The Brooklyn Rail

Despite its promising title, I Am Gravity offers less than a compelling argument for Bill Bollinger’s work as either historically pivotal or presently relevant. Never given to spectacle or theory yet consistently preoccupied with the conditional status of form, Bollinger was the quintessential post-Minimalist—and the obscurity of his work mirrors the art-historical erasure of the post-Minimalist moment. What is at stake here is not merely a curatorial shortfall, but a continued failure to grasp how post-Minimalism constitutes a missing chapter in late modernism’s history.

Where Minimalism deployed industrial materials and procedures in repeatable patterns and systemic configurations, post-Minimalist practices refigured those same materials as situational arrangements in which process, contingency, and entropy superseded objecthood. For reasons that remain unclear, this formation has been relegated to serving as modernism’s death rattle, rather than a discrete, conceptually rigorous project in and of itself. As Eva Hesse and Richard Serra have been reassigned to Minimalism, artists such as Bollinger, Alan Saret, Jackie Winsor, and others have been left stranded at the margins of a complex narrative.

What is lost in the relay of Minimalism–Conceptualism–post-modernism is any sustained recognition of how post-Minimalism’s dematerialized, event-based, and context-sensitive operations reworked the very notion of art’s objecthood, transforming it into a phenomenon, a site, and a by-product rather than a stable thing. If post-Minimalism were restored to its proper place within modernism’s history, the “end” of modernism would no longer appear to be the result of a slow entropic fade but would be revealed as the consequence of its own ambitions—material specificity, phenomenological encounter, institutional critique—pushed to the point of structural transformation. It is this expansion of sculpture’s field, through the absorption and displacement of abstract painting’s concerns, that effectively brings modernism’s search for medium-specific imperatives to a close.​​

Bollinger was not invested in ending modernism; rather, he probed the conditions under which objects can momentarily hold together within a larger, unstable continuum of material, spatial, and institutional relations and still be called sculpture—or, more broadly, art. That was his true subject. The objects themselves are, in this sense, its byproducts, a mere reminder of the larger issues.​ Karma’s presentation lacks such contextualization. The only accompanying text, an essay by gallerist Mitchell Algus—whose role in sustaining Bollinger’s legacy when it was on the verge of disappearance cannot be overstated—should be read within the broader arc of Bollinger’s recovery. This recovery began in 2011 with a series of solo exhibitions at Algus’s gallery, where the gallerist pulled from storage and private collections an array of works—ropes, chains, channels, early Xerox documentation, loft-scale proposals—to effectively salvage various aspects of Bollinger’s practice from oblivion. It would have been helpful had the catalogue for Christiane Meyer-Stoll’s 2010–11 survey, Water is Life and Like Art It Finds Its Own Level, at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein—largely assembled from a bequest by Bollinger’s one-time German dealer Rolf Ricke—been made available here. That exhibition was followed by Bill Bollinger: The Retrospective at SculptureCenter in 2012—also curated by Meyer-Stoll—which brought together some forty works from 1966–70.​

Given that Bollinger’s works have not been significantly presented since 2012, Karma’s installation is disappointing. It reads less as a reengagement than as a modest grouping of muted objects and puzzling images. The exhibition consists of three sculptures—a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with water, a log segment floating in a galvanized tub, and a graphite floor work—accompanied by twelve works on paper. With the exception of the graphite floor piece, these works murmur rather than assert themselves.

Bollinger’s most compelling works are jerry-rigged demonstrations of flux over fixity; as he maintained in a 1968 letter, his work “ceases to exist when taken down.” In a review the following year, Peter Schjeldahl registered the “quiet insistence” of these works, recognizing that they demonstrate a reversal of sculpture’s priorities: what matters here are the often-subtle physical events that the material setup makes present. In its pared-down format, however, Karma recasts Bollinger as a latter-day abstractionist rather than as the provocateur who bridged the Minimal plane and the post-Minimal event. As a consequence, his insistence on the real over the retinal collapses into a kind of residual formalism.

If one is knowledgeable—or simply curious—enough, the “sculptures” can still be mentally relocated to a field of dynamic relations—gravity, friction, buoyancy, containment—so that what is perceived is not an object but a material proposition negotiating its own coherence in space. In the graphite floor installation, a dark particulate skin laid directly onto half the gallery floor renders matter as field rather than form. Each traversal scuffs and redistributes it, making legible the tension between the image and its materiality. The floating log in its trough operates as a rudimentary but exacting physics experiment, its apparent stillness registering the subtlest vibrations of air and movement, turning “composition” into an ongoing negotiation between material state and environment. By contrast, the fifty-five-gallon drum of water stands as a vertical volume of latent energy whose equilibrium of weight and containment transforms the vessel into a pressure diagram, making palpable the proportional relationship between body, vessel, and liquid mass.

The other works on view—consisting of a suite of spray-paint and pastel pieces from the late 1960s that could be read as studies for color-field paintings; a group of cut-wood “paintings” from the 1980s composed of painted wooden slats banded together; and later paper works organized around what at first appears to be a broad, singular brush-like stroke, only to reveal it is two sheets of paper juxtaposed—enter this dialogue only in the most cursory fashion. As such, the works gathered under the heading I Am Gravity leave the viewer oddly adrift, deprived of the evidentiary surroundings that would allow the terms of Bollinger’s practice to fully unfold. This does him a disservice: the complexity of the artist’s discourse demands that its diversity and scale be restored, so that the work may again be encountered as a system of contingent forces rather than a suite of static curiosities.