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| Lightness
& Gravity Pieter Laurens Mol, Richard Wentworth Aleks Danko, Robert MacPherson Museum of Modern Art, Heide 7 October - 23 November, 1997 Melbourne |
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 Robert
MacPherson, White |
As
curator Ewen McDonald states in his opening catalogue
essay, Lightness and Gravity owes a curatorial
debt to the show Gravity and Grace: the changing
condition of sculpture 1965-1975 at the Hayward
Gallery in London in 1993. The show also references, but
may not as openly acknowledge, exhibitions such as Mind
Over Matter: Concept and Object at the Whitney Museum
of American Art in 1991. That show claimed to indicate
that "the traditional matter of sculpture material
and space is subordinated to the demands of the
mind", albeit with a group of artists at an earlier
stage in their careers than we see at Heide, but none the
less determined to turn "away from the
self-conscious absorption of formalist art". Both exhibitions foregrounded the play between the materiality and idea of the object, the symbolic resonance of the object within space, and the role of the viewer in constructing the works not only by observation but also by moving around and between them. These are all concerns evident in this local reframing at the Museum of Modern Art at Heide. In fact, from here, a list of references to other exhibitions from the past decade alone could go on and on. So why curate such a show at one of Australia’s leading contemporary art galleries now? What does this show do for us? It seems that it does several things. Firstly, it partly fills the rather large hole left by the final departure of the Australian Sculpture Triennial, which formally folded earlier this year. There is no regular survey show of Australian sculpture to replace it, although it is probably agreed that it was time for it to be dismantled, as it struggled to decide whether it was an exhibition with a curatorial premise or a festival with a more open format. Indeed its absence from the exhibition calendar makes way for more innovative and curatorially specific shows, such as this one. Secondly, the inclusion of Richard Wentworth and Pieter Laurens Mol in the exhibition continues to reinforce that if an exhibition is to attract good sponsorship and draw large crowds, an international contingent pays off well. In a sense the thread holding these particular four artists together is somewhat tenuous apart from the clear and now common a formalist agenda, they are all at similar stages in their careers and use humour to some degree. The inclusion of Wentworth and Mol has the effect of internationalizing the content for the local market. Interestingly, Wentworth had the unenviable task of being located between two of the best works in the show - by Danko and Mol respectively - in the somewhat awkward open space that the Museum houses at the entrance to the main gallery. His installation The Tortoise and the Hare, in which plates run in and out of phase around the floor, just manages to pull off this difficult assignment. Fortunately, his works take such discordance as their subject. Thirdly and most importantly, the exhibition reinforces something many of us have known for some time that Aleks Danko and Robert MacPherson effortlessly represent some of the best of Australian contemporary practice. Danko’s deftness and MacPherson’s subtley serve to magnetise the spaces they occupy, easily matching the gravity of other key works such as Mol’s Ascension Dream Sculpture. Marie Sierra © The artists and |
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 Aleks
Danko, "As you know, |
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 Richard Wentworth,
Load,
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