Jim Zivic at Leslie Tonkonow - art exhibit - Brief Article

Art in America, July, 2001 by Calvin Reid

Is it art or is it furniture? Jim Zivic's beautifully designed and constructed works are perfect ammunition for a bar-stool argument. The show features works designed by Zivic and produced by his design firm, Burning Relic (cofounded with his partner, Warner Wada). It showcases the range of eclectic materials, design concepts and machining skills he brings to bear in producing his artfully realized home furnishings. His work presents an uncluttered, modernist sense of design fortified by ingenious fabrication and coarse, hand-worked surfaces that present a seductive, fresh-from-the-metal-shop tactility. But it's his quirky materials that truly stand out--chunks of raw rubber, leather belt links, lengths of strung leather hinges used to run industrial machinery and formidable, 140-pound hunks of coal lugged to his Manhattan studio from a Pennsylvania mine--imbuing the works with a character and physical presence akin to, well, art.

The works clearly nod to Minimalist sculpture and architecture, and are executed under the equally Spartan influence of elegant experimental design chic. Zivic uses raw smoked Malaysian rubber--globular hunks of the stuff--as cushions for nifty metal gurneys. Like Robert Smithson, he stacks the rubber chunks in an exaggerated brick pattern to build a short wall, a conceptual diversion from his hybrid, utilitarian furniture. Drawing on a folk tradition of coal furniture that dates from 19th-century mine workers, his craggy, pitchblack coal end tables are presented two ways: polished to a high sheen or with a matte surface. Offering a bit of hotel-lobby ambiance, they also bring to mind the furniture art of Scott Burton or, if you stretch a bit, perhaps even the disparate stone, brick and steel works of Michael Heizer, Carl Andre or Richard Serra, with their austere emphasis on "natural" surfaces and shrewdly manipulated masses.

The centerpiece of the show was Leather Link Hammock (2001), an oversized, 6-by-7-foot hammock suspended from the gallery's concrete ceiling beams by four heavy-duty braided steel chains. The bed of the hammock is made of a single expanse of leather belt links, rows of brown leather hinges that suggest a woven mat. The piece offers a swinging, mechanized response to body weight as well as a tableau of oddly rustic visual serenity. It's also a Minimalist composition of finicky hand-tooled metalwork, a leather-accented line drawing in space.

Zivic calls his work "radical modern furniture," but there isn't anything necessarily radical about sophisticated, lavishly conceived furniture. Zivic's works are not so much radical as inspired. They're generic furniture forms, surprisingly luxuriant in their use of industrial materials, transformed by an artist's sensibility. This is furniture rich in the dual modernist legacies of functional design and nonfunctional esthetics.