UDBO - Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects

CLAIRE LIEBERMAN

UDBO UNIDENTIFIED DANGEROUS BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS

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CLAIRE LIEBERMAN

CLAIRE LIEBERMAN

CLAIRE LIEBERMAN

UDBO UNIDENTIFIED DANGEROUS BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS

MASSEY KLEIN GALLERY

CLAIRE LIEBERMAN has always had an expansive view of what sculpture can be—not only conceptually but

also in terms of its materials and processes. I

can’t think of anyone else who’s managed to find

furthermore clarified the purpose of this carving in one of his poems: Sì come per levar, donna, si

pone / in pietra alpestra e dura / una viva figura: Just as it is, my lady, by removing / that one places into

an aesthetic justification for Jell-O, for instance.

the hard and alpine stone / a living figure. Note

(in my experience) have been the instances

activity of painting as opposed to sculpture, thereby

Less unusual, certainly, have been her efforts to integrate video into sculpture, but fairly rare

where, as with some of Lieberman’s work, it’s clear that the video has been subsumed into a sculptural framework, rather than sculpture

(or, perhaps more accurately, objects) having been incorporated into a video installation.

Maybe that’s because at heart, Lieberman is a

sculptor in the most traditional sense. She is that

rarest of creatures in the twenty-first century, a carver of marble. And as such she might well

nod in accord with Michelangelo himself, who in a

famous letter declared, Io intendo scultura quella che si fa per forza di levare: I understand sculpture as what we do by means of taking away—that

is, by carving—as opposed to picture-making, quella che si fa per via di porre, what’s done by

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way of adding material. The Florentine sculptor

that si pone, one places, is a form of the same verb porre, to place, that he had used to describe the cleverly intimating that this activity of removal, sculptural carving, is a subtler and more effective way of “placing,” that is, adding something to the stone.

And what is it that the sculptor adds to the stone in taking part of its substance away through the act

of carving? Michelangelo’s answer: life. The carver does not merely depict a figure but imbues it with

life. And when I say that Lieberman is a sculptor

in the traditional sense, I am referring to her use

of carving to give life to the inanimate. Her work may seem untraditional in that what she carves

are not figures; rather than images of the human form, they represent objects. And yet we can feel that these objects breathe, that they have a pulse,

that they are alive. Consider, for instance, her black

subtly phallic shaft that emerges from a hole in the

rather an organic being, perhaps a seed harboring

energy to it, an apparent impetus to movement:

marble Radio: Look at how subtly its curves convey the feeling that this is not a mechanism, but a nascent existence and preparing to burst open

with it; the object’s surface suggests this invisible welling force within. Hi Speed is more obviously organic—it reminded me of all the unfamiliar

produce I used to see in the local shops when I lived in Chinatown—and yet it possesses a quality

main object—or should we see this rod, rather, as plunging into it? In any case, there is an inner life. That’s what makes these contrary objects— blunt and refined, organic and mechanical, succulent

and adamantine, seductive and warlike—so unequivocally sculptural.

—BARRY SCHWABSKY

of animation in excess of any mere vegetable in the market stall: Looking at it, I kept thinking it was

about to flop around on its pedestal like a fish, so lively is it.

Admittedly, many of the sculptures in the “UDBO

Playground” group that includes Radio and Hi Speed are far from organic in form. Big Sonar,

for instance, is a strange device resembling an

oversized top, or perhaps some sort of loudspeaker—though not, it seems, any of the sonar

BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and coeditor

there is a hint of the liveliness that Michelangelo

poems, Trembling Hand Equilibrium; and a new collection of essays,

transmitters currently available, if a hasty

Google search is to be trusted. But even here,

recognized as the carver’s goal, if only in the

of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include: The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present; a collection of

Heretics of Language. He has contributed essays to books and catalogues on artists such as Henri Matisse, Alighiero Boetti, Jessica Stockholder, and Alex Katz, among many others.

