Rabinowitch Steams Up the Fogg

Solid, hot, rolled steel. Chunks upon chunks of it. Now showing at the Fogg Art Museum, a packed exhibition of David Rabinowitch works shows off the possibilities of sculpture cut off at the knees: flat, squat pieces placed directly on the museum floor. Despite some bombastic prose that ill befits a show that already has a clear voice, anyone can appreciate the simple, elegant play on exact dimensions and object orientation--not to mention the rugged beauty of it all.

The museum heralds the show--a formative 1968 series--as Rabinowitch's first such exhibition in the United States. Apparently, at first only Europeans had felt strangely attracted to the tidy little masses of metal, but now we can all enjoy what might best be called the "Under-Foot Collection."

At the very least, the whole scene presents a play on the entire museum setting: just as you lean to examine one of the preparatory sketches, it becomes clear that an unlabelled scratched-up chunk of metal with no pedestal whatsoever is cowering before your feet. The process of stopping, side-stepping and viewing again lends a jerky mechanical rhythm to the experience that becomes inseparable from the act of appreciating each work individually.

But, while clearly interested ahead of time in the art involved in setting up an exhibit in a museum, Rabinowitch endows each piece with enough enduring personality to deserve lingering attention. Here sits one, a misshapen manhole or new-fangled stop-watch, whose scratches and smoothness vie with the bold, geometric chords that stretch across its center. There sits another, a pueblo for dormice, whose precise measurements and truncated top make one wonder what is suggested or what might possibly be missing.

The pieces also create an ensemble effect, the discarded yet pristine wreckage of objects waiting to be torn apart in the mind's eye by analysis. Otherwise, they sit, seemingly uncompleted, as if the artist still has to come back to the museum and finish up things whilst glancing at the plans on the walls.

Of course, a cynic might dismiss the whole lot as blueprints for futuristic or retro college dormitory facilities across the nation: the pieces almost all resemble architectural scale models, with the grand, misguided feel of an architect's imagination gone amok Furthermore, the room used to exhibit the pieces seems inexplicably gloomy at times and is somewhat inconve niently catalogued.

Regardless of any labeling one could do, each work, whether plain or vaguely complex, possesses a quiet stubbornness. This perception, when paired with Rabinowitch's play on the act of placing pieces in a certain context, makes the exhibition worth a quick look. But since Rabinowitch seems satisfied to work mainly with the object in relation to its environment and with solid, hot, rolled steel, the human element (barring the observer) sometimes feels lacking. A gay romp round to the nearby portraitures, however, should surely suffice.