Sorcha Dallas

Alex Frost’s practice spans the spectrum of sculptural tradition, employing the vocabulary and materials of both the jeweler and the architect. For example; ‘Mother Night’ (1999) is a series of climbing frames remade in miniature from soldered flower wire and colored glass beads.

Frost’s new work for Spike Island consists of a series of L shaped structures adorned with smaller re-workings formed of plaster, shellac and lengths of cut foam. The structures also provide support for some surrogate gilded styro-foam forms.

For Example ‘Jewellery is the ultraviolet of the spectrum of sculpture and architecture is the infrared’

Alex Frost’s practice spans the spectrum of sculptural tradition, employing the vocabulary and materials of both the jeweler and the architect. For example: Mother Night (1999) is a series of children’s climbing frames remade in miniature from soldered flower wire and coloured glass beads. For Theme Show (1998), Frost filled Transmission Gallery in Glasgow with a Buckminster Fuller Geodesic structure, fabricated over an eleven-day period, from plastic pipes, sheets of polythene and card. Mother Night reduced the functional and instructive to decorate form, whilst Theme Show returned Fuller’s patent (filed in 1951) from the Defence industries back to his ideas for utilitarian housing (and to its development at Black Mountain College where it had first been created from cardboard as part of a student workshop).

Jewellery and architecture – decoration and structure – are recurrent themes in Frost’s work. Stations (1999-2001), a series of mobiles constructed from coloured elastic bands and short lengths of doweling, reinvent the work of the sculptor Kenneth Snelson whose large-scale public works are self supporting through their use of ‘dsicontinuous compression and continuous tension’. Just as the ambitions of Buckminster Fuller were seen to have been taken from his control, in turn Fuller was seen to have appropriated the ‘energetic geometry’ of Snelson, a former student of his at Black Mountain College, by coining the name ‘transegrity’. Frost reclaims the design for Snelson by re-making imagined student prototypes – prototypes that Fuller ‘lost’.

Model for the ice town centre (Cumbernauld) (1998) replicates the architectural scale model of Hugh Wilson’s Scottish New Town (1955). Unlike Wilson’s plans for a city centre created from reinforced concrete, Frost’s model fabricated from cellophane and magic tape, proposes one of ice. Skelution (1999), a coloured wall drawing, traces hidden conduits within its host gallery’s walls. As with other works by Frost, Skelution returns existing structures to prototype – in this instance Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ project for Beauborg has been miniaturized and inverted.

In contrast more recent works, Frenchie, Necking and Spooning Maverick, (all 2000), are referred to by Frost in terms of imploded installations. These mosaic works sample the worst excesses of Nikki de Saint-Phalle and Antonio Gaudi i Cornet to create objects that appear to have been fabricated as part of a love-struck teenage community arts initiative.

Frost’s new work for Spike Island consists of a series of L shaped structures adorned with smaller re-workings formed of plaster, shellac and lengths of cut foam. The structures also provide support for some surrogate gilded styro-foam forms. For Example (2002) is made after Robert Morris’ Untitled (L-Beams) (1965-7).Morris’ investment in the extremities of 1960’s practice provides Frost with a metaphorical plinth for his ongoing investigation into the sculptural spectrum. Frost describes his revised Minimalism as ‘boyish’ rather than macho. Utilising materials and styles that orthodox tradition tells us to be contradictory, For Example embodies the incongruities of the adolescent male: innocent and experienced, serious and stupid…

In her 1994 essay, ‘Notes on ‘Camp’’ , Susan Sontag described the sensibility – unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it – that goes by the cult name of ‘Camp’. Much of artwork contemporary to, or made in the years immediately following Sontag’s essay now appears under the Camp umbrella. The ‘artifice and exaggeration’ that signified Camp in the mid 1960’s can be recognized in the big beards, bricks and boxes of late American Modern art. Products of this generation appear as components of the sensibility ‘that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’ . Diverse works of Richard Serra. Carl Andre and Robert Morris amongst others now exist perhaps within an esteemed canon, said by Sontag to include Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, Hector Guimard’s Parisian Metro entrances, Gaudi’s Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia and Tiffany lamps.

Sontag describes Camp’s ‘theatricalization of experience’ . The ‘theatrical’ nature of Minimalist sculpture was famously identified by Michael Fried in his 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ . Fried stated that ‘Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre’ . In the same issue of the same publication, Robert Morris’ essay ‘Notes on Sculpture Part III: Notes and Non sequiturs’ celebrated the same duration aspect involved in viewing his work and that of his peers that Fried had attacked: ‘Seeing an object in real space may not be an immediate experience’ .

Late American Modernist art attacked the notion of artwork as exclusive and in this sense was deeply politicized, but it can hardly now be seen as such being largely confined to private collection, museums and commercial, blue-chip galleries.

