Sculptural Practice

John Haber
in New York City

Tania Pérez Córdova

Edgar Calel and Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik

R. I. P. Germain and Claudia Pagès

Sometimes I worry that SculptureCenter has lost track of its mission. It may never be a center of the action, close as it is to the long-overdue resurgence of Long Island City. Often, though, its contents have little to do with sculpture, rather than video or conceptual art.

Now Tania Pérez Córdova gets real. Says SculptureCenter, she is "using materials that are historically related to sculptural practices—like metal, ceramics, plastic glass, and marble." She does, that is, not counting bird droppings, makeup, cigarette stubs, and human hair. One may have to get up close at that to sense a disturbance, apart from one small thing: that sculptural mass may itself seem left over from a work crew or artist's studio. Clumps of marble may end up in the trash, too. Could they have a second life as art?

Conceptual art can still get its hands dirty. Edgar Calel and Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik both do—one in search of his ancestors, the other of "living sculpture." Together, they turn SculptureCenter into a repository for the earth. It may not be as spiritual an experience as they might hope. It might in fact be a bit dry, in more ways than one. It does, though, lay the foundations for site-specific art and the long view of New York's land and sea.

Speaking of gentrification, SculptureCenter misses the old neighborhood, and it should know. It has made its home there long enough to have seen everything change. Founded in 1928, it moved to a dead end just off the main drag in 2001, early enough to have driven change itself. Can it, though, truly miss the days of empty storefronts, abandoned buildings, and nowhere to live or to eat? R. I. P. Germain shares the ambivalence, even as he brings his own graffiti and shuttered gates, as Avangarda. It may be a bit corporate for street smarts or an avant-garde, but he and Claudia Pagès in the back room find an antidote to dryness in something very much like SculptureCenter all the same.

In case of emergency

If something other than sculpture is all that remains, you can understand. The site itself is too much for many an artist to resist. Julian Abraham "Togar," as he calls himself, converts it into his OK Studio, a place to make music. He leaves out the instruments for a full band, with messages on the walls assuring you of his good intentions. (In Case of Emergency / Call Me by Your Name.) He personally rocks out on video by the sea or by a stoop, drumming and chiming away.

Drummer's Gonna Drum, Togar's titles read, and Rocker's Gonna Rock, but what about sculpture? Has it grown superfluous for those who can look around them and see? Marina Xenofontos calls herself a sculptor, on the slim basis of small cylinders rotating more slowly than the eye can see and deck chairs from a cruise to her native Crete. Devin L. Mays simply shovels pebbles from the often-empty sculpture garden up against the far wall, so that its mass becomes more than halfway sculptural itself. Someone should have thought of that just up the street at MoMA PS1, where the courtyard devolved into a pebbled wasteland with concrete walls from the moment it appeared. And then there is Córdova, in sculptural practice.

Practice makes imperfect, but one does have to get up close to see much out of the ordinary. On inspection, that black marble serves as little more than an ashtray for the bird droppings, makeup, and cigarette. Up close, too, shampoo bubbles up from a vinyl container, the kind often used for spackle or cement, like crystalline sculpture. As a further twist, that container is itself a replica, of itself. Córdova molded it, melted it down, and poured the results into her mold before adding bubbles. She began the series with a found trumpet, and it continues with a fragment of corrugated aluminum roofing on the building out front.

The Mexican artist is playing around with the industrial, like Minimalism, and the replica, like Postmodernism. She is playing, too, with solid objects and "negative spaces," like Rachel Whiteread casting entire buildings. Mays plays around with the familiar, too, when he throws in shipping pallets, with a poncho for an element of color, although it dilutes the creativity of his shoveled stone. It could pass for debris left over from installation a little too well. Córdova has also cast in bronze the design of larger spaces, like urban squares and rooms, for what look like Rococo picture frames. They, too, may not quite come off, but the puzzle of here and elsewhere, positive and negative, continues.

It does, too, when another tub holds artificial saliva. She is spitting on fine art, unless it was not quite spit and not so fine. She recasts as well the partition that divides the exhibition space from the front desk. Or rather, she replaces it with anti-hail mesh (whatever that is), littered with "industrially destroyed private information." She is again questioning public and private, but also speech and memory. The saliva fell from a speech of (she promises) fifty-two hundred words, and a performance just once during the show's run, In Other News, rewrites the headlines.

The flip side of communication is perception, and a larger, veined marble holds contact lenses, "of color different from human eyes." And the flip side of both is physical presence and bodily sensation. Córdova's single most sculptural work casts faces, as repositories for ice. As it melts, they reassert their ghostly impression, but so does the artist in replenishing it. So many bodies of work may leave a lesser impression, but all sensation has its limits. The polka dots on a black vase are An Unknown Person Passing By.

Dirty hands

Edgar Calel responds to two quite different sites. He fills the main hall with rolling hills of pebbles, boulders, and dry earth. One can gauge its dimensions by circulating around it—and, in the process, gauge the dimensions of the space. It may be at its best when the gallery opens, as a worker rakes the floor to all sides in the act of tidying up, as if tilling the soil every day. He has just finished setting out small flames here and there, like opening a bar for the evening, but for your eyes and spirit only, not for drinks. Calel speaks of sculpting in "rock, soil, and fire."

