Word: rabinowitch
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Solid, hot, rolled steel. Chunks upon chunks of it. Now showing at the Fogg Art Museum, a packed exhibition of David Rabinowitch works shows off the possibilities of sculpture cut off at the knees: flat, squat pieces placed directly on the museum floor. Despite some bombastic prose that ill befits a show that already has a clear voice, anyone can appreciate the simple, elegant play on exact dimensions and object orientation--not to mention the rugged beauty...
...museum heralds the show--a formative 1968 series--as Rabinowitch's first such exhibition in the United States. Apparently, at first only Europeans had felt strangely attracted to the tidy little masses of metal, but now we can all enjoy what might best be called the "Under-Foot Collection...
...while clearly interested ahead of time in the art involved in setting up an exhibit in a museum, Rabinowitch endows each piece with enough enduring personality to deserve lingering attention. Here sits one, a misshapen manhole or new-fangled stop-watch, whose scratches and smoothness vie with the bold, geometric chords that stretch across its center. There sits another, a pueblo for dormice, whose precise measurements and truncated top make one wonder what is suggested or what might possibly be missing...
Regardless of any labeling one could do, each work, whether plain or vaguely complex, possesses a quiet stubbornness. This perception, when paired with Rabinowitch's play on the act of placing pieces in a certain context, makes the exhibition worth a quick look. But since Rabinowitch seems satisfied to work mainly with the object in relation to its environment and with solid, hot, rolled steel, the human element (barring the observer) sometimes feels lacking. A gay romp round to the nearby portraitures, however, should surely suffice...
...increasingly difficult to fund major research projects. Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute has fared a little better, only because 10,000 Ukrainian Americans have supported it with gifts of more than $4 million over the past decade. Indiana University's Russian and East European Institute director Alexander Rabinowitch admits, "We're only managing to muddle through. For lack of funding we are losing quality...