Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Fred Sandback at Dia:Beacon

Fred Sandback at Dia:Beacon

Back at the beginning of November, our class took a trip to Dia:Beacon. Everyone was assigned an artist to present and I was assigned Fred Sandback–whom I knew nothing about beforehand. Here’s a bit about Sandback’s sculptures:

Fred Sandback’s acrylic yarn sculptures are designed to coexist in the space with the viewer. They outline planes and volumes in space and make the viewer conscious of the space, which he or she is occupying and sharing with the sculptures. Sandback calls this the “pedestrian space” of everyday life. The works embody the concept of oneness—between the space, the viewer and the work. This is something that the viewer experiences when they’re walking through the work and around the work and manipulating their body in the gallery space alongside the work. He’s not after painting’s space or sculpture’s traditional form of space—for the most part. What he’s after is literal, everyday space. The work is described as still sculpture, while less dense, with ambiguity between exterior and interior. He described the works as: a drawing that is habitable. The term pedestrian also involved the idea of utility—that a sculpture was there to be engaged actively, and it had utopian glimmerings of art and life happily cohabiting. The work engages the viewer using simple lines and vectors anchored to the walls and floor. They’re about the here and now through bodily presence.

The sculptures were made for the Dia space and respond to the architecture of a specific interior. While, they can be replicated in different locations, the situation is completely changed upon the moving of a sculpture. The dimensions and proportions aren’t all that’s important, but the color of the yarn and piece as a whole is constructed in proximity to it’s location and neighboring structures. The yarn is stretched in between points of the interior, and either produces floor-to-ceiling verticals or outlines closed forms. The idea is that the yarn, which has a slightly fuzzy property, loses its physical presence and turns into a dematerialized lines of color. The compositions also have an illusionistic effect where the colored lines appear to form the outline of transparent, glasslike planes. His work is not just about specific objects, but it’s about specific situations. For these “Untitled” works, Sandback integrated old pieces with newer ones to ground the viewer in a specific situation.

Sandback developed a singular body of work that addresses phenomenology or subjective experience and consciousness. His paradoxical play with material fact and perceptual illusion had philosophical implications. His sculptures define the edges of virtual shapes and the viewer’s brain is supposed to perceive the rest of the form—he wanted sculpture without a center. In this sense, he’s the anti-Ricard Serra because instead of forcing you into space, you are invited to move about freely within a space. You aren’t closed in and there’s no challenge in moving around the work—but quite the opposite. You’re free to move about and you always know where you stand with the work—which gives it a transcendent quality. The work is also reminiscent of Duchamp’s “Mile of Yarn” (1942) where the artist entangled a gallery space with 5,280 feet of yarn. The work occupies a post-modernism presentation because the gallery space is no longer neutral. The sculpture is supposed to be part of a continuing attitude and relationship to things—meaning that certain sculptures aren’t always seen as discrete objects, but more as instances of a generalized need to be in some sort of constituting relationship with the environment. Emerging during the heyday of Minimalism, Sandback’s art has separated itself from that of his immediate predecessors by its refusal to be reductively literal and material isn’t its primary mode of being. While the work itself is minimal, it’s conceptually based.

“My work is full of illusions, but they don’t refer to anything.” -Sandback

Sandback grew up with an interest in stringed instruments, which is where his use of material comes into play. He used to make banjos and dulcimers and his first sculptures were made with metal wire and elastic cord—but he eventually dropped the mass and weight of these materials in favor of store-bought acrylic yarn because its matte surface absorbs rather than reflects light and it doesn’t sag. He was attracted to this composition because he was able to manipulate something that was both existing and not existing at the same time. The forming of the figure—the shape and the dimension, had an “ambiguous and transient quality.” Sandback wanted to make sculpture, but he didn’t necessarily make a sculpture without a composition of parts or a sculpture without positive and negative spaces—but he wanted to make sculpture and these things seemed to be getting in the way for him.

He started exclusively using yarn around 1971, after in the last 1960s, he was making series of assemblages of industrial material. Sandback grew frustrated with the parts and thought that they didn’t have enough energy or conviction. The first sculpture he made to begin his signature compositions was made from a piece of string and a little wire, in the outline of a rectangular solid 2 x 4 inches lying on the floor. He said that this opened up a lot of possibilities for him because he could now assert a certain place or volume in its fully materiality without occupying and obscuring it.

Sandback had a background in philosophy–he had a B.A. in philosophy from Yale and his MFA in sculpture from Yale in 1969. He suffered from depression and committed suicide in his studio at age 59 in 2003.