New sculpture, which is attracting more and more attention at the moment, doesn’t have the unity, the uniformity that painting does (or that it did until recently). You can’t come up with a single term, like Neo-Expressionism, to describe what is going on; there’s too much diversity. A measure of this diversity was visible last fall in two gallery exhibitions. In October, Donald Lipski’s recent work was on view at the Germans van Eck Gallery in SoHo, and in November there was a show of William Tucker’s work at the David McKee Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street.
Of the two, Lipski is the more eccentric. He works with discarded industrial objects, a method favored by another prominent contemporary sculptor, R. M. Fischer. Whereas Fischer’s found objects are subsumed in a larger whole—a lamp, for example, functions as a work of art and utilitarian object—Lipski inhabits the realm of art more explicitly. But he rejects conventional artistic order in favor of a loose separateness, combining his objects in a way that stresses their uniqueness. In one work, a pair of heavy rubber boots rests on two metal conveyor belts. Each boot is crowned by a heavy-duty wooden handle, and the pair is joined by copper rods passed through the lace holes. In another work, a bucket is fitted inside with a reflective disc, and wrapped with a plaster-soaked bandage. Out of such combinations a whole of a different sort emerges: the “poetic object.”
The aesthetic of the poetic object
