The Hurtle of the Universe
The Critique of Pure Sculpture of David Rabinowitch
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David Rabinowitch is a sculptor who is, by evidence of his work, a member of this breed of separate breeds, this family of the self-created, or, to be more precise and avoid the inevitable, intrinsic arrogance of ad hominem assertion, his work is a participant in their capability of discovery. His work is demanding, not merely in the sense of being advanced sculpture, of being works of art that press against the tissues of conventional practice of the art, of being formally innovative, but in the sense of being exercises in advanced thinking, of being challenging instigations to the inquisitive mind. This is to say that Rabinowitch as an artist is a thinker, a thinker in sculpture, and thus he is, by any sensible definition of the term and despite his own denials that he has “studied” philosophy, a philosopher as a sculptor: an inquirer into essential issues of existence who uses sculpture as his vehicle of inquiry and discovery.
To our misfortune, Rabinowitch is a sculptor too little known in the United States, strangely unknown. Born in Toronto, he moved to New York in 1972 and has been living and working here since. Even so, he has exhibited relatively little in this country—the majority of his exhibitions, and evidently the larger part of his reputation, has been in Europe and Canada. A contemporary of such sculptors as Judd and Serra, it is odd that his work has not been more available to us.
The last two exhibitions of Rabinowitch’s work to occur in New York, and evidently in the United States, were mounted at the Peter Blum Gallery in 2003 and 1998-99 and were exhibitions of the artist’s drawings and, in 2003, monotypes with several early sculptures. The recent exhibition, under consideration here, presented works from one of Rabinowitch’s major sculptural series and is an opportunity, for the first time in New York for some time, to observe and estimate Rabinowitch’s achievement in full force.
On display here were works of Rabinowitch’s Phantom Group, a series of 14 sculptures and 16 drawings done in 1967. The drawings, of course, are in support of the sculpture—plans for the articulations of those works. They are all executed on paper, using either charcoal or a variety of combinations of pencil, colored pencil, oil crayon, crayon, gouache, and gesso, and all bear the same “title”: Untitled (Drawing for the Phantom Group), 1967. They range from what appear to be visual notes, the first thoughts for a structure laid out in loose assortments of a few lines, to technically accomplished, highly polished renderings of intended sculptural works.
Throughout the range of their finesse, even as recordings of compositional intentions, the drawings are striking as works in their own right. Some are so refined, they could stand as demonstrations of the methods and the value of drawing as an art in itself. They show a wide variety of the ways of combining, gravitating together, and apparently overlaying simple geometric forms to achieve a harmonic balance—a variety so broad, they constitute a short encyclopedia of the strategies to achieve compositional resolution. Even at their simplest, they are compelling to witness, as if the sheer achievement of formal resolution, without further drapery of depiction to excuse the raw formal exercise, were enough to create a kind of serpent’s eye: they seem, through their manner of inherent and palpable completeness, to be staring back at you, and to, thereby, transfix your gaze and hold you in astonishment, as if the promise of abstraction were finally achieved here. They are like pages from a geometrician’s notebook, and they reveal why mathematicians feel that pure mathematics is an entry into and an exercise in pure beauty.
But it is the sculptures that are the point at issue. They are all low to the ground—or in the cases of the smaller works, to the platform surface—worked sheets of metal, steel and copper, and in some instances cardboard models. The sheets are cut to be flat conic sections—in essence, ovals—and in some cases, just portions of ovals, with some of the extremities excised. The sheets have not been left flat—they have been “broken”: bent along a line to raise part of the sheet above ground level, sometimes in several steps, fold upon fold.
