Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jessica Stockholder
American, Canadian; 20th-century, 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art (Exhibition: Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories)
48%
Assist #3 A Chord. 2015. Painted metal, ratchet clamp with yellow webbing, felt, strap, modified vending machine entitled Immergence (2010) by Patrick Killoran on loan from Hyde Park Art Center
The work is a non-freestanding metal sculpture that requires strapping to some other object to stay upright and thereby be artistically "completed." As I understand it, it's up to whoever installs the work (not necessarily the artist) to choose that secondary object. In this case it's another artist's modified-found-object sculpture. As a conceptual gambit, the "assist" thing is not very strong, or to be more precise, it's vague. What exactly is the artwork articulating/focalizing/transforming: Stockholder's construction, the thing it's attached to, or the combination of the two? If the first, why not just make a regular freestanding sculpture? If the second, why this combinatory method and not one of the million other ways to conceptually remix and refocus reality? If the third, why foreground the "assist" dimension, which turns the piece into primarily an idea about interdependency and only secondarily into a physiognomic thing? The other way around might have better suited the artwork. Another way of framing this whole gripe would be to say that it's not sufficient for art to point out that significance seeps from context, but to do so in ways that are somehow not reducible to the act of pointing. Pointing by way of a bulky metal grated appendage on a coke machine is a pretty inelegant way to point. (And even on its own terms there's something irksome about Stockholder's sculpture as a sculpture. The thinness and the shininess of the metal is coy; the colors are indulgent — there's something about these properties that associate with Chicago art in the 2010s, à la Claire Ashley or Robert Burnier [the latter of whom is better than this]. There is something to be said, though, for the airiness of it all.) (2025)