Tim Griffin on the art of Virginia Overton

PROBABLY THE OBSERVATION by Virginia Overton cited most frequently by writers got here on the event of her 2013 exhibition at Switzerland’s Kunsthalle Bern. Wishing to tease out the artist’s ideas on the discovered objects used for her sculpture, the exhibition’s curator, Fabrice Stroun, requested a comparatively easy—if traditionally loaded—query: Is “a bit of wooden checked out in an area consecrated for artwork . . . not the identical piece of wooden discovered on the facet of the street”? It’s an affordable line of inquiry, notably on condition that Overton’s work suggests some nominal underpinnings, if solely by advantage of how the commercial supplies and objects she incessantly chooses—from wooden and steel to instruments and signage—seem like little altered once they turn out to be of a bit together with her sculpture. But when she answered, Overton successfully kicked the readymade’s legacy to the curb: “Truly,” she stated, “I feel they’re the identical factor.”

Taking the artist at her phrase, and looking out intently on the totally different objects in her work, one acknowledges that, certainly, they by no means fairly let go of their histories. (If there may be an arbitrariness to be discovered right here, it’s alongside one other axis.) They by no means turn out to be completely summary, revolving round some recognition of artwork’s elementary indeterminacy. Extra exactly, their use worth stays firmly intact, with respect not solely to the palpable and chronic stuff of previous lives, but in addition—her works quietly suggest—to future potential. An A-frame stepladder jammed between two concrete partitions in Untitled (Ladder), 2009, remains to be a stepladder that could possibly be taken down and used sooner or later; Sharpie scrawls on its facet recommend it comes from some establishment’s tools stock, to which it’s certain to return. (The phrases of Jasper Johns’s adage about doing one thing to an object shift subtly right here into doing one thing with an object.) Equally, the eight pedestals in Untitled (Pedestals), 2012—shimmed between two gallery partitions in order that they create an inconceivable bric-a-brac bridge spanning the room a couple of toes above the ground—are instantly legible as issues taken out of storage, getting used (or misused) right here just for a spell.

Actually and figuratively, her objects are “suspended”—the pedestals maintain themselves up, in any case—in order that a number of identities and definitions (and attending histories) are current. Without delay, they invite and disavow any and each single affiliation. Maybe Overton’s most elegant sculptural paradox on this regard is present in her untitled 2012 public work on the Excessive Line in New York, for which she parked a Toyota truck in a functioning car parking zone, the mattress loaded with mortared bricks. On the one hand, because the artist herself stated, the work rhymed with the bricked-up orifices that intermittently flank the previous elevated rail, the place trains would as soon as go into and out of various buildings. On the opposite, whereas Overton’s sculpture was certainly a sculpture, it additionally consisted of a truck doing simply what vans do, carrying a load of bricks in its mattress. When the set up’s run got here to an finish, she merely drove it away.

The use worth of her work stays firmly intact, with respect not solely to the palpable and chronic stuff of previous lives, but in addition—her works quietly suggest—to future potential.

TO GRASP OVERTON’S WORDS about her objects’ continuity throughout contexts, nevertheless, it’s most informative to think about a latest episode during which Stroun’s hypothetical turned a actuality. Just a few years in the past, the artist was driving her truck by way of a rural stretch of her native Tennessee and stumbled on a pile of deserted signage by the facet of the street—which she salvaged and used as materials for a 2020 exhibition of sculptures at White Dice Hong Kong titled “Alone within the Wilderness.” Such a creative course of is acquainted sufficient: Choose it up, put it within the truck, take it to the studio, make a piece. Displayed within the gallery context, the items conjured a powerful sense of their pasts—and, extra broadly (and as could also be acquainted thematically), of the outmoded in tradition. However, given Overton’s assertion, one can’t assist however contemplate anew the importance of such a sense doubtless already being current within the objects when the artist found them alongside the street, deserted within the grass and gravel. Anybody driving America’s rural routes as we speak is accustomed to how such objects evoke nostalgia or loss, possessing a sensibility akin to the vacancy attending Atget’s disappearing streets, figures of an age’s eroding economies. One imagines as effectively how affecting the scene would have been to behold, with the pile informing, and giving order to, the encircling panorama versus being wholly decided by these environment. Consider Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” during which the article—in a folksy activate Keats’s highfalutin Grecian urn—was positioned on a hill in Tennessee in order that the “wilderness rose as much as it.” 

