Daniel Barbiero
September 2016

Untitled (Sculptural Study, Seventeen-part Right-angled Construction) 1985/2006
© 2015 Fred Sandback Archive. Photo: Cathy Carver, Courtesy: Glenstone Museum

Fred Sandback

Untitled (Sculptural Study, Seventeen-part Right-angled Construction)
 The Line as Anti-Ideal

The Ambiguous Object 

Every threshold is a line. A threshold delineates outside from inside, this from not-this. Or in the case of, say, one’s house or room, ours from not-ours. But not every line is a threshold. In Fred Sandback’s yarn sculpture Untitled (Sculptural Study, Seventeen-part Right-angled Construction) (1985-2006), line becomes threshold becomes line.

Because of the sparseness of his forms and the simplicity of the materials he used, Sandback (1943-2003) is usually grouped with the Minimalists. Perhaps tellingly for his mature work, he obtained his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Yale before studying sculpture at the university’s School of Art and Architecture. After having become dissatisfied with the work he’d been making from industrial materials arranged serially, around 1966 he turned to using string, wire or yarn as his main artistic material. His first string piece was a modestly-scaled outline of a 2×4 lying on the floor. Sandback was intrigued by the ontological implications of the piece—that, in his words, it was “something both existing and not existing at the same time.”* The work’s ambiguity inhered in its allusion to a solid material object—a plank of wood—by enclosing light and air within its outline–as if the plank had dissolved into air. The ontological ambiguity of this dissolved object foreshadowed much of his later, larger scale work.

Like Untitled. Untitled is made up of a series of lengths of yarn—specifically, seventeen lengths of red yarn—reaching tautly from ceiling to floor, laid out at regularly-spaced intervals. Each length of yard traces a right angle as it continues some length along the floor: Imagine seventeen large “L”s lined up in parallel.

Seen from one point of view, the horizontal lines running partway across the floor look like shadows cast by the vertical elements—these latter appearing to be gnomens somehow designed for indoor use out of the sun. From another point of view the lines seem to be part of the space’s architecture—a row of columns thin to the point of disappearance, bearing the weight of the ceiling, or starved pilasters propping up an unseen wall.

Untitled is exemplary of Sandback’s mature sculptures. In scale and materials, it is much like the work the artist created from the 1970s forward. Like them, it’s based on a site-specificity that assumes the particular features of the room in which it is installed and becomes, to a first approximation, an architectural element among architectural elements. And as with those other works, its basic formal element is the line.

The Line as Anti-ideal

The line is both structural element and a centrally-recurring motif in Sandback’s sculpture and other works as well. The late small wall sculpture “Black Piet” after P.M.: “Composition with Red Yellow Blue 1930” of 2003 is a black-on-black plywood reworking of Mondrian’s small canvas. Sandback refigures Mondrian’s right-angled, painted black lines as incuse channels dividing an all-black surface. Whereas in Mondrian’s painting the black lines play a subordinate role in serving to separate colored rectangles of the three primary colors plus white, in Sandback’s wall relief the absence of a color differential places all of the motivic weight—and all of the formal drama, as understated as it is–on the lines themselves.

Sandback’s allusion to Mondrian is apt. The painter’s use of perpendicular lines predicts, in its simplicity as well as its thematic coherence, Sandback’s work with yarn. But an important point separates Mondrian from Sandback. This has to do with the nature of the line.

In theory, a line is an ideal object—a straight, one-dimensional figure without thickness that extends indefinitely in space. Something purely imaginary. In Sandback’s work this ideal form becomes an anti-ideal. Unlike Mondrian, who pursued a variety of metaphysical purity in abstraction, Sandback took the line as “a thing” that was “more or less [a] simple fact[]” rather than an “instance[] of a geometry or some other larger order.” Not an ideal by any means, although in a 1975 statement Sandback acknowledged that his work embodied a kind of “mysticism,” albeit one issuing from the “point at which all ideas fall apart.” Or fall to earth.

Certainly, in Sandback’s sculpture the line comes down to earth—literally in Untitled’s verticals running from ceiling to floor. But also in its makeup. As yarn the line loses its abstract quality and descends from supraphysical form to material thing, from one-dimension to three dimensions in which perfect straightness is compromised by the irregularities of surface inherent in the weave. A thing among other things, occupying space: The anti-ideal of the real supplanting the imaginary.

Contingency and the Anti-ideal

Sandback’s interest in the anti-ideal of the real manifested itself in his interest in the empirical characteristics—the contingent facts of situation—of the settings for his sculptures. Because of its site specificity, Untitled, typical of Sandback’s sculpture, is pure contingency.

