From a group of posts, a sentence of text is chosen at random. It is recorded and links to the original post from which it came. Every 60 seconds a new sentence is selected and recorded directly after the last sentence that was selected and recorded. In this way a new narrative is born.

I’m introducing a wiki on my site called Wiki Sources.

I started this wiki as a way to logically organize, link and make accessible the information I gather from source texts, images and multimedia, influences easily traced back to the development of my ideas as a visual artist. For the past several years, I have quoted texts and recorded ideas in notebooks that hide their valuable content, buried in my bookshelf until a later time when I decide to peruse them. While this has a certain charm to it, my intention is that I and others will benefit from this information more often.

If you’re wondering what a wiki is, in Ward Cunningham’s original description, it is the simplest online database that could possibly work. It is a software program that allows users to create and edit web page content using only a web browser. The first wiki was created in 1995 by Cunningham and today many people are familiar with Wikipedia, the free online wiki encyclopedia: http://www.wikipedia.org

to cast the in-between
to interior as to exterior
to environ
(to cast a riverbed)
to live in the solid space below

(Deposition (hortus conclusus) is a speculative piece.

When displayed indoors, the domestic qualities of this piece will at once be at odds with the modern classicism of its exterior form. Minimalism owns no patent on the cube, and if it ever did, its grant has expired. Consider the historical uses of the square as a surrogate for the human body.

The baroque Lexan® cube is not the object of this pursuit. It serves to confine and display through its four polycarbonate walls the soil and turf that would otherwise pile on the floor. Yet, it cannot reveal all.

The terrarium can be considered a contemporary version of the hortus conclusus, a Medieval visual conception of the enclosed garden as from the Song of Solomon, 4:12 “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse.” The hortus conclusus encases the Virgin, an enlarged fig leaf of sorts, providing the privacy required for Immaculate Conception. The High Medieval hortus conclusus contains a fountain or well at its center, the moist dark shaft that penetrates the Earth and brings forth everlasting life.

I would ask that the viewer participate in the deposition. Breathe the oxygen produced by your biological complement, converse with it or with the person in front of you, what you confess remains here.

The Garden of Eden
c. 1410
Tempera on wood, 26,3 x 33,4 cm
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

Each of us can make the choice to face the question of the origin and the structure of the universe in which our existence occurs. We have a few positions at hand. We can accept the mystery, become empiricists, or seek revelation. In any art practice, we approach each of these positions, whether the artist intends to conceal, to deduce, or to reveal. In this way, One of the primary concerns of art is the nature of our existence and the available methods we employ to find meaning.

I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct. -Richard Serra

Richard Serra Sculpture: 40 Years at the MoMA, running June 3 to September 10, still garners a good crowd even in the last few days of the show, enough to make the experience of his new sculptures more of a public experience than the contemplative spiritual one of the color field paintings that the large rust washed interiors of his pieces like Sequence (2006) and Band (2006) elicit.

Serra actively engages the viewer participant with his phenomenological sculpture spaces, forcing one to walk around, in and through, so much so that the distinction between architecture and sculpture begins to erode. If architecture’s prime mission as Paul Goldberger states in the catalogue for a concurrent Frank Stella show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is “the making of space, not the shaping of form – that in architecture, form is not an end in itself, but a means toward creating space,” then it is difficult not to see Serra’s recent work as architecture.

Serra’s large pieces resist betraying a gestalt, denying the viewer complete knowledge the sculpture from any one vantage point. But one does note with the indoor sculptures Band and Sequence the generous amount of space between the walls of the room and the sculptures, drawing these pieces more in line with sculpture as independent art object in the gallery. Similar pieces, when placed outdoors, as are Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) and Intersection II (1992) in the MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, read as architecture because the viewer participant invariably experiences these sculptures in relation to his own size, the constant that historically has pragmatically defined architectural scale. Perhaps one reason the outdoor pieces read more as architecture is due to the abnormal circumstances in which an autonomous architectural entity is visibly housed within another: a now ubiquitous modern example would be the office cubicle.

The labyrinthine interior divisions Serra creates in Band and Sequence not only carry the weight and charge of some unnamed mass which is dammed just on the other side of the wall, they also carry the auspices of autonomous architecture.

In a recently ended show cramped for the most part into a single room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,: Frank Stella’s Frank Stella: Painting Into Architecture, Stella’s First Model Kunsthalle Dresden (1991) presents triangulated and organic forms with bulging walls reminiscent of Serra’s large steel sculptures. Stella, unlike Serra is proposing architecture.

I did leave the Met with a sour taste in my mouth of Stella’s choice to display his unfinished Chineses Pavillion; I find affinity to Roberta Smith’s assertion in the New York Times that it is, “not so much architecture, or potential architecture, as [a] conservative [form] of installation art.” Despite the unfinished work and the scathing review in the Times that begins, “perhaps Frank Stella should have quit when he was ahead,” I mention Stella’s show at the Met for its merit as an illustration of a contemporary artist who has openly proposed his work as architecture.

I must end this discussion with the admission that I have not yet read the catalogue that accompanies Serra’s MoMA retrospective, nor have I read material in which he articulates his intention to create architecture. Perhaps I will revise my sentiments after reading the catalogue essays, but for now I would request that Serra take the step that Stella has and propose some architecture! In his sculptures, Serra has already engaged the engineering that lacks in Stella’s architecture proposals.

Richard Serra Sculpture: 40 Years Online Exhibition

Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times review of Richard Serra

Roberta Smith’s New York Times review of Frank Stella