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Linda Fleming at Linda Durham
Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Arden Reed
Linda Fleming's recent show, "(Dis)Integrated Ingredients," continued her long-standing exploration of how complex constructions evolve out of simple geometric forms. From the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, Fleming made assemblages of huge log-pole pines (some as much as 30 feet in their longest dimension) in the Colorado mountains; in California, in the early 1990s, these morphed into steel lattice-works (up to 12 feet) weighing a ton of more.
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At Linda Durham, sculptures from 2003-04 were smaller and had moved indoors. Three steel pieces that suggest the infrastructure of flying saucers are more refined and less punchy than the earlier outdoor works. Pink Wobble (21 by 52 by 52 inches) and Green Lace (31 by 59 by 59 inches) are openweave configurations with colored enamel edging; Glimpses (31 by 59 by 59 inches) is fabricated of steel wedges radiating from the core and studded with spherical magnifying lenses. Simpler and more striking were three black neoprene webs (45 by 55 inches) that flattened Fleming's sculptural forms into thin ovoid silhouettes.
Best in show was a large drawing (64 1/2 by 56 inches), Green Time, that depicts a Dutch merchant's natural history collection. Fleming's precise graphite drawing beautifully reproduces a print of Levinus Vincent's early 18th-century Wunderkammer, where wigged ladies and frock-coated gentlemen pore over cases of fossils and shells. Green Time is so expansive that we look down on long tables whose plunging perspective carries the eye up and back to columns, archways and balustrades in deep space. But rather than rendering the entire scene, Fleming omitted sections, as if she'd laid one of her neoprene webs over the image and filled in the open spaces with celery-green pencil strokes. This reduces our view of the Wunderkammer to thick criss-crossing slivers. At lower right, the image remains largely intact, but moving outward, the green increasingly dominates, flattening perspective, breaking illusion, reducing the Wunderkammer into linear incident. But in Fleming's Piranesian system, those linear elements also assert a spiraling motion from lower right to upper left, tugging against the residual stasis of the image.
Intentionally or net, Green Time introduces an ideological critique as well, for this scene of cataloguing and display demonstrates how archival activity itself confers value. The realistic scene is literally poked through with holes that reveal its constructedness.
A smaller room housed six monumental 1989 graphite drawings of Roman goblets (92 by 64 inches). The images possess a pronounced sculptural quality: Ribbon Goblet's shiny surface resembles polished marble, with geometric overlays and incisings reminiscent of animal bones. We feel Fleming's fascination with the workings of time: what breaks, what can be reassembled, what endures.
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