The Brooklyn Rail

A constellation of three squat and shallow arches creep along the floor of the gallery, waist-height and mimicking large impractical tables in scale. Made of rough-hewn wood and reminiscent of a Romanesque aesthetic, Alice Adam’s Large Vault (1975) cherry-picks certain qualities from architecture; structure for example; but dispenses with others such as function. In doing this she clarifies the often hazy line between architecture and sculpture. Part of this is due to her very specific use of the vocabulary of architecture: arches, supports, windows, walls and floors, but depriving them of their use-value, by making them too low to the ground, or removing a surface that would allow a wall to be a wall or a floor to be a floor. Adams problematizes the basic concepts of architecture and sculpture: presence, or creating/taking up space, with a language that is natural to architectural discourse, but often avoided by sculptors themselves. Three Arches (1978) plays with terminology to an even greater extent, offering in reality two-and-a-half arches: once again a Romanesque circular arch, a pointed Gothic one, and then a section of another round arch. These forms trigger a liturgical vernacular in the viewer’s mind, or more generally, an implication of old stone European structures. Unlike the other two pieces, Proscenium (1980) is unabashedly a work in wood, utilizing the irregular silhouettes of sections of rough-cut lumber, as stand-ins for theatrical flats on a stage, as the name suggests.

This exhibition of four projects focuses on Adams works which engage with monumentality. Many of the artist’s other sculptures, such as White Coat (2017) which was included in the Sites of Impermanence show at the National Academy of Design this past spring, take a much more human-scale and visceral approach to architecture and construction materials. White Coat is a bulging lugubrious skin of foam rubber cast in the form of shingling or brickwork. In her earlier work Adams often also presents sections of lathe and its supporting structure, as in Wall and Floor (1967) or enigmatic irregular tubes of chicken wire or chain-link, as in Big Aluminum 1 (1965), which was featured in Lucy Lippard’s seminal exhibition Eccentric Abstraction at the Fishbach Gallery in 1966. Part of this trajectory towards the monumental in architecture follows the artist’s career path from exhibiting in commercial galleries to outdoor public sculpture and land art, which took place in the 1980s, wherein constructions with a unified and more permanent and weather-resistant medium became an aspect of the artist’s practice. The transition from a gritty critique of literal construction, more a propos in the face of late-60s abstraction, à la Claes Oldenberg, Eva Hesse, and Robert Rauschenberg, yielded to a postmodern aesthetic in the mid 70s, in which Adams seems to be tracking architectural trends like Venturi Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas and the palimpsest constructions of Charles Moore, rather than the obsession with surfaces and simple geometricity of Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Minimalism in general.

Adams House (1977), the fourth project, exists only as a series of photographs and drawings of the artist’s first outdoor project, which was realized for the Nassau County Museum in 1977. Adams House Elevation (1979) is a concise hieroglyphic-like rendering of the project, presenting graphically the essence of the sculptor’s memory of her childhood residence, distilled down into a few salient architectural details. Most prominent is a Palladian window, and a couple of doorways, which float within a balloon-frame wooden matrix. The floor is simply a grid of joists, so the structure is uninhabitable, and functions as a literal architectural trace or memory. While universally acknowledged as a relevant sculptor of the 60s and 70s, Adams’ presence in the mainstream art world has been eclipsed for the past few decades by her success in the public outdoor art realm. Her vision of a sculpture which directly engages architecture is both unique and varied. Zurcher Gallery’s methodical presentation of the different phases of this artist’s career is an important contribution to the necessary re-presentation of a canonical artist.