Ad
Form is emptiness, or .... How I learned to stop worrying and love Karen Yank's art
Published
Modified
SANTA FE — At first glance, Karen Yank’s welded steel wall pieces in “Lessons in Abstraction” at Turner Carroll Gallery resemble locked bank vaults or armored gates. But appearances can be deceptive.
In a previous review of the show “Abstracting Nature” at the Albuquerque Museum, I compared her floor sculptures to Tesla Cybertrucks.
Without a doubt, Yank’s hard-edged steel shapes do evoke the military-industrial aesthetics that art historian Anna C. Chave criticized in her influential 1990 essay “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power.” At least they did for me when I first encountered them.
In that essay, Chave characterized the sculptures of Donald Judd, Carl Andre and their ilk as inherently reactionary and oppressive. Such works, in her view, exemplified “a nakedly dehumanized and alienating expression of power.” She even included an image of Nazi architect Albert Speer’s “Arcade of Nuremberg” alongside a similar-looking Judd sculpture just to drive the point home.
I didn’t go quite that far in my “Abstracting Nature” review, but I did suggest that Yank’s art was outdated.
Well, the evening after my review came out, there was a reception at the museum. As I smiled and shook Yank’s hand, she smiled back and said, “My friends warned me about you.”
She wasn’t upset, she said, but she did think I had misunderstood the work. So, she spent time with me. We walked through the exhibition, discussing it together, which I took as a sign of her openness and generosity.
“I feel like I’m seeing it with new eyes,” I said.
Indeed, learning about the depth of feeling she puts into her sculptures, and experiencing her almost holographic surface effects, gave me a newfound appreciation for her practice.
So, let this review stand as a qualified mea culpa. I’m not doing a complete 180, but I do acknowledge that my earlier critique lacked nuance. And some of Yank’s work is truly great.
Ad
Yank’s six-foot-square wall piece “Inside the Circle,” which occupies a prominent wall in the current “Lessons in Abstraction” show at Turner Carroll Gallery, is a major work with profound philosophical implications. The row of skinny vertical rectangles recalls the stylized prison bars of a Peter Halley painting — an effect enhanced by the welded steel itself as the material is redolent with oppressive associations: prisons, armored tanks and the like. But Yank’s Cy Twombly-like marks, which she scribbles onto the surface of the steel with a grinder, create the illusion of multiple planes of light floating inches behind and in front of the surface. What seemed hard and impenetrable becomes a wild mosaic of holographic fragments. The rigid, imprisoning structure deconstructs itself before our eyes.
The “Heart Sutra,” an ancient Buddhist text, states, “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” I thought of those words as I gazed at “Inside the Circle.”
I realize now that when I had first seen Yank’s work, I was only seeing its outer form. Now, I was seeing its inner emptiness and the miraculous fullness within that emptiness.
Another thing I had failed to grasp previously was just how distinctive all of Yank’s pieces are. Although she uses the same reductive vocabulary of circles, bars and squares, she’s not just repeating herself. If we look at the four corners of “Circle and the Square,” where the square pokes out of the circle, the corners appear rounded and bent when viewed head-on. But that effect is revealed to be an illusion when viewed from the side. These moments are almost impossible to describe, let alone photograph. They’re easy to miss in person, too, if we’re not paying attention. But they’re there.
“Circle and the Square,” “Inside the Circle” and “Realization” all feature a square of vertical bars inside a circle, but the experiences they offer are as different as green tea, white tea and black tea. Each work has its own flavor, its own feeling, its own subtle wisdom.
Yank learned meditation from her mentor, the artist Agnes Martin, and their relationship is explored in this show. Although the gallery calls “Lessons in Abstraction” a one-person show, a series of lithographs by Martin are included alongside a video of Yank describing their association.
Martin, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her early adulthood, found solace in the philosophies and meditative practices of Zen Buddhism.
My dad, an Army vet who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early adulthood, also found solace in Zen. Unfortunately, because of how much it had helped him, he thought everyone in the world, including me, should meditate as often as possible. And what kindergartener wants to be told to sit and stare at a blank wall and “become nothing?” It was unpleasant.
In college, I dated a Japanese film student from Osaka whose father had also forced her to meditate growing up. We bonded over our shared sense of Zen as an oppressive force in our lives.
Those old resentments have mostly faded. Now that I’m middle-aged, I even visit Zen centers on occasion when I feel the need for a little grounding. But I’ll admit that I still probably exhibit a knee-jerk response to some Zen-influenced art — a lingering echo of that Oedipal rebellion — especially when said art also reminds me of prisons and tanks. But I’m working to overcome those prejudices.
Today, I can appreciate that Yank is an extraordinarily talented artist who gets even the most solid-seeming forms to pulsate with an airy freedom. What at first seems oppressive becomes liberatory. Now, how she achieves that, I haven’t a clue. But leaving the gallery and walking down Canyon Road, I half-expected everything solid to melt into air. “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”
Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.
