Quadrum

Robert Grosvenor, whose formative years coincided with those of the leading American Minimalist sculptors Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris, is somewhat of an outsider even among his peers. Yet, they share an essentially structuralist disposition. Unlike phenomenology, Structuralism (which gained popularity in the United States through the films of Alain Resnais, and the writings of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag in the 1960s) does not render the world as it appears, but inves tigates its functionality. Barthes defined structuralist activity as a "controlled succession of a certain number of mental operations" whose goal it is "to reconstruct an 'object' in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of func- tioning (the 'functions') of this object. Grosvenor's sculpture replaces essence in art with presence and place; his work relies on the void, and the space around it, a space that since the Renaissance has been seen as distinct and unrelated to the art object. Proceeding from Brancusi's Bird in Space (1919), which treats the pedestal as an essential part of the sculpture, object-based art interacts with the space it occupies, to the extent that even the surrounding architectural space becomes an intrinsic part of it. Unlike mainstream Minimalism, Grosvenor's sculptures dispense with the reductiveness and intellectual gravity of that period. His objects are playful, capricious, or mischievously thoughtful. They are dynamic rather than inert. Grosvenor's structuralist attitude conveys a purely sensuous immediacy. He seems more concerned with what Japanese linguist Toshihiko Izutsu called the *fundamental magic of meaning."? It embeds the pleasant surprise of the unknown into the semantic constitution of his objects, recognizing that the objects of our daily life are unanalyzed, indistinguishable, and blurred in mean- ing, and surrounded by an aura of impressions, emotions, and expectations. In 1972, Grosvenor began to work with massive solid wood beams, which he would carefully break and either display in two parts or put back together by invisibly bracing the pieces with steel underneath. As Joseph Masheck pointed out, these fractured beams relate to Robert Smithson's ideas about entropy: "Smithson, in Partially Buried Woodshed, stopped when the roof beam broke... Grosvenor's works begin with the fracture of the beam Grosvenor himself more pragmatically links the origin of those works to his practice of drawing with tape: I was moving a lot of tape around in my drawings and slightly changing the direction of the tapes. Masking tape has a way of tearing or breaking that suggested this could be done with a wood beam. In this particular piece there is a break, a saw cut and a break. Grosvenor's works created since the 1990s have proven oven him to be one of the most intriguing American artists working today. While his early sculptures deal primarily with gravity and tension within given architectural structures, these more recent installations combine his characteristic material giddiness with a felicitously roguish wit that performs its semantic magic in the artist's reticent fashion. Grosvenor's Untitled (1997) consists of rough-hewn boulders embedded in concrete, evocative of suburban garden walls. On the left side, two glass spheres-one blue, the other green and each resembling a bowling ball-are propped on top of the wall. On the right, a large antenna-like structure made of steel rods rests on its side. However, the artist's works are not intended to glorify or make fun of suburban culture. In fact, Untitled (1997) was partially inspired by a wall Grosvenor saw in Aruba. The wall was newly built but made to look like time had caused part of the wall to sink: The slumped part of the wall. It was so curious. Sometimes in New England this happens over a period of time but here I could see that it was built in. That was my starting point. Albatrun (2002) is a large, flat, vertical leaflike shaped sculpture, punctured with two symmetrical holes, that stands upright on a large base. It is accom- panied, at some distance, by a set of steel rods. While more contemplative than his preceding works, it is no less obfuscating. Albatrun is Grosvenor's most "classically modern" sculpture and seems indebted to Brancusi's formal compositions. Despite its quirkiness and the artist's unusual choice of materi- als, the sculpture evokes Brancusi's "four-sidedness": as in Brancusi's later sculptures, Grosvenor's sculpture does not have a distinct "front" or "back"; rather all four sides are designated equally. In his installations, Grosvenor creates a space that is in-between-neither recognizable nor unknown, neither familiar nor strange-not unlike the ever- sprawling suburban spaces between cities and the countryside. At first, his sculptures, objects, and arrangements don't quite add up. They are vaguely identifiable, yet nothing is quite right. Grosvenor's labored arrangements are not assembled from found readymades-most of the elements are fabricated deliberately by the artist, and while the odd familiarity of his objects and structures is clearly intentional, they are always modified, stylized, or "upgraded" to a different logical position. This temporary abduction or sus- pension of logic enables the artist to create a cognitive space of anomaly, near familiarity, and surprise. Accompanied by some kind of explanatory meaning, it is then refitted into an organized conceptual pattern, thus creating something new each time, as if for the first time.
Text written by Curator Klaus Ottmann for the exhibition catalog.