For, in order to sustain artistic practice, a medium must be a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly "specific" to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity.
Rosalind Krauss 1
Lynn Duryea's clay and steel works-and particularly in those works combining clay and steel-reference the objects and architectural elements of industrial sites, at the level of materials as well as forms, and most profoundly at the level of affecting presence. 2 As the source photographs included in the exhibition indicate, these objects and elements are frequently of abandoned sites, places from which human activity is now absent, places manifesting not only the trace of their use, but also of their disuse. Like these sites, the artworks evoke an affective viewer response of quietness and stillness from the combinations of geometrically reductive forms and the conjoining of disparate materials in cathecticed associations.
Combining materials-and thus media-within a work would in itself be, one might suppose, unremarkable. To thus suppose is to disregard the discursive fields in which the practices of art in the twentieth century obtain. Central to modernism was the notion of the purity of a medium, to be attained through the reduction to that which was presumed to be essential to a given medium. Thus in Clement Greenberg's formulation:
Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive of it. By doing this each art would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure.
It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered "pure", and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. "Purity" meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance. 3
Having its roots in Lessing's Laokoön, with its distinction of the spatial arts of painting and sculpture from the temporal arts of poetry and literature grounded in Kant's distinction of spatial and temporal synthetic a priori categories, modernism on Greenberg's formulation entailed a presupposition of essentialism. 4 So also in the minimalist turn within late modernism. That Greenberg and his epigones were unwilling-or perhaps unable, given the inherent contradictions that would seem to obtain-to embrace the minimalist turn as an extension of modern formalism does not obviate it from being so regarded. 5 If, as Glen R. Brown urges, Duryea's works:
fulfill the primary minimalist concern for reduction to the simplest state of material being. At the same time, merely cataloging their physical properties does not exhaust their potential meaning. They ultimately break with minimalist concerns for the autonomy of the object. They may embrace minimalist form, but they also exceed it on at least three accounts: they are abstractions and, therefore, representations of something outside themselves; they engage external space and consequently cannot be described as self-referential; and the make no effort sequester themselves from the medium of time, but on the contrary, refer deliberately to processes of transformation. 6
they nevertheless entail certain other fundamental affinities with antecedent minimalist works, namely, the engagement of viewer response with the presence of the works, and their perdurance qua phenomenological object. 7 Much of the sense of presence of Double, Middle A and Double Deux have is a function of the resonance of the form of these works with the form of a standing figure, by virtue of their verticality and scale, and their structure of a flattened, elliptical cylinder fabricated of sheet steel topped by separate ceramic elements approximating the proportion of a head in relation to torso and legs. This is not simply a matter of anthropomorphism, as Brown urges. 8 Or perhaps anthropomorphism obtains here as a trace of animism repressed within the discourses of aesthetic response. 9 Or perhaps is merely that, as Donald Kuspit has urged with respect to sculpture in general:
one's body is privileged, and in a sense the first object in the world. As such, it is impossible to expunge, even through the pursuit of purity in art. Sculpture is optimally a metaphorical projection of bodily presence in alien material, . . .10
This figural resonance of Double, Middle A and Double Deux is mediated and distanced, for the reference is most directly to the structure of an architectural column as in itself a reference to the standing figure, or to the antique sculptural form of a herm, in which a bust tops a usually quadrangular plinth functioning as a substitute body, to which it corresponds in relative position and in mass. The mediated resonance of Double, Middle A and Double Deux with the standing figure aside, the proximal reference of these works is to elements of architectural and industrial sites, and to functional objects in the landscape generally, as in Trine, in which the massing of the form, as well as salient details such as the steel cylinder and its top band, are prefigured in the bundled pilings in the photograph of the source, Orient Point, New York. The photographs of formal sources are particularly instructive in suggesting the significance Duryea attributes to edges and to the space between forms. Thus the elliptical cylinders of Double, Middle A and Double Deux have antecedents in the elevations of grain silos in the chromogenic photographs, Mentone, Texas and Oklahoma Panhandle. Likewise, the negative space between the ceramic elements surmounting Double and Double Deux are adumbrated in the photographs The Texas Panhandle, Southwestern Kansas, and Portland, Maine. An edge is a boundary, the locus of liminality, a place of transition between interior and exterior. An edge in a three-dimensional form is a surface, metaphorically a skin.
As with industrial sites, as with the site of the body, Duryea's sculpture carries on the bounding surface the vicissitudes, the accretions and depletions, occurring within temporality. The surface of the clay is glazed, and sandblasted. The surface of the steel is galvanized, and allowed to rust. Within these accretions and depletions, both fitness for use and lapsing into disuse obtain. As with industrial sites, as with the site of the body, Duryea's sculpture has an interiority beneath the visible surface, beneath the skin. This interiority is inferred, not given as such in perception. In this implicit depth, too, is a resonance with the figure, the body and the self of consciousness. 11 As with industrial sites, as with the site of the body, Duryea's sculpture, the several elements comprising the work reference the several elements comprising an industrial site, a mechanical device, the parts of the body, the aspects of the self. The integration of the multiple into a unity is fundamental to functionality, whether of industrial sites, or devices, or the body and the self. And as Mikel Dufrenne has suggested, the body is the ur-unity. 12
In their materiality as such, in their transformation of materials into a medium, in their deployment of the conventions of medium in the facture of an artwork that is constituted as a unity transcending the disparate elements and materials from which are its formal and materials causes, Lynn Duryea's sculpture references ourselves no less than the artifacts and sites we make to mediate our engagement with the world. Like those artifacts and sites, like ourselves, the artworks have a distinct historicity of coming-to-be. It is distinctive of Lynn Duryea's works that they come-to-be within a situation in which the status of artworks as such has shifted from that of specific medium to generic artness, 13 and in which the characteristics of a material qua medium matter for their functionality in the facture of the artwork, not for serving as a presumed ground for a supposed hierarchy of media. The affecting presence of Duryea's works obviate any supposition of such a hierarchy.