Like junkyard parts brought to life by extraterrestrial energy: “Striding Figure II (Ghost),” one of Thomas Houseago’s sculptures at the Storm King Art Center. More Photos »

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: August 1, 2013

MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y. — Poor Masculinity, he’s but a shell of his former self. He’s been in decline for a long time — since as far back as the Industrial Revolution, one might say, when people began turning into cogs. Lately, what with the shifts in gender roles and sex, and the moral undoing of so many male heroes, he finds his prerogatives challenged on every front. Since his loss of authority, he’s been acting out in all kinds of inappropriate ways. He needs therapy.

These thoughts are inspired by Thomas Houseago’s obstreperous monumental sculptures of exaggeratedly masculine figures rendered in early Modernist styles, on view here at the Storm King Art Center in a show called “As I Went Out One Morning.”

Mr. Houseago has been highly visible in recent years. Represented by the major league galleries Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth, he has had more than two dozen solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States since 2000 and was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Born in Leeds, England, in 1972, he studied art in London and Amsterdam and now lives in Los Angeles, having recently become a United States citizen.

His most impressive piece at Storm King is both thrilling and comically outlandish, and it is especially striking to view outdoors against a backdrop of peaceful park grounds and the verdant rolling hills of the Hudson Valley. At 15 and a half feet tall, “Striding Figure II (Ghost)” is a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, blockheaded colossus.   One muscular arm is a cutout plate painted black, the other an assemblage of bent rebar with a hand like a pitchfork. Its torso is framed by an open grid of bent rods, and its tree-trunk-like legs and enormous splayed feet are crusty concatenations of boards and metal pieces cast in bronze.

The whole thing resembles a cinematic monster emerging from a junkyard where some extraterrestrial energy brought it to life. Metaphorically, it’s a terrific embodiment of what is repressed in modern masculinity.

Other works are less wildly imaginative and more serious about their art historical ancestry. “Sleeping Boy I” is an oversize youth whose body was fashioned from viscous oozy material like wet clay or plaster before being cast in bronze; it evokes ancient Greek sculpture via Rodin. “Rattlesnake Figure (Aluminum),” a nearly 11-foot-tall monolith carved with a chain saw from a single block of wood and then cast in aluminum, is a Cubist variation on the ancient architectural form of the caryatid. The interplay of old and Modern tropes comes off as academic gamesmanship.

An appealing exception to the humanoid works is “Standing Owl I,” a massive eight-foot-tall bronze sculpture of an owl that has the modeled-by-hand look of a work by Rodin, whose “Monument to Balzac” it calls to mind.

Indoors is a pair of bigger-than-life baseball-inspired figures made of intersecting plaster slabs reinforced by rusty rebar. One crouches like a catcher behind the plate while across the room the other hunches over like an umpire, his head in the form of an oval bowl. The contemporary aspect neatly matches up with a mythic dimension. They’re like the sculptures of archaic warriors made by Picasso during his early Cubist years.

In these and other sculptures by Mr. Houseago, you sense a melancholic anxiety about masculinity. His images appear to memorialize some more or less distant past when manliness was an unquestionable virtue. It seems as if he wants to rekindle that spirit in himself by working as ambitiously with materials, processes and forms as did the artists of old, from the ancient ones of Egypt, Greece and Rome to pioneers of Modernism like Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi.

He is not without a humorous self-awareness. “Vader Mask,” a dark bronze helmet-like object set on a Brancusian pedestal of solid redwood, alludes, of course, to the evil patriarch of the “Star Wars” movie franchise. But Mr. Houseago’s relationship to the dark side of masculinity — and the bright side, too, for that matter — remains fuzzily unresolved. He seems as much beholden to some creaky idea of virility as he is doubtful about it.

In an engaging interview with Nora Lawrence, an associate curator at Storm King, Mr. Houseago talks about “Column I (Light House),” a bronze monolith over 10 feet high resembling a giant bearded head of a Homeric hero. He observes somewhat disconnectedly that “it has this consciously phallic, Freudian sense — as a male sculptor that’s kind of bouncing around — the craziness of that.”

Would that his work were crazier than it is. There are hints of something more extravagantly and surprisingly idiosyncratic in works invoking popular culture like the junkyard giant and the baseball figures. But Mr. Houseago’s eccentric enthusiasms are muffled by his reverence for traditions old and Modernist and by his Postmodernist play with generic formal and stylistic conventions. His art is too much about art and not enough about his inner life. It’s too impersonal.

