The Brooklyn Rail

A reference to human scale in the title of artist George Trakas’s monograph, Head to Foot (Building Inside and Out), prepares the reader of this first comprehensive book on the eighty-one-year-old sculptor’s work with a useful context. The title references several overlapping influences that reigned in the seventies New York art world: traces of earth art, Process art, the ecological movement, and the body/mind problem of Minimalist theory echo alternately in a Trakas project. Trakas is one of the more unique participants in the era’s preoccupation with site-specificity, who merged the landscape subtext of earth art with an enthusiasm for the ecological movement’s perceived nemesis—built structures: bridges, dams, bulkheads, decks, and stairs.

Editor Valérie Cudel of Captures éditions packaged this overdue look at the Trakas oeuvre in a seventies-style brown paper jacket, within which a representative third of the work the artist completed between 1970 and 2020 is addressed. Each project constitutes a chapter, and each chapter is illustrated with black-and-white photographs, preparatory drawings and introductory texts penned by the artist, in which he recollects the challenges and decisions made during each project’s gestation. Rather than hire a single author to contrive an apocryphal mix of biography and superficial analysis, the documentary record itself is opened and displayed, interspersed with contemporaneous essays and interviews. The effect is that of reading from a lightly curated and largely intact archive. Considering the alternative—a coffee table, press-release inflected marketing tome—Cudel’s choice is inspired. The Trakas blend of improvisation, conceptual rigor, hands-on execution and creative independence is best left as one great project that unfolded slowly and methodically over five decades.

The texts are in both English and French, reflecting the publisher’s national affiliation, the fact that Trakas’s projects exist both in North America and in Europe, and a nod to his bilingual roots in Quebec. His technical yet unaffected prose helps maintain a focus on the public friendly aesthetic fundamental to his work. For example, Trakas writes, “The landscape I see is reminiscent of a vast architectural interior where the trunks are the columns supporting a light porous ceiling of foliage.” The range of the book’s writing styles, each a witness to their publication date, provide an intriguing review of last century’s art speak. Kate Linker’s brilliant though densely textured 1976 essay, “George Trakas and the Syntax of Space,” first published in Arts Magazine, is one of the book’s more prominent critical pieces. “Form and phenomenon are fused in his conception in the manner of Heidegger,” writes Linker, which “illuminates a meaning of architecture recessed behind its superficial sense.” This is as much a reflection of art world discourse at the time of its writing as it is a thorough exposition on what Trakas had accomplished to that date.

Added are the voices of Hugh Davies, Catherine Grout, Alexis Lowry, Chantal Pontbriand, Michael Sheridan, Pascale Soleil, Sally Yard, a lofty collection of art world insiders grounded by the presence of Mark Stevens, whose enthusiastic review of the Trakas Documenta 6 piece, Union Pass (1977) in Newsweek was an unusual embrace of the avant-garde in a skeptical mainstream press. Together, this chorus of commentary offers an unfiltered spread of how the art Trakas built over five decades addressed individuals inside and outside the art world.

The first part of the book is devoted to the artist’s more obscure early work, experiments that when reconsidered in light of what followed imply a sequential inevitability resembling the formal logic of Piet Mondrian’s measured steps toward abstraction. For instance, in The Piece That Went Through the Floor (1970), an installation executed at an unrenovated alternative space at 112 Greene St. in SoHo, Trakas recreated the rough construction of a demolition scaffold, the design of which reappeared in smaller scale on a two-foot high wooden trestle that intersected with a steel counterpart in an outdoor piece titled, Union Station (1975), built as part of a group exhibition that included work by Carl Andre and Alice Aycock.

A reader soon gets a sense of how Trakas works. He approaches most projects with only a general idea until he engages fully with a site’s physical reality, which may include both compelling features, access to water, and less appealing conditions, like industrial scarring or environmental neglect. The chapter on Berth Haven (1983), a waterfront reclamation project in Seattle, is described in the book by the artist’s brief recollection only with no other accompanying texts. Trakas recalls:

I was asked to build a sculpture at the new western headquarters of [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and it was my intent to bring people to the water’s edge, and the large fragments of concrete runway were ideal support to build on. Two lower steel decks emerge from the water with a triangular staircase narrowed under the effect of the incoming waves, echoing with the sound from the wind or the wake of ships. Two upper decks of native aromatic cedar completed the work.

The ability to grasp the potential in underwater rubble is what sets Trakas apart from other site-specific artists. The final design, based on the accidental shape of the dumped material, made for a fascinating triangular design that accelerates the water’s small waves into a whale-like spout, while realizing the archetypal value of access to the water’s edge.

The final essay, written for the book by Catherine Grout, traces the artist’s beginnings in dance and movement and follows through thematically to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, (2007–2020) the artist’s magnum opus, located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. And in keeping with the narrative’s James Joycean return to beginnings, a transcribed conversation between Trakas, Joan Jonas, and the artist’s daughter Maggie recorded recently by DIA Art Foundation and accompanied by a charmingly ingenuous photograph of a young Trakas and the late painter Susan Rothenberg (Maggie’s mother) in skinny dipping mode, compose the volume’s coda of personal memories, letting the reader in on the social and experimental vibe of pre-gentrified Tribeca.