War and Leaves: Sculpture by Lin Emery

by D. Eric Bookhardt, GAMBIT WEEKLY

It all started with a spoon. Years ago, a silver spoon poised precariously on the rim of a tea cup began dancing unexpectedly as a thin stream of water cascaded onto its smooth, sleek surfaces from the faucet above. Lin Emery was washing dishes at the time, and this little interlude – a gravitational tango enacted by a spoon, a tea cup and the faucet of her kitchen sink – came as a sign, one of those epiphanies that occur when ordinary things seem to conspire to reveal some previously hidden truth.

Small Palm, 1999

Emery knew then that she had to make kinetic sculpture, though this did not reveal itself in its full, obsessive significance all at once. All she knew at the time was that she was intrigued. Here an ordinary spoon had suddenly, under a casual flow of tap water, come unexpectedly to life. Suddenly, like Dorothy Lamour under a Hawaiian waterfall, it was doing its own little private dance for her eyes only. At the time, of course, she had no idea just what a siren song this really was.

But that was then and this is now, and, for brevity’s sake, we can skip the flashbacks to welding school in New York and study with Ossip Zadkind in Paris, and proceed directly to Emery’s show at Arthur Roger, where her sleek silver creations appear quietly meditative equipoise, slowly dancing to the subliminal undulations of unseen currents of air. Standing like an otherworldly grove of quicksilver arboreal species, Emery’s work is as kinetic as ever, though she long ago abandoned water in favor of air as her chosen element. Minimal and ethereal, her spindly creations have since grown in number and scope like a new realm of botany, a garden of metallic delights morphed from high-tech aerospace components.

It all looks familiar enough at first glance. For years, the tapering aerodynamic elements of her sculptures routinely incised the surrounding spaces like a recursive mantra of asymmetry, yet despite the shifting patterns of the “leaves,” their shape and form were predictable. In this show, however, Emery breaks the mold with some subtly significant changes. This is evident in Palm Tree, 1998, which lives up to its name.

As eloquently minimal as a Zen drawing, Palm features three broadly arching blades like Space Age boomerangs made from mirror-polished aluminum. Dangling languorously from a cubist deco trunk and balanced on high-tech bearings, connecting them to each other, these “fronds” hand with a familiar tropical lassitude. The overall effect is minimally austere, yet with a hint of the zaniness we so often associate with palms (which are to trees what Afghan hounds are to dogs – the madcap eccentrics of the species). Dragonfly, 1998, also is atypical. Graceful yet spindly and severe, it comprises lethally beautiful aluminum blades (like airplane propellers engaged in gestural genuflections suggestive of tai chi or modern dance). Hovering over the ground with its sleekly predatory aura, Dragonfly is an elegant monument to nature’s lethal allure. But such direct references to flight and insects are rare; works with titles like Palmetto are more the norm. Palmetto itself is something of a bridge between the worlds, for although palmettos in real life are among the palm tree’s closer relations, Emery’s own Palmetto is rather like Dragonfly in terms of fatal beauty.

If it appears that Emery has once again, despite variations in formal structure, given us a world of elegant aesthetic minimalism and perfectionist austerity, a trip to the back gallery puts things in a different perspective. Here we see her untitled experimental piece, the latest in a long line of kinetic conceptual efforts. As rough as the aluminum pieces are polished, this is truly Emery’s other side because it is very much about war rather than leaves, plants or flowers.

Rotating disks on the rear wall brandish staves or clubs as holes open up in the ground below to reveal swatches of flowing crimson. Metal bazooka-like tubes point skyward as spotlights sweep the perimeter, and dense metallic sounds hang heavy in the air like dissonant metallic echoes. Ensconced in a dungeon-like alcove with thick black bars separating the battlefield from the viewer, it gyrates eerily, an abstraction of the primal antagonisms of the ages mechanized for the convenience of the aggressors.

If this seems like a stretch for Emery, it may not really be such a big leap considering all those gleaming, machete-like forms that have graced her creations over the years. Indeed, even botany has its dark side, as species like the Venus flytrap, datura or devil’s trumpet so readily attest. Eternally alluring yet sometimes fatal, nature is an intimate interweaving of life and death, or so Emery’s sculptures seem to imply. In art as in life, appearances can be paradoxical, and even beauty can be double-edged.