“I started [tied wire sculptures] in 1962 when a friend of ours brought a desert plant from Death Valley and said, ‘Here’s something for you to draw.’ I tried to draw it, but it was such a tangle that I had to construct it in wire in order to draw it. And then I got the idea that I could use it as a way to work in wire. I began to see all the possibilities: opening up the center and then making it flat on the wall, and putting it on a stand.”
A n elegant, masterful, and intricately constructed drawing in space, Ruth Asawa’s Untitled bespeaks her career-long objectives of investigating notions of surface, interior, and exterior, redefining traditional conceptions of sculpture in the process. Executed in 1965, the present work is part of a series of sculptures the artist described as tied-wire sculptures that were inspired by trees and branching forms, specifically those of desert plants. Initially frustrated by being unable to properly capture the intricacies of a desert plant in two-dimensions, Asawa began shaping wire to understand its structure, later discovering she could more accurately depict the plant through this medium. The result is a beautiful and lyrical sculpture suspended in space, encapsulating the surrounding air.
Born in California to Japanese parents in 1926, Asawa grew up with a highly structured environment of chores, school, and farm work. As a child, the onset of World War II and the bombings of Pearl Harbor caused her family to be separated and forced into internment camps in Arkansas. During this t.mes , Asawa developed her artistic skills and was ultimately encouraged to become an art teacher as a young adult. Unable to matriculate into most universities upon her liberation, she enrolled in the avant-garde university in North Carolina, Black Mountain College. The curriculum at Black Mountain College emphasized formalism rooted in materiality, which proved to be the generative point of her career. While she worked under masters like Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham, it was her professor Josef Albers and his wife Anni, who proved most influential. In regards to her relationship with Josef, Asawa once stated, "the lessons taught by Albers were to do something with a material which is unique to its properties. The artist must respect the integrity of the material. I realized I could make wire forms interlock, expand, and contract with a single strand because a line can go anywhere, whereas a solid sheet is limited'' (The artist cited in: Stephen Dobbs, "Community and Commitment: An Interview with Ruth Asawa," Art Education, Vol. 34, No. 5, September 1981, p. 15).
In 1962, Asawa began making tied-wire sculptures that fully manifest the concepts imparted to her by Josef Albers. Embodying this artistic apex, the present work recalls the splendor of forms found in nature; winter trees, tumbleweeds, and succulents are apparent in Untitled. Reduced to its base element, Asawa's wire recalls the linearity of drawn images. The present work appears to be sketched in the air, reproducing itself dependent on the surrounding light sources through the shadows it casts in its environment. To produce this form, Asawa began with a center stem of hundreds of wires, which she then divided into branches using nature as her model. The result is a sculpture that provides her the freedom to explore the relationship between interior and exterior spaces, and how they are interrupted or framed through the use of a suspended line or wire.
Asawa’s life, originally rooted in labor and service, later became a vehicle to ignite her passion for advocacy, specifically that of arts education in elementary schools. To this degree, Asawa was not only a pioneer in her own work, but in inspiring others, often the most vulnerable, to excel in the arts. The sublime and effortless quality of Untitled lies not only in the craftsmanship of its creation, but also in Asawa’s natural and singular creative drive. The present work serves as a marker of Asawa’s dedication to her practice, which so effortlessly captures the essence of her wholly original innovation in Postwar American sculpture.
