The Rope Wrangler, Ideas Unfurling
Orly Genger, in Madison Square Park
Published: May 1, 2013
Some might argue that she does that already in her sculptures. Over the
last 10 years, Ms. Genger has become known for creating ambitious
installations from seemingly endless coils of rope that she crochets and
teases into shapes that recall Modern masterworks.
In 2007 she filled
a Chelsea gallery with 250,000 feet of knotted, paint-saturated rope,
creating a black, lava-y environment that suggested Walter de Maria’s
“Earth Room.” The next year, using similar materials, she built an even
larger installation
for the lobby of the Indianapolis
Museum of Art — a sly take on the aggressive metal stacks and cubes
of Minimalists like Tony Smith and Donald Judd. In 2010, for a show at
the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., Ms.
Genger used 100 miles of red painted rope to create “Big
Boss,” an 11.5-foot-high stack that burst through a gallery wall and
bubbled over for 28 feet into an adjoining room — a giant Color Field
painting run amok.
Now Ms. Genger, 34, has delivered her largest and most
labor-intensive work yet, a public sculpture in Madison
Square Park called “Red, Yellow and Blue.” On view through Sept. 8,
it’s made of 1.4 million feet of hand-crocheted lobster-fishing rope,
which she has used to create three towering enclosures, each painted a
different primary color. Seen from afar, their undulating walls arch up
into the trees, suggesting a mash-up of a Richard Serra’s “Torqued
Ellipse,” a psychedelic cityscape by Peter Max and a Claes
Oldenburg-esque layer cake.
Covering three separate lawns in the park — some 4,500 square feet — the
project is the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s largest to date. More
remarkable, Ms. Genger has handled practically every inch of its
materials herself. For the last two years, she and a team of assistants,
most of them young women, have spent almost every day in her studio
cleaning lobster claws and fish bones out of the rope and crocheting it
into the chunky scarflike strips, some 150 feet long, that she used as
building blocks.
“I like getting dirty,” Ms. Genger said recently. “It makes me feel like
there’s more freedom to break rules.”
And on a cloudy day last month, Ms. Genger got dirty with a different
crew, this one made up of burly young men who dragged and piled nearly
200 of those strips onto steel supports to create the wavy wall of the
red enclosure. Passers-by stopped to stare and take photographs, while
Debbie Landau, the director of the conservancy, fretted that the artist,
who is just over 5 feet tall, might be pushing herself too hard.
Yet Ms. Genger seemed elated. Usually “I’m the first one to see flaws in
my work,” she said later, as she led the way into the blue piece, which
had just been painted. “But look at this — it’s electric.”
Around her, the brilliantly colored rope walls looked as if they were
writhing. After two years of intense production, sculpturing the work in
public was “the fun part,” she added. “It’s frightening and exciting at
the same time.”
She had good reason to be excited. Not only is this Ms. Genger’s first
major public sculpture in the city where she was born and raised, but
she has two other collections on view as well. The dealer Larissa
Goldston is showing “Iron Maiden,” a group of small metal
sculptures cast from superhero figurines and rope, in a pop-up space at
530 West 24th Street through June 22.
Ms. Genger also makes knotted rope jewelry in collaboration with the designer
Jaclyn Mayer, and their latest line, also inspired by “Red, Yellow and
Blue,” recently had its debut online at the design showcase Grey Area.
As for the installation, it will become the first Madison Square Park
commission to travel: Ms. Genger will reinstall it in October at the deCordova Sculpture
Park in Lincoln, Mass., where it will remain for a year.
For Ms. Genger’s supporters, the attention seems well earned. Susan
Cross, the Mass MoCA curator who commissioned the massive red piece “Big
Boss,” called her “a force of nature,” adding that her work has broad
popular appeal.
“Everyone can relate to it, even though it’s this overwhelming size,”
Ms. Cross said. “You see that it’s rope, but you understand the labor
involved. I think that really pulls people in.”
Lisa Freiman, who heads the department of contemporary art at the
Indianapolis Museum of Art, singles out Ms. Genger’s savvy reworking of
art history.
