Terry Adkins / Jane Dickson / Robin Kahn / Susan Leopold / Christian Marclay/ Matthew McCaslin / Sara Pasti & Artist / Neighbors / Hope Sandrow / Glenn Seator / John Yau

Catalogue made possible by Adriana Mnuchin

Hope Sandrow, Nature Monochrome IX : Reconstruction, 1995, Material Matters, Silver print fragments, papyrus paper, twine, framed photographs, cardboard boxes, 15’ x 10’ x 10’

MATERIAL MATTERS: Art in the Anchorage

For the past twenty-two years Creative Time has been dedicated to bringing artists’ voices to unlikely and even abandoned public spaces.  A prime example is the massive vaulted chambers of The Brooklyn Anchorage, a site that was transformed from municipal public storage space into a premiere exhibition locale more than thirteen years ago.  Our annual Art in the Anchorage exhibition has thus provided an appropriate context for the creation of the exhibition, MATERIAL MATTERS, a large-scale installation exploring the roles artists play in the transformation and revitalization of neighborhoods.

Artists have often ventured into neglected, even notorious neighborhoods to turn rundown spaces into studios and homes. They have taken very real risks, invested countless hours of labor and dollars to improve their environments and through their hard work they have enhanced their neighborhoods. As a result, thousands of artists have been rewarded with costly lawsuits and the menacing threat of eviction. In response to this phenomena, MATERIAL MATTERS offers a poignant and thoughtful reflection on how displacement profoundly affects individual lives and cultural production.

Anne Pasternak, Executive Director, Creative Time

See Press below.

The Brooklyn Anchorage consists of huge cathedral-like spaces located inside the granite and brick base of the Brooklyn Bridge. An architectural wonder, the bridge inspired many early modernist artists and writers; among them the painter Joseph Stella, and the poets Hart Crane and Vladimir Mayakovsky. At the same time, the demographics of the area around the base of the Brooklyn Bridge have changed considerably from the days when the waterfront housed factories that manufactured, among other things, corrugated boxes and munitions, to the 1970s, when many artists began moving into the rundown factory buildings, empty warehouses.

Hope Sandrow, the curator of MATERIAL MATTERS and one of the artists who has worked in the exhibition, invited several artists to make work using cardboard boxes, something which had once been manufactured in abundance. Sandrow knowingly evoked the possibility that the piece could address the artist’s position in society; that artists were both discardable and good for transmitting something, and that art and life are inextricably linked. In Nature Monochrome IX, Hope Sandrow erects a column out of cardboard boxes, thus subverting the modernist ideal associated with Brancusi’s Endless Column. Instead of rising majestically toward the sky, Sandrow’s column rises precariously out of a haphazard pile of boxes, many of them open.

In the open boxes, the viewer sees large photographic images of a hand. The emulsion (or skin) has been peeled off. The artist doesn’t simply make images. Rather as Nature Monochrome IX suggests, the artist both constructs and peels away; the process of artistic creation is precarious. The toppled boxes remind us that we, as viewers, can intervene and destroy art. However, while Sandrow’s peeled photographs remind us that the process of creation includes an element of destruction, the toppled boxes serve to remind us that acts of intolerance and aggression produce only ruins.

John Yau, MATERIAL MATTERS, 1995