Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Herbert House
American; 20th-century
Normal, IL: Illinois State University
43%
Untitled. 1974. Steel
It seems trite, at this point in art's history, to deride a sculpture for wanting to have been a drawing, but the criticism here is apt. There's nothing in the way those rectangles move off of that inclined surface that makes clear why they needed to project at all. It's an evident di Suvero derivation, but the inclusion of that plane where he would have allowed his beams to just cut through space and lean around proves that whatever little value di Suvero has lies in his ability to get away with an absence of evident centers to his sculptures. And then there's the appendage off the backside of House's sculpture, which is so completely a structural support, rather than an active aesthetic component of the work, that almost half the space the piece is occupying seems to have been given over to, like, the admin of holding it up. Public sculpture past the endgames of modernism can be pure piece-shuffling; this shit is what gives "formalism" (scare quotes intended) an awful name. (2025)