“I just got tired of sculpture as a big thing in the middle of a room. I wanted it to go into space."
Embodying Lee Bontecou's tireless interrogation of the cosmos and dimensionality of her world, Untitled from 1983 is a galactic microcosm of the artist’s category-defying hanging constructions. Nowhere is Bontecou’s incomparable vision more apparent than in her gracefully suspended sculptures, as she sutures together steel, cloth, wire and porcelain into an intimate, hypnotic, otherworldly mobile that gently fuses the organic with the mechanical. Emerging onto the New York art scene of the 1960s in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, Bontecou worked alongside her Pop and Minimalist contemporaries but instead forged an intricate visual lexicon entirely of her own, one simultaneously rooted in her personal fascination with outer space and grappling with a fraught world order. Bontecou consciously challenged the masculine dominance of sculpture and embraced, in her own words, “freedom in every sense,” and the oeuvre she left behind continues to resist categorization. Featured in the artist’s critically acclaimed 2003-04 retrospective presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the present work stands to the enduring singularity of her practice. Further test.mes nt to the present work’s significance in the artist’s oeuvre, Bontecou, the only female artist to be represented by gallerist Leo Castelli, held Untitled in her own collects ion until its acquisition by prominent California collects or Chara Schreyer. At once futuristic and fossil-like, weighty and weightless, Untitled is Bontecou’s intellectual and celestial response to reality, the unknown and the sublime.
Untitled illustrates Bontecou’s technical mastery on an intimate scale, achieving the painterly sense of depth and illusion resulting from the artist’s lightweight welded framework. The resulting object, while primarily geometric in form, resembles animated, rough-hewn machines bearing a curiously handmade aura: “a kind of botanical surrealism” (Karen Rosenburg, “Galaxies of Wires, Canvas and Velvety Soot,” The New York t.mes s, 13 August 2010, p. C22). Unlike Bontecou’s wall reliefs, Untitled is literally set in motion, a slowly whirling constellation of forms radiating from its porcelain core.
The unfurling structure evokes the unfamiliar, uncanny and extraordinary: experiencing in real t.mes the tenuous midcentury history of the Cold War, Space Race and nuclear paranoia, Bontecou turned to sculpture to cleave open new realms, producing assemblages as precarious as the world she inhabited. Struck simultaneously by fascination and fear with contemporary scientific and technological advances, the apocalyptic beauty of her work conjures the nefarious underbelly of the modern world. In a stat.mes nt accompanying the Museum of Modern Art’s 1963 exhibition Americans, Bontecou said that her goal was to “build things that express our relation to this country—to other countries—to this world—to other worlds—in terms of myself. To glimpse some of the fear, hope, ugliness, beauty, and mystery that exists in all of us and which hangs over all the young people today” (Lee Bontecou quoted in Exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, Americans, 1963, May – August 1963, p. 12).
Bontecou’s ability to condense the dreams, anxieties and fears of her t.mes into sculptural form made her one of the most important working artists in New York in the 1960s. Her fascination with space fueled her void-centric renderings, which mimicked the deep black vastness and swirling densities of not only the cosmos but collects ive sent.mes nt. Beyond their topical relevance, Bontecou’s sculptures are masterfully executed with mechanical influence. The technical handling of Bontecou’s chosen materials stem from her early exposure to the process of industrial manufacturing, as both her parents were skilled technicians – her mother a worker in a World War II submarine factory wiring transmitters and her father the inventor of an all-aluminum canoe. In her craft, Bontecou twists and stretches material ranging from conveyor belts discarded by the laundry beneath her apartment, bits of canvas, and pieces of wire and machinery left on the streets into three-dimensional wall hangings. The resulting fabrications are characterized above all for their ingenious, unsettling use of space: sculptures that excited both fear and fantasy, armatures which present complex feats of engineering, architecture, and artistic brilliance.
A critical touchstone of Bontecou’s conceptual enterprise is her prudent confrontation of the machismo inherent within the canon of sculpture. “I just got tired of sculpture as a big thing in the middle of a room,” she reflected. “I wanted it to go into space” (the artist quoted in: Paul Trachtman, “Lee Bontecou’s Brave New World,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2004 (online)). Contesting the virility of her Abstract Expressionist predecessors and peers such as Donald Judd and John Chamberlain, Bontecou’s sculptural corpus is radically feminist in principle. She has profoundly influence other female artists, including Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, and critics and artists alike testified to the impact and magnitude of her developments. Dore Ashton said of the artist in one 1963 essay: "In this image-making prowess there is an originality that would be difficult to define in the logic of language, an originality in the quite literal sense: one is absorbed by the reigning image and knows instinctively that it had its origin deep in the artist's psyche... The reigning image is the black tunneled hole central to anything Bontecou undertakes... the intensity of her expression and the currents of authenticity that one feels so strongly lead one to sense for a moment the depth and inexpressible sources of her imagery" (Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, 2004, p. 174).
The product of thoughtful introspection and unflinching honesty, Untitled commands our respect: simultaneously a creation of our own world and an aperture to another, the present work embraces the otherworldly and exceptional form. Standing at a historical crossroads, Bontecou’s work is unequivocally her own, a balance of woman and machine that has colored the work of countless artists to follow yet has never been replicated.
