ART-PREVIEW: Nancy Rubins-Fluid Space

Through sculptures assembled from discarded materials and graphite drawings that assume the appearance of liquid metal, Nancy Rubins transforms quotidian objects into artworks that exceed the sums of their parts. She explores the precariousness and limits of natural forces through large-format pieces with formidable psychological and physical presence.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Nancy Rubins presents her solo exhibition “Fluid Space”, the exhibition takes its name from the homonymous series (2019- in which  Rubins uses the same cast metal animals that appeared in her “Diversifolia” series (2016–18), now sliced into fragments that expose their seams and undersides, calling further attention to the shape-shifting potential of the metal itself. These quasi-organic structures bloom from tables and stools, recalling works such as “Table & Airplane Parts”  (1990–2011), which incorporate architectural foundations from which disparate elements emerge. In sculptures such as “Fizzy’s Nebuli” and “Noir’s Cluster” (both 2019), parts of the cast animals are bound together by webs of tensile cables, producing configurations that are no longer legible as fauna, reading instead as structures that approximate rosebuds or ivy tendrils. The sculptures’ titles also emphasize their correspondence with cosmic and cellular phenomena. In these and other works, Rubins testifies to her chosen materials’ resilience while also hinting at ongoing processes of change. Also on view are large-scale and smaller unmounted drawings on paper, fixed directly to the wall in Rubins’s customary manner. She covers the entire surface of the thick paper with graphite, producing a dense, shiny, steel-gray expanse that bears traces of her hand and gives the impression of bottomless depth. In the larger drawings, multiple sheets of paper are combined and folded so that they arc away from the wall, echoing the forms of some sculptures.

Nancy Rubins attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she completed a BFA in 1974. Although she majored in painting, she also worked a great deal in clay, and was particularly impressed by the work of Robert Arneson, a visiting artist who headed the graduate ceramics program at the University of California, Davis. Rubins entered the program at UC Davis after graduating from MICA, completing her MFA in 1976. She relished the relatively small and quiet working environment at Davis, especially “the northern California funk aesthetic, which, to me, seemed like a kind of funny and vulgar answer to Pop. I liked the earthiness and rawness of it.” Although Rubins would never produce the figurative work favored by Arneson and others associated with California Funk, she fully absorbed the group’s insubordinate spirit. After completing her degree, Rubins stayed in Northern California for a few years, but by the late 1970s she was drawn to New York. The assemblages she made at that time, domestic appliances (fans, clocks, TVs, and toasters) embedded in walls and mushrooming towers of concrete, were shown in both commercial and nonprofit venues. A teaching opportunity brought Rubins back west in 1982, when she joined the faculty at UCLA, and she has remained in southern California ever since. Her colleagues at the university included the mischievous conceptual sculptor Charles Ray; her future husband, Chris Burden, who was then known for grueling performance work; and Paul McCarthy, a master of scabrous videos and installations. These associations proved instrumental, but as at Davis, Rubins maintained a vigorous independence. While still a student, Rubins experimented with a kind of sculptural theater, for instance by using wet clay (slip) to stick coffee cups to suspended tarps; the cups popped off as the slip dried. In another project from 1976, she used a small electric fan to create a work that involved graphite-covered paper spattered with red paint. This and other related experiments introduced a way of using paper that Rubins returned to in the 1990s, making works that are hybrids of sculpture and drawing. Porous boundaries between disciplines, and the fluidity of the mediums themselves—the tendency of wet clay to slide and slump—are qualities that appeal to Rubins. The springs on which these animals once bounced serve as content rather than structure. Although they perform a nonfunctional role, they signal Rubins’s long-standing interest in tensile strength. What has held her work together since the middle 1980s is not the brute cohesion of concrete but steel cable held in tension, as in suspension bridges. In other words, the sculptures are bound—often in dramatically cantilevered configurations—by active relationships among parts.

By the late 1980s, Rubins’s constructions had reached truly colossal proportions. For example, in “Another Kind of Growth” (1988), she added a trailer home to the materials strung together, and in 1992 her epic sculpture “Trailers & Hot Water Heaters” (1992) was included in “Helter Skelter” the much talked-about exhibition organized by Paul Schimmel at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Soon fighter jet wings and fuselages were among Rubins resources as well, lending associations to power and grace, and a kind of propulsive energy that evokes J. G. Ballard’s novels of calamitous beauty and Paul Virilio’s theorization of violence and speed. These sculptures gave way in turn to others featuring bound mattresses sandwiched around squashed masses of frosted cake—materials that are thoroughly domestic and yet, in their overpowering abundance and imminent spoilage, still deeply disruptive. By the middle of the following decade, Rubins had begun to assemble brightly colored fiberglass canoes and kayaks into outsize bouquets that flower overhead with a less aggressive kind of exuberance. The “Monochromes” series, which comprises assemblages of unpainted aluminum canoes, began in 2010. In addition to the sculpture commissioned for The University of Texas at Austin, it includes examples in Buffalo, Chicago, and Paris. By forgoing color, Rubins divorces the sculptures from painterly qualities that have caused critics to compare her work to John Chamberlain’s sculptures of compressed and cut-up auto parts, which have been linked in turn with the slashing compositions of Abstract Expressionism. In Rubins’s Monochromes, the connecting steel cables are slightly more prominent than in her previous work, forming linear networks that provide a counterpoint to the lean but substantial metal boats. In these darkly gleaming sculptures, the cantilevered, gravity-defying forms, like the playground animals in Our Friend Fluid Metal, seem a little melancholy, and a little menacing. There is also an association to warplanes, again nearly subliminal; some of the canoes were made by the Grumman Corporation, a military producer of the jet planes Rubins had used earlier. But these vessels also evoke a different kind of movement, and life: in contrast to the thundering flight of old military aircraft, canoes glide silently through the water, and speak of a kind of virtuous solitude. A single paddle is enough to guide them, and their footprints are small.

Photo: Nancy Rubins, Fizzy’s Nebuli, 2019 Aluminum, brass, bronze, stainless steel, and stainless steel wire, 79 × 103 × 115 inches / 200.7 × 261.6 × 292.1 cm, Photo: Brian Guido, © Nancy Rubins. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, California, USA, Duration: 24/6-6/8/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, https://gagosian.com