David Rabinowitch: Sculptures and Templates, 1968
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge
September 14, 1996 - January 12, 1997
The special exhibition David Rabinowitch: Sculptures and Templates, 1968, which is a rare presentation of this important sculptor's work in a United States museum, was conceived by David Rabinowitch and James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, and is presented in conjunction with the publication of Pacing the World: Construction in the Sculpture of David Rabinowitch, by Whitney Davis, professor of art history and director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University.
"We are very pleased to be showing the work of David Rabinowitch and to be publishing the first book-length study to investigate its significance within the history of modern sculpture," James Cuno said. "For reasons I do not quite understand David Rabinowtch's work is very much better known in Europe, especially Germany and Eastern Europe, than it is in this country. It has been collected by most major European contemporary museums, exhibited widely from Prague to Paris, and published frequently in European journals and catalogues. But of course, until fairly recently, the same has been true of the work of his peers, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd. It may have to do with a European predilection for tough-minded and radically experimental art, especially of a materialist kind. We, in this country, have preferred painting to sculpture and optical to materialist art," noted James Cuno.
David Rabinowitch was born in Toronto in 1943 and has been working in New York since 1972. His work can be characterized by an intensity of thought and material and simplicity of form, and it is representative of certain concerns of minimalist sculpture. The works to be exhibited at the Fogg, which include nine solid hot-rolled steel sculptures and seventeen drawings, or templates, have been chosen from a series done in 1968 which were formative in Rabinowitch's subsequent work.Ñ"My work from 1968 was a watershed for me," stated the artist, "in the sense that after that all of my sculptures were conceived in terms of operations in extended planes of mass and their relation to vision. It was the first time I worked in terms of template construction, which just means a one-to-one plan for a sculpture. Before, I used only plans and sketches. After this period I was able to make a certain percentage of templates as drawings in their own right and was stimulated to begin to make drawings independent of sculpture.
"It is significant to note," David Rabinowitch continued, "that this is the first time that these templates, which were selected from some 500, and sculptures will be exhibited as two orders of work that make up an enterprise."
The exhibition is the first of an informal series of exhibitions to be planned for the Fogg which will explore the relationship of recent sculpture to the floor. "Sculpture has always been concerned with its base," Cuno pointed out. "That is, how sculpture relates to our world and the space in which it is experienced by us is determined in great part by whether or not it is placed on a pedestal or directly on the floor. A pedestal tends to isolate sculpture and idealize it; as if were an object of an order different from objects in our world. As early as 1932, Giacometti placed a sculpture directly on the floor. Radical at the time, this has become commonplace since the 1960s. Over the next few years, we intend to offer exhibitions which highlight and examine this relationship.
"Such concentrated exhibitions are typical of our approach to the presentation of contemporary art," Cuno explained. "We hope to offer our visitors access to works of art and issues in contemporary art that have been overlooked or left unexamined by our colleague institutions in the greater Boston area. We don't want to duplicate what is already being done so well elsewhere. Equally, we want to publish serious and scholarly publications on contemporary art. Whitney Davis's is the first such publication. A distinguished scholar of Egyptian art, and a formidable critic of contemporary art theory, Professor Davis brings a powerful mind and extraordinary insights to the examination of Rabinowitch's work. And yet, like the work, it is accessible to anyone interested in contemporary art. It is not only a scholar's work."
FOGG ART MUSEUM
Harvard University Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
