Sculpture.

My experience visiting the Noguchi Museum in Queens was a strange one, and for this reason my writing it comes belatedly. I was unsure how to language the feeling, now I feel more confident to attempt. Monolithic lumps of rock huddle between walls of cinderblock and steel as winter takes its first bite out of spring. Some looming and leaning, towering like a giant's planted walking stick; others rising up like super-natural portals, an elliptical loop of silken stone bent barely forward, backward, leaning at an impossible angle and seeming to be what could only be described as striding forward, propelled by the bar of ether vibrating between its legs, in the loop's center; others sinking into the concrete floor like primeval snakes, coiled and fossilized, broken and split by time, honed and resurrected by some acolytic archaeologist; some like phantasmal hammers or phalluses hovering above the ground to meet your stare as its edges quiver and shimmer; and others slouched l...

In May 2012, Rachel Harrison opened her show The Help  at Greene Naftali gallery, New York. A long, purple carpet (like one down which Willy Wonka might walk, stretching to the gates of his chocolate factory) cuts through the middle of the room. An astroid of multicolored mush anchors one end of the rug as it sits stubbornly where it seems to have landed, half-atop a tin garbage can and a television looping a point-of-view film of a nighttime cab ride. The boulder does not look particularly comfortable, though immovable. The other end of the rug is held by a patchy green-and-pinky box like a cabinet-shaped paperweight. Behind its back it hides a carpet sweeper. Doing the rounds it seems, or paused. This must be the help. Working hard? Or hardly working? None respond, it does not turn, yet there hangs an eery sense of order in the air, as though each has done/does/is doing their duty, everything in its right place, all quiet and well. This in contrast to the gnarled silhoue...

On entering Jack Whitten's Odyssey  show at the Met Breuer I'm confronted with a blank wall bearing said title, emblazoned in blue, and a great white coffee table of a pedestal rising from the slate floor in the center of this initial space. Atop it like a fishbowl of orchids is a horned stump of bright wood, the base warm and warted with something like pearly fungus and the horn peaking into a a crooked point, a polished thorn stained like deep cabernet, rising from a whitewashed cinderblock. I approach and find the "fungus" to be really detris, bits of plastic, technological trash, seashells, teeth. A stripe of white paint, I realize, skirts the base of the stump, and I feel as though it were floating or really sprouting from the thing like a seed. A gnarly lima bean. And from the crusted stump sprouts the thorn, polished and crooked and sticking out a knotty arm as if to stabilize itself or grab at a nearby tree, more sure than itself. At the thorn's gentle cr...