It’s also a problem that Mr. Houseago is far from alone in his preoccupation with the past. His work would have looked right at home in the Neo-Expressionist 1980s, when artists like Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel were turning out their gassy retrogressive masterpieces. Lately the sculptor Huma Bhabha, too, has been making sculptures of ancient-seeming figures out of disparate, junky materials. Recycling antiquity is the tiresome order of the day.

In his interview with Ms. Lawrence, printed in a museum brochure, Mr. Houseago speaks at some length about how inspiring music has been for him. He mentions the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” and Bob Dylan’s psychedelic period in the ’60s. The title of his exhibition, “As I Went Out One Morning,” is in fact the name of a song from Mr. Dylan’s 1967 album “John Wesley Harding.” Yet those mind-blowing influences are hard to detect in Mr. Houseago’s lugubrious backward-looking sculptures. Now would be a good time to leave the past behind and make way for the art of a new man.

“Forty-Part Motet,” a sound installation by Janet Cardiff, in 2005.

By BLAKE GOPNIK

Shhh. Listen.

Nothing?

Listen again.

Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall.

And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. Sound art has been on the rise for a decade or two, but it may have at last hit the mainstream: On Saturday, the Museum of Modern Art is opening its first full sonic survey, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” while two major sound installations are to go up in New York in the fall.

“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show — which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.

Ms. London’s survey will include those recorded bells, by the American soundster Stephen Vitiello, as well as recordings made near Chernobyl by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Dane, and a grid of 1,500 small speakers, each playing a different tone, by the young New Yorker Tristan Perich. It will also feature the Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, whom the larger art world has taken to heart.

At the Modern, Ms. Philipsz will be reprising a 2012 work from Germany’s Documenta, the twice-a-decade festival that is one of the world’s most prestigious artistic events. Her “Study for Strings” riffs on an orchestral piece composed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp for musicians there. For her recording, Ms. Philipsz has redcted the parts for all the instruments except one cello and one viola, leaving plangent silences between those two players’ scattered notes — and, of course, evoking the erasure of musicians and artists by the Nazis.

“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences — in the uterus, in fact.”

Ms. Philipsz’s new piece, called “Day Is Done,” will be the first permanent work of contemporary art on Governors Island, a former military site just south of Manhattan whose public spaces are being revamped with a budget so far of $75 million. Ms. Philipsz is mounting four old-fashioned “trumpet” speakers — the kind you’d see in an old ballpark — across the facade of a sprawling old barracks, and for an hour every evening, they will broadcast the notes of the bugle call “Taps.” The tones of the ghostly melody will pass from speaker to speaker, fanning out across the island’s open spaces.

At a test run one cold day in the spring, the piece evoked the era when “Taps” would have been played daily on the island, while it also triggered thoughts of military funerals and loss of life. (On Sept 11, those on the island were able to see the collapse of the twin towers.)

“Day Is Done” also evokes New York’s maritime presence. Visiting from her home in Berlin for the test run, Ms. Philipsz said that after the recording had played on site for the first time, “we thought it was still on.” She added: “But it was the sound of a ship’s horn. We were so happy.”

Mr. Eccles pointed out that with a piece like “Day Is Done,” “you don’t have to recognize it as art, immediately” — meaning that any knee-jerk resistance to contemporary art is less likely to kick in. “A sound work allows you to do something quite complex that might be unacceptable in another medium,” he said.

That could be because of the role MP3s and podcasts now play in our lives and because of our new comfort with the immaterial world of pure data, which makes immaterial sound art seem less esoteric. Sound waves floating through air may not seem any more exotic than information flowing through cyberspace.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324809004578637911908326712.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_LifestyleArtEnt#slide/6

Museum Director in Ukraine Paints Over a Mural She Doesn’t Like

Made in Space

Courtesy the artists, Gavin Brown's enterprise, and Venus Over Manhattan

Works by, from left, Marcia Hafif, Rebecca Morris, Hannah Greely and Eric Orr in “Made in Space” at Gavin Brown’s.