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FLOWER 2017 black marble 13.5" x 13" x 12" 6

BIG SONAR 2017 black marble 22" x 11.5" x 18" 8

RADIO 2017 black marble 10.5" x 8.5" x 6.5" 10

STAR FLEET 2017 black marble 23" x 14.75" x 11.25" 12

GRENADE WITH FLOWERS 2017 black marble 14" x 11" x 11" 14

UNIDENTIFIED DANGEROUS BEAUTIFUL OBJECT 2015 black marble 12" x 6" x 6" 16

SPHERE XX 2017 black marble 13" x 12" x 12" 18

HI SPEED 2017 black marble 12" x 7" x 7" 20

BLACK MARBLE GRENADE X 2017 black marble 13" x 10" x 7.75" 22

UDBO PLAYGROUND installation view 24

UDBO PLAYGROUND installation view 26

SERIOUS PLAY:

CLAIRE LIEBERMAN’S UNIDENTIFIED DANGEROUS BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS

I can think of few sculptors at work today who

Lieberman is not an abstract artist. Each of

subject of a recent show at the Massey Lyuben

moment the sculptor pulls back from that

have a greater respect for their materials or their craft than Claire Lieberman. She was the

Gallery. The center of the gallery was dominated

by nine sculptures carved from single blocks of black marble and placed waist high on white

pedestals. The daunting regimentation of their

arrangement in rows of three by three lent a

sense of high seriousness. Together they formed UDBO Playground, in which UDBO stands for

Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects.

Unlike so many contemporary artists, more concerned with the message of their work than

with its material or form, Lieberman rejoices in

the sheer, irreducible objecthood of her works, and that enthusiasm is infectious. It is hard to stand near them, each about the size of a large

watermelon, without wanting to engage them— against one’s better instincts and art world

decorum—in some tactile way, to revel in their

absolute smoothness or even to lift them in order to assess density.

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these nine works suggests something that might exist in the real world. But at the last

hint of familiarity to render the objects alien and inscrutable. The title, UDBO Playground, provides some clue as to how we should

interpret them. They are indeed beautiful objects that resist identification. At the same time, a

sense of danger lurks about them. In addition

to their unyielding density, several of them resemble grenades or the sort of generic bomb that might explode in a vintage Looney Tunes cartoon.

That association brings us to the other component of these works, the element of child’s play, but

with little of its presumptive innocence. Often these objects recall the little metal objects in a Monopoly set or the trinkets that one might attach to a bracelet. In this respect they playfully

resemble schematic flowers or children’s tops.

Only one, shaped like a gourd, suggests something organic rather than machine made. All of them have been burnished to a degree of superhuman

smoothness, although one work—a sort of oblong

of danger—often resembling guns—with a sense

that enliven its surface.

few feet away.

orb—does betray a few fleeting, consoling glimpses

of rough stone on several of the protruding bosses

What is Ms. Lieberman up to in these UDBOs? In

of inscrutability and of play. Their spectral fragility

played off against the density of the stone objects a

—JAMES GARDNER

part she is invoking the inveterate game of the Minimalists as she plays with scale in tiny trinkets

enlarged to the size of mid-sized mammals. At the same time, and more importantly, she derives from Surrealism an appreciation of the dreamlike

strangeness of her objects, at once present and familiar yet inscrutably elusive, as well. And

yet, overriding all of that, I suspect, is a deeper

reverence for the pure materiality of the stone and also for that transcendental quality that

stone, with its awesome permanence, holds for us evanescent creatures of flesh and blood.

While the nine objects in UDBO Playground made

up the core of this show, it also included several of

the artist’s prints and blown-glass objects. These latter, in particular, share thematic elements with

the stone sculptures. They combine an element

JAMES GARDNER is an American art and culture critic based

in NYC and Buenos Aires. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and The British Spectator. He was the art critic at the New York Post and wrote architecture criticism for The New York Observer, before serving as the architecture critic at the now defunct New York Sun.

He now writes for The Real Deal Magazine, The Weekly Standard,

and Antiques. The author of six books, Gardner’s most recent book is The Louvre: A History.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PUBLISHERS Massey Klein Gallery and Claire Lieberman

TEXTS Barry Schwabsky James Gardner

DESIGN Roberta Melzl

PHOTOGRAPHY Ken Kashian, Bojune Kwan, Malcolm Varon

© 2018 Massey Klein Gallery and Claire Lieberman All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without written permission of the publishers.

Images © Claire Lieberman Essay © Barry Schwabsky Article © James Gardner This article was first published at artcritical.com on February 4, 2018 and is reproduced by kind permission.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-692-12825-1