All of which is to say that no matter qualities Overton’s objects possess when encountered throughout the gallery partitions would have already got been discernible when these objects had been discovered outdoors them. Their histories—and their valences of previous and potential, with respect to make use of—stay palpable, held in suspension, as they relaxation alongside the street. The item isn’t mounted or resolved, with meanings foreclosed; it’s all the time inherently ambiguous. The property of the fabric that’s conjunctive, that’s all the time being one thing and one thing else, takes over; there is no such thing as a transformative second shifting into the gallery however as an alternative a sedimentary accrual that’s certain to proceed indefinitely. Once more, maybe the inventive perspective right here is much less that of doing one thing to an object than that of doing one thing with it.

It’s this ambiguity that her objects share and maintain, and that stands in dialogue with fashions diverging from that of the historic readymade. Talking about modern artwork in 2007, for instance, Édouard Glissant would advocate for artworks’ motion away from any identification vouchsafed from others—articulating as an alternative a relational, differential place predictive of nonetheless different such relations that will but emerge.¹ Maybe extra succinct right here could be phrases borrowed from scholar Homi Ok. Bhabha’s theorization of subjectivity many years in the past: These are hybrid objects from the beginning, containing totally different histories and makes use of and views. When Overton asserts that her discovered objects are the identical no matter context, she articulates the phrases of a nonessentialist sculpture that does away with binaries—together with these of being in or outdoors the gallery or inside or with out the establishment of artwork extra broadly. Certainly, if Bhabha as soon as argued that the “topic’s individuation emerges as an impact of the intersubjective,” affording it a form of company, right here such multiplicity—seeing these facets in relation—defines the article, if solely momentarily.² “I by no means see something as divorced from its different lives,” Overton says. “One simply turns into extra current. You understand that saying, ‘He’s Mr. Proper Now?’ ”

ANY NUMBER OF OVERTON’S particular person artworks mannequin such logic. An untitled large-scale sculpture for Artwork Basel’s Parcours in 2016, for instance, consists of the sections from a disassembled pickup truck piled into the car’s personal mattress. Positioned excessive on a pedestal, the piece gestures towards John Chamberlain, given its cornucopia of automobile components, however solely to the extent that it recollects the litter of a scrap heap or an overloaded toolbox: It’s a sculpture displaying its readiness to collapse, or to be variously reassembled and redeployed, as an alternative of getting been compacted right into a formally resolved unity.

At instances, Overton renders this state of irresolution literal. A given piece created in a single setting could also be dismantled by the artist (if it stays together with her lengthy sufficient), its supplies used to make one other work. Her observe is certainly one of provisionality; the truth is, such operations may even compete together with her objects as reservoirs of which means. To quote one other poet, one recollects Valéry’s well-known declaration {that a} poem isn’t completed, solely deserted: So it’s with Overton’s sculptures, their constituent components, and play.

One recollects Valéry’s well-known declaration {that a} poem isn’t completed, solely deserted.

Such accrued temporalities sometimes open as effectively onto “discovered” issues of historical past and legacy. When invited to create exhibitions, Overton incessantly makes use of supplies discovered on-site on the establishment—together with, deliberately or not, people who belong, or have belonged, to different artists. For her 2018 exhibition “Constructed” at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, Overton’s Untitled (Suspended Beam), 2018, consisted of a wood beam hanging as a heavy swing from certainly one of Mark di Suvero’s outdated gantries, situated on this website of his former studio; there, audiences might congregate or, as Overton says, “sit a spell.” The piece nods to certainly one of Overton’s inventive influences even because it misuses that artist’s software. (Notably on this regard, whereas artworks are sometimes stated to indicate the indicators of their very own making, right here these indicators turn out to be literal: The gantry—just like the recurring determine of the pickup truck in Overton’s work—denotes one thing nonetheless being made, splitting Overton’s sculpture between the gerund’s previous and current tenses. The work is completed and unfinished directly.) Extra humorously, when Overton lately made sculptures for an exhibition at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany, she employed supplies from the establishment’s storage; after dismantling the works, she was prevented from leaving with sure sections of two-way mirror—as a result of they had been truly spare components for a Dan Graham sculpture that had been left in a storage closet.

