Art review

“Spider”, 2007, Metal “butterfly chair” supports, 38” by 38” by 30”.

Post-Modernism brought to us the linkage between the often pedantic formality of Modernism and the decided impiety of Pop, a union some may have found intellectually, if not literally in a physical sense, insalubrious, but one which those whose openness to new experience both visually and ab imo pectore can embrace in all of its impertinent effulgence.

Is there, then, a work which encompasses all we have come to expect to see shot from the Post-Modern Canon? Is there a representative of not only the aforementioned formality, perhaps ironically, in form, but the equally aforementioned impiety, perhaps no less ironically, in materials?

This critic suggests there is such, as the French say, un représentant bearing the flag of this most dynamic and controversial era in Art. It is culminated in the sculpture depicted, “Spider”, a work which blends the lyrical line of a three dimensional Pollock while subtly revealing its origins in Twentieth Century leisure furniture. Another irony, always an inevitable element of Post-Modernism, is found in the hard, rusting metal such that which we experience in a Serra piece many times the size and weight, both literally and figuratively, of “Spider”, with the inverse provided in the resonance of its eponymous l'exemple dans la nature, weaving and looping in an evocation of that creature’s agile and balletic movement.

Functioning as both a simulacrum of Modernist sculpture revering form uber alles and an Anacreontic adumbration of the everyday world, both in Nature and in interior design accessories, “Spider” fuses the two often dichotomous movements into a single statement that cannot help but resonate through the years since the former’s inception as a revolt against the Academy’s tyranny of the literal and bring peace, if not in the world, at least in the galleries, museums and salons, surely a worthwhile endeavor on its own merits.

The President of the United States of America

Is that pride swelling in your chest or are you just appalled to see him?