The sculpture reflects what Sandback characterized as his “generalized need to be in some sort of constituting material relationship with my environment.” In practical terms, the particular shape of the sculpture is formally constituted by the material facts of the room; that is to say that it is the outcome of the interaction between the material makeup of the sculpture and the given architectural setting it’s meant to respond to. As with many of Sandback’s room-scaled sculptures, Untitled and its situatedness reflect an integration of the structural features of the rectangular space with the linearity of the sculpture. Taking their place among the basic facts of floor, ceiling and wall, the serial, rectilinear forms of the sculpture’s Ls echo the rectangular structure of the space that contains them. The given space is an essential part of their construction, as conveyed by the angular harmony of linear forms. Out of this harmony emerges a sense of “being in a place,” which is precisely how Sandback described one of the central meanings of his body of work.

What also emerges is a peculiar frame-within-a-frame—a recursive relationship like a conversation taking place in a hall of mirrors. Just as much as the site frames the work—a natural relationship for a sculpture to have to its setting—the work frames the site. This recursive, mutually-implicating relationship of work to site is less natural, or at least less expected, and has implications for the constitution of the site. Through this external, framing relationship the sculpture imposes a set of internal, formal relationships on the site, relationships it wouldn’t have in the absence of the work. These formal relationships consist in the foregrounding of the right-angles that organize the room as a space. These angles were there before the sculpture was installed, of course, but the sculpture pushes them to a point of salience or crisis, a turning point beyond which they take on meaning in a way they wouldn’t in the absence of the sculpture. In sum, as a frame Untitled serves to crystallize a situation, and within that situation precipitates meaning. Through this meaning, the empirical—the contingent facts of the room and sculpture—takes on a particular formal value that goes beyond the plain architectural geometry of right angles. 

From Line to Threshold 

Although Sandback asserted that as things among things, his string, wire and yarn lines didn’t define planes, it’s hard not to see Untitled’s yarn Ls as defining planes, albeit of a peculiar type. These planes are open, only two of their sides being given; the missing two sides can be imagined or, if taken as non-existent, can be seen to imply a plane extending indefinitely behind an edge defined by an XY axis. And the sequence of right-angled strings does seem to suggest a cascade of Cartesian coordinate systems. But the more apposite interpretation is that the lines don’t define planes so much as that they define thresholds.

Every threshold is a line—the delineation of a boundary. Not every line is a threshold. But in Untitled the line effectively becomes a threshold. This seems to be a deliberate effect of the use of string as sculptural material. As Sandback contended in a 1975 statement, “[a] line of string isn’t a line, it’s a thing, and as a thing it… [defines] everything else outside its own boundaries.” It is, in other words, a threshold.

To the extent that it defines the space that it delineates, a threshold functions as a kind of definitive setting off of one part of the world from another. It represents the division of like from unlike, or like from like. A threshold separates inside from outside, one domain from another—but these thresholds, because they are precipitated from open planes, perform their function ambiguously. The inside/outside distinction is thrown back onto a paradox, as each term—inside and outside—becomes interchangeable with its opposite. An unsettledness seeps into the heart of exactly what it is that the threshold divides. Seen from one perspective, a certain area marked by the line will appear to be inside; move around and thus change the line of sight, and that same area will now appear to be outside.

The Ambiguous Object Returns

Like 1966’s dissolved 2×4, Untitled is an ambiguous object. Unlike the 2×4, Untitled’s ambiguity doesn’t inhere in an allusion to something that is there and not there at the same time, but rather to its apparent refusal of a perceptual synthetic unity. As thresholds, its lines separate inside and outside in an unstable, fungible manner. By the same token the sculpture’s open structures, in not enclosing a discrete object or tracing a form quickly grasped as finite and spatially bound, effectively defer the integration of multiple, partial viewpoints into the image of an overarching whole. Its elements are as bound to the site as they are to each other and thus it remains at the level of the contingent: A set of features taking their place as a set of facts among the architectural facts of the space.

If the outlined 2×4 represents a dissolved object, Untitled represents an object that is dispersed—dispersed into the space that contains it. Which recalls Sandback’s assertion that he wished to make sculpture that would become part of “the existing local order.” 

Notes:

*All quotes, unless indicated otherwise, are taken from Sandback’s statement “Remarks on My Sculpture, 1966-1986.”  This and other statements quoted can be found on Fred Sandback Archive:  fredsandbackarchive.org

Fred Sandback: Light, Space, Facts

thru December 2016
The Glenstone Museum
Potomac, Maryland

http://www.glenstone.org