It was this ingredient of her work that prompted Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK to contact Overton with a exceptional tailored invitation to go to its services this spring. The establishment had lately found two transport containers stuffed with supplies that had been gathered by the artist Anthony Caro to make works for the park. Right here, in piles, are ambiguous objects, the surplus or unused, mendacity in limbo, with, say, a leftover metal wheel not set inside any functioning machine however not but situated within the mechanics of a creative observe. Intriguingly, some shards of steel had been lower or joined collectively like Caro works in gestation, however they hadn’t but attained any such differentiation.³ They remained items checked out, ignored, and appeared previous.

From this materials, Overton was given the chance to make sculptures of her personal, which go on view this month at Goldsmiths Centre for Modern Artwork in London. When her works are positioned on show, they might look like historic remixes, not bespeaking any corrective anxiousness of affect, rereading, or homage a lot as reflecting a layering and relayering of fabric encounters from technology to technology. Maybe most telling with respect to Overton’s perspective towards supplies usually is her recounting of the surprisingly visceral sense that Caro had, the truth is, dealt with this materials. He had touched these shards of metal, beginning down the street of giving them totally different kind. Which isn’t to recommend that Overton advocates a privileged return of the artist’s hand, nor does she fetishize an paintings’s aura; quite, she acknowledges that to provide consideration to the usage of objects or their historical past is, essentially, to think about their place within the palms of individuals. The dimension of presence in historical past—of individuals’s bodily presence in it, and of historical past’s presence in our bodies, or of, put one other manner, the intrusion of actuality—can’t be put aside.

OVERTON HAS SAID that she first turned enthusiastic about public sculpture partly as a result of she observed how incessantly it’s misused. Or, extra precisely, how incessantly—and no matter any pretense to autonomy—it’s used in any respect. No matter an object’s aesthetic worth when set in a grand plaza or within the nice outdoor, we’re apt to search out individuals using its base as a backrest, or gathering on its horizontal planes for lunchtime dialog, or curling up in its nooks with a e book within the solar. The artwork could effectively have a symbolic perform in a public setting, in different phrases, however it’s all the time one thing different, or one thing extra (or much less), than that.

So it’s that lots of Overton’s public sculptures nonetheless strongly evoke the touchstone efforts by artists of earlier generations, however solely whereas acknowledging no matter resides past a purely aesthetic encounter, that exists, because it had been, in actual area. Individuals could effectively have been cleared off the cantilevered or angled metal beams of di Suvero’s sculptures throughout the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, however they’re implicitly invited to congregate on Overton’s Suspended Beam. And when Overton’s main out of doors works strategy extra clearly the summary geometries of di Suvero, they nonetheless discover unusual bedfellows in an anti-aesthetic. If these items aren’t pointing again to earlier histories and remaining stubbornly themselves—think about Duchamp selecting up his shovel to do yard work after he’d completed exhibiting it—they’re calling to thoughts commonplace figures in tradition. Contemplate Untitled (Gem), 2018, whose simply recognized wood roof beams are conjoined to create a huge treasured stone akin to Claes Oldenburg’s monumental clothespin or baseball bat. An upcoming fee for LaGuardia Airport in New York equally takes up a well-recognized characteristic of the city panorama: skylights, which on the terminal will grasp from the ceiling by a series, each pendant-like in its crystalline geometry. Although right here, once more, one can think about taking a bit down and popping it right into a ceiling someplace.

Overton’s challenge for the present Venice Biennale equally displays this hybrid character. Right here, the artist sought out huge precast concrete wall sections designed to be used in constructing street or railway tunnels by way of the Alps, arranging plenty of them back-to-back (to create what she calls a “tulip”) or on their sides—every part’s arc providing audiences a spot to climb or relaxation. Overton requested that her sculptures be situated on the very finish of the Biennale’s lengthy Arsenale, the place the big corridor opens onto an interstitial area between an industrial inlet (the place outdated gantries nonetheless stand on totally different jetties) and close by gardens: a spot the place audiences, nearing the top of the exhibition, are incessantly determined for a spot to relaxation; and the place guests and water-taxi drivers alike are identified to search out themselves confused as to which areas they’re permitted to enter and which passages and waterways are useless ends. Set into the concrete varieties are small holes coated with pink glass matching the colour of the town’s streetlight lenses, by way of which gentle will go over the course of the day. (When the streetlights of Venice had been made, many years in the past, the town chosen cheap glass; being economical, that tumbler was initially clear however modified colour over time, giving outmodedness itself a specific hue.) And these are echoed by plenty of pink glass buoys Overton will set at varied locations within the water. 

