Scale Matters

David Altmejd, Robert Therrien, and Tara Donovan

"Size matters"—at least in determining when a cliché, like an art installation, has reached critical mass. In a review of Sex and the City, somehow The Times could not resist that particular cliché, in a punning putdown of the movie's inordinate length.

Just a few pages away, one might turn to a review of the National Academy's annual group exhibition. And, sure enough, one learns that the exhibition coordinator has called her catalog essay "Size Does Matter." Have the arts grown a little, well, out of hand?

This site has stumbled through so many overblown, adolescent exhibitions in the new century that it gets harder and harder to keep them straight. For once, however, an overblown, adolescent metaphor can help. Along with shows by David Altmejd and Robert Therrien, it can illuminate a distinction once important in modern painting, between size and scale. From there, one can turn to a sculptor who really does understand how scale can transform the experience of familiar things, Tara Donovan.

Clichés matter

One does not need a reminder that sex sells—or that pack journalism looks for shortcuts. When it comes to art, however, The Times was onto something big. The National Academy can afford to talk about size. It is seventeen years short of its two hundredth annual, and the 2008 National Academy Annual packs more works than the Whitney Biennial into a narrow mansion. Still, its idea of size speaks solely to painting, and that only underscores how much is bursting out beyond the safety and scale of a juried show. Sculpture has become almost a quaint synonym for installation.

Art has acquired a habit of filling a gallery to its limits or, like Urs Fischer, bursting through the walls and floors. And I mean big time. It gives literal force to a museum blockbuster. The impulse to trash the gallery goes back at least to the participatory landscapes of Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark. Land art by women, too, was mapping nature and culture. It was exploring found and socially created landscapes, artistic expression and institutional forces.

All that has continued relevance today, as artists attempt to find media capable of describing global networks. A 2005 group show at the Whitney, called "Remote Viewing," took painting, drawing, and sculpture on the scale of a room—often directly on museum walls. This, too, is a way of breaking through. For all that, however, the ruckus of installations today has less to do with ideology and more with the market.

It reflects pressures on museums to supply mass entertainment. It reflects pressures on artists to assume the status of celebrity icons. Finally, it reflects pressures on galleries to gain immediate attention in a crowded market. As I put it at the very start of the decade, one could define Postmodernism as Modernism pressed for time.

The trend continues with David Ellis, who gained attention at the spring art fairs and "Greater New York." His heap expands on a personal mythology—or maybe lifestyle—of alcohol containers and loud music to match. It also rises right to the ceiling, pressing out from a corner of the gallery to fill perhaps a quarter of the back room. The remnants of an artist's studio also expand audibly, with three separate mechanisms in as many rooms. All of them pound out rhythms that I had hoped never to hear, but one can always bring earplugs and smile at the visuals. Plastic lids made for paint or spackle wobble up and down like organ stops, but the alcohol bottles definitely have the last word.

One could name any number of other spring and summer exhibitions of fatiguing breadth. Piotr Uklanski makes visitors circumnavigate a red wall just to find a huge raised fist in praise or mockery of Solidarity, an equally large emblem of Poland, and a sickeningly elaborate Christmas crèche. Zhang Huan's soft-focus tableau of peasant labor has grown so large and that his gallery offers pedicab rides to take it all in. Ai Weiwei, too, reduces political and cultural conflicts to self-assertion, with an immense Chinese lantern fallen like a limp prick to the gallery floor. But let me stop there. Lists, too, can grow supersized.

Supersize me

Just as symptomatic, two artists make size explicit right within the confines of sculpture. Instead of piling it on, they build it up. Instead of dispersing attention through litter, they focus attention by distorting the human image. Each uses disjunctions in scale not as the basis of an installation, but as subject matter.

David Altmejd's adolescents stand erect, limited in stature only by the gallery. For the 2004 Biennial, he hid his werewolf on a hill in Central Park, as if it had run free. In the gallery, he again uses nudity, rough hair, quartz crystals, and violently abraded surfaces to suggest a convergence of human and inhuman, organic and inorganic, the primitive and the future. Altmejd's shaggy men, and I do mean males, show what a little Plexiglas and testosterone can do. One monster also holds a hollow globe of metal strands like the old spinning symbol of atomic energy. Kids really do get to take over the science museum after hours.

Robert Therrien's tables and folding chairs insist on their size without the melodrama. Altmejd can fall back on goth and sci fi, and why not? Cave men and nukes sound scary, but they amount merely to alternative gimmicks for a stock disaster movie. A Hollywood director has in fact followed up future catastrophe with a spectacle set in 10,000 B.C. Therrien, in contrast, draws on the movies for a family comedy. He puts one in the role of Tom Hanks in Big.

The casual furniture has some of the pleasures of Pop Art, the charm of simplicity, and Modernism's appreciation for industrial design. It succeeds best, however, as child-friendly entertainment. The mix of visual and physical sensation becomes most obvious with gigantic bowls, the kind that stack with their rims anything but horizontal. As one circulates, the sculpture seems to spin before one's eyes. One's head and gut might as well.

After all that, can an Academy Annual compete with the galleries for sex appeal? Perhaps it helps to remember why painting, too, once grew in size. Abstract Expressionism certainly included dense work on a modest scale, such as the pioneering drips by Janet Sobel or Shimmering Substance by Jackson Pollock. Even these, however, played out against a larger field. A generation had borrowed the scale of public art—such as history painting, Guernica, a WPA mural, or the Romantic sublime—for personal gestures. Henri Matisse had suggested the possibility, with Red Room, but even he sought the impersonal calm of eighteenth-century palaces. Now painters had changed the relationship of the artist's gesture or the viewer's perception to the painted object, until neither could be fully public or private again.

