Before continuing with this post I suggest a quick review of two earlier posts The future of the work yet to be titled and Plinth.

I picked up the steel supports I designed and had fabricated by Ballard Road Art Studio in Wilton, NY yesterday. This is the first time that I have worked with a fabricator and I was very excited to see how my idea manifested itself. Because the distance between my studio and the fabricator's studio is a 3.5 hour drive there were no test pieces or mock-ups. We texted drawings and photos back and forth, materials were ordered and shipped but until I got there I did not know what I would have here.

The work is still 'yet to be titled' and after seeing a painting on the support I wasn't sure of what to call the steel supports. Originally, I was thinking of creating a more solid plinth. That idea morphed into the drawings of the steel supports that were eventually welded together. Many years ago when I was making more sculpture than painting ... or during the period of time when I at least thought of these as two distinct 'things' ... I would have called the steel support a base or a pedestal but those words imply something that an object sits on that is separate and distinct from the object it supports. After seeing the 5 inch squares on top of the steel I saw the metal beneath was too integrated in the work as a whole to be thought of in these terms.

Quick aside, on my way to Ballard Road I stopped by the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY to view the exhibition Dona Nelson: Stand Alone Paintings. Here is a video of the exhibition put together by Thomas Erben Gallery, the representative of the artist.

Having seen the artist's work in other exhibitions (Whitney Biennial 2014) in which the works were hung at an angle to the wall, and thinking of Laura Owen's piece Untitled 2015 which I had seen again (I saw it in its first installation at Capitain Petzel in Berlin) at the Whitney Museum's retrospective in December, I was curious to see how Nelson solved the problem of the double sided painting and bringing it off the wall and into the space.

One thing I found is that unlike Owens how Nelson chose to make the paintings 'stand alone' appears as more of an afterthought than truly integral to the work as a whole. Although Nelson's palette is not my cup of tea I appreciate how she plays with paint, the surface, viscosity, the grid. There is a clear generational difference between Nelson's and Owen's approach to painting. Nelson is not using PS and other CAD programs to generate the images. And from the looks of how the canvases are stretched and the supports put together she is not surrounding herself with a team of assistants ... or if she is she may want to reconsider their skill level. Taken together, the works of Nelson and the work of Owen for me both painters paintings occupy a three dimensional space as a two dimensional object; yet Owen's painting remains painting, thumbing its nose at any notion this might be sculpture. Nelson's paintings are paintings that have been put on a pedestal, it's nice we get to see both sides but the only purpose of the foot is so we can move around the painting, they add nothing to the paintings themselves. If anything, the approaches Nelson has taken to the supports detract from the paintings. Sometimes it looks as if the artist by propping up the paintings on milk crates and cinder blocks, suspending using standard pipe fitting might be attempting to evoke an 'unfinished' studio atmosphere but this seems unnecessary and not very successful. The steel bases do not detract to the same extent but they also do not do what Owen's bolting into the floor of the massive canvases to make them 'stand alone' does - without apology claim the space of the sculpture, the three dimensional object, for painting. However, Owen's solution is one that few artists, including Nelson, would be able to to pull off and one few collectors, galleries, or museums would or could accommodate.

Now back to the work yet to be names and what to call the steel portion. The suggestion to call them 'crus' came from the fabricator, miChelle Vara. A 'crus', plural 'crura', can be the lower part of a leg or hind limb, or various parts of support structure likened to a leg. This word makes sense to me in relation to what the steel is doing for the work as a whole, it is distanced from the other terms, and it references the anthropomorphic-ness that the height of the work (approx. 5 feet 5 inches or 163 cm) communicates to the spectator as he or she looks into the painted sections at nearly eye level. There is also a 'dancing' and 'swaying' that the spindley-ness of the square steel rods holding up the heavier - yet lighter - wooden paintings with their light and colorful tones evokes.

So, although the work is yet to be named the steel component is now termed a 'crus' and together the 24 are 'crura'.

Here are some photos courtesy of miChelle Vara, Ballard Road Art Studio, 2018.