Aaron Curry at Lincoln Center

 

With the completion of the renovation of much of its campus, Lincoln Center has returned to presenting sculpture on the main plaza. For the Fall season the Lincoln Center Art Committee, headed by Peter Kraus, commissioned Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Curry to create a series of sculptures for the space. The choice was made “with guidance from a Curatorial Advisory Working Group comprised of Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation; Nicholas Baume, Director, Public Art Fund; Thelma Golden, Director, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Christian Rattemeyer, Associate Curator, The Museum of Modern Art; Scott Rothkopf, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Philippe Vergne, Director, Dia Art Foundation.”

There are fourteen painted aluminum pieces of various heights and dimensions arranged around the fountain. The artist has stated that he “was immediately struck by the scale of the Plaza and its architecture. This led me to think about how I could engage the space, not compete with it, or try to overwhelm or obscure it, but rather activate it as an environment of sculpture. The concept of an interactive, almost performative installation began to develop. I became excited by the idea of placing several sculptures throughout the Plaza so that the visiting public could move among the works, experiencing them directly as part of the given environment. Giacometti’s unrealized project for Chase Manhattan Plaza is something of a touchstone here, but so are the designs for theater and ballet of Picasso and Matisse. It occurred to me that an arrangement of sculptures at Josie Robertson Plaza could echo what occurs on stage: the sculptures can be understood simultaneously as characters and as being the setting for some event.”

The artist himself was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1972 and received a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 2010 he was a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin. Curry is represented by the Michael Werner Gallery, which has branches in New York, London, and Berlin. If I list all these prestigious names and connections it is only to indicate the kind of institutional support that this site-specific installation, “Melt to Earth” (7 October 2013-6 January 2014), has supporting it. The biomorphic pieces are whimsical, even fun, but they in no way challenge the viewer or even demand thought.

They are basically flat aluminum plates, cut and painted; they look like crude paper cut-outs translated into metal with paint thrown on them. The bases are also flat. The works lack three-dimensionality; they could just as easily be wall-mounted pieces, And the paint, in the kinds of bright, indeed garish, colors of cartoons, emphasizes this flatness. In fact, the works could easily be stills from an animation. They are playful, easily legible as “art,” but to what purpose? They lack resonance, a sense of something beyond immediate pleasure. This is art by committee, I am afraid, like so much of the non-performance-based art shown at the various constituents of Lincoln Center. The celebrity artists, for instance, chosen for Gallery Met, whatever their talents, seem to produce inferior work for the space there; and they clearly have been chosen as much for name value as for their ability to create themed work. If the Art Committee wanted a celebrity, perhaps they should have considered Mark di Suvero, whose work both amuses and challenges. Or they could have chosen older artists of lesser fame, but no less importance, like Richard Nonas or Hans Van de Bovenkamp or Herbert Ferber. Such a lost opportunity.