The Brooklyn Rail

Over the last few years, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has homed in on various facets of Mary Bauermeister’s career, proceeding in an almost taxonomical manner. In 2019, Mary Bauermeister: Live in Peace or Leave the Galaxy focused on her white wooden “lens boxes,” which are composed of magnifying glasses, lenses, and prisms, through which the viewer can flit their gaze to see layered labyrinthine objects, phrases, and scrawled drawings. St.one-d, the gallery’s third Bauermeister exhibition, methodically attends to the artist’s use of small, rounded stones. Rosenfeld propounds a throughline tethering Bauermeister’s tawny- and coal-black–flecked mark-making to her winding stone mandalas and modular constructions by inaugurating the show with Übergänge (1959–61), one of her abstract dot “Pünktchenbilder” paintings, which she also termed “constructive tachisme.” At first gloss, this strikes the percipient as counterintuitive; after all, once Bauermeister truly began repurposing stones, her sequenced helix spires and recessed matrices consisted of shade- and form-based attenuated arrangements. The “Pünktchenbilder” paintings, in comparison, are far more aleatory and unstructured. But once we progress to Bauermeister’s Sand Stein Kugel Gruppe, executed a year after her constructive tachisme in 1962, the continuity between these seemingly disparate periods is rendered pellucid. The artist’s first work incorporating stones as a material, this sprawling, sectioned, seven-part composite includes a large square slab darted with uneven black dots, edged by varisized pearlescent stones. Their forms cohere into a visual stretto and cast ovular shadows that rebound the dots’ oblate schema. Thereafter, the exhibition branches in varied directions, comprising thirty-one pieces including examples from Bauermeister’s late “Chaos” series, lens boxes, “Meatbeater” mallets, particle-board assemblages, and homages to box construction theorist and critic, Brian O'Doherty, to name but a few examples.

This show goes well beyond Bauermeister’s much celebrated box constructions, a welcome reprieve as these—captivating though they are—have overshadowed other aspects of her multifaceted oeuvre. Assiduously curated, Rosenfeld’s exhibition offers a comprehensive view of Bauermeister’s use of stones in particular and organic material more broadly. By purposing flotsam, hay strands, small polished pebbles, and plywood strips into honeycombed, laminate, and circuitous relief surfaces, Bauermeister distinguished her art practice from her fellow Fluxus members who ardently engaged in the epoch’s intermedia affordances. Bauermeister’s serialist assemblages and sculptures were galvanized by a more organicist tendency, thereby transmogrifying the mathematical-theoretical principles of atonal music that German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (to whom she was married from 1967 to 1972) championed into the visual medium. It becomes apparent that, with her meticulously ordered networks and towers, Bauermeister sought to descry the dialectic unity of order–disorder latent in the form of natural objects. As she noted to Hans Ulrich Obrist in a December 2014 interview, “as a child, I used to fill up the holes on the street with stones,” playfully endeavoring to systemize even in these earliest engagements. Of course, stones found in nature, with their variable sizes and forms, inherently resist order. Bauermeister sublated their disunity by selecting for the most regular “pebbles,” as she termed them. Then, sorting for size and color, she arranged them into cascading spiral progressions or recessed tile-patterned boards. In Kleine Steinspirale (1962–2011), for instance, the centered rufous pebbles burgeon into progressively larger ferric- and rust-colored fieldstones. From a distance, the cochlear coil appears symmetrical, as does the scaled succession of honey-beige sandstones embedded into the left half of the sand-coated particle board in Art is for centuries (1965–67). The latter work’s right bisection, on the other hand, includes more disordered stone arrangements ornamented with delicate ink jottings and drawings of hands—perhaps Bauermeister’s own—manipulating mallets, scissors, sticks and other instruments.

