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n a sprawling mesa in Topanga Canyon, flush with chaparral and oak, Nancy Rubins’s elephantine, cascading sculpture Our Friend Fluid Metal (2014) rests atop a massive concrete pad. When first presented, at Gagosian on West 21st Street, the work undulated outward from the white wall, grasping and stretching into space while seeming to collapse ceiling and ground in the capacious gallery. Here at Rubins’s California studio, the collision of rust and paint, of carousel-horse legs and cartoon-turtle grins, contorts and thrusts against the hot pale-blue sky and the rippling topography. Out of doors, with its heavy base on full display (in a gallery that base would hide behind a wall), Our Friend Fluid Metal reveals its mechanics full tilt. Made through Rubins’s long-tested method of using tension cables to rig her objects, their clusters building off a system of T-bars that protrude like branches from a central arm, the work is a dense bricolage of coiled metal, of punctured limbs and heads, all gesturing out to the hills and trees. Our Friend Fluid Metal and its smaller companion works marked a departure for Rubins, who had for years been largely occupied with her formidable series of suspended canoes. Comprised of decommissioned playground equipment—spring-boun cing rockets and cartoon animals that had seen years of use, rust, and repainting—these new sculptures had a specificity that at first proved challenging for Rubins. They sat on the property for two years until she felt ready to deploy them. Recognizing that their “objectness was irreversible,” she finally penetrated what she called their “pop-object quality” to see that the material they were made of was itself at a critical cusp in its life span. The same thick aluminum that made up the airplane parts of her earlier sculptures was evident here, as if recuperated from postwar scrap-metal heaps, brought to 60
life by a surge of playground-building, then abandoned as junk some seventy years later. With an archaeologist’s eye, Rubins came to see each of these forms as time stamped, standing just at the threshold of disuse and abandon before the aluminum was again melted down. With this attention to the material’s potency—to the history it wears on its surface—the artist then constructed each work as a dense composition of form, color, and line, making the playground character begin to disappear into the voluminous whole. If Rubins saw a historical connection between her airplane and playground parts, the evolution of the Our Friend series typifies her larger practice, where disparate bodies of work not only coexist but are bound within systems of continua. This interconnectedness—which seems to touch all facets of her work—is visible both in and outside the studio. In the studio building this summer, I saw multiple ongoing projects sharing space: the sizable, meticulously finished Monochrome maquettes; object studies rendered in wood or epoxy; and clusters of tables together holding a mass of graphite drawings. On the sides of the studio are loading doors through which the occasional breezy gust comes in, rustling the more fragile of the objects inside. Across the property, older work is scattered alongside new, along with vestiges of some sculptures by the artist’s late husband, Chris Burden. In addition to Rubins’s and Burden’s respective studio buildings, the rolling land is dotted with concrete pads, rigging armatures, sheds, and the like—the necessities required for the monumental production involved in constructing works at Rubins’s characteristic scale. On the mesa, one can imagine the marking of time by the spread of buildings and sculptures, and by the continuous transformation of the land. The dramatic vistas, and the machinery that supports Rubins’s practice, together imply an ecosystem that
Out of doors, with its heavy base on full display (in a gallery that base would hide behind a wall), Our Friend Fluid Metal reveals its mechanics full tilt.