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With a Bang
John Haberin New York City
Liz Larner and Carol Szymanski
Liz Larner started her career with a bang. The sheer sound may stick with you for days after her retrospective, even as the course of her work gets harder and harder to pin down.
Was she bashing fine art with Corner Basher in 1988, before ultimately settling down with proper sculpture in such materials as leather and ceramics? Do not be too sure what counts as sordid and what as high and mighty art. Do not be too sure even in a show of hands, pleading for something more. Hands will always have a special place in art, even when you cannot see them. It is hard not to think of the work as handmade, even when it has become digital. Carol Szymanski evokes them, too, but they become more sordid and provocative still, not as matters of life and death, but as performance or a come-on. 
Transience with an ancient pedigree
Right out front at SculptureCenter, you can flick a switch, setting in motion a vertical pole in not so stainless steel. As it rotates, slowly but inexorably, a chain begins to swing, and your first instinct can only be to get out of its way. Inertia being what it is, its swing takes on a life of its own, but its collisions are regular enough, and the corner walls bear their lasting traces. Look down, though, to leap more than thirty years into the present. Stacked polygons suggest the greater weight and regularity of Minimalism, and their ceramics approach marble's pinkish white. Late Modernism takes on an ancient pedigree.
Or does it, and just how much has she changed? In reality, Larner was interested in the art object from the start. The opening work is interactive, but not to turn responsibility over to the viewer. If it ran all the time, the walls might not be around much longer. A cube from that same year amounts to weaving in metal, from crossing copper strips threaded in and out of one another. Craft here undermines the appearance of Minimalism, while never quite giving it up.
Then, too, just how solid is her later art? The look of fake marble in her latest puts the accent on fake, and Larner could be faking Minimalism, too. The polygons vary in size, shape, and degree of completion, and their stacks lie toppled over. The artist, as perpetual corner basher, might have knocked them over once and for all. Leather from 1990 may mark a transition, but it looks suspiciously like punching bags left limp and unattended on the floor. It may also resemble giant worms.
Larner gets the entirety of SculptureCenter, a rare tribute, including the gorgeous basement tunnels as preserved by Maya Lin. The show is in no hurry, with not quite thirty works, and one tunnel remains vacant, but it feels busy and complete. It does not run chronologically or entirely by theme. It is more interested in contrasting structures, comparing past and present, and having fun. It has a mouthful of a title, "Don't Put It Back like It Was," because curators these days will do anything to get attention. Still, who said that there is no going back?
Surely not the curators of a retrospective, but Larner was into transience from the start —and how she can give it an assist. Some of her earliest and still best-known work features bacteria, human hair, and buttermilk. Set out in glass and culture media, they look like lab samples for studies in decay. Tempted by the lab-leak theory of the origins of Covid-19? You may find yourself taking a step back here, too. Yet the small scale invites you up close, and the one with buttermilk also includes bits of an orchid and a penny.
They are already a study in contrasts. The pedestal for buttermilk is suitably unsightly, but the bacteria rest on crossing planes of aluminum and glass, as Primary, Secondary: Culture of Empire State Building and Twin Towers. A year later, Bird in Space takes its title from Constantin Brancusi. As late as 2013, V: Planchette leans on Brancusi, too, for its black wings and elegance, although his surfaces have coarsened in her hands and the wings fail to match. One can see all her art as a cross between early Modernism and its late decay.
Showing the cracks
That could make her the prototype for Postmodernism and the postmodern paradox—caring while debunking, moving on while looking back. Her Bird in Space spreads its wings as her single largest work, from 1989. Its threads arch over the main gallery, weighted down at each end and held up at center by more threads, arching down from the ceiling. The lower arch, in turn, holds them in place. Like Brancusi's, it takes flight, but its fragility is something else again. It gives Modernism the bird.
From then to the present, Larner is more consistent than one might have thought. The show gives particular weight to glazed ceramics starting in 2013. There most of all, she combines the sheen of sculpture with signs of decay. Weighty blocks on the floor, one black and one white, may evoke the likes of Carl Andre and Donald Judd, but they have lost serious chunks and developed serious cracks. An entire tunnel for works on the wall, like paintings, gets increasingly colorful but also increasingly disturbing. Art may have given decay an assist, but it will happen quite well enough on its own.
