The underside of innocence: in works whose overtones of menace are tempered with a melancholy, often chilly elegance, sculptor Not Vital provokes us to contemplate things only incompletely known

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Nancy Princenthal

Sixteen silver spheres, each 9 inches in diameter, were lined up in an evenly spaced row on the floor of an otherwise empty room at Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York. Like bails in a pinball machine, they seemed ready to spring into action. Are they meant to be sent around the circuits of some esoteric metaphysical pursuit, as are James Lee Byars's gilded bronze globes? Or will they release the perceptual energies produced by minute asymmetries, as do Roni Horn's deformed spheres? Or maybe they will lead us into a benignly psychotic trippiness, in the manner of Yayoi Kusama's silvery floating balls? No to all three or rather, not quite; all these precedents are somewhat pertinent. But the specific nature of the spheres of Not Vital's Camel (2004) was announced in the exhibition's press release, which explains that the remains of an entire "sun-dried camel"--the please inevitably suggests a new pizza topping--have been divided among them, sealed invisibly inside.

That we must take the presence of this desiccated flesh on faith goes to the heart of the matter. (The artist and those close to him are, it should be noted, adamant about the claim's veracity, if circumspect about the practical details involved.) Historically, the question of credence in art can be seen as an axis along which to plot uses ranging from primitive cult to highly elaborated religious ritual to the most astringent conceptualist regimens. In Vital's new work, that axis is intersected by a perpendicular line of inquiry which measures material value, calibrating increments of preciousness and rarity. Contemplation and covetousness, passionate devotion and simple curiosity are some of the responses Camel provokes--or offers itself as a means of gauging. If all this testing seems a little cagey, it is undertaken with abundant grace. The polished silver spheres spanned the room from window to interior wall, reflecting a subtle spectrum of light from the blues of daylight to the yellows of artificial illumination, and picking up more of the warm glow cast by me polished wooden floor as they went. More malleable than steel and more susceptible to the atmosphere than gold, silver yields to touch and breath, clearly and irresistibly.

The same vocabulary of form and ideas was applied, somewhat less hypnotically, in another reliquary sculpture included in the show, Bremer Stadtmusikanten (2004). A stacked quartet of silver boxes, graduated in size, the work is said to contain the dried remains of a donkey in the largest receptacle, a dog in the next, a cat in the one after that and finally a rooster. (Vital's reference here is a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, "The Bremen Town Musicians," in which the four barnyard animals stand on each other's shoulders and sing, a startling performance that routs a gang of robbers.) Placed just above eye level atop a tall wooden pedestal, the ziggaratlike sculpture evokes a kind of generic, golden-calf-style pagan worship, its precipitously receding stepped caskets impressive in a way that just exceeds irony.

Elsewhere in the same show, Vital achieved an equally unstable balance that can be called dark whimsy in a wall installation of 300 big, shiny, irregularly spaced stainless-steel knives, business ends pointed straight out. Viewers were kept at a safe (roughly 15-foot) distance, ensuring that the glinting charm of 300 Knives (2004) competed successfully with its menace, h kind of companion piece, 3,000 Tears (2003) is a long and narrow rectangular marble block, its sides pitted irregularly with tear-shaped depressions, as if eroded, but with uncanny precision. The marble block perched a little uneasily, at an angle, on an equally long and narrow metal pedestal, cantilevering off the base on one end. Here, too, danger was tempered by a melancholy elegance.

The undercurrent of threat in Vital's current sculpture brings to mind such contemporaneous works as Marina Abramovic's knife ladders and Gregory Green's whirling circular-saw blades. But equally germane are the works of a whole host of artists now involved with fairy tales, from Martin Honert and Kiki Smith to Cindy Sherman, Amy Cutler and Anna Gaskell. As any reader of the Grimm Brothers knows, the distance between the domains of threat and folk fancy is not as great as it might first appear. Vital has roamed it for more than 20 years, exploring the underside of innocence and the more ingenuous charms of violence and fatality. In 20 drawings also on display at Sperone Westwater, Vital leans toward the fey, with modest but appealing images that occasionally depend on wordplay and visual puns, but even here the humor is sometimes menacing. Writing in 1989, Donald Kuspit said that while Vital's earliest sculptures, based on roughly modeled animal forms, seemed "excavated from some bog and still reeking of fresh death," his subsequent work aimed "to make us superstitious" about objects that dispensed, first, with all traces of the organic, and later, sometimes, with any figurative reference at all. (1)