Occasionally, one can see the relation between specific drawings and specific sculptures—one can see some of the record of working towards the completed sculptural realization. But in all cases, the sculptures have the air of being the fruition of the line of thought, the manner of thinking, that is deposited in the drawings—like starting speculations that ultimately coalesced into tangible realities, like a promise kept. The compelling, transfixing aspect of the drawings is as heightened in the sculpture. They have the feel of essential forms, each one a single form in spite of its compositional complexity—they seem somehow realer than you, as if we were fleeting presences dancing through time, and these were that which knows nothing of the passing of ages, as if these and their like are what is left after time has eaten away all that can be deteriorated, as if the dust of mortality, of that which passes, had been blown away by the winds that turn the pages of the calendar and that billow the bane of Ozymandias, and this is what has been revealed—this is what remains. And in their purely geometric faces, in the complex, strangely right compounding of simple forms that is their form, there is something alien, something unlike us, but even so, something strangely familiar. There is a secret held within—something we were about to realize for ourselves, but have not, not yet.
But the secret is tightly held. There is an opacity of intention in these works that is impossible to miss—they carry an undeniable sense of weight and import, one has an instinctual response that there is something here, something of significance that one risks missing, and yet they are self-evidently but sheets of folded metal and board and, in the sheerly physical sense of them, nothing more. They are the threat of abstraction fully achieved—there are no clues of meaning through depiction, no hints for the literary mind, no story; there are no literal faces, no figures, no human forms. There are just forms, with no translation grid against which to measure their implication, no concrete values to fill in the variables. And simple geometric forms are, by their nature, as deadpan as anything can be. With nothing of voiced thought appended to it, an oval is an oval.
We are told in the statement that was available in the gallery that Rabinowitch intended each work to represent a material plane of infinite extension—the conic section is to be taken as an observed portion of an endless plane, a foundation level that is not set against a background but is the background. The vertical breaking, the folding upwards of portions of these planes, is the “interior articulation” of this represented background extension—the crimp in the field.
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But self-evidently, in deadpan fashion, this helps us little. To gain a better sense of the significance of these works, one needs a guideline—one needs a sense of Rabinowitch’s concerns, a sense of the field of inspiration for his art. Rabinowitch has spoken of his “overriding concern” early in his career as a sculptor: “to discover a unique basis from which a fundamental critique of sculpture would follow naturally. The conscious aim was to generate works that would exemplify this critique.” The focus of his critique was the “anthropomorphic, totemic (Romantic) and painterly tendency” and the Bauhaus-tinged tendency of contemporary sculpture to be conceived “in terms of pre-planned, usually closed, factory-produced (and architecturally modelled) volumes.”
However, Rabinowitch’s critique has proved to be much more thorough than that, his artistic concerns much broader. They are philosophical and scientific. Rabinowitch has been an extensive reader of Hume and Spinoza, in particular, as well as Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, Frege, and other philosophers. He also has studied and drawn ideas from scientists, among them Einstein, Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, and more.
Evident in Rabinowitch’s published remarks on philosophy and on science, and suggested, once the clues have been taken up, by the sculptures themselves through a clear and deliberate, deliberating focus on the most essential of formal exercises—through the care and intricacy with which so foundational a set of manipulations have been carried out, giving the works an intricacy their apparently basic means of execution belie—is the artist’s orientation on philosophical examination. These sculptures are means of investigating the questions with which philosophy is occupied. More precisely, Rabinowitch is examining the conditions of reification, the intrinsic conditions of reality, of something’s being extant.
Rabinowitch’s means is to work with essential components that, philosophically, straddle the divide between reality and perception, that are the preconditions—it is argued both ways—for existence per se and for observation, for presence in the world, ontologically, and for presence within the range of our awareness, objectively, presence as phenomena. The primary components of his artistic ruminations—the primary conditions of existence in one sense or the other—are, he has told us, gravity and perspective. Perspective is the lateral extension, the run along the floor of the steel plate, that which is to be considered a portion of what is infinite, and thus foundational. Gravity is the lift—or vice versa—the vertical structure engaged by the folding of the plate. And it should be noticed that these two terms, terms of Rabinowitch’s choosing, strike to the two fields of category. Gravity is, presumably, a property of that which is, not a perceptual condition but a condition of the world as it is, as it is even when we’re not looking. Perspective is a property of observation, things appear to recede to a vanishing point specified only by a specific point of view, when in fact, presumably, they do not.
