Louise Nevelson and Robert Smithson

" Black Wall "1958 Louise Nevelson

Black Wall is an abstract, assemblage sculpture by American artist Louise Nevelson created with discarded wooded objects that she found while walking around the streets of New York City. She began making these sculptures in the 1950's. Wooden boxes filled with smaller wooden parts that are each individual works and then assembled into a larger work titled Black wall.

The work is mutable. A writer for art international described her work as" interchangeable units or boxes that can be rearranged and extended indefinably"

Though made up oh many individual parts the application and total coverage of matt black paint is what unifies the work into feeling like one solid object. on her choice of black paint  Nevelson's said its "A colour which will make any material look more distinguished"

 She describes New York City as her" mirror" 

The work looks like a jumble of  buildings , a reaction to the city's urban growth and development.

The work is site specific, relating to buildings, made from its own dis-guarded waste, the artist takes what is unwanted and creates something new. This work was made in the 1950s before buzz words like sustainability and repurposing and the threat of irrecoverable environmental damaged caused from over consumerism.

 The use of black to unite the structure makes me think of hard, concreate structures of a city, the way the boxes are stacked and stuffed, its kind of untidy and random as city is and though you can make out the former identity of the materials its not a great leap of imagination to transform the forms into a city scape. The viewer has some input in their experience of the work. I'm  relating this to the way I'm using dis guarded packaging to make abstract, structural images, that are also interchangeable and extendable, mirroring the site specifics. There are similarities here in  the use of found objects to create structure without needing to heavily disguise the source material as it is of the place and adds to the physical story of the work. 

"My House is a Decayed House" Photo collage 1962 Robert Smithson

I saw this work at the Nottingham Contemporary hallow earth exhibition. The title is taken from a line of  T.S Elliot's poem "Gerontion" -meaning little old man in Greek.Its a photo collage with paint and ink, I was drawn to it for its structural imagery and title. It looks like a town scape with a church, very dark as the title suggests there is ruin in the detail. this is an artist who made lots of work referencing decayed structures. A different place and a different time but still finding that inspiration in the run down and decayed. Its very dark and dramatic, the angels of the buildings jutting out many paint layers suggestive of time ravaging an old village, of history and feeling of foreboding doom, the busyness  of the lines, visually there is a lot to take in. Its map like while also being 3d, its abstract but also clear of what it represents.In terms of the link to the poem, the veiws of an old man and a decayed house, are the structures representing the human body, a feeling of weariness,

Suzaan Boettger from the Holt smithson foundation website wrote:

My House is a Decayed House also links Smithson’s affiliation with deteriorated architecture. At 17 he drew a dilapidated fence before a multi-story construction site, Untitled (Ruined Building) (1955). In 1970, drawings pictured building fragments mired in mounds of earth; that year the trajectory of architectural ruination culminated in his dumping an avalanche of dirt atop the roof of Kent State University’s grounds storage cabin until its main beam cracked, creating Partially Buried Woodshed.