 By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: August 1, 2013

If much of the work in this sprawling, energetic two-gallery group show looks fresh and unfamiliar — and as if it might not come from New York — there’s a reason. Everything on view was made in and around Los Angeles, fairly recently and often by artists who are either young, unknown in these parts or both. The show’s title, “Made in Space,” connotes the City of Angels, where, the thinking goes, studio space is cheaper and more plentiful and the general horizontal openness gives everyone more time and privacy to develop.

Certainly the work there often seems looser, brighter and generally more at ease with itself compared with what is found in New York. There’s a greater tolerance for painting of all kinds, even full-on or diluted, and less of a mania for minimal austerity.

“Made in Space” was first seen in Los Angeles at Night Gallery, which is overseen by Davida Nemeroff, a young photographer-dealer formerly of New York whose large color close-ups of horses are represented here. The show is probably less a snapshot of the Los Angeles scene than of the ecumenical tastes of its organizers: Laura Owens, an established painter who decided against including her own work in the show, and Peter Harkawik, a younger sort-of painter who favors decals on clear vinyl at Gavin Brown (and who has his New York solo debut at Knowmoregames, a gallery in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, through Aug. 30).

The younger set gets solid backup at both galleries from older artists like Rebecca Morris and David Korty (both especially impressive), Derek Boshier, Jim Isermann, Jorge Pardo, Allen Ruppersberg and Peter Shire, a well-known ceramist-sculpture and founding member of the design group Memphis, whose Memphis-y bench-sculpture brightens the entrance at Gavin Brown.

But it is mostly works by artists in their 30s with little or no New York exposure that steal the show. These include Leah Glenn’s small, quirky paintings; Patrick Jackson’s handsome bucket-size ceramic cups; John Seal’s stylistically varied paintings (as well as Aaron Wrinkle’s); and a charcoal rubbing on canvas by Joshua Callaghan of a Ford Focus. The efforts of Vanessa Conte, Lucas Blalock, Gabrielle Ferrer, John Mannis and Max Maslansky also reward attention. Still, the show’s surprises are not all from the young. Marcia Hafif, the New York abstract painter who now divides her time between the coasts, is the oldest artist here, and she weighs in with an anomalous work: a wall-size handwritten text about women, aging and sexuality that makes its presence felt.

The Bass Museum of Art's Fiat Urban Surf Party will host a free night of music, drinks and culture including a silent disco party provided by Silent Frisco.

By Ricardo Mor | rmor90@gmail.com7/30/2013

The Beats After Sunset party, held on the first Friday of every month at the Bass Museum of Art, is always a great time for young art lovers to enjoy a night of music, drinks and culture. The museum is taking their event to the next level with the Fiat Urban Surf Party edition of Beats After Sunset this Friday, August 2, from 8 to 11 p.m. 

For the party, the museum will their regular outdoor dance party in addition to an indoor Silent Frisco party, which will be a dance party inside the museum where guests can listen to dance music using wireless headphones. The result is a dance party for those who are listening with headphones while those who opt out can enjoy a refuge from the thumping music (but we highly recommend joining in on the fun). The effect is super cool and a rare chance for Miamians to experience the silent dance party craze firsthand, which is all the rage in Los Angeles and San Francisco.Whether you choose to do the silent dance party inside or the booming outdoor party, DJ Antanas Jurksaitis from Rockit Sauce & DJ Seamaster will be behind the turntables providing the beats.

In addition, locals can sip on Reyka premium small-batch vodka from Iceland and Rex-Goliath Wine during the party while you check out the museum’s collection of art as well as the latest Fiat car which will be parked inside the museum. Adding to the fun is an afterparty at Rokbar, where all attendees of the party will get complimentary cocktails from 11-12 pm. Best of all, all of this is free. You’d be a fool to miss this event.

JULIE V. IOVINE

The Museum of Modern Art/Richard Pare

The Ronchamp Chapel (1950-55)

Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes

Museum of Modern Art

Through Sept. 23

New York

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret changed his name to the curt and commanding Le Corbusier, an invented nom de plume in 1920, but that hasn't made it any easier to understand the famed Swiss architect or his work: more than 75 buildings in a dozen countries; master plans reimagining capital cities (mostly by proposing to erase their centers) from Paris to Rio to Algiers; more than 40 books, including "Towards a New Architecture" and "The Radiant City"; and hundreds of essays establishing him as one of the most influential voices in 20th-century culture.

