6.19.24 — Home Away from Home
Alice Adams could not have lived in Adams’s House, but you can easily imagine it becoming home—a finer home than she or anyone could have known. Drawings for the project track its assembly piece by piece.
Yet her work from the late 1970s at Zürcher, through June 20, could just as easily be fragments from what she lived in and lived with every day. It shows her as modern architect, designer, 
and Minimalist, living and working close to the ground. It also shows her refusal of the spare logic common to all three disciplines. If that sets her apart from the demands of her time, it makes for a wondrous rediscovery at age ninety-three.
Is Adams’s House a sculpture, a house, or a stage toward both? Its slim beams rise in parallel, as what sculpture back in the day called “drawing in space.” In the work’s long-term installation, outdoors at the Nassau County Museum on Long Island, sunlight picks out its spruce and Douglas fir. A beam could pass for a neon tube from Dan Flavin. An arch rests there, too, waiting for a crane to hoist it into position as the roof. This really could be a work in progress, quite as much as a construction site I had passed just that afternoon—and it, too, had barely passed the ground floor.
Drawings for the project pick out arched windows with greater finish and detail. They could belong to another house entirely, one that has been around a long time. They seem as much observed as imagined. The work itself does not recycle industrial components in the manner of Donald Judd, and they do not stick flat to the ground like metal plates for Carl Andre. It takes full advantage of its place between art and the great outdoors, like earthworks for Agnes Denes, simple wood risers for Mary Miss, or stairs for Jackie Ferrara. It could serve as a rejoinder to the old macho joke about Minimalism, that these guys could not get it up.
Those women, too, often lack for attention in a time of maximalism and anything goes. Still, they had their place in the sun, and they may yet again. The present show’s works exhibited back then at the Museum of Modern Art. And all three continue the interplay between the observed past and a future under construction. Adams could be disassembling tradition or Minimalism—and then reassembling it on her own terms, in wood. In each work, too, she builds on arches.
Like the dream house, Large Vault raises soaring architecture just off the floor. Title notwithstanding, it amounts to half a dozen or more vaults, depending on who is counting. Three vaulted ceilings rest side by side, each with three vaulted sides below. Arched beams stabilize and divide the top. One vault has a single curving beam, one has two beams that create three sections, and one has two crossing beams creating four. They could be alternative drafts of the whole or a single numerical progression. Windows are nowhere in sight.
Three Arches takes another view of the alternatives. Its arches reach to human heights, each in its own style. One is rounded and solid like Romanesque architecture, one pointed like Gothic, and one just halfway complete. One rests awkwardly on a small riser, while the other two seem determined to go it alone. Museum-goers can walk on work by Carl Andre or squeeze between tilted arcs from Richard Serra, but there is no passing above or beneath these ceilings. They earn the title sculpture after all.
One can pass through Proscenium, but beware. Its point of entry has a rectangular outline, like an ordinary door, and one must stoop to enter. It means interacting with a whole cast of characters, in a succession of cut wood panels to either side. A well-known critic, Michael Fried, dismissed all of Minimalism as theater, and Adams supplies the proscenium arch. Is this a play in progress, or has the curtain already descended? For her, there is always enough stability and always another possibility.
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