The Brooklyn Rail

Coinciding with New York City’s spring art fairs, Berry Campbell Gallery is presenting a thorough and impressive mini-retrospective of Mary Ann Unger. Comprising twenty-five works that date from 1976 to 1998—the year of the artist’s untimely death from breast cancer—the show demonstrates Unger’s notable sculptural range. Untitled (1976), a biomorphic barbell of bonded iron, shows an artist unafraid of working relatively large in heavy materials; wall sculptures like the crimson clay Untitled (1997) betray the lighter touch of Unger’s air-borne sculptural lattices; a Giacometti-esque Blue Head (1997) unwinds any supposed prohibitions on figuration. Finally, a suite of early graphite drawings suggests a connection to the repetition and modularity of conceptualism, even if this is not the effect of Unger’s work overall. Art history feels very present, as does a knack for engineering. Ultimately, the work feels deeply human.

Most of what is on view is presented in four rooms that border the gallery’s nave-like central space. However, the exhibition’s undeniable showstopper, Across the Bering Strait (1992–94), is installed in a large back gallery of its own. Debuted at Jersey City’s Trans Hudson Gallery in 1994, this is the first time the work has been installed in its entirety in New York City. Across the Bering Strait is a large-scale sculpture made of thirty-three elements of welded steel covered by pigmented Hydrocal (a harder version of plaster) pressed into cheesecloth. These elements are constellated into ten individual groupings, all with one or two roughly Y-shaped posts that support a bundle of irregular rods. The rods are between ten and fourteen feet long and covered in a modulated rusty grey that recalls the color of slate. The surfaces are smooth but irregular, with scabby passages or wrinkles caused by the cheesecloth, like creases in elephant skin. Excepting one set toward the center of the gallery, at least one rod in each grouping touches the floor, like nine seedlings that all bend in unison toward the sun.

Since I saw it, I’ve become captivated by the way Across the Bering Strait’s sculptural elements push right up against the limits of language. The rods are at once bean pods, worms, mummified appendages, semi-flaccid phalluses, chromosomes, primitive tools, and prehistoric sea creatures. The posts are both hands and vertebrae. Each of these metaphors is both too specific and not descriptive enough. Yet despite its wide associative range, the work still retains a certain window of specificity: all of these things support and structure life, whether at the molecular, anthropological, or geographic level. It is rare and noteworthy for abstract art to offer the viewer such interpretative agency while still maintaining a firm grasp on meaning’s thematic flow. In Unger’s hands, this is not iron-fisted authorship, nor is it “anything goes.” It is an acknowledgement that life’s ebbs and flows, across time and place, are often structural (not just personal, as many accounts of Unger’s art suggest).

Unger’s willingness to share the task of making meaning with her viewers in Across the Bering Strait comes to the fore in at least two ways. First, the work is not organized centripetally like many of her earlier large-scale installation works such as Paradise as a Garden (1981) or Misericordia (1989), which both feature a semi-enclosed central space (neither is on view here). Instead, by wandering among Across the Bering Strait’s sculptural groupings, we enact a central lesson of phenomenological experience: that we cannot apprehend the whole at once but rather must discover it from and within our own various standpoints.

Second, Unger supplemented Across the Bering Strait with a pair of artist’s statements (ca. 1992–95) that are included in the exhibition catalogue. Typewritten on personal letterhead, each presents a different version of the same narrative. Both address the theory that the Bering Strait was once a land bridge between present-day Russia and Alaska that animals and people crossed from Asia into the Americas. One is written in the third person: “‘Across the Bering Strait’ suggests migrants carrying their tent poles and their bundles of possessions on their shoulders … mothers holding their children, or men carrying their dead home from war.” The other is in first person: the work “evokes memories of our primeval history and suggests a continuity between the journeys of our ancestors and our journeys today. My paternal grandparents were Russian and Hungarian Jews, and for me one specific reference of the title is to the Diaspora.” Such shifts in point of view dramatize the polysemy of abstraction through the specificity of language, revealing an artist who acknowledges her own embodied position even as she looks for shared experience. Unger, a feminist, made Across the Bering Strait during a moment when many artists were making (art) history’s treatment of identity political. One telling example is found in the painting Untitled (I Do Not Always Feel Colored) (1990). Here, Glenn Ligon stenciled the eponymous words from Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” on canvas. In Ligon’s work, the first-person “I” is a shifting signifier: its meaning depends upon who speaks it, the author or the viewer.

That there are innumerable other interpretative paths one might take through Unger’s oeuvre, and Across the Bering Strait, suggests both the strength of her work and the reality that we may only recently have acquired the hermeneutic frameworks to make sense of it. A partial list of topics for further analysis might include themes of cradling and directionality, the implication of drastic shifts in scale and time from prehistory to the present, or writer Carla Harryman’s notion that Unger’s sculptures do “not allow consideration of the singular body apart from its interrelationship to other bodies.” Building on Unger’s recent retrospective at Williams College Museum of Art, the Berry Campbell show insists with good reason that we continue to pursue this barely-started work.