Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
“S, M, L, XL,” organized by Michael Darling, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, took its title from a Rem Koolhaas book of the same name—a 1,376-page tome, published in 1995 for OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), that contains essays, manifestos, diaries, fiction, travelogues, and reflections on the contemporary city as a place of change and ever-increasing scale. Unlike that innovative book, which was complex in scope and execution, this show was somewhat simplistic in its concept—it basically invited viewers to interact with sculpture. There were only two thin points of connection to Koolhaas’s architectural analysis—changing scale and a departure from Modernism. The four works in “S, M, L, XL” called to mind Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), one of the first texts to map Postmodernist art. They were produced over five decades by noted artists and differ in appearance and size. Although a few didactic labels offered facts about each piece and a general explanation about the evolution of sculpture, little explanation was given about how this work breaks from the Modernist canon. …see the entire review in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine.