Accordingly it can be generally perceived through its loss of ‘context’ to have gathered another important facet of Sontag’s understanding of Camp – that it is ‘disengaged, depoliticized or – at least apolitical’. In 1989 Richard Serra’s Titled Arc (1981) was removed from New York’s Federal Plaza amidst great controversy, yet in 2001 not such dissimilar works by Serra were presented by Herald Szeemann at the Venice Biennale where they were installed to popular acclaim with financial assitance from Gucci. The support of an exclusive fashion house is ironic given Moris’ suggestion in 1967 that ‘Such work would undoubtedly be boring to those who long for access to an exclusive specialness, the experience of which reassures their superior perception…’ .

Sontag sees Camp as being ‘wholly aesthetic’ . The problem with identifying such late Modernism as Camp would be that such art is usually characterized by parity rather than opulence – too little rather than ‘too much’. And yet the industrial materials favoured by artists of this era were worked in exactly the same way as more obviously decorative artists such as Louis Comfort Tiffany favoured coloured glass and AntonioGaudi utilized broken ceramics: ‘Specialized factories and shops and used – much the same as sculpture has always used special craftsmen and processes… industrial and structural materials are often used in their more or less naked state, but the methods of forming employed are more related to assisted hand craftsmanship’ .

Sontag interprets Camp as ‘Dandyism in the age of mass culture – that makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object’ . Her observation again finds an echo in Morris’ ‘Notes’: ‘The new three-dimensional work has grasped the cultural infrastructure of forming itself which has been in use, and developing, since Neolithic times and culminates in the technology of industrial production’ .

In 1974 Morris created an infamous untitled poster edition to advertise his Labyrinth – Voice Blind Time show at the Castelli-Sonnabend Gallery, New York. This self-portrait presented the artist as the archetypal macho sculptor – naked bar an oversized German army helmet, aviator shades and studded collar, glistening with oil and wielding thick, linked steel chains. Morris was acknowledging his position within what was, at the beginning of the 1970s, seen to be a racist and sexist tradition. Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff were to plot the same strains through the Modern movement in their Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture in which they sought to expose the ‘pejorative use of the word ‘decorative’ in the contemporary art world. They quote, amongst others Adolf Loos form Ornament and Crime (1908): ‘I have made the following discovery and I pass it on to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects’ .

Morris encouraged the more obviously decorative sculptor and some-time collaborator Lynda Benglis into creating her own version of his untitled poster. Benglis took out an advertisement in Artforum (for her exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York) in which she presented herself naked but for a pair of white sunglasses and a veneer of oil, wielding a dildo. Benglis’ response was not just a declaration that American art in the 1970’s was still a ‘heroic, macho sexist game’ but also an oblique reference to Martha Mitchell, the wife of Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, who wore similar shades and ‘was doing a lot of the talking’ post Watergate: ‘They couldn’t shut her up, so she became some sort of role model for me’ . Benglis’ statement was misunderstood. The following issue of Artforum carried a letter of protest to Editor Chief, John Coplans authored by his own associate editors Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff (the husband of Joyce Kozloff), Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Masheck and Annette Michelson who felt compelled to renounce the ‘extreme vulgarity’ of the image . To quote Sontag once again: ‘The old style dandy hated vulgarity. The new style dandy, the lover of Camp appreciates vulgarity… the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves…’ Alex Frost’s For Example could be seen to be doing something similar.

Rob Tufnell Assistant Curator Dundee Contemporary Arts

1.Carl Andre quoted in the press release for Words and Small Fields, Sadie Coles HQ. December 2001. 2.Sontag, S., Against Interpretation, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1966, p.275 (first published in The New York Review of Books, 1964) 3.Ibid. p.275 4.Ibid. p.284 5.Ibid. p.287 6.Fried, M., ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum 5, No. 10, June 1967. p. 12-23 7.Ibid. 8.Morris, R., ‘Notes on Sculpture Part III: Notes and non sequiturs’, Artforum 5, No. 10, June 1967, p.24-9. Reprinted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Ed. Stiles, K & Selz, P., University of California Press, 1996 9.Ibid. 10.Sontag, op cit. 11.Morris, op cit. 12.Sontag, op cit. 13.Morris, op cit. 14. Audon, V & Kodloff, J., ‘Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture’, Heresies 1, No. 4, Winter 1977-8, p.38-42, Reprinted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Ed. Stiles, K & Selz, P., University of California Press, 1996 15.Loos, A. Ornament and Crime, 1908 reprinted in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900, MIT, 1981 16.Lynda Benglis quoted Ratcliffe, C., The Fate of a Gesture: Lynda Benglis, Artnet.com 17.Ibid. 18. Ironically Coplans is now better known as a photographer who exhibits images of his own naked octogenarian body.