The Brooklyn Rail

In 1970, Terry Fox decided to levitate. The Seattle-born artist—then primarily based in the San Francisco Bay Area, before his 1980 move to Europe—had been living with Hodgkin’s lymphoma since his adolescence; after the most recent operation, Fox explained, he “wanted to leave the Hodgkin’s behind, and [Levitation (1970)] was a way of doing it.” After a three-day fast, Fox, encircled by a plastic tube of blood—and grasping additional tubes of blood, milk, water, and urine—lay atop a square of dirt in Richmond Art Center for six hours, his bodily sensation dwindling until he felt he was floating. Gallerygoers, allowed entry after the fact, encountered Fox’s absented form impressed into the soil, as if he had levitated away.

A conceptual-spiritual engagement with embodied ritual, and a fascination with the literal and metaphorical transformation of natural materials (including bodies), are recurrent motifs in All These Different Things Are Sculpture, Fox’s first institutional solo show in New York in four decades. Spanning from 1969 to 1989 (Levitation, depicted in a photographic diptych floating by a window, is among the earliest works on view), the exhibition assembles video, photography, ephemera, and sound. An “artist’s artist” associated with Bay Area conceptualism, body art, sound art, and Fluxus, Fox believed in an expanded definition of sculpture. This titular framework—which feels related to but not synonymous with notions of “social sculpture” put forward by Joseph Beuys, with whom Fox collaborated—replaced genre commitments with attention to the spatial, material, and energetic underpinnings of disparate things.

Some of Fox’s performances, or “situations,” were simple, powerful gestures that readily translated to photographs, such as Defoliation Piece (1970), here presented as a sequence of six photos, in which he burned a rectangle into a Chinese jasmine bush outside of Berkeley’s University Art Museum. Fox referred to Defoliation Piece as his “first political work.” Shown as a single-channel video projection, Turgescent Sex (1971)—in which the artist, devastated by media photographs of the Vietnam War, unbound, bandaged, and tenderly blew smoke on a dead fish, as if attempting to reanimate it—was another early political piece. Fox’s more environmental, durational performances resisted documentation, making contextualizing ephemera essential. Take Yield (1973), made one year after his encounter with the visual-architectural-experiential Chartres Cathedral labyrinth, a maze which he characterized as the “blue-print for all [his] work from 1972–78.” Twelve auratic photographs of Yield taken by Fox’s brother show the artist manipulating—wetting, spreading, kneading—flour.

Capturing a meditative ritual of minor metamorphosis, these smoky, quasi-spiritualist photos relay Fox’s brother’s vision of the performance’s inner sanctum; the rest of the visitors to the University Art Museum experienced the actions at a remove, from a balcony. An excellent booklet excerpting Fox’s and others’ reflections on his work (which also might have been helpful as wall text), along with a diagram and description in a vitrine, clarify that the artist spent three days performing trancelike actions such as tracing a skeleton in flour in an environment featuring blown-up photographs (including one of a plaster model of the labyrinth), tubes of bodily fluids, and a curtain shaped like a body. The human body, repeatedly mapped onto the space, became the site in which everything occurred.

Emanating from a nearby row of speakers is another labyrinth-inspired piece, The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Cats (1976). Transforming a physical environment into a sonic one, Fox’s “aural architecture” features purring by eleven cats—one for each concentric ring of the labyrinth—mixed and layered to reflect the labyrinth’s thirty-four turns. When the listener reaches the “center,” the felines purr in unison, their sounds crescendoing to a forceful drone with sculptural solidity. A similar logic undergirds the audio recording of 552 Steps through 11 Pairs of Strings (1976), for which Fox, equipped with a mallet and a score of 34-foot-long string (for the labyrinth’s turns) knotted 552 times (for its steps), played eleven repurposed piano wires (for its rings), transforming his loft into a musical instrument’s resonant open chamber. Fox also made sound on and with the street: excerpted here in a video and set of photographs, The Resonators (1989) was a collaborative event with sound artist Yoshi Wada at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage. Wada played bagpipes and alarm bells, and Fox rubbed drinking glasses on a pane of glass and hit a piano wire with a tin can. Embracing noise, this piece of public theater attuned listeners to the ambient sounds that comprise New York City’s sonic landscape.

Much of the work on view is suffused with a feeling of hypothesis and discovery, in that Fox meticulously constructed material or sonic “situations” and allowed them to play out. His Children’s Tapes (1974), a forerunner to Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987), are a series of videos, ranging in length from one to seventeen minutes, demonstrating basic scientific phenomena like surface tension with clever set-ups featuring water, matches, spoons, ice, candles, and other simple materials. Fox made the work with his young son in mind, driven by concerns about the potential of commercial television’s homogeneity to produce passive, incurious spectators. “It’s not so much about the particular objects that the tapes convey, it’s more an attitude,” he explained in a 1974 Avalanche interview, on view in a nearby vitrine. “An attitude of contemplation … of wonderment, of relating to something real … without having to take sides.”