Word: glassing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...often to gaze at the far wall of his cavernous office. He mixed up dates and forgot a name. At one point, a pitcher of ice water in his hand, he poised haltingly over his coffee cup as his face betrayed mounting confusion over the disappearance of his water glass, which he had earlier placed behind him. "It's just like an airport novel," muses a city official. "It's like the poor country boy who fights his way to the top and then becomes everything he's been fighting against." Like the emperor, Barry blindly marches...
...themselves in a complementary silence . . . comes close to the act of creation." Wilmarth's singular project was to create the spirit of reverie that surrounds the "negated object," but in that most object-affirming of arts, sculpture, and to seek its poetic effects in heavy industrial materials -- steel and glass. Typically, Wilmarth, a Californian who spent most of his working life in New York City, adopted as one of his heroes John Roebling, the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge...
...artist of Wilmarth's age there was nothing radical about steel. It was the bronze of modernism, the normal substance of constructed sculpture for the past 60 years and more. What was unusual was his decision to combine it with glass and thus make transparency, as much as spatial enclosure, a part of the sculptural effect. Wilmarth loved light. It was his madeleine, a trigger of memory, as a particular smell might be to others: "I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time." In fact, glass came before steel in his work...
...association of glass with steel that gives his work its peculiar evocative power. Wilmarth worked the glass, bending it discreetly and etching it with hydrofluoric acid. This frosted the panels and brought out their color, which varied from a cold ice green to a soft, almost moonstone blue, diffused on the face but sometimes concentrated with sharp energy within the edges. The dark steel, seen through this translucency, lost its declarative character; it blurred, and became a presence, or rather an immanence: something very much there yet hard to define...
...works like the Nine Clearings for a Standing Man, 1973, Wilmarth achieved the kind of grandeur of light and pared-down form that one associates with Rothko at his best, and something more: the sense of a figure, not described but evoked by a flat vertical plane, behind the glass. Even in a smaller piece like Is, Was (Chancing), 1975-76, there is a fascinating exchange between dark and light, solidity and translucency, underwritten by the economical logic of its making: a single sheet of steel cut and folded, a single plate of glass. And the cables that hold such...