Art in the mass market has all but lost that power of self-reflection, but it is acting in the same sexy space. Is it still capable of adult sex as well? With his 1993 Family Romance, Charles Ray had brought the ideal American family naked, down to the scale of its two children. Ron Mueck has veered between a tiny couple and an infant roughly the size of a corporate yacht. Artists can still try to keep Altmejd and Therrien from having the last word. In today's scene, however, children have assumed mythic proportions.

Working the room

Tara Donovan knows how to work the room. In her case, it involves real work and a real appreciation of the room. Ordinary materials play off against an extraordinary installation, solid objects against a whole always about to come apart, and substance against light. For once size hardly matters, but scale very much does.

Donovan's last solo show made waves. Stacked, disposable cups turned the gallery floor into a lunar landscape. With her gently rolling hills of plastic, whiteness seemed itself to undulate before one's eyes.

One year later she appeared in "Burgeoning Geometries," and one could better see the geometry beneath the burgeoning. Simple straight pins became a shining, forty-inch cube. Again she cultivated a sense of beauty and the element of surprise, but one could also better see her modest sense of humor. This was not just carnival entertainment. One had to remain aware of two very distinct scales, neither quite that of sculpture, and to tread carefully.

An equally beautiful variation on the pin cube turned up at the Flag Foundation, a curious nonprofit open to the public exactly one afternoon a month. The ninth floor of the so-called Chelsea Arts Tower, which is otherwise condos, has gorgeous views. Yet even with the foundation's Web site and free catalog, one cannot easily discern what is going on. Is it another vanity museum, puffing up a collector's status and prices? Instead, one finds no credits at all, beyond a consortium of anonymous private collections. The mysterious exclusivity of the rarity of public viewings makes its place between the profit and nonprofit sectors murkier still.

For all that, celebrity curators seem up to the task of showing off, and on a sunny day in spring Donovan alone made a visit worthwhile. Her cube of wooden toothpicks has the look of polished light wood. She also makes explicit a possibility in her cubic metal pincushion without the cushion—that pieces may fall off. She does so by embedding the cube in a slightly larger square on the floor, like a frame or a pedestal. Where does a work end and the world begin, Jacques Derrida and Constantin Brancusi asked in different ways, and does a frame or a pedestal partake of either or of both? Here either the work or its frame can tumble off into the world.

Donovan knows, too, when to manipulate illusions. It would be a mistake to ask her materials to mean something specific, to distinguish them from a model landscape in a science museum. They do not raise challenging associations with America's social fabric as process or wasteland, like Phoebe Washburn or by David Opdyke. They do not reimagine a gallery opening at which the same opaque plastic would serve ecologically correct wine, like the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Rather, their impulse is simultaneously domestic and formal, like the visual overflow of a dream.

The disposable museum

Donovan could easily have fit into "Undone" at Altria or "Unmonumental" inaugurating the New Museum's architecture. But what about sedate museum halls as a world for herself alone? Strangely enough, an artist whose work is all about outgrowing confinement finds herself in a low-ceilinged room dwarfed by stairwells above and below. At the Met, contemporary art falls between displays of the early and late twentieth century. No wonder it prefers artists who, like Donovan, overflow a linear history.

She must have seemed a natural for the cramped mezzanine. The space roughly mimics a private gallery while threatening to spill out onto the usual suspects on the floor above. Already Kara Walker and Neo Rauch have taken turns struggling with the space. Both did so by also blending artistic tradition, a nation's shameful history, and the Met's permanent collection. With Donovan, it is not so easy, for in her work history either starts with Minimalism or stretches to eternity. Would she have to close the space off entirely or open it to the skies?

She has done neither, and it never quite comes off. She again starts small, with closed loops of Mylar tape of variable length and about the width of a thumbnail. Each loop sticks to the wall. A purely intuitive patterning runs across the entire gallery. It resembles a micrograph of microbial life, with Mylar as its cells. The gallery's constraints have obliged her to think more in terms of an image, whereas her true strength lies in her materials.

At its best, the work seems to have sprung to life. Other artists, too, have used walls to explore the relationship between modular addition and the self-driven chaos of living things. Digital art and real-time data often do, and Sol LeWitt was there long before. Without the floor to ground it, though, the art object loses touch with its changing landscape. As formalists used to complain when faced with representational art, it looks like illustration, and you probably hated your biology textbook.

The work most repays attention close up. Gallery-goers could not get too near her plastic cups, without a severe reprimand. One could pick up a pin from the floor of the Whitney at Altria, as gravity partly dissolved the cube, but with equal fear of museum propriety and the sharp point. One cannot touch the tape either, but one can enjoy the variable size and form of her loops. They come closest to her characteristic shimmer when one can focus on the solid object. The Met also deserves credit for backing an artist this time who has not already had museum solo shows. Maybe next time it will help her shimmer.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Piotr Uklanski ran at Gagosian through May 31, 2008, Ai Weiwei at Mary Boone through April 26, Zhang Huan at PaceWildenstein through July 25, David Ellis at Roebling Hall through June 28, David Altmejd at Andrea Rosen through June 14, Robert Therrien at Gagosian through June 14, and Tara Donovan at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 27. Donovan appeared previously at at PaceWildenstein through April 22, 2006.