Rebecca Nemser

Bod­hisattvas with serene, all-embrac­ing smiles; gold­en flower bas­kets for car­ry­ing lotus petals to puri­fy a sacred space; rit­u­al bronze chimes adorned with pea­cocks. “Each arti­cle is incred­i­bly beau­ti­ful, but it’s only when all the arti­cles come togeth­er, evok­ing the pres­ence of the Bud­dha, that you can under­stand Bud­dhist art.”

These ancient bronzes, which have long since lost their gold­en gleam, are still numi­nous frag­ments of a van­ished world. One stat­ue of young man was recent­ly pulled out of a riv­er; his pale sea-green body is scratched and scarred; but he is still a love­ly appari­tion, remind­ing me of some lines from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”:
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suf­fer a sea change
Into some­thing rich and strange.”

Work­ing in bronze, that most ancient and endur­ing of mate­ri­als, JUDY MCK­IE’s work reveals the pow­er of art to con­sole and heal. Her Bird Foun­tain has the silent, soar­ing pres­ence of great mourn­ing mon­u­ments. “The water makes you feel calm and peaceful,” she says. “It’s nour­ish­ing. A life force.”

JOHN WILSON is a clas­si­cal­ly trained artist whose life’s work has been a search for endur­ing, spir­i­tu­al­ly charged images of African-Amer­i­cans. JOSEPH NORMAN weaves togeth­er all kinds of imagery into elab­o­rate com­po­si­tions that are ele­gant, yet full of feel­ing. “For both of these artists, art remains an impor­tant way to think about what it means to be human and to have an inner life.”

Bernd and Hilla Bech­er pho­tographed blast fur­naces, water tow­ers, pow­er sta­tions, and oth­er indus­tri­al struc­tures, which they called “anony­mous sculp­ture.” I thought of this show again when I first read W.G. Sebald’s books — mys­te­ri­ous, elu­sive, and strange­ly moving.

“When the “light prop” was set in motion for the first time in a small mechan­ics shop in 1930, I felt like the sor­cer­er’s appren­tice. The mobile was so star­tling in its coor­di­nat­ed motions and space artic­u­la­tions of light and shad­ow sequences that I almost believed in magic.”

All that we know of Greece has come to us in ruins–armless, head­less, fad­ed, fall­en, bro­ken, bat­tered, lost in trans­la­tion. What we have are frag­ments, frag­ments that have lost almost everything–except their poet­ry. But, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion, that poet­ry has nev­er lost its thrilling, vision­ary gleam.

A neon blue riv­er of light cross­es the stage on a diag­o­nal. A black moun­tain looms beyond, pierced by a stark white water­fall. The sculp­tor sits brood­ing on a rocky throne; an egg-shaped stone is pierced with a spear. Two Irenes enter, and lie on the ground, like stones. “You have killed my soul,” they cry. “I am an artist!” cries the sculp­tor. One Irene sits on the rock, like a stat­ue. “I was a human being too.”

His sculp­ture is like a very sophis­ti­cat­ed game of musi­cal chairs, where all the pieces come togeth­er for a moment of per­fect, pre­car­i­ous bal­ance. In his draw­ings, the char­coal keeps on danc­ing, long after the music stops.

His fal­cons are ele­gant objects, yet they are also birds of prey. They are chained to a perch, dream­ing of flight; per­fect­ly at rest, yet poised to spread their wings and reach for the sky. His art con­veys a sense of scrap­ing away and dis­card­ing every­thing that is not essen­tial — of trav­el­ling light, like a nomad, and soar­ing high, like a bird.

Sculp­tor JOHN UDVARDY sees the aes­thet­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties in an old whit­tled pad­dle or a forked birch branch, and he knows how to make a curve from a green sapling. But most of all, he brings to his mate­ri­als a feel­ing that every mark mat­ters: every stick, every thread, every shell, every bone.