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.
Richmond
Claire Lieberman
Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University
Containing elements of childhood play, both sensuous and sensual pleasure, and a silent though pervasive anthropomorphism, Claire Lieberman’s Walking thru JELLO, half three-dimensional comic strip and half nonlinear parable, slyly considers the postmodern critique of the pure aesthetic object. Concurrent with this is a selfexamination of the artist herself and her intentions—a natural task for this theory-savvy artist, but also an imperative one since Lieberman’s formal training is grounded in traditional stone carving techniques and underpinned by certain tenets of high Modernism. Addressing the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of stone in contemporary sculp
ture (Sculpture, February 1998), Lieberman asks: “…in an era in which the absence of material in art is of equal or greater importance to physical presence, how then is it possible to use stone persuasively, to pry it away from conventional associations, and to evolve compelling engagement pristine “white room,” Walking thru JELLO appears like a sci-fi moderne landscape. Comprised of five alabaster sculptures, three identical 13-inch white televisions, four white studio lamps, and two black VCRs in plain sight towards the back, the installation spreads out across the floor with
Duplicating the smooth and elastic plumpness of water balloons and breasts, the five alabaster sculptures are oriented horizontally and carefully posi-tioned—four of them directly lit (and warmed) by a corresponding lamp. Motionless and serene, there is a curious suggestion
that transcends the obvious?” Walking thru JELLO is one answer to this question, compelling through its visual dialogue, which continually loops and reloops intersecting strains of irony, physical beauty and pleasure, and critical theory. The work is refreshingly nonpolemical, and it possesses an overall tone not unlike that evoked by Duchamp’s sense of structured whimsy.
As an installation that occupies half the length and the entire width of the Anderson Gallery’s nothing higher than the tops of the portable TV sets. There is a sense of design in the overall placement of the objects, yet there is a welcome casual quality too, derived from the intractability of the TV, lamp, and VCR cords.
of consciousness: reverie, self-reflection, and the possibility that two or three of the sculptures are watching TV. Superbly crafted, their humble elegance references Brancusi’s ovoids—icons of idealized form, of Modernism’s search for truth and its parallel movement toward abstraction and formal purity.
Amid these stone muses, two different, though related, videos continually play on the three televisions. The subjects of both are deep-red Jello forms that correspond exactly in shape and scale to the five alabaster sculptures. Both videos document a sleek, beautifully veined foot—appre-hensive one moment, engaged in unrestrained indulgence the next—as it explores the skin and marrow of each Jello balloon/ breast. Sequences of alternating slow motion and real-time shots, the videos are seductive and oddly thrilling as celebrations of touching, pressing, petting, and violation. Testing the breaking point of the taut and fragile waxy veneer, one scene reveals the foot poised in anticipation of penetrating the surface and interior of one of the forms. Another segment shows a gleeful foot speckled with Jello fragments, rhythmically stretching and tapping its toes in deep satisfaction like a jubilant dog wagging its tail.
While the sensationalism of the videos tends to dominate the attention of the viewer, the alabaster sculptures linger in thought. One becomes engaged in discovering the connection between the video imagery that is experiential (though purely visual) and the solemn stone forms that are idealized; although there are no fixed answers, myriad questions and possibilities emerge. How would one interpret the sculptures without the presence of the videos? And vice versa. Is one an ancillary object of the other? Is there a hierarchy of importance here?
Initially, the video imagery and the alabaster sculptures seem to be distinct elements (despite sharing certain attributes); but eventually the activity on the video screens becomes a mirror for the musings and dreams of the stone forms—perhaps a kind of projection of the sculptures’ fantasies or id. In this context, Lieberman establishes a narrative not unlike that of Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, where in the scale of perfection and imperfection, longing, desire, and even covetousness can point us in the right direction: a locale where the experiential, the complexity of details, the human, the flesh are the ideal.
—Paul Ryan