As Hauke Ohls notes in his Many-Valued Aesthetics: Interconnections in the Work of Mary Bauermeister (2024), “the stones in Bauermeister’s oeuvre,” collected from the beach, where they have been polished by the waves smoothing them against the seafloor, “are the result of weathering.” Bauermeister’s stone arrangements (unlike her boxes) lack art historical precedent, having little to do with Andy Goldsworthy’s stacked slabs, Richard Long’s piled platforms, or Michael Heizer’s hulking, monumental boulders—all stone-based projects undertaken contemporaneously to Bauermeister’s practice. Rugged materiality and overpowering scale are prominent in these artists’ works; for Bauermeister, the stone, comparatively diminutive, licenses subtle, sequential unities that are oft-disrupted from without. For instance, in a number of works from the mid-1960s, such as Stone with Easel (1969–70), Some Stones Missing (1962–67), and Stone Arrow/Error (1964–66), she apportions segments of her square or chevron forms in a milky patina, effacing their sequential unity. By introducing further units of disarrangement into the tableau’s edges—including prodigious hand-carved pencils and mallets coated in toothy pebble blocks that protrude outwards, far beyond the assemblage’s planar space—Bauermeister destructures her tidy, shifting arrangements. This negation, in turn, clarifies the subtending seriality’s built or imposed status.

Indeed, it is fitting that Bauermeister began her stone-based practice shortly after her 1961 “musical theater” collaboration, Originale, with Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, Christoph Caskel, and other Fluxus artists. Her contribution consisted in outlining a serial set of disruptive acts like throwing beans at onlookers, or leaping into tubs filled with water. Where Stockhausen’s compositions quantized aural elements like timbre and duration into a “group form,” Bauermeister quadrated visual discernibilia into both material (e.g., rectangular plywood boards) and immaterial (e.g., Fibonacci sequences) set forms.

If Bauermeister’s work lacks antecedents in the Land art and Environmental art traditions, it similarly cannot be tethered to the concomitant history of artistic gleaning. Admittedly, Bauermeister’s gleaning is imbricated in a self-contained mystical ethos licensed by the fugue-like repetition that we also find in Louise Nevelson’s collages, tempting a comparison. However, the two artists, both of whom also trafficked in the box construction, hewed towards distinct source material. Bauermeister plotted stones into ziggurats, carved wood into looming hand-colored pencils, and—as was immortalized in Carmen Belaschk’s film, Mary Bauermeister: One and One is Three (2020), a fragment of which is excerpted in the Rosenfeld exhibition—traced serpentine tails into the sand that were inevitably washed away by lapping waves. She regularly submerged her detritus and ocean-marbled stones into the sand, coating them in a crystalline rocky gleam, whereas Nevelson “bathed” her found materials in monochromatic white, gold, or black paint coats. Thus, Bauermeister’s stone works ought to be interpreted through the aperture of markedly organic-natural principles (rather than, say, urbanity, or those pertaining to the domicile).

In a telling 2009 interview with Art Conservator, Bauermeister characterized her “stone pieces” as “pure nature,” before going on to remark that her use of “all kinds of natural material[s],” such as “stone, sand, pebbles, tree trunks and many ‘ready-trouvier’” (the artist's choice appellation for found objects) was “an homage to Marcel Duchamp.” But unlike Duchamp, who sought to eschew “esthetic delectation” and pursue “regions more verbal,” as he put it in his 1961 MoMA lecture, Bauermeister’s cairns-cum-mandalas are, even when flanked by cobble-mounded or written phrases, readily optical—and pleasantly so. One can go so far as to deem them properly beautiful, a consequence of their ordering-and-effacing natural beauty. Even in the “Chaos” series, where the bedrock of disarrayed pebbles enjoys little order, the laminate top layer facilitates an evenly-spaced latticework of oblong apical abutments. These are, in fact, some of the most enthralling works in a scintillating show, for they clarify the core concerns that ground Bauermeister’s art practice: the mathematical grounding of nature, which, Bauermeister submits, enthralls mankind not through its manifest orderliness but through its aesthetic qualities, which only surface through imposed sequencing.