Neil Jenney at Alexander and Bonin - New York - Brief Article

In the late 1960s, before he came to be identified as a pioneer of the style of crude brushwork and apparently naive imagery dubbed "Bad Painting," Neil Jenney created a series of influential sculptures that participated in dismantling many of the austere tenets of Minimalism and heralded a new, postminimalist interest in a more individualized and expressive form of creativity. Six of those sculptures--five diptychs and a construction of corrugated tin sheeting and fluorescent light fixtures--all from 1967, made up this show.

Each diptych (all are titled Linear Piece) is composed of two aluminum rods that have been shaped irregularly by hand to duplicate each other as closely as possible, but whose imperfect twinning is readily apparent as they hang together on the wall. In one instance, each aluminum bar has been bent in half, with one portion remaining perfectly straight and horizontal, and the other undulating and jutting out from the wall. It is as if the rigidity of the formal Minimalist object were at war with a softening, playful freedom. (No doubt, the structure of these inexact pairs anticipates the deadpan premise of Jenney's later paintings, such as Trees and Lumber, in which fundamental dichotomies are posed between two incarnations of ostensibly the same thing.)

Like such contemporaries as Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, Jenney addressed the principles of Minimalism--its simplicity of elements, its seriality--only to undermine them in subtle and often affecting ways through the introduction of anthropomorphic elements and a sensitivity to the expressive potential of raw materials. Although the aluminum of Jenney's sculptures has connotations of industrial processing, it is frequently coated in a vegetal brown and green silicone rubber that suggests an affiliation with some natural locale.

The two rigidly horizontal rods of one work are hung side by side, as if to instantiate nothing but regimented, linear regularity. But their unruly ends are bent in wispy curves that nearly intertwine, like hands reaching for each other, and cast multiple shadows on the wall as would the frayed ends of a rope. Shadows, it should be said, play a significant role in all the diptychs, making salient the importance of the fluctuating environment that art works and audiences share.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group