Nancy Rubins

The Rapture and the Tsunami

I had never noticed the angular, meticulous shadow thrown by a half-open barn door until I saw the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly. I had never really thought about the oozy sand in the tidal pools at Malibu beach until my friend and fellow surfer Kenneth Price made that goo a gift to me in art. Now, thanks to Kenny, I can feel it sliding through my fingers. Today, finally, I can luxuriate once again in the clean, fluid, highway reverie implanted in my lizard brain by a million miles of American highways, scrawled there by my dad’s big-band tours, by my own beatnik adventures, and endless, bloody, promiscuous, rock-and-roll crusades. For decades this serenity was lost to me, burned away by the ferocity of whatever mission I was on. Now the smooth whoosh is back, mine again thanks to Edward Ruscha—happily restored by the haunting, floating language, the hazy atmospheres, and razor sharp horizons of his paintings.

Had Michael Heizer not dug his Double Negative in the desert outside Las Vegas, I should have forgotten the lesson Larry McMurtry taught me in his novel Horseman, Pass By. When told by the parson that his father had “gone to a better place,” McMurtry’s hero snaps, “Yeah, if dirt’s better than air.” Without Heizer’s fiat, I might have forgotten the primacy of air, the priority of surface over volume. I might have forgotten that negative space is positive space for human beings, that gravity is death and the hard earth is our only destination, pressed down as we are by a power for which art is the only redemption.

My oft-told story about Nancy Rubins concerns my brother and sister and me. When we were youngsters, my grandmother had a large walk-in refrigerator in her flower shop that was devoted to exotic flowers—a refuge for multicolored orchids, for flaming heliconias surging upward like fireworks, for ginger, yellow fern, birds of paradise, Madagascar honeycomb, anthurium andraeanum and other varieties of the “flamingo flower.” Compared to dingy brown Texas surrounding us, my grandmother’s icebox was heaven, so we played a game inside it. We would shut ourselves in, close our eyes, and chant “flower, flower, flower, flower, flower, flower” until (like Gertrude Stein’s “rose”) the sound “flower” was just noise, washed of meaning and reference.

Nancy Rubins, Big Edge, 2009. CityCenter, Las Vegas. Aluminum boats, stainless steel, stainless steel wire cable, 51 × 75 × 57 ft. Collection of MGM Resorts International, Las Vegas. Photograph by Erich Koyama. © Nancy Rubins. Courtesy of the artist.

Then we would open our eyes and just for a moment, before the mechanisms of cognition kicked in, the flowers weren’t flowers. They were sheer amazement—a chilly multicolored dream. The clouds of blooms and fragrance seemed to bear us up with rapturous lightness. At the same time, the curve of the stalks bending over our heads evoked the surfer’s nightmare of coming up into the leading edge of a thirty-foot wave. I should never have remembered this anecdote, however, if the catastrophic glamour of Nancy Rubins’s sculptures had not produced in me the same brew of sensory memory. Thus the title of this essay: the rapture and the tsunami—which is a good title, although I have discovered that most of my friends tend to favor one over the other. Lotus-eaters love the glamour. My anarchist friends embrace the apocalypse. As an adept of creative destruction, I quiver at the dread of the wave coming down and also imagine myself rising like a dolphin within the clear blue wall of wave.

Rubins’s work, in fact, could easily have been Wallace Stevens’s subject when he wrote, “Death is the mother of beauty,” since, parochial aesthetics aside, neither death nor beauty is ever absent (or could be absent) from Rubins’s graceful, brutal sculpture. Her giant, ragged straggle of airplane parts crashing from the downtown Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (adjacent, of course, to the airport) evokes some aviational catastrophe. The clumps and folds of airplane parts that adorn the tree up in Topanga echo the wreckage of every misguided smuggler’s plane that ever plunged into the cypress swamps of Louisiana. The pyramid of trailers piled helter-skelter in a field outside Pittsburgh speaks all too clearly of the aftermath of a tornado in Oklahoma. The salad of house trailers and hot water heaters Rubins constructed for the Helter Skelter exhibition at MOCA rather ominously recalls one of Fernand Léger’s bad dreams.

