Installation view with Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Yellow Abakan (1967-8), in the exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction on view at The Museum of Modern Art April 15–August 13, 2017
The career of Magdalena Abakanowicz arced from imposing rough textile sculptures of the 1960s to figurative sculptural groups in the 1990s and on. The first work I encountered by the artist was Yellow Abakan, a hanging sisal work from 1967-8 in the galleries of MoMA’s exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction in 2017, the year she died. A representative work from this period of her career, abakans (a shortening of the artist’s last name) are woven constructions hung on the wall or suspended from the ceiling whose folds, gaps, and layerings evoke the body, particularly the female body. Abakanowicz turned to textiles in the ’60s. It was a less regulated medium than more traditional fine arts in Soviet-dominated Poland, and such works could be rolled up for easy storage in her limited space. Abstract, dominating masses, they were difficult to situate at the time because they stake out a dramatically different artistic realm from the proscribed Socialist Realism. Over the course of her career, Abakanowicz expanded her practice from textile works to sculptures in other materials, and from the abstract to the more clearly figurative. A work by Abakanowicz on permanent display at Storm King rests between these two poles.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, 1989. Wood, glass, and iron. 8 ft. 6 1/2 in. x 17 ft. 2 1/2 in. x 143 ft. 3 in.
Recently, among the bright angular sculptures that populate the meadows of Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, I came across the low-lying, reclusive set of glass and metal enclosures that make up Sarcophagi in Glass Houses. Sited on low ground in a meadow surrounded by trees, the work is less prominent than many of the monumental, vertical works by Alexander Calder and Mark Di Suvero. Sarcophagi in Glass Houses is a 1989 work by Abkanowicz that the artist installed on Storm King’s grounds in 1994. Four glass houses enclose beetle-shaped structures made of rough, dark wood. The horizontal masses suggests great weight, in opposition to their light container. From a distance, I mistook them for greenhouses. Up close, the glass merely encircles the over-sized objects that fill its interior space. The wood tombs have rounded lids that seemed to have been sealed over something, implying a body. Yet, like the abakans, the scale exceeds the individual, magnifying the human form into something grander. The secluded site and its superhuman size create the sense that I had stumbled across something otherworldly and powerful.
The unusual shape of the sarcophagi comes from an arms factory in France that Abakanowicz worked with the early 1980s. In her examination of the factory’s equipment, she discovered a large engine part that reminded her of a belly. Abakanowicz used the engine as a model for these half-barrel shaped oak pieces with curved edges. Both an engine and the female belly are sites of generation. Here, the evocation of a pregnant belly as a site of generation and power is restrained here by the glass and metal shell, which both protects the work and contains it. And while the form evokes birth, the title of the work suggests burial and death. What is created is a state of suspension.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, 1989. Wood, glass, and iron. 8 ft. 6 1/2 in. x 17 ft. 2 1/2 in. x 143 ft. 3 in.
Abakanowicz began working with metal in the late 1980s. The glass and metal structures of Sarcophagi in Glass Houses were built around the wood coffins on site. The Storm King Art Center Archives has some great photographs of installing the work and of the artist with the work. The glass suggests preservation, like an insect in amber. It also introduces the idea of display and viewership. Access is only possible through the clear glass—this remove from the tactile sensation of the rough wood tombs heightens a sense of reverence. However, the focus is still on the objects inside, the hulking masses that evoke pharaohonic tombs more than modern graves, as the title “sarcophagi” suggests. Yet nature and the weather have entered, with dirt seeping onto the concrete floor and visible degradation of the wood. Wood, like the body itself, decays over time. Sarcophagi in Glass Houses becomes a memento mori on the grounds of Storm King, reminding us that time claims the ultimate power over life and art.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, 1989. Wood, glass, and iron. 8 ft. 6 1/2 in. x 17 ft. 2 1/2 in. x 143 ft. 3 in.