The Brooklyn Rail

Upon entering No One Thing, the viewer encounters seven sculptures, arrayed before the yellow-painted expanse of Hauser & Wirth’s high rear wall. Several of these works are part of an iterative family of sculptures explored over time in the studio, while others are stand-alone pieces. All are initially seen as frontal. This is one of several ways they address the medium of painting; others include their color and the occasionally gestural quality of their surfaces.

While David Smith’s permanent studio and home after 1940 was at Bolton Landing, New York, in the Adirondack mountains, he would make regular journeys back to the city and stay with his close friends Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell on the Upper East Side—painters were very important to the development of his sculpture. There is a clear transference of pictorial ideas, though they are always transformed in the process. And, though the sculptures are often composed frontally, like a painting or collage, moving around and through them is ultimately irresistible. The artist that most comes to mind here is Pablo Picasso, another artist that combined two and three dimensions, and the artist Smith himself singled out as his main influence. Visitors to the gallery on the day that I was there appeared to be in physical dialog with each piece as they circled, paused, contemplated, and moved on.

The installation here successfully recalls the many photographs of Smith’s sculptures in a field, set against the landscape and sky outside his studio at Bolton Landing. The sculptures stand vertical, summoning a physical identification with the viewer’s own vertical posture. As projections of thought and feeling that operate through association and pure formal invention they engage us, externalized as objects in the non-human space that surrounds us. They are a way for us to respond to our own movement—physically and imaginatively, consciously and unconsciously—through the world as physical beings enmeshed in time.

Candida Smith recalled her father speaking of his work in this way,

Again and again, he referred to his “work stream”; each work of art being as a vessel filled from the stream while never wholly separate. I understand his term to mean the flow of his identity made physically manifest—the process by which images and ideas from decades or days before inform a work in progress or yet to be made.

This shifting back and forth through chronological time testifies to Smith’s commitment to exploring the continuities and contingencies of self, imagination, and experience. This is a conceptual flexibility that manifests itself directly in the formal diversity of Smith’s works.

Take for example, Primo Piano (1962). The white planes of welded steel plates are arranged horizontally, bringing to mind a bench from which is suspended a rusted steel shape. It is, in fact, bolted on but somehow evokes the pin one can drop on an online map—it appears to hover ambiguously in space. By contrast Zig I (1961), named after the Ziggurats of Mesopotamia, is in vertical orientation, the painted surface color somewhere between brown, copper, and rust, the color applied rapidly and with gestural dynamism. Its curved and connected planes rise up in an alternating rhythm, while at two places the sculpture rests on the floor, suggesting legs supporting a torso and a displaced head on the right side. None of this anthropomorphism is literal, but it is nonetheless formally evocative and compelling. Totemic, human-scaled at seventy-four inches in height, and burnished with sand or stone colored paint, Ninety Son (1961) is yet more evocative of the human body. It stands narrow, supporting a hollowed disc at the top, a succinct symbol of a person’s presence.

I’ve been looking at Smith’s sculptures for many years, but on this occasion I was struck, for the first time, by way Smith’s work speaks to the dilemma of what Emmanuel Levinas termed alterity. Another person is a universe of difference largely unknown to us, and the challenges that we encounter in regarding the other can have dire consequences. To see sculptures that shrink neither from difference nor similarity, and that celebrate the various trains of inventive formal play in Smith’s contrasting presences of material, shape, and color, brings home the possibility of bridging that gap. The particular characteristics of Smith’s sculptures make each different in the extreme, and yet, they still inescapably speak of commonality, even community.