This form of work makes Rabinowitch’s sculpture, as he has acknowledged, an exercise in Constructivism—one of the movements of geometric abstraction—a practice or movement in Modernist art that dates from the early part of the twentieth century. Practiced roughly as much in sculpture as in painting (which is not the case for most modalities of abstraction, which have been largely a painter’s ambition), it can be said Constructivism is to be found in the art of (working under a variety of movement titles and including predecessors as well as direct movement practitioners, and much of this is Rabinowitch’s own list) such artists as Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Miro, Mondrian, Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Duchamp, Brancusi, and Giacometti, as well as Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner.
The overt purpose of Constructivism, on the part of those artists on Rabinowitch’s list who practiced it knowingly, was to seek the reality of the world, to peer behind the veneer of appearances and give at least some indication of the nature of the world beyond the limits of our senses. It is one of two principal motivations to abstract art, the other being direct emotional expressiveness, which very likely should be isolated for the most part to Action Painting—and it should be observed that the two objectives are far from mutually exclusive, Jackson Pollock being a case in point. It is broadly recognized that the invention of photography, and particularly the refinement of photography late in the nineteenth century to the point at which it started to become a hobby, the practice of it no longer limited to professionals, made the reproduction of appearances in visual art seem pointless.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson in her exceptional books The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (which is unfortunately out of print at this time) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works has argued convincingly that the motivating factors were much more numerous. In the decades before World War I, a number of scientific discoveries and mathematical explorations initiated among the general public a rage of interest in the invisible reality behind apparent nature: X-rays, radioactivity, luminiferous ether, and the formulations of non-Euclidean geometry and four-dimensional geometry, particularly in the work of Henri Poincaré, which had been taken up by a number of popularizing authors, including
E.A. Abbott and Charles Howard Hinton, and were common currency among a thinking lay public. Such ideas and discoveries spurred interest in the search for the invisible world and made the reproduction of appearances in art seem naïve and provincial. As Henderson has put it in an abstract for one of her papers, works as indispensable as her books, “X-ray’s proof of the inadequacy of the human eye as a perceiving instrument played a vital role in supporting artistic speculation on the possible existence of a suprasensible fourth dimension of space, to be revealed by the visionary artist.” (Her word “suprasensible” is intriguingly near Kantian terminology. And it should be added that Henderson has argued with equal conviction that the established idea of a relation between the development of abstraction and Einstein’s theories of relativity is largely fallacious—the dates simply don’t work.)
Thus, Rabinowitch’s sculptural practice fits within the tradition of Constructivism, both in its methods and its appearance, which resembles in particular Malevich and the Russian Constructivists, and in the ambition of revealing the nature of reality beyond the conditions and distortions of observation. What distinguishes Rabinowitch’s work is the weight of intellectual importing, the degree of direct influence of the specifications of established thinking, of actual ideas and focused questions. There is a literateness that can be found to the same degree in likely no other artist working today. To locate the role these ideas play in his work, one needs to turn again to the artist’s statements to receive a sense of his immediate concerns.
Rabinowitch has spoken on occasion of specific issues, as well as the influence of specific thinkers, that are operative in his work and that indicate the concerns at hand in it. There are three distinct structures of ideas that come up repeatedly (if any statement can be said to occur “repeatedly” in the rare published presentations of his thinking) and that are presented as determining.
Mathematics as a universal language
It is clear from statements such as these that the geometric exercises of Rabinowitch’s work are explorations of the mathematical substructure that is the condition of the existence of anything, of existence itself. If it were asserted that this thinking, and this body of work, is Platonic in a specifically limited sense—not as ascribing universal forms but as asserting the laws of geometry as the ground plane for existence—that characterization would be correct.
It is equally clear that there is in operation here an alignment, a perfect alignment, of the structural (geometric) principles of thought and the structural principles of existence. The inward and the outward are built upon the same principles. What is not clear here is the field of existence: are the laws of geometry pertinent to the world as it is, or are they pertinent to the world as we perceive it, that perception, potentially at least, being conditioned by the structural principles of thought, thus accounting for the ideal alignment? There is a similar vagueness in a number of Rabinowitch’s observations, a folding together of the objective and the ontological.
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