Liza Lou (1969–)Kitchen, 1991–96, Glass beads
ART CAN BE GENERATED THROUGH ENGAGEMENT WITH A PARTICULAR MATERIAL
In the late twentieth century, a number of artists began to make work whose central feature was the behavior of the medium in which they worked. Thus the New York painter Morris Louis (1912–62) made pictures in which he poured thin layers of paint onto large swaths of unprimed canvas. The resulting pictures are fundamentally demonstrations of how paint behaves under these circumstances, staining and spreading to create soft-edged veils. This approach was expanded upon by the painter Paul Jenkins (1923–2012), who devised an array of mechanical means to pour and mix paint onto a surface, revealing sometimes surprising properties of the material.
A more aggressive approach was taken by Lawrence Poons (1937–) in the 1970s when he began to pour large quantities of very thick paint onto canvases. The paint was allowed to move freely as successive colors were combined, building to three-dimensional surfaces.
In a rather different vein, the gargantuan steel sculptures of Richard Serra (1939–) are dependent on the physical properties of enormous steel plates. They rely in large part simply on the behavior and appearance of medium.
The rather prosaic substance of concrete is central to many of the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread (1963–), in which its capacity to pour, fill, and set hard is used to render palpable interior volumes that are usually filled with air. A more challenging example is the work of Dan Flavin (1933–96), who made many artworks using commercial fluorescent light fixtures. The resulting pieces incorporate both the fixtures and the light envelopes they engender.
In the work of all these artists there runs the idea that the artwork gains authority by promoting, exploring, and dramatizing the characteristic behavior and appearance of a medium.
Liza Lou (1969–)
Kitchen, 1991–96, Glass beads
In this life-size kitchen, all the surfaces are created with beadwork, an example of a look and enterprise driven by a medium, in this case that of traditional beading techniques. The artist has continued to use beadwork for her sculpture even as it has become more abstract and minimal.
