Published in the catalogue accompanying the short-lived exhibition “Terminal Five.” To read more about the exhibition, click here and here.

Mark Handforth, installation view, 2004 Whitney Biennial

Mark Handforth possesses the increasingly rare ability to make sculptures that engage the eye, the body, and the mind. With an incisive wit and visual sophistication, the Miami-based artist pairs the handmade with appropriated everyday objects, making subtle alternations and juxtapositions to reference modernist design, Minimalist sculpture, street subcultures, and roadside Americana. To great effect, Handforth plays representation against abstraction, the rough against the refined, and art history against itself. He frequently exhibits multiple works at once, making installations of casual associativeness that, as 2004 Whitney Biennial curator Debra Singer notes, “suggest a constant state of flux—a process of being rearranged, constructed, and dismantled all at once.” This was literally true of earlier works, such as Not from where I’m standing, exhibited at the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. That installation comprised a tower of industrial scaffolding that acted as a screen on which an ever-changing array of objects were installed or hung. More recently, that sense of flux occurs in the mind, as the viewer becomes progressively more cognizant of the multiple quotations implanted in each work. However, it is no small feat that, unlike Simon Starling, whose highly conceptual work inevitably requires careful explication, Handforth never loses sight of the value of aesthetic pleasure. He delights in a narrow range of materials—exotic woods, industrially fabricated metals, fluorescent lights covered by colored gels, multicolored candles—that are deployed to very specific effect. The result is an art that, as Singer writes, is “equal parts suburban alienation and modernist transcendence.”

Given Handforth’s consistent engagement with Minimalist sculpture—no matter that only some of his works resemble Minimalist objects—it can be rewarding to examine part of his oeuvre through the dominant lens by which that earlier generation was viewed: phenomenology. A recent Artforum article by art historian James Meyer posits that for many contemporary sculptors a relationship to the spectacularly sized gallery space has replaced a direct engagement with the viewer’s body. At the tail end of a half-century genealogy of this transition, Meyer cites Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses and the sculptors who have filled Tate Modern’s grand Turbine Hall as artists for whom “…an aesthetic of size…has subsumed a Minimalist concept of scale.” Yet Handforth’s art is an exception to this trend, with many of his works splitting the difference between the two poles while falling outside of Meyer’s chronological spectrum. As physical objects, Miami Kiosk (1998) and DiamondBrite (2004) can be placed somewhere between the somatic works of Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, and others in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966 and the oversized sculptures by Tony Smith, Ronald Bladen, and Barnett Newman in Scale as Content at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1967: they’re big enough to seem awkwardly stuffed into the gallery space yet not so large as to fully alienate a viewing body. (In fact, the exact opposite of alienation occasionally happens: one widely circulated picture of Miami Kiosk features children playing on top of it.) It is conceivable that Handforth really performed a David-versus-Goliath showdown with the highway sign—just as fellow Biennial artist Wade Guyton wrestled with Marcel Breuer chairs—to make DiamondBrite, generating its torqued form by hand. Handforth’s objects privilege neither viewer nor gallery space, thereby completing the Minimalist task of making the viewer physically aware not only of the object, but the space in which it resides.

Yet Handforth slyly embeds too many quotations in his works for us to rely on formal analysis alone. He draws from high and low sources: the graceful curves of Freebird (2000) call to mind Alexander Calder’s mobiles, but the title comes from Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band from the artist’s adopted home of Florida. Likewise the sculpture is made from the streetlamps found all across the country, but the artist’s longstanding interest in modernist interior design connects this work to Achille Castiglioni’s canonic 1962 Arco Floor Lamp (itself a part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection). Even the simplest of Handforth’s objects, arrangements of fluorescent tubes distributed across a wall, open an arena of complicated interpretation. Perhaps more than any other modern artist, Dan Flavin laid singular and lasting claim to his chosen medium, and it takes bravura to rush into this hallowed territory. Even more so considering the decorative end to which Handforth has deployed the material: one work presented the Union Jack across a gallery wall and several others Jesus’ cross. Representation, however frought with its own meaning, is slipped into the work. (Another way to put it: he takes representation off the cross on which modernist abstraction had tried to nail it.) Handforth brings Flavin’s ephemeral transcendence (and his latent, secular spirituality) back to Earth: the enlightening glow of an expansive empire, represented by its flag, and Jesus’ beatific, radiant presence are invoked by humble, commercially available materials.

Lest we picture the artist solely as a postmodern ironist, Handforth also notes that fluorescent tubes provide a lovely, mood-setting light, and it’s worth noting a romantic thread that runs through his practice. Its most succinct embodiment came in the form of a public artwork in Basel, Switzerland, for which the artist found graffiti and duplicated it in blue neon beneath a bridge: Claudia I love you kind of; 11:25pm. A humble turn on Jenny Holzer’s gnomic pronouncements, the sculpture, perhaps as fragile as the original message was transitory, reflected frustrations of the heart in the churning waters. Another work, exhibited in the courtyard of Galleria Franco Noero in Turin, outfitted a Vespa scooter with nozzles that emitted a fine, cooling film of water. The scooter’s headlights, left on, created rainbows in the surrounding air. The artwork references the omnipresence of the scooters on Turin’s streets as well as the final scene in the Who’s Quadrophenia (1979), which features the teenage lead apparently driving toward suicide on the foggy seaside cliffs near Brighton. As the critic Tim Griffin notes, “Handforth’s sculpture is romantic but never quite leaves reality behind, laden as it is with sociological content.” Another Vespa is one of many objects—among them a parking meter, fire hydrant, and a length of pipe (dedicated to the artist Jack Smith)—that Handforth has covered in wax devotional candles. They drip a spectrum of color, making concrete the accretion of time and suggesting that Handforth prays at an altar dedicated to beauty found in the everyday.

Mark Handforth, Vespa, 2001

The site-specificity of the Turin Vespa was again evident in Lamppost (2003), a sculpture commissioned by the Public Art Fund for Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast corner of Central Park. A forty-five foot long industrial streetlight, it is bent in two places and laid awkwardly on the ground, its yellow sodium bulbs replaced by red lamps. The work updates Claes Oldenburg’s public proposal sensibility without seeming as much of an intervention: Lamppost countered the muteness of other modernist public sculpture, retaining its functionality by lighting the plaza at night with an amber glow.

Handforth’s reappropriations betray an interest in the failures and creative reuses of other artists’ grand gestures. He delights in the public outcry over a Carl Andre sculpture made of 120 bricks and tells the story of a Richard Serra sculpture sited publicly in London that, comprising four massive slabs leaning one on another, has a center closed off to public eyes: its interior space has become an outhouse for the city’s transients. Coming from Handforth, the tale has an insouciance that adds frisson to his own art. To quote Griffin: “Handforth looks for ‘sculpture’ that already exists amid the cultural wreckage,” and he’s smart enough to know that his art may meet the same fate. (An acknowledgement through which the Romantic can once again slip in.) Handforth writes: “At the end of it, all you have is a work and what that work does, where it sits in the world, and what is ultimately … affected by it and through it…. [My objects] exist in the world on the world’s terms.”