Fondation Le Corbusier/ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris

'Blue Mountains' (1910)

A modernist pioneer in architecture, planning, criticism and painting, Le Corbusier was so heralded and reviled throughout his career that when his memorial was held in the courtyard of the Louvre in 1965, the novelist André Malraux, then minister of culture, was compelled to note how the architect was "for so long, so continuously insulted."

Le Corbusier is a rich and complicated subject for a monographic exhibition. And "Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes" at the Museum of Modern Art succeeds at maintaining a sense of awe about the fearless architect once photographed in the nude baring a long zig-zagging scar from a shark attack. But the show—MoMA's first retrospective on Corbu—is also hamstrung by a theme that, by harping on "a vision profoundly rooted in nature and landscape," tries too hard to establish a too-narrow focus for the technology-obsessed master. Corbu's aesthetic emphasized the purely rational wedded to the perfectly proportioned. He embraced innovation and technology as ethical imperatives and seemed to have not the slightest ambivalence about radical change. Corbu's legacy includes open interiors with panoramic strip windows, space conceived in modular units, skinny steel columns and urban plans that would have imposed brutal uniformity on the land.

Drawing extensively from MoMA's own collections, from the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, and from private collections near and far, the exhibition is curated by Corbu biographer and authority Jean-Louis Cohen and by MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll. It includes personal and professional riches, from childhood sketches and notebooks to models, renderings and plans from practically every project devised and place visited over six decades. Among the delights are midcareer oil paintings, home movies and the 20-foot scrolls of design doodles that the architect liked to whip up on his world lecture tours. With 320 objects, it is the most Corbusier material ever to be displayed in one place, and a rare chance to immerse oneself in the evolving creative output of a genius.

The exhibition opens compellingly with watercolors that young Jeanneret painted of the Jura Mountains and forests near his childhood home in rural Switzerland, in an effort to establish his landscape-loving bona fides. It then roams through two rooms of diary entries and notebook sketches of his youthful travels through Western Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and Greece. For the uninitiated this segment of the show is especially rewarding and accessible, as the brilliantly articulate student soaks up the world and starts to formulate his ideas. Read how he describes the Acropolis in Athens as "a giant tragic carcass in the dying light above all this red earth" and the Parthenon as "a sovereign cube facing the sea." The image of the Aegean on the horizon interrupted by the thrusting temple thereafter held tremendous elemental meaning for Corbu, who reworked that combination of long horizontal and vertical in almost everything he did, from his United Nations slab rising from a platform to the hill-crowning chapel in Ronchamp, even striving for that same mighty scale.

The exhibition moves broadly, both geographically and chronologically, through the architect's professional career, interspersing realized and rejected work with paintings that dabble in Cubism, Fauvism and other popular styles from the 1920s. Dioramas of rooms he designed, complete with furnishings, including a handsomely burled desk for his mother, enliven the march of projects as they become more specialized and opaque, not to mention problematic.

Today we can appreciate but no longer embrace Corbu's vantage point in 1925 when he proposed his Plan Voisin calling for the demolition of all but a few key monuments in the center of Paris in order to make way for his super slab towers. From grim experience with Robert Moses and through the eyes of Jane Jacobs, we are appalled by the lack of sensitivity to context. But clearly he thrilled to the promise of a future full of air and light, and an escape from still-lingering 19th-century fustiness. It's a godsend that similar plans for other cities never happened, although the prints of elevated "inhabited freeways" that he envisioned snaking from mountain to sea in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo still look pretty sensational.

In later years, Corbu faced growing disillusionment over projects unrewarded or compromised. He fought with famous futility to control the design of New York's United Nations Headquarters completed by Wallace K. Harrison, sniped that Manhattan's skyscrapers weren't big enough and that the city was a "fairy catastrophe" on his first visit in 1935. But in his final 20 years he realized some of his most potently evocative and sculptural work, including the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh (1951-65) for the new Indian state of Punjab, the stacked Unité d'Habitation apartment house in Marseille, France, (1946-52) and the Ronchamp Chapel (1950-55) in eastern France.

There's a lot jammed in, and a single rewarding visit could be spent studying only his early and late villas, thoroughly documented with sketches, plans, models and images, including sumptuous recent photographs by Richard Pare commissioned for this show (but hung too high to really be savored).

