Magnetic at PS122 Gallery

PS122 Magnetic, Installation photo, sculptures Victor Liu, drawings Laura Smith

By SIBA KUMAR DAS, December 29, 2024

Magnetic is a spare, small exhibition with large implications. It showcases three sculptures by Victor Liu and ten graphite drawings by Laura Smith. The product of a response by the two artists to an open call from PS122’s governing body, a not-for-profit gallery, Smith and Liu partnered with each other to curate the show.

While each artist’s oeuvre is distinctively their own, their artistic practices are united by a common interest in art that is devoid of any easy signification or conclusiveness. Smith’s process-driven work embodies an expansive openness, and it is form and not content that is her starting point. Yet, through resonance, content emerges organically from form. Think also of Clive Bell’s aesthetic theory of significant form. An artwork’s form can be expressive, he said, stirring in the viewer an aesthetic emotion that is not dissimilar to a spiritual experience.

Victor Liu’s art engages with the world and the significant forces affecting it but he is alive to the daunting complexity of his task. He realizes he can do no more than stimulate an embodied gaze into thickets of connections and contradictions. His sculptures are endlessly suggestive.

The installation photograph that accompanies this article foregrounds an illuminating complementarity between Liu’s sculptures and Smith’s drawings. This is not just a superficial matching of form and imagery. Something more profound is at play. In spite of the differences in the artistic styles that engendered the two sets of objects, they share a common magnetic field.

Laura Smith, Illumined Black 21, graphite on dura-lar, 11x14, 2021.

Smith’s drawings take their existential sustenance from the negative space of sculpture she has previously made. Using collages to inspire forms derived from the negative space, she makes positive negative space in the form of graphite drawings that create in the viewer an illusion of three dimensionality. The result is drawings that carry a sculptural charge. Close prolonged looking at these drawings will likely transform her graphite’s luminosity into a sense of transcendence or connection to the ethereal such that you might recall the effects of fineness and delicacy that silverpoint and goldpoint created in early Renaissance drawing. Smith’s leveraging of negative space and the three dimensionality she achieves may also prompt you to remember the innovations that Futurism and Cubism introduced into the development of spatial forms in modernist art.

Such intertextuality creates a linkage between Smith’s drawings and the three sculptures that Liu has on display at the PS122 show, for they too allude to the spatial innovations of 20^th century art. When you view Liu’s “Sergeant Surge,” he makes you think of a stormtrooper from a future world of science fiction. But you think too of “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” that great Futurist sculpture created by Umberto Boccioni. Rashid Rana says that though Boccioni made the sculpture over a hundred years ago, it’s “still so relevant.” “This work,” he says, “is a great example of how form leads the way.” (1) While this is indisputably so, let’s also note that Liu’s sculpture works through a biting ironical comment on the aggressive striding through space that Boccioni’s creation suggests. Liu’s Sergeant Surge is a lame, defeated warrior. He has transformed his rifles into crutches. He has lost much of both his legs and is moving about on prosthetic feet. Liu achieves his purpose---a bitter satire on our contemporary world---by at once invoking Boccioni’s innovations and subverting the vision that catalyzed them.    

Victor Liu, Sergeant Surge, 2023, cast resin with porcelain powder and nickel silver, 38x 18x 22'

The Smith-Liu partnership in the show is galvanized by two technical factors arising from their artistic practices. Both utilize limited palates. Smith’s graphite images are mostly black. Liu uses three powders in his casting: porcelain powder (white), nickel silver (metallic, goldish/silvery), and silver graphite (dark grey, almost black). Thanks to Smith’s graphite use and Liu’s resort to silver graphite in his sculpture “Dark Cygnus”, the luminosity you see in Smith’s drawings is matched by the sheen that is a prominent feature of the black swan. Not to be overlooked is the fact that when placed in a magnetic field, graphite flakes rotate and align themselves along magnetic force lines. So, Magnetic is affected by a magnetic field both metaphorically and literally.

“Dark Cygnus” has a powerful presence. His wings surround a staff that you might think of as a divining stick or as a symbol for lightning or a fork in the road. When you reflect deeply on the sculpture, you see it is more than a reference to the black swan that is native to Australia. As Liu intended, it’s also an allusion to the black swan theory that Nassim Nicholas Taleb developed in an eponymous book published in 2007.  Basically, a black swan event is something rare that has a major, widespread, far-reaching effect. Moreover, when you think of swans, it's difficult not to think of the Greek legend about Leda and the swan, a legend addressed often in Western art and literature. In this story, it is the god Zeus, disguised as a white swan, who rapes Leda, a white,  Spartan queen. But, in a sculptural rendition of the event created by Fernando Botero, Leda is dark, and so is the swan.

“Maiden China”, Liu’s third exhibit in the show, is another complex achievement. The Chinese woman he depicts with four arms is at once a contemporary young person and a female bodhisattva, an enlightened person who has postponed nirvana so she could spread compassion in a suffering world. The sculpture alludes to China’s contemporary rise after a century of injustices inflicted by foreign powers. It also alludes to the injustices that still dominate the contemporary world. Sergeant Surges are even now being created, and a black swan event may happen any time. As we reflect on this, let’s also recall that the yearning for compassion and an end to suffering as incarnated in bodhisattvas influenced the spiritual lives of two great artists, Vincent van Gogh and Constantin Brancusi---an influence they carried over into their art. (2)

In this review the last word belongs to form. Magnetic may be telling us that form is not just an aesthetic matter confined to art. In their different ways, Laura Smith and Victor Liu art employ form to suggest art’s larger purpose---to throw light on life and the world. WM

Notes

1. See The Artist Project: What Artists See When They Look at Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017---pages 184-5.