The sculpture that Rubins has snuggled into the alcove of a museum in Graz, like a giant robot’s knuckle or a titanium canapé, is located next door to what was once the home of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Serbia set off World War I. Today, it could easily be construed as a war memorial, or, at least, at worst, as testament to malignant industrialism, but it’s not and has never been. Rubins’s graceful sixty-five-foot flower in Las Vegas blossoms among the faux-modernist sleekness of CityCenter like a fleur du mal, a repudiation of everything around it, and everyone still loves it. The bouquet of canoes shooting off the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla (adjacent, of course, to the ocean) imagines the tsunami in the moment of its sucking roll.

Rubins herself has her own view. She is sort of indomitable. “I am an optimist,” she says. “You mentioned Wallace Stevens. Well, for me, junk is the mother of beauty. We live like squealing babies between nature and disaster. We have parks to remind of us of ideal nature. We have my works to remind us of the catastrophe, to bracket our comfortable lives with something scary and beautiful.” Thus, Nancy Rubins’s sculpture has joined what for me is an elite category of art that I find to be self-evident in the Jeffersonian sense—art that exists without precedent, excuse, cultural confirmation, decorum, science, psychology, or theory, just hard-core physical staying power—intellectual art in the sense that it makes ideas visible, but never conceptual. Conceptual art, in Rubins’s view, is the job of beholders and dependent on their own reading list.

Because of their categorical cleanliness and freedom from denominational off-ramps, these works, for me at least, move with alacrity, without the slightest hesitation, into the scrambled wires of my perceptual mission control. They light up an assortment of talismanic moments from my youth or adolescence, and, at first, when I was learning about art, I thought these unbidden recollections were causes of my art preferences (I grew up in West Texas, therefore I liked Ellsworth Kelly), but that was a tyro’s delusion. Today I consider these self-evident objects as sensual cues, random gifts of feeling that generate forays into the opaque nebulae of the cortex. The art itself, of course, is always the cause and never the effect of something past. It restores fugitive moments hitherto lost, blurred, or buried. This is one of the many things that art does, and one of my favorites.

The difficulty of nailing down the long, unspooling procession of these artists’ works, and other artists of their clan (Pollock and Chamberlain come to mind), is that these artists are practitioners. Like doctors, lawyers, and architects on the site and in the weather, they have a contemporary task to perform in a particular place and a cluttered warehouse of ahistorical precedents from which to take what they need. They can take anything from anywhere because they are not developers. They are not concerned that this year’s model is at once similar to and different from last year’s model. Like Pollock and Chamberlain particularly, Rubins practices incremental improvisation. Pollock’s method was to paint one good painting and cover it with another good painting, and another good painting. No fixing up or “do-overs” allowed, except for the occasional splash of zinc white. Chamberlain started with a good group of objects picked up off the studio floor, like words from a book, and proceeded from there, elaborating his object with steel paragraphs of wreckage that proceeded with increasing delicacy until the whole chorus sang.

Rubins proceeds like this. Her recent pieces start with a provisional maquette that is subject to intervention. On site she mounts a canoe on a steel armature in what she considers to be a cool position and secures it with cables. Then she decides where the next canoe should go and what color it should be and secures that canoe with cables. Then she decides about the next canoe and the next canoe and the next, etc., securing each canoe with cables. Needless to say, Rubins’s sculptures are enormous and daunting industrial projects, but there is the trick. At first, when you look at her work, those of us who have been indoctrinated by sleek software and ingenious engineering solutions (and that’s all of us) presume that there is a rationally designed system of enclosing cables. There is not. The canoes are attached incrementally, decided upon one at a time. The more cables the better, in Rubins’s view, so what at first appears to be an incredibly complex engineering solution turns out to be a poetic, material ballet, hard as hell to reimagine but easy as pie to improvise if you have a gift for it as Rubins does. One good canoe is wired up; another good canoe makes it better and so on and so on. The challenge of this practice is the increasingly outrageous improvisations and adaptations, lifts, inversions, and cantilevers, which are demanded at every level, so each work may contain ten new options, ten versions of the future, one laid upon the other.