If the effort to prove that Le Corbusier was as committed to landscape as he was to his abstract convictions seems sometimes strained, the show—and the extraordinarily learned and lush catalog—is brilliantly effective at providing a compelling portrait of a difficult man who in the words of Mr. Cohen "shouldered epic endeavors to transform the world."

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

A visitor to the Detroit Institute of Arts can see some of the world’s greatest artworks. “The Wedding Dance,” Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s lusty rendering of a peasant’s celebration from the 1560s, is there. So is a self-portrait by a wary and anxious-looking Vincent van Gogh. There are treasures by Matisse, Rivera, Picasso and Calder, to name only a few in Detroit’s vast collection.

But plan a trip soon — this year, or maybe next. With debts hovering near $18 billion, Detroit has filed for bankruptcy protection, and the institute’s impressive collection of more than 60,000 works, worth at least $2 billion, is being eyed hungrily by the city’s many creditors. Christie’s auction house has sent two of its people to view the museum’s most valuable pieces.

The urge to sell — essentially to hock the family silver to pay the bills — is understandable. But selling the city’s art could be incredibly shortsighted; the long-term value of maintaining this valuable institution and its collection could easily outweigh any immediate gains. Quite apart from the damage it would do to morale, selling this trove would also be a violation of the public trust for the nearly 600,000 annual visitors, including 50,000 schoolchildren. And residents of three counties who agreed to a property tax increase to help finance the museum would almost certainly demand a rollback in the future.

This art should not be sold to some private investor who might hide it in the den or, worse, a Swiss warehouse. As Thomas Campbell, the chief executive and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, said, public art must be “a permanent, rather than a liquid, community asset.”

It is not clear yet whether Detroit’s officials will ultimately try to sell the collection. Michigan’s attorney general, Bill Schuette, has issued a strong opinion that the art can be sold only to acquire more art, not to retire public debt. But Bill Nowling, a spokesman for the city’s emergency manager overseeing the bankruptcy proceedings, said this week that although there are no specific plans to sell the art, all options “remain on the table.”

Selling the people’s art will not restore a battered city. It will only send more of its true assets elsewhere.

Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77

Museum Associates/LACMA

“The 2000 Sculpture” (1992), by Walter De Maria, an example of his groupings of ordered elements using precise measurements. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 26, 2013

Walter De Maria, a reclusive American sculptor whose multifaceted achievement and sly Dadaist humor helped give rise to earthworks, Conceptual Art and Minimal art, on an often monumental scale, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 77 and lived in New York.

Mr. De Maria went to California two months ago to celebrate his mother’s 100th birthday and had a stroke there a few days later. He had remained there for treatment. Elizabeth Childress, the director of his studio, said that he died in his sleep, perhaps of a second stroke.

In a career of more than 50 years Mr. De Maria made drawings of all-but-invisible landscapes, gamelike interactive wood sculptures and a record of himself accompanying the sound of crickets on the drums.

Mr. De Maria himself was a sometime percussionist who played in jazz and rock groups in New York in the 1960s, including one that evolved into Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground. Yet as an artist in later years he avoided the limelight, rarely giving interviews or letting himself be photographed.

He was best known for large-scale outdoor works that often involved simple if rather extravagant ideas or gestures: a SoHo loft filled with two feet of earth, for example, or a solid brass rod two inches in diameter and one kilometer long driven into the ground in Kassel, Germany, so that only its smooth top was visible (a work consistent with an artist who once noted that “the invisible is real”).

In other works Mr. De Maria favored shiny metals and pristine floor-hugging geometric forms that were often repeated in great numbers. Early in his career, he earned the unwavering admiration of a German art dealer, Heiner Friedrich, who went on to become the founding director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Dia was dedicated to enabling a handful of mostly Minimalist artists realize ambitious, permanent, pilgrimage-like projects, and Mr. De Maria became one of its leading beneficiaries. The foundation financed four of his best known site-specific pieces and continues to maintain them.

The most famous is “The Lightning Field,” which opened in 1977 in western New Mexico after several years of trial-and-error construction. The work is a grid of 400 stainless steel poles averaging 20 ½ feet in height and spaced 220 feet apart covering an area 1 kilometer by 1 mile.

The possibility that lightning would strike the poles was rarely fulfilled, but the piece could look glorious at dawn or sunset, and its hard-won perfection — all the points of the poles were at the same level — brought a striking sense of order to the desert.

