“What if the art object is not a polished object, but rather an unwanted guest? For a long time I thought about the end of art and who it is for,” said British sculptor Phyllida Barlow, as she completed a series of steel and fiberglass sculptures, her first large-scale outdoor pieces made from durable materials. . These works, commissioned for a Public Art Fund exhibition in New York, are also Barlow’s last, after his sudden death in March at the age of 78.
JOKE opens June 6 (through November 26) at City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, where, before his death, Barlow plotted the location of his seven new sculptures. Called antique, prank, prank call, jinx, imitate, to delay And truancyeach is an assemblage of precariously stacked furniture that’s seemingly brought to scale by a playful, anthropomorphic pattern that Barlow has called “bunny ears.”
“They all suggest some sort of flirtatious behavior or something that’s a little left,” says Nicholas Baume, artistic and executive director of the Public Art Fund and curator of the exhibition. “Phyllida has always been interested in her work, making you do a double take, pushing the boundaries.”
Long based in London, Barlow was an influential teacher, including during her 23 years as a professor at the Slade School of Art, before receiving acclaim of her own later in life, notably in 2017, when she took over the British flag at the Venice Biennale. She flouted sculptural conventions and pretentiousness by making monumental installations in what she called “crappy materials,” including cheap cardboard, plywood, fabric, and cement.
When the Public Art Fund initially proposed to create a project after her first US museum exhibition in 2012, at the New Museum, “it took a long time for Phyllida to figure out how she would approach a body of work that, by necessity, , , have such different materials than what she normally used,” says Baume. Eventually, the conversation led her to revisit the shape of her oversized “bunny ears”, first done in white plaster and wedged onto household objects such as a television or ironing board in her 1990s series . Objects forwhich satirizes the phallic nature of many sculptures.
“It’s a huge contribution from him, to really broaden the notion of what sculpture is,” says Baume. “It can articulate a critique of the self-sufficiency and self-aggrandizing character of the outdoor sculpture, as it has a good time and makes us all laugh.”
For work in JOKE, Barlow’s “bunny ears” motif transformed into an eccentric animated fiberglass creature that seems to explore cumbersome accumulations of steel: leaning towers of chairs and desks, tottering rafts of sofas and pianos, a wobbly phalanx of studio lockers. Baume sees “bunny ears” as genre fluid. “They capture shared human characteristics and weaknesses,” he says, “whether it’s the love of showing off – one seems to pirouette like a dancer – or perhaps laziness, where another has l look like taking a nap.”
Baume adds, “I feel Phyllida’s personality, her spirit so deeply in the work.”
- Phyllida Barlow: prankJune 6-November 26, City Hall Park, New York