Overton acknowledges that to provide consideration to the usage of objects or their historical past is, essentially, to think about their place within the palms of individuals.

The massive constructions instantly summon Nancy Holt’s Solar Tunnels, 1973–76, proper right down to the holes of their surfaces—however with apparent distinctions. For one factor, Overton’s sculptures are seen inside out and set back-to-back. This association (in contrast to Holt’s work) deprives the viewer of any form of directed view, simply as the sunshine passing by way of the small home windows fails to kind any particular sample (à la Holt’s constellations) however merely strikes throughout the in any other case strong kind over the length of a day. In truth, the query of the viewer’s orientation is prompted by this and different works by Overton, which, the artist says, search to immediate viewers members to maneuver round them with out settling into (or being glad by) any specific view. This level is made nearly comically at Socrates Sculpture Park by Overton’s Untitled (4×8 View), 2018, which leads guests to have a look at the encircling city panorama by way of dozens of lower pipes—however once more, with out directing them towards any specific landmark or orientation on the compass. Individuals can look by way of any variety of “tunnels” and assume as effectively of the proportions of others for whom a special tunnel could be extra applicable. So many various views can be found on the identical aircraft.

As Overton’s items transfer away from resolved autonomous objects certain to their makes use of, a query arises concerning their valences in public area. The query is a crucial one in our singularly fraught instances: Round simply what ideation of the “public” does Overton’s sculpture revolve? How is that this ideation altered in and by her work? For that matter, contemplating that pile of signage by the street, what’s the distinction between being “public” and being “in public”? Individuals partaking with Overton’s work aren’t made mounted topics of their context, however are as an alternative as ambiguous because the sculptures themselves: organized not as a individuals however, to borrow one other philosophical time period, as a large number.

IN THIS VEIN, it’s particularly essential to think about how Overton engages establishments when she is invited to indicate inside their partitions. Often, a considerable portion of the work that can be exhibited doesn’t even exist when she arrives on-site, and whereas Overton brings some supplies from her studio, she additionally (even primarily) works with objects she gathers from what’s already contained in the constructing. These supplies bear the marks of their previous makes use of. However Overton doesn’t essentially uncover or wield these histories—or literal architectures—within the mode of institutional critique, understood in its broadest phrases.

Trying once more on the pedestals suspended in a gallery, one could observe that they don’t seem to be, say, taking literal measure or architectural inventory of the area, as artists equivalent to Mel Bochner or Lawrence Weiner initially of their careers may need executed.⁴ Neither is her work working within the method of items equivalent to Hans Haacke’s Condensation Dice, 1963–65, whose concentrating water underscored the never-neutral actuality of the gallery as a bodily area. As a substitute, Overton brings the provisional to the fore to make it extra obvious (if not an outright start line).⁵ To quote a comparable work: In Untitled (Slant), 2013—which, aptly sufficient, was put in at Kunsthalle Bern, the well-known website of Harald Szeemann’s watershed 1969 present “Reside in Your Head: When Attitudes Grow to be Kind”—Overton wedged lengthy planks of wooden right into a gallery at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. Of biggest curiosity to her was how they’d develop and contract, warp or straighten, over time. One turns into extra cognizant of how the area is topic to contingencies, and topic to vary, nevertheless strong the partitions might sound. The piece is situated in a register of contingencies, discovered all through Overton’s work, the place one may additionally contemplate her varied indicators of labor—and particularly of commercial labor—to supply a feminist critique of how work has modified over the many years, turning into, per Donna Haraway, feminized in its precariousness, with its contours shifting, because the scholar says, from full-time to part-time to flextime or no time. Or, to make use of a special parlance, shifting in dialogue with Overton’s vans: from the meeting strains of Fordism to the challenge groups of Toyota-ism.⁶

Round simply what ideation of the “public” does Overton’s sculpture revolve?

A seamless collection of sculptures by Overton makes the purpose seriocomically: For a lot of of her exhibits at arts establishments, the artist will fabricate backlit signage with hand-affixed lettering that spells out the internet hosting venue’s title, whether or not THE KITCHEN, KUNSTHALLE BERN, or the WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART. The item’s very redundancy contributes to its humor: Put in contained in the exhibition, the place, in any case, any viewer ought to know precisely the place she is, the signal features as an indication, each virtually and semiotically. But it’s within the latter sense {that a} refined seriousness infiltrates. It’s as if Magritte’s well-known phrase “This isn’t a pipe” had been inverted—making the hole between phrase and object, thought and actuality, all of the larger, such that the connection between the phrases can not be presumed as established or, for that matter, eternal. Or, with respect to any establishment (and within the register of her public sculptures), as one thing that would probably exist aside from our particular person actions. The outmoded know-how of the signal itself means that the belief of such stability could also be a factor of the previous.