Another work that opened in 1977 was Mr. De Maria’s “New York Earth Room,” also a Dia project, which consists of a 3,600-square-foot loft at 141 Wooster Street in SoHo filled with 22 inches of dark loamy earth (specially treated so that nothing is supposed to grow in it). The piece, which recreates one the artist first executed in Munich in 1968, exudes a slightly moist, muffling atmosphere and affords a sight so surreally, deliriously startling as to be simultaneously ridiculous and sublime.

The Dia Foundation also made possible “The Vertical Earth Kilometer,” another 1977 work, in Kassel, and its 1979 companion piece, “The Broken Kilometer,” which consists of 500 two-meter rods of brass arranged in perfect rows on the floor of a ground-level space at 393 West Broadway in SoHo, where it remains on permanent view.

It gave rise to numerous other gallery-sized floor pieces, including “The 2000 Sculpture” (1992), which inaugurated the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall.

Walter Joseph De Maria was born on Oct. 1, 1935, in Albany, Calif., near Berkeley. His parents were the proprietors of a local restaurant and known for being extremely outgoing. Their son was shy, however, and studied music — first piano, then percussion. He also took to sports and cars, of which he made drawings.

By 16 Walter had joined a musicians’ union. From 1953 to 1959 he attended the University of California, Berkeley, studying history and painting, the latter under the painter David Park, who was also a musician and had a jazz group in which Mr. De Maria occasionally performed.

During these years Mr. De Maria was part of San Francisco’s developing avant-garde scene, participating in “Happenings” and theatrical performances and turning increasingly to three-dimensional works. His friends included the composer La Monte Young (later to become another Dia beneficiary) and the dancer Simone Forti, whose task-oriented choreography made him interested in interactive sculpture. Mr. De Maria moved to New York in 1960 and immersed himself in the downtown scene. He participated in Happenings with Robert Whitman (who was then married to Ms. Forti) and briefly ran a gallery on Great Jones Street with him, exhibiting Minimalist sculptures made of wood.

The sculptures were often Dadaist in intent. A piece called “Ball Drop” consisted of a tall columnar structure with a small hole at the top and bottom and a small wood ball. The viewer could drop the ball in the top hole and retrieve it from the bottom.

During this time Mr. De Maria performed with jazz musicians, including the trumpeter Don Cherry, and joined a band called the Primitives. It would evolve into the Velvet Underground.

He had his first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery in 1965, at the Paula Johnson Gallery on the Upper East Side. (Its owner soon became better known as the New York dealer Paula Cooper.) Shortly thereafter he began making stainless steel pieces, including a tall, thin cage structure called “Cage” (after the composer John Cage), that was included in “Primary Structures,” a landmark survey of Minimal-ish work at the Jewish Museum in 1966.

Another early steel piece was “Bed of Spikes,” a bed of nails exaggerated to the sinister scale of railroad spikes; in many ways it was a precursor to “The Lightning Field.”

Mr. De Maria began making drawings and proposals for earthworks in 1960, starting with “Art Yard,” a Happening-like urban event that would involve steam shovels digging a large hole. His first executed earthwork was “Mile Long Drawing” (1968): parallel lines of chalk 12 feet apart that extended across the parched Mojave Desert, accenting its flatness.

Mr. De Maria also participated in a landmark survey of Post-Minimal art, “When Attitude Becomes Form,” at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, in 1969. He was represented by a black telephone placed in the middle of a gallery beside a small sign that read: “If this telephone rings, you may answer it. Walter De Maria is on the line and would like to talk to you.”

The piece is on view this summer in a recreation of the Bern exhibition at the Prada Foundation in Venice.

Mr. De Maria’s early marriage to Susannah Wilson ended in divorce. He is survived by his mother, Christina, and his brother, Terry.

At Home in Two Places

Carol Bove Sculpture Shows at the High Line and MoMA

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

“Celeste,” by Carol Bove on the High Line. More Photos »

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: July 25, 2013

The stretch of the High Line from 30th to 34th Street, still semiwild and closed to the public except by appointment, is a challenging place to exhibit art. Anything installed there risks being overwhelmed by the beauty of the site itself, with its sweeping arc toward the Hudson and its picturesque weeds sprouting up between splintered rail ties.