Think of Art Pepper playing “So Nice to Come Home To” with Miles Davis’s rhythm section, always outdoing himself—each solo surpassing the previous one in its daring and effortless invention; then imagine the chromatic complexity of laying all these solos over one other. This would comprise the whole heart of the endeavor, and it’s hard to write about art that arises out of such complex physical poetry because Rubins’s performances are so daunting, humongous, intricate, and original that they raise the primary question about all great performers: How does one sustain a belief in one’s gift that is profound enough even to embark on such a mission? Most of us believe in our skills, our intelligence, our moves and experience, but these won’t set us asail. When Nancy Rubins begins a project, or Mick Jagger steps onto stage, or Kobe Bryant steps on the basketball court, they believe in their gift. All other circumstances aside, they believe they possess the moral resources that will bring their endeavor to its fruition—that will make it happen. And where does this faith come from? Jackson Pollock, the most gifted artist of the late twentieth century died of not believing in his gift, died listening to people and trusting people, unable to find in himself the insouciance and carelessness that Joe Namath bore with him onto the Super Bowl field.

In search of an answer to the mystery of great performance, I thought for a moment that I would describe one of Rubins’s sculptures in process, observe her performance step-by-step, with canoes sailing by, rising up, cable-by-cable, part-by-part, impromptu decision followed by impromptu decision. But prose could never do this. Words are things, to be sure, but, they are not heavy enough things to do the job, and that would be the point. I have written this kind of story before about Lou Reed and the New York Dolls—tour stories—and I would probably come out with nothing more now than I did then. There would be chatter, numbers, hard labor, tears, panic, desperate decisions, and finally: Boom, the work would be there and nothing that came before would matter. The process would evanesce like dry ice but the work would not disappear as music does; it would not yellow like the pages upon which I wrote about it. It would stand there viewable in a thousand dimensions, painted with a thousand shadows, not quite writing, not quite music, not quite painting, and not quite sculpture, really—just a gift—a visible concert that goes on forever.

The consequence of this protean, mercurial process is that Rubins’s work, while shining in the light of the moment, casts a light into the past. Her work confirms a tradition that began with David Smith’s antigravitational urge to draw in space in three dimensions. She also exploits the glistening surfaces of Smith’s sculptures, and the invention that Tony Caro made in America of slicing the air rather than the medium, of substituting surface for volume. According to Caro, this idea almost had to be imagined in America, since the UK, with no sky and too many trees, provides such an ideal environment for solid blocks of steel. (In America, a solid block of anything situated anywhere just doesn’t light your candle.) My best explanation for Caro’s insight is that America is beautiful for its spacious skies, compared to which the amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties are nearly negligible attributes.

This war between earth and sky, surface and volume, has intrigued American sculptors since Smith’s shining cubes, especially on the West Coast where, thanks to plastic, the paints, and the surfaces got stronger and sleeker quicker. As a result, when I asked John McCracken about Clement Greenberg posthumously sanding the color off Smith’s sculpture, he just shrugged. Some ideas precede the technology available to execute them, he noted, so the scrape and repaint would have been inevitable because Smith used bad paint. The redo would have to have been done for the same reason the Guggenheim conservators transferred Jasper John’s two white flags (White Flag, 1955), chip-by-chip from the bed sheet upon which it was painted to an archival canvas.

Rubins’s greatest fiat, however, was to explode the geometry of Smith’s arboreal, floral Cubi into tropical profusion, and there is surely a local explanation for this. Like many of my artist friends who have lived and worked in the American South—like Bob Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Lynda Benglis, Jim Rosenquist, Bill Eggleston, and Teresita Fernández—Rubins is profoundly beguiled by the South’s semitropical jungle landscape, its horizon-less, tawdry, proliferating tangle, its opaque profusion—and its trailer parks, of course. In this sense, Rubins’s plane parts crashing into a tree is analogous to Lynda Benglis’s early pour pieces, which arise from Benglis’s familiarity with the oil slicks on the bayou. Rubins also shares an interest in “agriculture” with Ann Hamilton, although Rubins’s “agriculture” is much less bookish. They both love the soft point at which nature and culture interpenetrate.

