Visual Arts Brief

At first glance, it does not seem as though Richard Artschwagers sculptures and Ross Bleckners paintings belong in the same room. Artschwagers homage to packing crates and Bleckners images of Tetris-like biotic spheres do not look remotely alike or seem to address similar issues. It becomes apparent after a brief spin around the ground floor of the Carpenter Center that it is precisely in this unlikely juxtaposition that the interest of this exhibition lies. This contrast illuminates aspects of each artists work that would otherwise be overlooked.

Both Artschwager and Bleckner are contemporary artists who have received a great degree of renown and acclaim. In recent years, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of Artschwagers work and the Guggenheim did the same for Bleckner. This exhibition at Harvard features a small selection of the recent work of each artist. Artschwagers six sculptures, all untitled, were constructed in 1995-1996. Bleckners works in oil on linen, also all untitled, were painted this year. Neither artist provides clues for the viewer as to how to interpret their enigmatic work.

Perhaps we need none if we look long enough. After observing the monochrome nuggets squashed together and suffocating Bleckners canvases, no one would be surprised to discover that he is the president of the Community Research Initiative on AIDS. The bubbles themselves look like knots tied on a rope, but condensed, without any space between them. Covering the entire surface of a canvas, they begin to look organic, slimy, alive; indeed, they look like cells. The use of transparent color to isolate certain groups of cells relates directly to AIDS; the identification of certain vessels indicates foreigners, intruders within a common landscape.

Artschwagers sculptures look equally foreign; his wooden structures, built to resemble either furniture or boxes, would be highly unnatural in any environment. This commentary on interior and exterior (a la Rachel Whiteread), packaging and contents, and meaning in art, would be trite and dull if not for the sheer beauty and subtlety of the forms. There is a radiance and sheen to the light wood which fills these works with an uncanny ebullience and optimism. By carving out space where conventional forms would otherwise protrude, at the top of the bed, for instance, Artschwager complicates his works further. He negates the simple question of negative and positive space by tampering with that distinction.

Viewing Artschwager and Bleckners works together makes it incredibly difficult to differentiate between the organic and the artificial. Artschwager takes a living material, wood, and presents it as lifeless; his sculptures are rigorously symmetrical, quadrangular and severe. Bleckner, on the other hand, makes his canvases feel biological, endowing oil and linen with all of the texture, mutability and fluid motion of life.