Minimalist Sculpture In A Spacious Room: Poles, Lights And Lipstick Fill The Henry

Art review "Earths Grow Thick: Works after Emily Dickinson by Roni Horn," and "Simple Form," sculptures by Polly Apfelbaum, Cris Bruch, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Lachowicz, Roy McMakin and Rachel Whiteread, at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, through Feb. 1.

Now that the Henry Art Gallery has spent more than four months tweaking the skylights in its 6,000-square-foot South Gallery, the museum can get back to the business of showing artwork in the luxuriously spacious, barrel-ceilinged room.

The room was designed to showcase large or unwieldy work, and though none of the sculpture in the two shows that opened yesterday is especially large, some of it is unwieldy, metaphorically if not physically.

Minimalist sculpture by a new generation of thirty- and fortysomething sculptors is the focus of the two shows. Though minimalism first emerged in the 1960s and '70s in the highly reductive, abstract work of artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Agnes Martin, a second generation of cerebral, minimalist-minded artists came of age in the late 1980s and early '90s. The sculptures in these two shows were all created in this decade by artists who, by and large, have won significant honors in the art world. The fact that they are working in a minimalist vein well into the 1990s is one of the signals that this decade has yet to come up with a significantly new art aesthetic.

"Earths Grow Thick" is an exhibit of large (up to 6 feet long), aluminum, four-edged poles imprinted in black plastic with lines from Emily Dickinson poems. New Yorker Roni Horn says in her artist statement that she has been fascinated with Dickinson's life and poetry since Horn started reading the poems a few years ago while visiting Iceland. Horn writes that she is intrigued by Dickinson's animated imagery and blunt syntax, and Horn attempts, with varying results, to re-create the impact of Dickinson's syntax and imagery in her art work.

Horn also wants to force the viewer into a physical relationship with the poetry. To read it, the viewer has to walk around the poles, which lean like a giant child's set of pick-up sticks against the gallery walls. Reading the lines also requires cranking your head from side to side since the writing sometimes runs from top to bottom, sometimes from bottom to top.

Like several other contemporary female artists who have recently rediscovered Dickinson as a muse - artist Lesley Dill is known for writing Dickinson's poetry on dress-shaped paper sculpture - Horn is clearly moved by the Dickinsonian enigma of the flame burning white-hot within an icy, quotidian shell. Horn refers to that contradiction by placing the cool, sleekly designed poetry bars in stark, sparse arrangements. But anyone who doesn't read the artist's statement before entering the exhibit could be forgiven for believing that the show had yet to be installed.

This show was organized by the well-regarded Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and has already been on display at several East Coast university galleries, where critical praise, in general, has been enthusiastic. Horn herself is a widely acclaimed artist who has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as well as in Europe. She is one of the current young stars of contemporary sculpture.

Still, despite the cool, cerebral seriousness of purpose that permeates this show, it's difficult to feel much pleasure in the work. Though the stark arrangement of the poetry poles amply conveys the solitude in Dickinson's work, their shiny sleekness seems to sap the heat and sensuality out of Dickinson's phrases. And at a time when the thoughtfully written word is an endangered species, turning reading into an awkwardly physical exercise seems at odds with the spirit of Dickinson's wondrous poetry.

Post-minimalism continues in "Simple Form," a show of work by six sculptors, two of whom are from Seattle. The show was curated by Sheryl Conkelton, the Henry's senior curator, as a companion piece to Horn's exhibit. The two biggest names in this show are Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-born artist who died of AIDS in 1996, and Rachel Whiteread, an English artist who in 1993 received the Tate Gallery Turner Prize, one of England's most prestigious art awards.

The physicality of the Whiteread piece at the Henry makes it one of the most successful in the show. It is essentially 25 resin sculptures made by filling the space under 25 different chairs. Though they look at first sight like an inviting pod of amber and green stools, once you realize what they are they inevitably conjure comfy images of dust bunnies and slippers lurking in the forgotten netherworlds underneath furniture.

Gonzalez-Torres' piece is 12 long, snaking strings of light sockets outfitted with some 600 15-watt white bulbs. At the Henry the black rubber light strings have been hung in an arc over a stairway, creating a gateway of weirdly dim bulbs that altogether suggest either the entry to a hall of enlightenment or the doorway to a casino. Either way, the lights seem to be the artist's metaphor for life in America, which he has described as "a place of light, a place of opportunities," but also a place of risks, racism and injustice.

The wittiest piece in the show is a four-sided lipstick and wax sculpture by Rachel Lachowicz that is a direct reference to Richard Serra's famous, huge and heavy "House of Cards," a masterpiece of minimalist sculpture. Although Lachowicz's feminist take on Serra's big, metal, macho piece is obvious (and not all that interesting), the very idea that this 3 1/2-foot-tall mini-version of Serra's piece is partly made of fire-engine red lipstick is a delight. No woman can look at it without thinking of the messy little shards of lipstick that end up all over a lipstick tube if you put the cap on awkwardly. It's hard not to touch this piece.

The two Seattle artists in this show are Roy McMakin, an artist and furniture designer who is known more for designing the avant-garde furniture for the new Getty Center in Los Angeles than his Bauhaus-like fine art, and Cris Bruch. McMakin's piece in the Henry show is a 16-foot-long glass display table on which has been carefully arranged a landscape of white, wooden objects that look like children's toys made by a skilled woodworker. McMakin calls the piece "Alphabet Sketches," and the neatly arranged assemblage of pristine wooden shapes seems to be the outline for a utopia or 21st-century city. Bruch's engaging steel and brass sculptures that mimic organic forms, including something that looks like a fabulous fossil of a woolly mammoth tusk, are the most accessible works in the show.

Less appealing is the room-size array of bright fabric rectangles by New York artist Polly Apfelbaum. Commissioned for the Henry, the piece, according to the museum, is a reference to the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 film about political and social upheaval, "Zabriskie Point." The crushed velvet, tie-dyed fabric pieces on the top of duller fabric bits are meant to remind us of the turmoil of the 1970s and also to point out that such fabrics - and perhaps such social discord - are back in style. Unfortunately, the more likely reaction of most viewers will be that someone flung some fabric swatches around on the floor and that the Henry has neglected to clean then up.

Though these two shows will not leave every viewer satisfied that they have had an art experience, the Henry's mandate is to showcase challenging, contemporary art. And by filling the big South Gallery once again, the museum is doing just that.