Or, alternatively, of the long run, if solely by advantage of the signal’s analog nature. In any case, for such signage, somebody should bodily connect the lettering to the sunshine field. On this manner, it turns into clear that Overton’s work inside establishments—and with their histories—doesn’t revolve round any form of “subversion for rent,” to make use of a decades-old phrase. As a substitute, and at a second of nice institutional uncertainty within the arts and in society extra broadly, she involves organizations with a special thoughts, attending to how individuals, histories, and use are essentially entwined. What’s there, what’s getting used, what’s not getting used, how might it’s used otherwise? How can we make such valences seen? (In her Kitchen exhibition, she used theatrical lights to light up areas behind freestanding gallery partitions—to not critique the area, however to permit the one thing else that was there to be seen.) The questions lengthen, infectiously, to institutional workers: Who’s there, who’s and isn’t being de- or employed, who could possibly be employed otherwise?

The solutions generally come organically, as when a group working with Overton throughout the set up of her exhibition on the Whitney Museum gifted her a wheel chock—about which she’d expressed nice enthusiasm—that ultimately ended up turning into a part of her exhibition. On different events, the solutions come up by way of necessity, as individuals within the institutional areas start to do issues—out of enthusiasm wedded with want—that fall outdoors the established parameters of their positions. As with the panorama surrounding the jar on the hill, the establishment—the individuals—begins to mobilize across the challenge, assuming totally different roles to make it doable. Like a bridge of pedestals held in suspension between gallery partitions. 

Tim Griffin is a contributing editor of Artforum. 

NOTES

1. This passage paraphrases a portion of a 2007 lecture by Glissant at Vassar Faculty, and is very related when contemplating how Overton usually makes use of parts of her varied sculptures in subsequent tasks, disassembling one piece with a view to make one other composition doable. Whereas Glissant’s phrases correspond with how Overton’s supplies discover totally different iterations over time, such an iterative proposition additionally calls to thoughts Johanna Burton’s quotation of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with regard to the artist’s work. Particularly, Burton, contemplating valences of Overton’s sculpture (and its upending of “masculine” procedures in artwork and labor), cites Sedgwick’s consideration of how one could “occupy liminal—even a number of—gender identities” with “decibels of how ‘gender-y’ . . . any particular person may be.” Johanna Burton, “Class Act,” Constructed, exh. cat. (New York: Socrates Sculpture Park, 2018), 19. Amongst friends in modern sculpture, Overton’s strategy on this regard may additionally be similar to that of Carol Bove. Many due to artwork historian Molly Nesbit for steering me to Glissant’s dialogue.

2. Homi Ok. Bhabha, The Location of Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1994), 265.

3. To increase the Deleuzian phrases that will encourage Glissant, one may additionally examine this liminal state to the yolk of an egg. In truth, curator Jess Wilcox, who organized Overton’s exhibition at Socrates, means that the artist’s observe is deeply inflected by her youth working in farmland, planting rhizomes. See Jess Wilcox, “Public Works,” Constructed, exh. cat. (New York: Socrates Sculpture Park, 2018), 11.

4. This work appeared as a part of an exhibition curated by Matthew Lyons on the Kitchen in New York, the place I used to be govt director and chief curator on the time.

5. One is tempted to say right here Hal Foster’s commentary that modern artists from Isa Genzken to Rachel Harrison have deployed the readymade—a mannequin from an earlier industrial period—in a fashion that’s “not merely . . . outmoded however nearly . . . pathetic, both hypertrophied or ruined or each.” For a fair broader swath of latest artists, the usage of discovered supplies underlines how there may be “scant public sphere outdoors this ‘capitalist rubbish bucket’ and scarce object relations past its junkspace.” Overton generates one other dialog round potential. Hal Foster, Dangerous New Days: Artwork, Criticism, Emergency (New York: Verso, 2015), 95.

6. See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Expertise, and Feminism within the Late Twentieth Century” (New York: Routledge, 1991).