In that essay, "Children's Guide to Seeing," Sandback compares what he's doing to the game of cat's cradle and encourages kids to get some string from the museum guards.

"Your fingers might do some thinking while you wander around and look at my sculptures," he says. And this, for me, is the key to what makes this work great: it's conceptual work that's not dictated by ideas, but by experience.

"Often cat's cradle is about making a little place," writes Sandback, "just for yourself, or to share with someone."

RELATED: Robert Morris talks about his sculpture

Newman's own

John Newman is a materials guy.

His small, quirky sculptures mix different materials in strange ways that create particular little worlds. Things that don't ordinarily go together - like heavy bronze and Japanese paper - somehow play nicely.

Over a dozen of Newman's sculptures are on display in a show at the New York Studio School gallery.

From a distance the room looks like a high-end toy store, with bold colors and strange forms. Up close, each work reveals itself slowly in the materials.

One work, "bamboo from sail to plow," uses bamboo in a way that compliments and supplants nature.

We know how bamboo grows, but Newman cuts it and reassembles its sections in a related way to natural bamboo sectioning, as if twisted while growing.

It's this eye for the natural behavior of materials that lets Newman pull this kind of cheeky behavior. It's not about accumulation of different objects, or the pastiche of unlikely partners.

Newman sees the properties in different forms and materials and respecting them enough to see a conversation with other materials. In the end, there is an organic whole not because of the materials but because of something else that's embedded in them.

In a video produced for the show, Newman says "All the sculptures have disparate things in them. It's kind of how believable - if that's the right word - is it that these foreign materials have been captured in this complete structure."

brass braid and yellow sketch, 2007