Many of Rubins’s sculptures are given titles that infer the possibility of growth arising out of destruction, and this organic leitmotif is all the more explicable when you imagine Rubins growing up and attending public school in Tullahoma, Tennessee, where (as a genetic enemy of overorganization) she flunked synchronized swimming. From Tennessee, the temporal sequence of her work is less a story than a picaresque travel narrative, bouncing around America and Europe with evolutionary stops along the way. The long narrative of her work in material terms, begins with mortar (clay). She adds bricks (found appliances), then demotes the mortar, then upgrades the bricks to ungrounded objects in part or intact—boats, airplanes, surfboards, trailers, jet skis, hot water heaters, canoes, and mattresses—anything you can pick up and take with you, anything streamlined with airfoil lift or buoyancy. Then she eliminates the ground altogether. She floats objects, like the clouds of German mattresses, Belgian mattresses, and Danish hot water heaters—all of which she created in Europe. She creates enormous metal juggernauts that disguise their footing in a steel armature. Then there are those sculptures that present themselves to us like wounded warriors with space-age prosthetics. These grow out of live bases, like one of Ovid’s arborescere reversed. Rather than Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel tree, we get a tree transforming itself into a glistening industrial instrument.

At school in Maryland, she began with clay, fashioning teacups with bananas tilted in them, thus establishing the single consistent visual leitmotif in her art: the phallic banana-canoe, an icon in which she takes some ironic delight. In New York in 1980 at OK Harris and Battery Park, Rubins substituted concrete for clay and added found appliances to create standing objects best characterized as deep mosaic or macho terrazzo. In 1982, in Washington, D.C., the concrete goes clandestine within an enormous bulb of clustered appliances, like a bulging, penultimate flower bud. Before this, she wasted a few years in San Francisco, a city whose artistic toxicity is best characterized by local artists’ tendency to hang together and support one another’s work—San Francisco being so “special” and so genteel that nobody has the guts to tell you it’s shit. Then she moved to Los Angeles, where everyone hates everyone and everything. At this point, things really took off. It was as if the blade that “Nice Nancy” had been hiding all these years suddenly slipped from its sheath.

People started hating Rubins’s work right away and that was better than hugs since nobody questioned her high-handed authority or the work’s absolute self-evidence. They just hated it, and this meant people were afraid. It meant that they didn’t understand what they knew was irrevocably happening. Taking Caro’s example and following Chamberlain, Rubins bypassed the paint problem by using prefabricated, industrially painted and finished material to create certified, volume-less, 360-degree sculptures. She happily exploited broken, crushed, and bent industrial accouterments to insist upon the emptiness of their prefabricated, conceptual curves, to acknowledge the fractal universe and the primacy of surface. Then, finally, there is Rubins’s virtual, inexplicable, and always welcome predisposition to make her sculptures fly—to make a place for themselves above the tree line—and this, too, may be the residue of claustrophobic Tennessee.

In any case, in every possible sense, in every possible maneuver, Rubins strives to free her sculpture from the hegemony of gravity—to invest it with the blessed weightlessness of painting (without which we would have no angels), and having seduced gravity, her work carries the historical prolixity of visual imagination back into the heart of the baroque and the rococo, to the ceilings of Carracci, Tiepolo, and Boucher. In these maneuvers, Rubins does for lightness what Richard Serra does for visible weight when he re-evokes the palpable avoirdupois of Mantegna’s dead Christ. Rubins, for her part, slips the surly bonds of earth while eluding the conceptual protocols of modernist abstraction. The objects she sends aloft all reference human scale, so they are very nearly creatures, floating in the atmosphere, contiguous but unattached like the gods and icons that float on Tiepolo’s ceiling in Würzburg. And why? When I asked Bob Grosvenor this question about his radically cantilevered sculpture, he shrugged and said, “Because I hate things that make sense.” As do I, except when they make the sensual logic that Nancy Rubins has mastered.