Most of these have cracked plain in half, and the cracked edges look like biological growth, while the swirling, overlapping colors might be its by-products. Larner could still be in her bacterial phase after all. If something unites her art apart from its contrasts, it is just that simulation of life. Increasingly, too, that includes human life. There is a reason you shied away from her earliest art, if you did: you took it personally.
The human references begin as early as 1987, with a sphere fashioned from sixteen miles of surgical gauze. A small recent work takes the limp shape of a woman, clinging for refuge to the wall. Its bronze turned green emphasizes her helplessness. You Might Have to Live like a Refugee, it announces. It is Larner's one bow to political relevance, at a time of refugee art. Yet someone was in need of medical attention all along.
As with Corner Basher, the threat may be site specific. Her Guest series from 2005 consists of gold or dark metal, woven into chains and draped like fabric across the tunnel infrastructure. One could easily overlook it, but it belongs. (Did I say that the glazed work on the wall looks a bit like flat-screen TVs?) It may also suggest chain mail, and someone unseen may need protection. Larner is going out with a bang.
SculptureCenter is out to rescue her from relative neglect after a bang-up start. It collaborated with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, but it makes ingenious use of its site. Larner could almost have had it in mind when she created Bird in Space and Guest. Ten pewter hands occupy the head of the main stairwell, suspended in isolation and in pain, like the hacked wood of Judy Glantzman. They might have been there all along. Splayed, tarnished, and shining, they are unable to connect but inseparable. They are inseparable, too, from the hands that fashion art.
Lend a hand
The very shift to interactive art brings hands into focus, with Carol Szymanski, only now your hands, while conceptual or performance art may highlight them even as they are no longer bear responsibility for the work. As a subject for art, from M. C. Escher to Larner, they return to the tradition of the painted or sculpted body, and they are the one body part (along with maskless faces) that are almost always nude. They comport with contemporary art in which a woman reclaims her body as well. They comport, too, with text-based art, for something has to do the writing or typing.
Szymanski pulls off quite a feat, with work that has a hand in any and all these ways of making art. At least as remarkable, she dares you to defend them or to tell them apart. Her Polaroids, slightly blurred and larger than life, make them inescapable, much as in prints by Siobhan Liddell, but why? They began as video, which recalls art's role as a documentary record while making it anything but. It also gives the hands a greater physical presence—a critic's euphemism, no doubt, for arousing or alluring. But then critics and art historians, men especially, have always fallen back on euphemisms.
You might catch yourself before calling them sexually suggestive, lest that say something about you. They are cut off, so that one cannot so easily know which fingers belongs to which hands. In a show called "You Pair How," the hands may appear in pairs, but pointing in opposite directions. Do they owe their allure to an implicit violence or to Larner's text, set within the photographs, in neon, or on the wall? It is fragmentary, too. It is also at times confessional, but of whose desires?
Confession can be another token of immediacy or merely the prerequisite to a dating site. And Szymanski has been playing the dating game for months now, only not in search of love. In an extended performance, she has been acting as go-between. Who, then, is the you in "You Pair How," and how? Point a finger at whomever you like. The artist could be the only one here whose desires are not in question.
Matchmaking is an art, and Szymanski turns to art for help. Make that a perverse token of art. She conducts interviews and distributes questionnaires, modeled after a nonsensical one in Harold and Maude, the 1971 film by Hal Ashby. The gallery calls it a cult film, which is another way to say you that may not admit to liking it, even if you do. Recall that it involves a sixty-year age discrepancy and an obsession with death. But then, like desire, death is only human.
When it comes down to it, hands always call in question what it means to be human. When a portrait restrains their motion, like Renaissance portraits by Hans Holbein right now at the Morgan Library, that is a telling gesture in itself. Look at someone else's fingers in the present, and they are almost surely moving. A person becomes the other, with an interior life you may never know, even as you see that person as an object. That is just one more reason to start questioning yourself.
Liz Larner ran at SculptureCenter through March 28, 2022, Carol Szymanski at Signs and Symbols through March 26.