by Cynthia Nadelman
A vivid thread of visual lyricism and near gaiety revolving around color and form runs through Claire Lieberman’s work—sometimes in spite of itself. She combines disparate elements in a way already familiar from the work of Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik, with the addition of an I Love Lucy side strictly her own. Just as the general effect of Beuys’s and Paik’s output can seem greater than the parts (or sometimes the other way around), Lieberman’s work hovers on the edge between masterful orchestration and the objecthood of individual components. In each of these cases, though, there is an element of entertainment—from Beuys’s idiosyncratic poetry to Paik’s jumpy, electronicage Busby Berkeleyisms, to Lieberman’s colorful referentiality.
In Lieberman’s installations from the 1990s, trailing electrical cords connecting the video monitors and VCRs, which were interspersed with various other elements, figured prominently. This trailing became a signature motif and one that created its own odd form of beauty, especially in combination with some of the other elements that defined different pieces. In Sleds (1994), a poignant update to Beuys’s use of oldfashioned European models like the one that facilitated his rescue in World War II, Lieberman used shiny aluminum, flyingsaucertype sleds in combination with organic shapes carved from marble and video monitors showing the contents of refrigerators.
Sleds, like Beuys’s work, is about sustenance and communication (the sleds here look a bit like satellite dishes), but, above all, it is about a learned vocabulary that lets us see such things as art. She upped the ante in Targets and Pools (1996), in which mandalalike stovetop heating coils were arranged on a floor strewn with video monitors, more carved marble sculptures, and snailing electrical cords that echoed the linearity of the heating coils. In light of our worrisome dependence on greater and greater amounts of electricity, all this exposed interconnectivity takes on added resonance. Whatever the intellectual intent tendered, though, how could we not be seduced by the visuals?
Riversponge (1996), a series of 10 buoylike, perforated alabaster balls that were placed on poles in a tidal river, continued this pattern of riffing on roundness. The work was installed as part of “Convergence,” an annual outdoor sculpture festival in Providence, Rhode Island. These porous balls of soft alabaster would, of course, eventually erode, but that impermanence served to play with notions of time and traditional stone sculpture. Riversponge made us think about the sitespecificity of eons of historical sculpture, as well as works of more recent vintage—to say nothing about the natural incursions visited upon outdoor art and other structures.
As Lieberman has traveled the route from traditional stonecarver (though she has always had an eye to context and making that occupation new) to a greater sense of inclusion in her pieces, she has also let the content of her videos
come out into the threedimensional world. For example, she has moved from using a dense form of Jell-O as an element to be walked through and roughed up in the video segments of Walking Through Jell-O (1999)—the piece included sensuous marble sculptures that mimicked the eventually destroyed onscreen Jell-O forms—to using it as a sculptural element en plein air. Furthermore, she has run with the vivid colors of Jell-O—primarily red and orange—and begun to work with stone of similar hues. Rather than limiting her carving to the old handson, direct, and in her version frankly referential tradition, she has begun to create blatantly trompe l’oeil, seemingly machinemade pieces that mimic the forms made in Jell-O molds.
Sticking with the food metaphor— as well as the exploration of roundness and ring or toroid shapes—various elements in her new pieces are reminiscent of tomato aspic, salmon mousse, and candy Lifesavers (white marble for peppermint, red Jell-O for cherry) in color and form. For “Convergence 2002,” Lieberman created Cookie Bench, a white marble sculpture in the form of a flutededged cookie, with Jell-O as the jammy center. The cookie makes further appearances in the photoetchings Cookie Target I and II (both 2003).
Various new installations have emerged from this suggestive cornucopia. In Lifesavers (2002) and the brandnew Poppies (2003)—the former debuting at the University of Alaska at Anchorage and featured last September at the Pamela Auchincloss Project Space in New York, and the latter first shown at Chiaroscuro Gallery in Santa Fe— Lieberman has been preoccupied with a new way of inserting video. (In Poppies, she actually abandons the food motif, at least on the surface, though the shape of the eponymous flower resembles the multipetaled cookies of recent pieces.) She has abandoned the telltale electrical cords and embedded video screens within white Plexiglas tables, through which the video imagery penetrates the holes of outsize Lifesavers or flowers, alternately made of colorful marble or Jell-O placed on top of the tables. Color and an emphasis on smooth surface have come to the fore.
These new works are sleek and selfcontained, not to say hermetic, in outward appearance. They seem to lock us ever more subtly into the electronic grid on which we are so dependent. Poppies even employs a gridded, tictactoelike format. Yet the presence of the selfdestructing gelatin and the video content of these pieces—including water swirling in drains and breaking up round cookies in the process—are constant reminders of vulnerability and flux. In the case of Lifesavers, this, of course, brings us “full circle” to the original meaning and purpose of lifesavers as rescue flotation devices—a purpose mordantly undercut here by the use of stone and gelatin.
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Meanwhile, Jell-O shades have migrated into a series of hotsculpted glass guns that Lieberman has been making for the past few years. Fantastic, impractical weapons based on a new generation of water guns have morphed from transparent, icylooking crystal to multicolored, gelatinouslooking glass. With barrels that turn into champagne glasses or twist around as in a cartoon, these are some of Lieberman’s most whimsical—albeit biting—productions yet. From alabaster to Jell-O to glass, with a running element of timebased (and constantly repeating) video, Lieberman’s individuated and interrelated parts add up to an increasingly momentous and meaningful sum.
Cynthia Nadelman is a writer living in New York.