Steve Currie, Terminal (2014), stainless steel wire, plastic tube, bobbers and hydrostone, 112″ x 72″ x 60″; courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery
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The following essay appears in the catalogue accompany Gone Fishing, an exhibition of sculpture by Steve Currie currently on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery.
While rifling through a folder of reviews written about the sculpture of Steve Currie, a passing observation caught my eye, not least because it points to the puzzling nature of his art.
Writing about a 1998 Currie exhibition, the critic Kenneth Baker discerned a Minimalist current informing the work, particularly in the deployment of materials. Minimalism, it is worth recalling, abjured mimesis and association–that is to say, metaphor–in favor of unencumbered materialism. The what-you-see-is-what-you-see approach (to iterate Frank Stella’s deathless phrase) has its adherents, but Currie isn’t one of them. Baker ultimately pegged him as “no true Minimalist”. He was right to do so. Though Currie came of age toward the tail end of the style’s dominance, he proved too restless a talent to settle for the easy-out. No literalist dead-ends for this sculptor. Inviting aesthetic discomfort in the cause of artistic potential, Currie has forever been welcoming of a certain impurity.
Well, maybe not “forever”, but Currie has been working and exhibiting in New York City for close to thirty years. That he’s managed to do so without succumbing to fashion or capitulating to cynicism is remarkable in and of itself: the art scene isn’t the most accommodating (or kindest) place for those with independent temperaments. As a veteran of this milieu, Currie has witnessed a fair share of cultural and ideological shifts. Taking them in with a sense of measure and, I like to think, bemusement, Currie carried forth in the studio, questioning the limits of his vision even while prodding at the sculptural tenets of the day. In doing so, he’s discovered tangents that are diverting, sometimes fruitful and sometimes dubious, and always worth investigating.
Steve Currie, Gone Fishing (2015), stainless steel wire, plastic tube, fishing poles and hydrostone, 112″ x 80″ x 26″; courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery
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The title of this exhibition provides an example of how Currie has strayed from any kind of orthodoxy. As a thematic marker, Gone Fishing connotes a level of disengagement, at least from the mundane worries of the here-and-now. As sculptural fact, “fishing”, for Currie, is an avowal of the benefits of play, of following where the logic–or illogic–of the work takes him. Whether twisting fine lengths of wire or making casts of hydrostone (a cement derived from gypsum), Currie evinces a healthy acceptance of their material and allusive capabilities, even when they lead down pathways he could never have imagined. This aesthetic flexibility–along with a deadpan whimsy that marks Currie as the most disarming of artists–extends to the recent use of found materials: those would be the fishing bobbers and poles punctuating his signature amalgamations of systematic modularity and free form improvisation.
The incorporation of readily identifiable objects within abstract structures seems, on the face of it, a lopsided and potentially foolhardy endeavor. Wouldn’t these prefab items call attention to themselves at the expense of sculptural unity? One can’t help but be reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s remark that no work of art could hope to improve upon the inherent beauty of an airplane propeller. And, sure enough, the bobbers are, in their streamlined elegance, impressive combinations of functionality and design. That’s what caught Currie’s eye when he chanced upon them in the window of a fishing supply store near his Brooklyn studio. But an object remains “found” only to the extent to which it is endowed with poetic import. Currie transforms the fishing bobbers into integral adjuncts of a larger artistic context. They remain themselves and yet they don’t. Currie’s slight of hand is pivotal to the work’s integrity, and beguiling to boot.
Steve Currie, Adrift (2014), stainless steel wire, roots, plastic tube and bobbers, 117″ x 79″ x 54″; courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery
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It helps that Currie has long employed industrial materials and proven them un-industrial—in other words, pliable and humane. But the inclusion of the bobbers and, for that matter, the dried roots seen here-and-there, is unexpected even if the adroitness with which they’ve been synthesized is no surprise at all. Synthesis is, after all, Currie’s forte. As a sculptor, he’s less interested in essentializing forms than in creating a dialogue between contradictory impulses. Forget how he enlivens the buck-stops-here ethos of Minimalism with a limber strain of Surrealism. Consider, instead, the oddball tete-a-tetes generated between mechanical surfaces and organic rhythms; stolid architectural forms and graceful expanses of line; diagrammatic emphases and animal-like shapes; and, of course, volume and mass simultaneously confirmed and thwarted. What, finally, do we end up with? Donald Judd meets Paul Klee meets Wild Kingdom meets Tinker Toys, after which they collectively manage to defy gravity as deftly as Fred Astaire. And that’s just where Currie starts.
A recent trip to Asia affected Currie in ways still new to him, but references to topiary gardens and airplane terminals are there to be gleaned, albeit less as biographical markers than as extensions of the artist’s fascination with the world, both natural and otherwise. And it’s this fascination—turned outwards, appreciative and questioning—that endows the work with its droll animism. When ensconced in the studio–a locale whose isolation can engender the worst kind of self-absorption–Currie doesn’t tune out the particularities of what’s out there; the world is, in fact, ushered inside the door. As both philosophy and art, this approach is remarkably grounded and blessedly unpretentious. “No true Minimalist” Currie is, without a doubt. But the truth of his art lies in how thoroughly these quietly ambitious sculptures engage and enthrall the eye. Every artist should be as encompassing and true.
© 2015 Mario Naves
Too Much Art 