The light-filled gallery on the Museum of Modern Art’s fourth floor, just outside the rooms that house the permanent collection of painting and sculpture, presents a different set of obstacles for the contemporary artist. There are the Pollocks and Calders at one end, the commanding view of the sculpture garden at the other. Viewers streaming single-file off the narrow bridge from the escalators don’t have much time to stop and look before they’re pushed along into the collection galleries.

The sculptor Carol Bove is now showing in both of these places at once, and managing beautifully. It helps that she is a master of nuance and understatement, and an exquisite calibrator of contextual relationships. It isn’t lost on her that her shows arrive at a moment when both sites, MoMA and the High Line, are transitioning from 20th-century relics — both dating from the 1930s — into 21st-century civic landmarks.

With these exhibitions Ms. Bove is also branching out from the scholarly eclecticism of her earlier artworks, which incorporated found objects like books and crystals, into a more elemental kind of abstract sculpture that at times evokes Richard Serra, Franz West and Mark di Suvero. It takes a certain kind of courage for a post-Post-Minimalist artist, born in 1971, to make such clearly articulated forms.

The High Line show, titled “Caterpillar” and organized by the High Line art curator and director Cecilia Alemani, savors this last opportunity to see the elevated railway in its undeveloped state. (It remains on view until May, when construction begins on this final section of the park.) The show has seven sculptures, distributed relatively evenly along the C-shaped length of track.

Two are looping, hollow noodles of white powder-coated steel, from a series called “Glyphs.” They have been given playful, anthropomorphic titles, “Prudence” and “Celeste,” but these squiggly creatures call less attention to themselves than to their postindustrial surroundings of gravel and rusted iron. Viewed on approach, their coils coalesce into a kind of tunnel; from the side, they look more like a stretched-out Slinky.

Three other sculptures, Tetris-like arrangements of steel I-beams, are well camouflaged by comparison. They evoke the frames of nearby buildings under construction, as well as the titanic outdoor works of Mr. Di Suvero, but seem to have more in common with the dilapidated skeleton of the High Line. The steel is rusted, and crisscrossing components that look like they should be joined together for structural purposes often aren’t; pieces wobble, unexpectedly, when the breeze picks up.

Ms. Bove, who lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, knows how precarious solid-looking infrastructure can turn out to be. Another of the show’s sculptures, a low bronze platform titled “Monel,” bears traces of damage from Hurricane Sandy: a creeping discoloration at the edge. These marks add character and contingency to what is otherwise a harbinger of the Hudson Yards development; the piece has been laid across a portion of the High Line’s tracks, anticipating the covering-over of the rail yards below.

A similar platform links the seven sculptures in Ms. Bove’s show at MoMA, which is titled “The Equinox” and was organized by the curator Laura Hoptman with an assistant, Margaret Ewing. It includes a glyph and a piece made with I-beams, but unlike “Caterpillar” it’s installed as an ensemble. It also features materials much less sturdy than steel; one sculpture takes the form of a shimmering, silver-beaded curtain and another consists of parts of a used mattress salvaged from the trash.

Altogether “The Equinox” has a very different mood from the High Line show, mystical and more in keeping with Ms. Bove’s earlier sculptures. An intricate open grid of brass supported by painted fiberboard is titled “Terma,” after the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism; “ Triguna,” which incorporates a peacock feather, a shell and a hunk of found metal makes reference to the Indian ayurvedic tradition. Even the I-beam sculpture is titled “Chesed,” a term from the kabbalah.

Everything here might also be taken as sly commentary on the religion of modernism. The mattress piece, for instance — “Disgusting Mattress,” Ms. Bove has titled it — gestures to Rauschenberg’s “Bed” assemblage and Calder’s wire sculptures with its gray stuffing and flyaway springs. And the whole grouping of sculptures, on the white platform, seems to miniaturize the sculpture garden below. (Ms. Bove has spoken about the importance of this view from the gallery’s large, east-facing glass wall.)

Ms. Bove is very good at working with, or against, the personality of a given site as the situation demands. (Sometimes, though, you wish that more of her personality, strongly influenced by her Bay Area upbringing, would come through.)

On the High Line she renews our appreciation of a truly unusual public space that’s become, at its southern segments, an overtrafficked urban fetish. And at MoMA she refuses to be intimidated by the collection or sanitized by the building that contains it. Certainly, the architects and urban planners in charge of Hudson Yards and MoMA’s expansion could learn a thing or two from her.