“I really see her as one of the most important sculptors working today,”
she said. From the start, she noted, Ms. Genger has been “taking on
classic Minimalist and Postminimalist and feminist art at the same time,
and doing it in a completely original way.”
Building each piece is something of “an endurance performance,” said Ms.
Freiman, who describes the artist as “one of the toughest makers I
know.”
Yet by her own account, Ms. Genger did not start out that way. Growing
up in New York City with parents who collected modern art, she said, she
was so shy that she rarely spoke until she was 12. Instead, she said,
she drew: “It was kind of a safe space. It was always the thing I felt
that I could do well.”
When she discovered sculpture as an undergraduate at Brown University,
Ms. Genger became obsessed, spending hour upon hour in her studio. “I
was really drawn to working with my hands,” she said. “It was more about
using my body as the tool and having a direct relationship with the
material.”
At first she focused on collecting found objects like chairs and brooms
and encasing them in gobs of white plaster. Then, during a
postbaccalaureate course at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, she began playing around with yarn, using her hands to make
chains and slip knots. Soon she was creating sculpture that recalled
the craft-based work of 1970s feminist artists like Harmony Hammond and
Faith Wilding.
After returning to New York, Ms. Genger had her first show at the Stefan
Stux Gallery in Chelsea, and her career began to take off. Some of
those early pieces prefigured the more severe forms of the work she is
making today, like a six-foot-high stack of droopy white rectangles, or a
spiraling dark-green floor piece fashioned from a long crocheted strip
several times her own height.
Her work took another leap in 2004, when she built her first outdoor
piece for the Socrates Sculpture Park
in Long Island City, Queens. Forced to find a material that would be
more weather-resistant than wool, she discovered mountain-climbing rope.
The resulting construction,
a green phallic-looking column that rises 15 feet from two puddles of
purple and green rope on the ground, fired Ms. Genger with new ambition.
After that, she said, “I became more interested in the heft of the
material and the massiveness that it gave to the piece.”
Then came the Earthwork-like installation at Ms. Goldston’s gallery, the
forbidding Minimalist sculptures in Indianapolis and the eight-ton “Big
Boss.” For “Big Boss,” Ms. Genger said, “I wanted to make a piece where
the minimal and the very organic both could coexist, and where you felt
that they needed each other.”
Not long after that installation” went up, Ms. Landau, the Madison
Square Park Conservancy director, stumbled across an outdoor piece by
Ms. Genger at the 2010 Pulse Miami fair: a group of
white Judd-style columns that the artist had toppled onto a grassy lawn,
transforming them into curvy lounge chairs. Once she was standing
“within the work, touching it,” Ms. Landau said, “the light bulb went
off: how wonderful and different it would be to have Orly’s work
intersecting with the park.”
Ms. Genger’s plans were presented to the conservancy’s board the next
spring. One early idea involved filling the park’s central lawn with
mounds of red rope, but she ultimately decided to transform three
smaller lawns into rooms instead. Besides “giving the park some
verticality” by building walls, Ms. Genger said, “I wanted to create
spaces where people felt held.”
She also wanted to explore the “very, very fine line between being
contained and feeling like you’re suffocating” and “feeling contained
and safe.”
Then came the task of procuring 50 tons of rope, and quickly, so she
could get to work. By then Ms. Genger’s installations had become so
large that she had shifted away from climbing rope “because of its
cost,” she said. But during the construction of “Big Boss” (some of
whose materials were recycled into the current piece), Mass MoCA had
discovered a cheaper source: the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation, which
has become an informal clearinghouse for the worn-out ground line used
by fishermen up and down the New England seaboard.
Channon Jones, 40, a third-generation Maine lobsterman who was one of
the largest contributors to the piece, recently observed that Ms. Genger
had probably wrangled more rope than he had. “Maybe in my lifetime as a
fisherman I might have used that much rope altogether,” he said, “but
not all in one place.”
Ms. Genger savors that sense of accumulation, too. “I stand here and I
feel the past two years of my life — every knot. It’s a physical
manifestation of time.”
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment