Spotlight Review - Massachusetts

Jo Sandman: Once Removed
Danforth Museum of Art • Framingham, MA • www.danforthmuseum.org

Jo Sandman, Small/Big, plaster of Paris and automotive hose, 1994. Photo: William Morse.

Made of plaster-filled rubber hose, Small/Big stands four inches tall and contains a sizeable chunk of the history of sculptural process. On top of that, it is impudent and brash, its plaster core exposed with a series of removed cut wedges that suggest puppet mouths chattering about their elemental making and disrupting their formal restraint. Jo Sandman has been thoughtfully reconsidering the material conditions of art since the 1950s, producing experimental bodies of work that provoke reflection on why and how artworks are made and attended to.

Small/Big is one of a number of similar hose and plaster works, including the large installation Continuity (1993–95, with a new configuration in 2008), that are made of industrial materials not typically associated with art and that are the products of layers of process: casting or molding, carving, assembling and, in the case of the forty-foot-wide Continuity, installation and video. The employment by an artist of such a range of methods is instructive about her artistic mission. Sandman’s work is more the product of an adventurous and responsive thought process than it is an extension of a physical practice. Her craft is invented as needed, rather than displayed as virtuosity. Not to say that the work in this large show lacks physicality or refinement; Sandman releases the inherent physicality of her materials so thoroughly that they seem beautifully alien. Artifacts of Air, Suite IV (c. 2000), is a series of small, framed works made of caulk on black sandpaper. Based on Sandman’s observations of dust motes falling through sunlit air, Artifacts of Air are stripped down minimal gestures that imply a secret alphabetic order. One wonders why caulk rope wasn’t discovered as an art material a long time ago. Its obvious plasticity, its capacity to relay an intended gesture invites the gesture of intention. To put it another way, Sandman uses materials dialogically. She sees materials for what they enable as ideas, rather than what they can accommodate as ideas.

Jo Sandman, Continuity, plaster of Paris and automotive hose, 1993-95 (new configuration 2008). Photo: Toru Nakanishi

In her explorations of a variety of materials, Sandman has not only established a break from traditions, she has also made a connection with the materials of ordinary work and ordinary objects—caulk rope and sandpaper (how apt for Sandman), tar, insulation foil, rubber inner tubes and automotive rubber hose, plaster, used painting tarpaulins, tape, rivets. These prosaic materials, associated with buildings and cars, are for the most part covered over, not meant to be seen. Except for the earlier folded duck cloth pieces of the 1970s, Sandman’s materials are the plain innards of industrial systems. Sandman joins her formal vision to this non-formal arsenal of supplies in such a way that she is able to depart the strictures of painting, which is more her antecedent than sculpture, and to advance a modernism of increasingly humane sympathies.

Her work has an apparent function of shifting between art and artifact as though she were discovering an ideal within the routine boundaries of work and production. Her found tarpaulin pieces are slices and sections of old paint-spattered drop cloths in configurations that quite delicately make a split-second dance of form that opens up their white supporting spaces. The tarpaulin pieces are risky and somewhat uneven for their play with painting as art and as trade, but necessary to the evolution of Sandman’s ideas. An insulation piece like Tape Removal #007 (1976), with its dark shimmer and hint of something hidden, is work of a revelatory nature. In the insulation pieces, Sandman pulled sections of their foil surface away with tape, exposing the inner composite material and evoking the traditions of material gesture and spiritual tug in action painting. 

Sandman’s workaday materials are primarily black, white, gray, and silver. The objects she makes are, by extension, spare and lean and without decorative distraction. As lean as it may be, Sandman’s work does not lack vitality. The large installation Continuity is made up of dozens of plaster-filled sections of automotive hose in various lengths. Like Small/Big described above, these individual elements are sliced into and articulated in various postures. Some seem to pair off as they crawl along a wall. These figures form a community on the walls, the floor, and on sculpture pedestals as though the art were both breeding and escaping. Continuity becomes an organic force as unruly as Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that Sandman’s art is about liberation—the liberation of art from its habits, its institutions, and its own history.

—David Raymond

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