Judy Pfaff: life and limb Art in America, Oct, 1998 by Nancy Princenthal In Judy Pfaff's biggest and most ambitious work to date, a 1995 installation called cirque, Cirque at the Philadelphia Convention Center, nine miles of metal tubing soar through 700,000 square feet of space. Glass globes twinkle far overhead, suspended from the 100-foot ceiling of the shell of the old Reading Terminal (which was said to be the world's biggest room when it was built in 1892). Gleaming lines of gold and blue aluminum define eddies of air up near the roof. Metal coils expand and contract, like the tentacles of a giant squid, while smaller arabesques suggest the shimmer of a school of fish. The work was partly inspired by the ceiling of New York's Grand Central Station, the influence of which is most strongly felt in the blue- and yellow-tinted glass spheres that are set, like jewels, into patterns suggesting constellations. As the title indicates, circuses are also germane. But what the installation evokes most powerfully is an experience of being on the ocean bottom, while light and life play far above, near the water's surface, perhaps dimly echoed by deep-sea bioluminescence. Says Pfaff, on the other hand, "I didn't want to make a potted plant." A sculptor who has been doing installation work for 25 years, Pfaff is now the United States representative at the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal. Among major commissions in development is an indoor/outdoor project for a medical insurance office building in Portland, Ore. Pfaff's work has always been exuberant, lush and hospitable to the language of poetry and music. But it is based on a very no-nonsense approach to making art. Visual effects don't interest her much; causes are more her style. "Looking at anything long enough," she says, "gives it meaning it doesn't deserve." Like any good student of Post-Minimalism, Pfaff is interested in what happens if things are poured, gouged, pulled, punctured, striated; she favors first judgments and immediate results. But if serendipity is fine, hard work is what counts. The sculpture may not be centered, but it is always composed. Broad violations of existing architectural structure and formal protocol are balanced with delicacy and concern for detail at every scale. Witness Round Hole, Square Peg, a fall 1997 installation at Andre Emmerich Gallery that transformed a usually sedate space into a scene of considerable visual mayhem--"more mischief than humor," Pfaff says. As she has done almost from the beginning of her career (with a brief hiatus in the later 1980s, during which time she made discrete objects), Pfaff took over the gallery floor to ceiling and wall to wall. A rectilinear metal structure echoed the proportions of one boxy room, providing a cube-within-a-cube that framed linear improvisations in a variety of mediums. Here and elsewhere in the gallery, there were plaster and latex puddles on the floor, rippled like still water disturbed by a dropped stone. Bands of horizontal lines, akin to musical staffs, were drawn directly on the walls and remained visible beneath cascades of watery paint. And the walls themselves were perforated, with holes drilled right through them at various heights and in several configurations--single, paired, in threes; they seemed to be riffs on the peepholes sometimes provided in fencing at construction sites. Even the freestanding wall that screens the big 57th Street windows was punctured, which was, Pfaff says, an important motive for the installation. Originally, she intended to remove that wall altogether, opening up the gallery's central axis to the "river" of traffic on the busy street and thereby providing, as backdrop, a readymade moving frieze. It is relevant to the analogy between river and street that Pfaff's main studio, in Kingston, N.Y., is an old tugboat factory, situated on a canal which leads into the Hudson River. Wide windows just feet from the shore at water level make the big workspace seem as much boat as building. The sensed threat of flooding--the easily imagined moment at which the water's slow grace might become violent aggression--seems to underlie the rhythms of Pfaff's work. And if floodwaters evoke violently uprooted vegetation and beached jetsam, the analogy is especially apt. The most dramatic gesture Pfaff made at Emmerich was to import a substantial portion of a massive tree into the gallery, suspending it sideways and causing metal pipes and tubes to sprout from its trunk. At its nether end, fine, hairlike root-ends hung frail and naked. Elsewhere--overhead in the entry hall, and in the transeptlike space at the gallery's rear--twisted metal pipes emerged from tree trunks like water sprouts in springtime. There seems to have been a powerful metaphor at work here, which extends to its roots the notion that the freely drawn line--or the creative urge itself--is the natural child of organic growth. At the moment, Pfaff's use of trees finds her in good company. Robert Lobe, Mel Kendrick, Gillian Jagger and Zoe Leonard are among the artists who have recently used big portions of trees, extended by various metal prostheses and body casts, to exaggerate a symbolic condition: even when still in the ground, trees link the quick and dead, exposure and concealment, as well as often spanning several human generations and otherwise transcending the scale of simple mortal toil. But Pfaff, who has been working with trees at least since 1980 (when large branches appeared in an installation at Holly Solomon Gallery), is alone in expressing the literal subversiveness trees can exert, as when the slow growth of their tender roots heaves up whole blocks of concrete sidewalk. That kind of wanton, seemingly effortless exercise of spatial prerogative permeates Pfaff's installations. At Emmerich it ranged from the poured plaster slumped unceremoniously in a corner to the staffs ruled meticulously on the walls to the sight lines drilled right through them. As Pfaff recalls a little ruefully, her work was once identified with the glittery grunginess of the early '80s, and in particular with a loose affiliation briefly known as Energism. The nighttime frolics of a downtown club scene and, by day, Canal Street's odd-lot trade provided social reference and local resources; characteristic materials included colored Lucite, Mylar and miscellaneous dry goods. Pfaff herself, however, thought of her early work as "tumultuous, and dark." She recalls that when she began, the reigning process-oriented sculptors promoted colorlessness, factuality and anti-illusionism; Pfaff, who started out as a painter (she studied with Al Held, who remains a good friend), simply sought a "permission that seemed, at the time, forbidden in sculpture." If her work has grown more open and airy since, its appetite for space, taste for detail and tendency, generally, toward breakneck visual profusion still find company among works tied to an esthetic of souped-up trash--the installations of Jason Rhoades, for instance. Perhaps closest are the roughhewn installations of Jessica Stockholder, which like Pfaff's are deeply involved with painting and with the mechanics of relating abstract form to existing structures. Stockholder, though, is more concerned with color, often as static mass; Pfaff these days is devoted above all to line and, specifically, to moving linear gesture. Hans Namuth's famous film of Pollock working on glass, shot from below so his gestures take the shape of dance, provides a kind of background music: in an interview more than 10 years ago, Pfaff said, "By going after a certain speed traditionally reserved for painters, I'm reaching for a crossing over of ideas and a weaving of thinking and making."(1) It is a risky way to work. The Kingston studio has recently been dominated by a large mock-up of the project Pfaff is now completing for the O.D.S. building in Portland. Metal limbs extending from the trunk of a dead 70-foot-tall tree will penetrate the building's curved glass facade, in a melding of the organic and the artificial that Pfaff describes as being like a giant ikebana arrangement. Photographs (by Pfaff's husband, Rob van Erve) and sculptural elements will be situated in the building's lobby and other interior spaces. Sunlight on active water, shadows cast by moving branches and the elusive contours of torqued shapes are among the reciprocal movements between fluid line and static form that the O.D.S. installation will explore. But beware mistaking this for the stuff of revery. Few artists make sculpture as wide-awake as Pfaffs. (1.) Wade Saunders, "Talking Objects: Interviews with Ten Younger Sculptors," Art in America, November 1985, p. 131. Judy Pfaff's Round Hole, Square Peg was on view at Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York [Sept. 4-Oct. 15, 1997]; a selection of graphic works was shown at Galerie Deux, Tokyo [May 23-Aug. 5, 1998]. Pfaff is currently representing the U.S. at the Sao Paulo Bienal [Oct. 3.Dec. 13]. COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group