Paint it black
Final Rice Gallery show, others depict intriguing meaning in dark boxes
Sol LeWitt’s “Glossy and Flat Black Squares” will be the last art anyone sees at Rice Gallery, which closes its doors May 14.
For 27 years, director Kim Davenport filled the 40-foot-by-44-foot main space in Sewell Hall with an inspired rotation of site-specific installations. She commissioned major works from artists who previously were not featured prominently in Texas.
Davenport is now chief curator of Rice’s new Moody Center for the Arts, which also will commission installations. But they can be anywhere in the building or on campus.
Davenport often introduced emerging artists on the cusp of international fame, but she also invited known masters to utilize Rice Gallery. They engaged viewers in myriad ways.
The installations could be mind-bendingly complex: Phoebe Washburn sculpted “True, False, and Slightly Better” from thousands of found cardboard boxes. El Anatsui pieced together the hanging textiles of “Gli (Wall)” from metal foil bottleneck collars. Henrique Oliveira’s “Tapumes” featured just one wall, but what a wall, full of swirling, colorful wood forms. Yasuaki Onishi’s mountainous, floating “reverse of volume RG,” cast from plastic sheeting, hung by countless black strands.
The gallery’s installations also could be poetic, inducing jawdropping drama with light and shadows that immersed visitors in a slice of heaven. Soo Sunny Park’s wavy “Unwoven Light” shimmered from the colorful reflections of a gazillion small glass squares. The ornate, all-white hanging paper pendants of Kirsten Hassenfeld’s “Dans la lune” dangled like contained dreams, lit from inside. Stephen Hendee filled the space with glowing green light for his sculpture “SuperThrive.” Anila Quayyum Agha’s intersections cast Islamicart-inspired shadows on every surface of the room.
Sometimes the installations lightened spirits. Thorsten Brinkmann invited visitors to crawl inside a miniature house to see all of “The Great Cape Rinderhorn.” El Ultimo Grito’s “Garden Object” incorporated benches and tables within its colorful amorphous forms. Wayne White’s “Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep” featured a 22-foot puppet head of country singer George Jones, circa 1950.
LeWitt, a pioneering conceptual artist who died in 2007, designed “Glossy and Flat Black Squares” for Rice Gallery in 1997, right after Yayoi Kusama’s “Dots Obsession” washed the space in acid yellow, with a riot of black polka dots.
LeWitt, always fascinated by art’s relation to architecture, reclaimed the contemplative potential of the room during a pivotal point of his career.
He had produced wall drawings in ink, crayon or pencil for decades, but in 1997 he began using latex paint, which allowed him to exploit the serene qualities of glossy and matte finishes within a monochromatic black palette. He created one of his first latex drawings at Rice Gallery that January, before similar applications at New York’s Ace Gallery and Yale University Art Gallery.
All of LeWitt’s wall drawings originate like numbered musical scores or architectural blueprints, with instructions on paper that others can still execute, directly onto walls. (“Wall Drawing 821,” for example, has this description: “A black square divided horizontally and vertically into four equal parts, each with a different direction of alternating flat and glossy bands.”)
The scale and proportion of the Rice Gallery wall drawing reflects all the elements of the room’s architecture, including its ceiling height, the width of the rectangular walls, the limestone squares that compose its flooring and the vertical rectangles of the front wall glass, which is delineated by black mullions.
“Glossy and Flat Black Squares,” technically known as “Wall Drawing #813,” is the only show Rice Gallery has repeated. The first time around, the show included several sculptures LeWitt designed from Styrofoam and cinder blocks. In the lobby where one of those pieces stood, visitors can now peruse a rotating rack of catalogs that document the gallery’s history.
Viewing art can never be a subjective experience: All visitors carry accumulated consciousness. The eyes get excited, sparking associations or memories.
I didn’t see LeWitt’s installation in 1997, but after spending time there recently, I began noticing monochromatic black works in other Houston museums.
The Russian abstractionist Kazimir Malevich invented the genre in 1915 with “Black Square,” seeking to reach a “zero point” of painting. “Black Square” was one of about 30 canvases Malevich created for a show whose works relied only on basic forms and primary colors (or noncolors) — a seminal moment of modern art history.
Artists have been looking for the Godot in black canvases ever since.
As a student in the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg created a series of black paintings built from protruding layers of newspaper and dense paint, so they have a three-dimensional effect. Meanwhile, Lucio Fontana was doing the opposite: Puncturing and slicing canvases inward, to draw eyes through to the wall.
Ad Reinhardt devoted the last decade of his life to making 5-foot-by-5-foot square, black paintings. According to the Museum of Modern Art, his inspiration stemmed not from the Malevich history but ancient, monotonal Chinese paintings.
Aiming to provoke new ways of thinking about art, Reinhardt described his black canvases in a kind of manifesto as “pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting — an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art (absolutely no anti-art).”
Visitors make pilgrimages across the globe to experience the 14 monumental canvas murals Mark Rothko made from 1964-67 for Houston’s Rothko Chapel. Those works even inspired a song, Peter Gabriel’s “Fourteen Black Paintings.”
Not truly monochromatic, Rothko’s famous canvases are suffused with layers of color that change, depending on the daylight striking them. Rothko wanted his paintings to be places as much as objects, providing viewers with the ability to immerse themselves in something sublime.
Down the street at the Menil Collection, in “The Beginning of Everything,” a considerably more intimate black drawing by Brice Marden drew me in. Made in 1970, it fills a 40-inch-by-44inch sheet of Arches paper with black graphite and beeswax, creating a sensual, nuanced surface that both devours and reflects light.
Conceptual artists are still finding inventive approaches to the darkest monochromes, even giving them an extreme political charge.
Within the big Museum of Fine Arts, Houston show “Adios Utopia — Art in Cuba Since 1950,” visitors might easily miss the walls that hold the solid black prints of young Reynier Leyva Novo’s “Nine Laws.”
Novo designed software that calculates the area, volume and weight of the ink in handwritten and printed documents. Each print of the installation symbolically transforms an onerous, historically significant Cuban law into a protest treatise.
As visceral as all-black works can feel in person, when a viewer stands still with them, they aren’t kid stuff. And they yield boring photographs.
In the Instagram age, they remind us, importantly, that the best art experiences are physical.