The Brooklyn Rail

Once upon a time there were two art theorists who claimed that a well-known modern philosopher once wrote (or said) something to the effect that we live in story after story. What made the claim extra special was that they didn’t cite their source, and this is why I’m okay with keeping all three of them anonymous. “We are narrating and narratable beings,” the tag-team theorists went on to proclaim. Indeed, we are, and quite often it’s the not knowing that does the heavy lifting when it comes to the material and formal requirements for any story that has been or ever will be told.

Robert Therrien lived in his story after story more completely than almost any artist I’ve had the good fortune to know. One of the things that makes his work extraordinary is that his presence permeates all of it—“the devil is in the details,” maybe—as the unexpected catalyst for keeping himself out of its way. At The Broad, curator Ed Schad, with, to my eye, the thoughtful yet unobtrusive care of the team that stewards Therrien’s estate, has put together one of the best retrospectives I’ve seen since, well, the 2011–12 Willem de Kooning exhibition at MoMA. One of the reasons for this is that the installation from room to room not only reinforces Therrien’s magical studio building near downtown Los Angeles, but also substantiates the museum as, quite literally, a second home for his work. This, of course, is anchored by Under the Table (1994), remaining on view up on the third floor, where, simply and plainly, it belongs. Claimed to be the most sought-after work in The Broad’s collection (that’s no surprise), its literal separation from the vast array of Therrien’s output does two wonderful things: first, it reinforces how much it has become beloved by audiences that aren’t fixated on who made it as they might be the Andy Warhols, Jean‐Michel Basquiats, Jeff Koonses, etc.; and second, it heightens the synaptic impulses of many of the other works on view in the exhibition two floors below.

We live in story after story, and we live in room after room. Therrien’s relationship with “the room” is as crucial as his relationship to shape and association. For example, right away in the first, No title (stacked plates, white) (1993) and No title (pitcher relief with yellow spout) (1990) come together like a vernacular poem to establish just how attuned Therrien was to the productive agility of form and situation—as opposed to the comparative brutishness of a lot of contemporary sculpture—and what that agility can provide us to make meaningful connections to what we are looking at during the moments of our direct experience. The dizzying optical effect that occurs while we circle an oversized stack of dinner plates doesn’t collapse into gimmickry largely because the proportions of the room, along with the simple-yet-expansive wood pitcher relief attached to the wall like a painting, create in tandem a gentle gravity. It’s the anchoring that almost always comes to the rescue of Therrien’s work. Not that it needs saving (anything but), but instead to facilitate even the most manic moments, relatively speaking, of another major work also in this room: the almost Looney Tunes-vortex of No title (large telephone cloud) (1998) that is part Tasmanian devil and part snowman, a communicative cloud just before we got the Cloud.

Quite like my assessment of the de Kooning retrospective (see the October 2011 Rail), I find myself utterly convinced by nearly every work in this abundant display of Therrien’s. Like my irritation with most of de Kooning’s 1960s work, I can quibble here with a few things of Therrien’s. For example, the baby’s head emerging from one end of No title (Soapy, pink) (2017), because its weirdness entraps the sculpture’s form. Then, two works that borrow extensively from the impactful sculptural interventions of the under-recognized Glen Seator (b. 1956, d. 2002) who, like Therrien, showed work at Gagosian in Beverly Hills in the late 1990s: No title (room, panic doors) (2013–14) and No title (sidewalk) (2011). Since, again, Therrien’s work lives so fully in story after story and room after room, these two works, for me, disrupt—slightly, to be fair—the simultaneous expansiveness and intimacy that infuses seemingly every single other thing Therrien made. (Seator got past such detours by literally upending his and our perspective, demonstrating that he and Therrien were two very different types of artist.) Put another way, all but a few works in this beautiful exhibition look as if they are just getting started, and I can’t think of a better thing for anything in the world.