PAPER INTO SCULPTURE
at Nasher Sculpture Center
A paper napkin performs its duty by wiping away sauce from a fast food meal. Paper makes up the books we read over a lazy summer evening. Paper in art is supposed to be flat and contain just a sketch for a more ambitious project. Yet many contemporary artists use paper as a means to create an artwork as finished and important as an oil painting or metal sculpture. We can thank Giorgio Vasari for his promotion and his collection of drawings by his Renaissance contemporaries. He was an early advocate for keeping and preserving drawings. His love of drawings helped create a climate where eventually the paper itself would become understood as an important element of art. Paper has come into its own by transcending the drawing and becoming an object with surface and texture that is not just flat.
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Nasher Sculpture Center features Marco Maggi, Joshua Neustein, Noriko Ambe, and Nancy Rubins who explore the limits of this material, paper. Slowing down and looking a little closer is Marco Maggi’s game. His small detailed cut pieces make you want to go in close to observe the delicateness of paper. His little cut shapes seem to float and draw shadows on the paper surface. Maggi’s miniature world reminds me of the outside modeling of a sci-fi spaceship.
Noriko Ambe works in the tradition of altered books, the only paper becomes geological formations. The cut and removed area remind you that those thick stacks of paper are more than just individual pages, but rather a stacked system ready to be deconstructed. Joshua Neustein breaks up the paper but then reconstructs it into bales. I am reminded of square bales of hay I used when gardening. Only this mess of paper is closer to some of the post-minimalist investigations reacting to Donald Judd’s strict idea about paper and its role in sculpture. Judd had returned to the idea that paper was about the plan and not the art. Neustein clearly sees that paper has a role to play in the making of a sculpture beyond just the plan.
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I think Nancy Rubins takes the most traditional approach in the show. Although her pieces are folded paper, she is still adding graphite on the surface and hanging the work on the wall. Folding paper after drawing on the surface makes me cringe, but somehow the piece is elegant and beautiful. I love the shiny graphite that seems to shine and glimmer in the light.
Next to the Paper into Sculpture show is a collection of Esopus Magazines. This New York-based magazine also approaches paper as both 2 and 3 dimensional. The two shows end on February 4th. Expand your mind about the paper as art and visit this show before it leaves.
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