New York
Polish-born sculptor Joanna Malinowska, now based in the U.S., has shown at the SculptureCenter and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Though she often collaborates with her partner C.T. Jasper, her recent exhibition was primarily a solo effort, with strikingly idiosyncratic single and grouped sculptures that appeared to have been designed on the fly. Objects such as stacked plates placed on the floor, a rickety ladder, and a tall column of stacked fedoras reaching nearly to the ceiling seemed to occupy their places by chance.
The word “random” has been at the center of new art since Modernism. A way of letting in unknown relations, chance can stimulate artistic production by casting an aura of free association over process and finished artwork alike. In Malinowska’s case, a casual arrangement of objects enables her to suggest interpretive links from one work to the next—a highly efficient way of creating an open field in which the artist’s decisions are placed to the side in favor of the viewer’s imaginative connections and intelligence. Because Malinowska often uses ready-made objects, we do not necessarily pick up on her own associations, which means that she expects us to read the works with a degree of distance, or abstraction, reinforced by the limited personalization of her mass-produced materials.
If it is close to impossible to decipher a specific reading of Malinowska’s works, it nonetheless behooves us to try. The objects often remain opaque, but inventive viewers might find correlations between one thing and the next—despite the fact that no obvious thread might be found, for example, between the column of stacked hats rising from a pedestal and the improvised, makeshift ladder, created with flimsy white rungs. It is not easy to say what exactly these two pieces, each quite intriguing, have to do with each other. Perhaps the best we can do is to suspend disbelief and allow the disjunction to occur.
The arrangement of the show was invisible, an intellectual ploy and not a visual one. Its random nature enriched and complicated what otherwise would be mere side-by-side juxtapositions operating without associative meaning. Overall impression seemed to take precedence over the study of discrete sculptural events, the entirety more important than the single object.
On one wall, simple abstract forms (Ode to Impatience, 2024) were arranged rather like tools. A light tan effigy of an automatic rifle was placed in a corner, accompanied by what looked like a white rifle stock, without trigger or barrel, and other forms tentatively identified by the evocative title of the grouping—Bones, Boomerangs, and a Gun (2024). While neither assembly made clear sense, alone or in conjunction, their placement was compelling. And the items were visually arresting—in such an environment, the facsimile of a gun starts to take on genuine visual strength, if we disregard its most obvious meaning. Perhaps Malinowska is trying to re-make content by replacing the most salient reading of a sculpture or environment with something else—an interpretation abstracting the usual experience of art.
The equally obscure Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Godzilla (2024) brought together a strange pair of icons. Godzilla, constructed from reddish clay, stood in attack mode. The aggression was palpable, despite slightly cartoonish features more suggestive of a grin than a sharp-toothed display. The accompanying white porcelain statue of Jesus—commercially made, utterly conventional, and saccharine in expression—for some reason wore a brown paper crown around his head.
Who is to say what means what in such a varied array? Strikingly creative visual devices can be felt, but everything remains indirect and inadvertent. Glimmers of clarity ebb and flow, arriving, or not. We see the entire structure before breaking it down to study individual components, and yet general meaning remains hazy. The show’s title, “Holy Philip Guston, Pray For Us,” gives no clues. Clearly, for Malinowska, Guston has undergone an apotheosis, even if one senses that some of the energy behind the words is comic. If the title is truly randomly given, we are left with an imagistic scaffolding, which is as it should be.
