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Liz Larner: Don’t Put It Back Like It Was
A long-overdue appreciation of the influential sculpture of Liz Larner and its radically adventurous formal and conceptual vocabulary Los Angeles–based sculptor and installation artist Liz Larner (born 1960) was originally a in some of her earliest projects, she documented the volatility of bacterial cultures in petri dishes. However, she soon realized that she was more compelled by the dishes themselves and how they presented questions about what an art object can entail. Since then, she has continued to pursue her interest in formal unpredictability through a focus on sculpture and architectural space. Composed of a diverse variety of materials, her sculptures frequently function as optical illusions that seem to bend the space around them. Sometimes rigidly technical in their geometry and at other times soft-edged and amorphous, Larner’s sculptures are striking both for their fluctuation of form and for their representation of spatial politics.
Repositioning her enduring formal and material concerns alongside her relationship to a feminist sculptural position, this monograph offers an opportunity to consider Larner’s artistic project within today’s expanded discourses of embodiment, gender and posthumanism, and to recalibrate our understanding of it in relation to male-dominated Postminimalism and installation art, which have often underpinned Larner’s critical reception. Poet Ariana Reines, cultural critic and theorist Catherine Liu, and curators Connie Butler and Mary Ceruti consider the physical properties and sociopolitical implications of the materials present in Larner’s work, which range from ceramic to steel chain to surgical gauze to human hair.
Repositioning her enduring formal and material concerns alongside her relationship to a feminist sculptural position, this monograph offers an opportunity to consider Larner’s artistic project within today’s expanded discourses of embodiment, gender and posthumanism, and to recalibrate our understanding of it in relation to male-dominated Postminimalism and installation art, which have often underpinned Larner’s critical reception. Poet Ariana Reines, cultural critic and theorist Catherine Liu, and curators Connie Butler and Mary Ceruti consider the physical properties and sociopolitical implications of the materials present in Larner’s work, which range from ceramic to steel chain to surgical gauze to human hair.
103 pages, Hardcover
Published August 30, 2022
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July 21, 2024
“The color technically sits on top of the metal but seems to also describe its shapes; color and form are equal and as one” (23) -Connie butler’s essay on Larner
“People have dealt with the wall, or the floor, but where two walls meet is a really beautiful, poetic space. Where two axes arrive and touch each other should not be dead space; it should be one of the most powerful spaces. I like moving things into the corners and sometimes trying to change the shape of the corner” (23) - larner on her own work
“Formally stable but inherently precarious…a long line of ceramic practices that embrace the wrong, the accident, as the counterintuitive…blobby organicism and rough untreated edges contribute to the weird sum of entropic parts that make these finished objects” (23)
“A necklace of waste…How can one body generate something so massive?” (25)
“One needs a body to experience sculpture” (27)
“Multipoint attachment” (29)
“We have profound attachments to things that endure and allow us to have a sense of ourselves over historical time. The idea of immortality is tied up with value, which is probably owing in part to this desire to know our past” (32)
“A sculptor once said that good sculpture should deny photography: that is, it should be unphotographable, because it defies stasis and eludes capture, because its very presence in the space of representation makes the seizing of such a space impossible for any technique of camera obscura” (41)
“Technics install the human being on a horizon: this “installation” allows for the human being to have a certain coherent relationship with nature, available to him or her either as a resource to be exploited or a ruin to be mourned” (42) — informed by heideggerian notion of technics
“Art must always in some sense resist theory, and theory art” (43)
“Culture, in larner’s body of work, does not signify the mass psychosis in which we all participate…Encounter produces strange chemical reactions; decay can resemble blooming. That which we would purport to preserve, we distort. The medium becomes the message” (94) - ariana reines
“How do you build a monument to some of the less-celebrated streams and currents of the real without submitting to the lie on monumentality?” (94)
“People have dealt with the wall, or the floor, but where two walls meet is a really beautiful, poetic space. Where two axes arrive and touch each other should not be dead space; it should be one of the most powerful spaces. I like moving things into the corners and sometimes trying to change the shape of the corner” (23) - larner on her own work
“Formally stable but inherently precarious…a long line of ceramic practices that embrace the wrong, the accident, as the counterintuitive…blobby organicism and rough untreated edges contribute to the weird sum of entropic parts that make these finished objects” (23)
“A necklace of waste…How can one body generate something so massive?” (25)
“One needs a body to experience sculpture” (27)
“Multipoint attachment” (29)
“We have profound attachments to things that endure and allow us to have a sense of ourselves over historical time. The idea of immortality is tied up with value, which is probably owing in part to this desire to know our past” (32)
“A sculptor once said that good sculpture should deny photography: that is, it should be unphotographable, because it defies stasis and eludes capture, because its very presence in the space of representation makes the seizing of such a space impossible for any technique of camera obscura” (41)
“Technics install the human being on a horizon: this “installation” allows for the human being to have a certain coherent relationship with nature, available to him or her either as a resource to be exploited or a ruin to be mourned” (42) — informed by heideggerian notion of technics
“Art must always in some sense resist theory, and theory art” (43)
“Culture, in larner’s body of work, does not signify the mass psychosis in which we all participate…Encounter produces strange chemical reactions; decay can resemble blooming. That which we would purport to preserve, we distort. The medium becomes the message” (94) - ariana reines
“How do you build a monument to some of the less-celebrated streams and currents of the real without submitting to the lie on monumentality?” (94)
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