He recreates a site as well, in the foothills of Guatemala, his native country. He prefers to remember them not by an older name, Chi Xot, in memory of his ancestors. For him, it is a living memory, and others still make the pilgrimage in search of the B'alab'äj, or Jaguar Stone, which lends its title to the work. They come to pay tribute to the dead, to give thanks, and to ask for their help. You need not believe a word of it to give thanks, too. It leaves the more literal, image-heavy tributes to a Latin American heritage at MoMA PS1, a few blocks away, in the dust.

The mounds grow taller in a small room to the side. These are hedges, and they form an X. Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik has emerged through the "In Practice" series of emerging artists, solicited through open calls. While normally that series gets the basement tunnels for a group show, one can imagine this art dredging them, for the first time since Maya Lin converted the former trolley repair shop in 2001. Set in near darkness, as Parasympathetic Fever Dream, it could conclude Calel's dream as well. It is at once emblematic and alive.

Maybe you are still wary of they/their as singular pronouns, but Loeppky-Kolesnik has every reason to claim them. This artist may deny or identify with both genders, but also living earth. Yet the work has its own strict, unnatural rhythms. The darkness turns day into night, and light returns only when the rest of New York takes its daily rest. The work also brings a clinical detachment to its rhythms. Monitors display what I can only presume are air and soil temperature, as distant from the air and soil outside as Chi Xot.

This is not the first time that conceptual art dallied with the art object or that land art asserted its own rhythms. Agnes Denes has covered a pyramid with earth in Socrates Sculpture Park, two miles north, like a monument to death and life. Nor is this art's first roomful of dirt. Walter de Maria still has his New York Earth Room with the Dia Foundation in Soho, as a cross between earth art, installation, Minimalism, and a mess. It defies visitors with its bare white wall and thick black soil. It became something of a joke from the time it settled in, in 1977, but its aroma lingers in the senses and the mind.

It takes serious maintenance, too. The rakers and monitors at SculptureCenter have it easy. Where De Maria is determined to stand outside time, Calel and Loeppky-Kolesnik immerse themselves in present memories, and that takes a back story that you may choose not to read. They are less sensual than de Maria as well. Can they still have their fever dreams? Art does not often take such care to dirty its hands.

Past the gates

It took a long time for gentrification to reach the neighborhood. You can now find a decent bookstore and a noodle joint right across Jackson Avenue from SculptureCenter, although real growth lies closer to the East River, amid artist studios, craft breweries, and a waterfront park with a gorgeous public library. Still, change in New York comes with conflicting claims and a welter of graffiti. Developers demolished a building across from MoMA PS1, just a short walk away, angering those who miss its paint job as a genuine expression of neighborhood spirit. The developers, in turn, tried to cash in on its street name by adopting it for apartments. Are R. I. P. Germain and SculptureCenter already late for the party?

The Berlin artist may not know his way around the hood, but he does mourn a loss of community. As his name has it, R.I.P. He describes storefronts everywhere as places to go and to meet. At the same time, he sees them and the gates that cover them as obstacles, designed to keep people out. And Germain sets out four gated storefronts, one after another, like a series of obstacles. You can walk past the first, but will you pass them all?

Not that they go all that far toward filling the impressive main hall. That can only reinforced the impression of abandonment. It can also restore faith in the trolley repair shop that Maya Lin left largely intact while putting it to the use of art. Each of Germain's gates has its own graffiti, but not with the naiveté and egotism of tags. They come teasingly close to text but impossible to read. All that you may remember is the image of a silvery robot, on a rampage or on guard.

Their backs offer a slightly different picture. One has a glass door. A small assemblage on the floor behind each one includes a pot, a potted plant, and a magazine with its own dark stories to tell. Germain may be leaving open the possibility of life or closing it off for good. The entirety looks confused and slightly pathetic, not to mention out of touch with Long Island City today. But then welcome to the search for affordable housing and community in New York.

Claudia Pagès pays a different kind of tribute to the basement tunnels. Not that she would admit it, but her video could well be exploring them. Downstairs, the institution displays "world cinema" from a recent biannual in Taipei. Together, their fifteen works take a serious commitment, but dipping in may be enough. It accords with the themes of incompleteness back upstairs. I caught some shifting patterns, disaster areas, and zombie creatures, but nothing like the basement's own layered history.

Pagès can match that history and then some. Her explorations take her to a cistern in Spain, where her camera's restless motion may remind you of your own. Moorish invaders remade the ancient roman caverns as their own, before Christians used the structure for a church and moderns for a fancy hotel. If her wanderings seem to lack direction, the video does not—abruptly flooding the tunnels and leaving her waist deep. Did you think that an institution called SculptureCenter would be showing sculpture? Gentrification itself may leave you high and dry.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Tania Pérez Córdova, Julian Abraham "Togar," Marina Xenofontos, and Devin L. Mays ran at SculptureCenter through December 11, 2023, Edgar Calel through August 7, and Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik through June 19. R. I. P. Germain ran through March 25, 2024, Claudia Pagès through February 19.