FENCING THE IMAGE: ANNE BAXTER’S WIRE MESH SCULPTURES

Traditionally it has been possible to make the distinction between sculpture and painting in terms of there and not-there. Sculpture, one assumes, has mass and requires physical space while painting requires only a surface and, although the pigment has a physical substance, its function is to make us see something that is not physically there. In innumerable ways 20th century innovations, starting with collage and direct metal sculpture, have blurred these distinctions, opening up sculpture’s mass and making painted surfaces tangible. Anne Baxter has found her own means of having it both ways, of exploiting the tensions between there and not-there, of fashioning sculpture that has both substance and transparency.

Her material is wire mesh, commonly used for cages and fencing, so in a sense she is caging or enclosing her image, but then it turns out that nothing other than space is enclosed, that the image resides in the subtle shaping of the enclosure itself. Since wire mesh is a grid composed of fine strands of wire, sculptures made from it are suggestive of a kind of three-dimensional drawing in space. Indeed they remind one of Uccello’s laborious perspective drawing of an urn and other Quatrocento attempts to use line to mathematically project three dimensions into two, only here the line actually exists in space and has light refracting properties. In fact she actually made a perspective drawing in wire as background for a hanging bat (Bat in Perspective, 1996). Thus the properties of sculpture and drawing are entwined - we perceive the image by its linear contour; the object/image is three-dimensional, but we see through it to the surface behind and beneath it, as with a drawing on a sheet of paper.

The ambiguities lent by the unusual medium, ambiguities which provoke reflections on actuality and illusion or on presence and absence, find a counterpoint in the pedestrian nature of the subjects Baxter chooses: construction workers, piggybanks, a classic still-life, dustpans, umbrellas. Here there is no question of elusive content; the mimesis is as direct as the subjects are ordinary. Still-life objects sit squarely on sturdy tables of wire mesh, a lizard climbs a “scroll” of wire, and a pig standing jauntily on its hind legs receives coins through a slot in its back. One of Baxter’s early inspirations was the cast-from-life sculpture of George Segal and her own portrayals of anatomically correct figures in action - workers on ladders and a crouching Japanese wrestler - have a similar unheroic matter-of-fact quality. Yet there is a built-in contradiction in the dematerialization of these figures so that what one recognizes as the representation of a solid mass is at the same time transparent and lightweight. They exist as three-dimensional entities, but the fact that one sees right through them lends an aura of hallucination. They’re so literal as to be taken for facsimiles of still life objects, figures, birds, insects, but their transparency gives them an intriguing fugitive quality. As phantoms they make us question our ready acceptance of the tangible world. They remind one of Magritte’s deadpan transpositions whereby an object is deprived of its function through changes of scale or substance. Like his images metamorphosed into alien materials, Baxter’s innocent objects take on an irritant quality generated by the juxtaposition of irreconcilables, similar to that used by the surrealists to short-circuit rationalism and gain access to the unconscious.

They are nonetheless exquisite despite this delicately unsettling quality. There is something of the marvelous in the transformation of the material - industrial wire mesh, stiff and unyielding, challenging the artist to treat it as malleable and shape it into form that has nuance and movement. Baxter was led to the use of wire mesh in 1984 when she was working on the armature for a plaster sculpture. When the plaster figure was finished it seemed less interesting to her than the armature it covered and she began experimenting with various open-form techniques, including wire mesh. The latter she fashioned into complicated x-ray views of a populated building and a crowded subway car. When she moved to Paris and began working in the atelier of Pol Bury at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1986 she began to expand the use of wire mesh as a material for sculpture, even using it for an oversize figure as well as small figures in action. Today, working in Santa Monica, California, she still orders most of her galvanized welded steel wire mesh from France because the mesh is finer than what is available locally. Her tools might have come out of an electrician’s workbox: wire cutters, pliers of various sizes, measuring tape, a hammer and heavy gloves. With these the stuff of cages and fences is bent and twisted and knotted at the joinings until the recalcitrant material takes the tensile shape of a poised hummingbird, the coil of a lizard, or a table covered with a rumpled cloth and holding a bunch of grapes. Each seam between the sections of wire takes much more than gentle persuasion; joining the projecting ends of wire is a tedious process and fashioning a bunch of grapes can take days of strenuous finger manipulations. Yet one has the impression that the exacting nature of the process appeals to the artist, that the long involvement in bringing about these transformations holds a certain fascination that propels her onward.

Recently Baxter has begun to have some of her pieces gold-plated, to stunning effect. Where the dull surface of the galvanized metal tended to absorb light, the gold-dipped wires shimmer as if they might dissolve in light. Her scorpions, hummingbirds and wrestlers, subjected to a Midas touch, take on the character of precious sacred objects like reliquaries and croziers in the medieval church.

In her newest work, a large hourglass and a folding screen, she has given an unexpected twist to a favorite subject, the aquarium. Two fish are suspended in the upper portion of the hourglass while sand accumulates in the lower section. Here, as in the aquariums, the space defined by the mesh becomes a fluid substance, i. e. the implied watery habitat of the fish or the shifting sands of time. One can become mesmerized in contemplation of the illusions created here, but there is also a sharp poignancy to the image which touches on a genuine ecological threat as well as on the mortality shared by all living creatures. The three panels of the wire mesh screen reveal various forms of sea life: turtles, angel fish and needle fish, along with underwater plants, that transform the caged space to water; so that in looking through the layers of wire one experiences the sensation of having been transported to oceanic depths. Again the tension between the industrial material and the delicate illusionism of the image lends a certain mystery that keeps the work suspended between reality and fantasy.

Baxter’s sculptures are richly associative works, touching on age-old traditions of metal-working and representations of the animate world at the same time that they break new ground in the use of an industrial material, as well as in the questions they pose about a transparent universe. She leads us from the deceptively simple representation of the ordinary to the contemplation of the extraordinary, from the visible epidermis of the tangible to meditation on the intangible. Her images are created by literally fencing space, at once a tour de force and an impossibility.

MARTICA SAWIN

Martica Sawin is an art historian, critic and author of Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, MIT Press, 1995.