Leonardo Drew (review)

Number 52, 1996, rust/fabric, plastic, wood. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery. LEONARDO DREW MARY BOONE GALLERY NEW YORK Minimalism was seemingly everywhere in New York gallery shows last fall, from Yayoi Kusama's swollen organic forms, and Polly Apfelbaum's dazzling architectonic puzzle of cut-out velvet shapes, to Leonardo Drew's sculptural grids. These artists share a formal bravado, taking the constructions of grids, floors, and walls as endless variables, open to mockery or formal adherence, or both. Drew can be located in this moment of Post-Minimalism, and although his sculptures initially recall the work of such artists as Anselm Kiefer, Robert Morris, and Eva Hesse, these comparisons bear only a surface value. Drew's use of materials signals a different lineage and a point of interrogation which is quite different from his precursors. These new sculptures are imposing facades of multiple squares, boxes and discarded or distressed objects: paper, cotton, bits of metal and glass. The works function as a gauge for the effects of time and decay, their facades are worn, dilapidated , and covered with accumulations of rust and grime. The materials not tempered by the effects of real time, but by the artist's hand. This is theater, a bit like the decrepit and stained tableaux of Keinholz, or Ann Hamilton's durational exercises and "obses~ve accumulations." And, as in Hamilton's work, Drew's materials are quite ordinary; and only when experiencing them this way, can we recognize their meaning and significance. Drew's is a different alchemy that of restoring memory to the mind, rather than turning lead into gold. Drew relishes the grid, in all its permutations, as a means of establishing his claim to this technique. Far from the austere rigor that might provide the underpinning for Minimalist ideology , however, Drew deals with grids made ragged by the passage of time. These rough structures offer a way of casting geography and defining and experience of place. Like David Hammons, Drew reclaims objects and "conjures" a spirit out of them. Previously, Drew has made wall reliefs by stacking up square bales of unprocessed cotton. In Drew's hands, cotton becomes a potent metaphor for memory, and of course, a direct reference to African American slave culture and to Southern life more generally . Cotton is pedestrian and omnipresent; one cannot go a day without coming into contact with it, but despite cotton's utilitarian aspects its innocence is questionable. Drew does not make it a clean and familiar thing; rather, he depicts it as dirty and raw, coated with rust and aggressively spilling away from the wall. An immediately recognized signifier of the plantation , cotton means hard labor; it is the heat, dust, and blood money of the south. R~petition is a visual motif, and is also part of the making of the works: the hours and hours spent scavenging the nails, pieces of metal, flattened cans, screws, glass, string, and bits of rags, covering of each block with knit cloth. The fashioning of disparate objects into rows and bales is akin to the repetitive nature of physical labor and some domestic tasks. The slowness of each act is heightened, and the works look as if they took forever to fabricate, and forever to .achieve their patina of age and decay. This sense of duration is almost oppressive. The rigidity of the minimal composition almost completely collapses under the weight of the dust and the sheer volume of stuff. The grid struggles to maintain its control over the collections of charred wood blocks, dirty glass, ragged scraps of cloth, bolts and paper anchored to it, but cannot control its cargo. Encountering these dark groupings is like stumbling into a damp and leaky basement whose contents have been left to decompose for years. The archive stored in Number 55 (all works 1996) rebels against the grided boxes into which it's been packed, dense stacks of aged paper spilling out, like memories that cannot be suppressed. The wooden slats of Number 54 store small amulets - a bit of a jacket, a bright feather, a doily, a piece of rug. Every square or rectangle is a unique composition, suggesting that its contents are...