Joseph A. Ruiz II
Two decades ago New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer was asked by movie critic Vincent Canby to consider reviewing some avant-garde abstract films by Paul Sharits that Canby had found puzzling. Kramer replied that he had long ago determined “If it moves, it’s not for us.” This story has been used to illustrate Kramer’s conservatism or myopia, and perhaps it does, but he did have a point. Kinetic sculpture, for example, involves very different issues from stationary work: movement tends to fix the viewer’s gaze on the moving parts and to make him less inclined to walk around the piece, which would introduce movement of his own, or to imagine the movement suggested but not realized by the forms.
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Ruiz is the son of Jose de Rivera, a noted abstract metal sculptor who executed many public commissions and whose works are in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago (though not currently on view here). Ruiz, who was born in Chicago in 1929 and has lived here most of his life, often worked as his father’s studio assistant until Rivera’s death in 1985. And he cites Rivera as his principal teacher: “Take the work out of the sculpture,” his father often told him. He meant, Ruiz recalls, that “when someone looks at the work they should not see the hammer marks” or other signs of fabrication. Rivera was influenced by Brancusi and Mondrian, and that influence also appears in Ruiz’s work: they sought abstract forms that would express the essence of things, not the particularities of nature–Brancusi even spoke of the “search for God.” Ruiz’s abstracted forms are well within this tradition.
vites. Here the slow, almost hypnotic rotation seemed to lock my eye into a steady stare, almost as if I were being told how to view the relationships between the forms.
I felt I was an observer at some magical miniature cinema being offered a continually new unfolding of reality, but with a difference. The illusions I was seeing were all explainable by the physical objects around me–by the varying surfaces of the sculptures, by the things in the room. One could pass freely from viewing the reflections to focusing on the solid copper surfaces to regarding the actual objects. It was as if one were moving at will between viewing a movie and traveling through time and space to the locations where it was shot–a movement that would rob the screen image of its authority by allowing one to compare it to the “reality” from which it was drawn.
This erosion opens the sculpture up to nature more than usual: museums and galleries generally try to save artwork from the decay that this piece welcomes. The process Lewis introduces recalls the way that concrete structures like seawalls are eroded by waves or that rocks, even mountains, are worn away by water and wind. The loud noise and the change of position each time the blocks make contact also suggest that the entire work has somehow changed states–like a particle undergoing a quantum jump or a solid suddenly turning into a gas. The wind, Lewis seems to be saying, can effect a complete alteration in physical states.
I watched these sculptures for a long time; I could have stayed many hours. They’re hypnotic in the best sense: their multiple movements, neither predictable nor strictly random, seem to be telling a new story every minute. Even more than Ruiz, Lewis has moved away from sculpture as self-contained forms. These works need the wind to complete them; they don’t pretend to calculated perfection. They don’t encourage the inward spiritual journeys of modernist masters but open the viewer up to the world.
