Galerie Hubert Winter

Fred Sandback
13. November – 23. December 2015
Da wir alle atmen, die ganze Zeit, ist es seltsam, wenn jemand anders uns anweist, wie und wann wir atmen sollen. Und wie lebhaft du auch ohne die geringste Fantasie sehen kannst, was dir als anwesend geschildert wird, mit Geländer und Gummischürfleiste, und was sich nach rechts in eine Dunkelheit hinabwindet, die vor dir zurückweicht.
Mit Schlaf hat das nichts zu tun. Ihre Stimme ändert sich auch nicht, wird nicht leiser. Sie ist einfach da, spricht ganz ruhig, und du auch.
David Foster Wallace, Der bleiche König. Dt. v. U. Blumenbach. Köln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2013

On Fred Sandback.
Excerpts from an interview between Franziska Hausmaninger (FH) and Hubert Winter (HW), 20. 11. 2012.

HW
In the end, I came to think that Fred Sandback’s measuring of space and this sitting down in the exhibition space before installing a show wasn’t about an understanding of the exhibition space, it was a contemplation about his personal space within the space. Fred was creating own spaces, not bound to the characteristics of the actual exhibition space. He created spaces to escape the institutional space. By no means is his works site specific. He was concerned with something related to purism, a pureness, but not with the construction of a space, and certainly not with an occupation of space. He was thinking of his own space when he was looking around. He wanted to forget the real space. It was an intimate process; very private, shy, hermetic.

FH
The early works were a hint towards those details within a space that are normally overlooked.

HW
Yes, that might have been the case in the shadow pieces. Fred was extremely well educated, reflected and he was surrounded by “space occupiers”, Judd, Andre, LeWitt, Serra. Ideologically, emotionally Fred distanced himself from them, he wasn’t present within the Minimal Art scene, he was simply not visible.

FH
To pick up the topic of Fred Sandback’s relationship with Minimal Art: “Just as the balloonist leaves behind the ballast of matter – the burdening sand – to escape gravity”, Fred Sandback freed sculpture from the ballast of material, Carsten Ahrens noted in the catalogue for the Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover in 1987. Sandback himself said that it was his wish to create the body of a sculpture without the opaque bulk. But then, it is also hard to imagine Fred Sandback’s formal vocabulary without the minimalist artists, with their maximal, almost aggressive corporeality. Do you see in the decision to use knitting yarn, with its feminine connotation, and the abandonment of an opaque, solid materiality – leaving aside his undeniable innovations – an ostentatious, critical distancing from the “space occupiers” of Minimal Art?

HW
That is difficult. He was definitely influenced by it, but never really present in the Minimal Art scene. He created his own space of withdrawal within the public space. He was working against the trend to allocate, to occupy spaces. Fred’s ideal form might have been that of a monkish life. And he used the feminine yarn in an ironic way. A photo feature in Interview magazine showed giant bales of wool in an agricultural surrounding, threads of wool in fashion, as jewellery, a Fred Sandback work in the middle: He liked that.

FH
Fred Sandback called his works sculptures. But he also talked about constructions and situations. How to differentiate these terms? Are they reflecting a shift from the object within a space to an engagement with space? Sandback’s pedestrian space is conceived as a space, within which artefacts, artists, everyday objects and people interact.

HW
A differentiation of terms is difficult. Much revolves around the topos of the beginning of the 1970s: around Lucy Lippard’s The Dematerialization of the Art Object. This dates back to the Russian Avantgarde of the 1910/20s, the key word: „non-objective world“. Back then – nowadays one might think differently about it – this was very much related to Sandback, Weiner, Barry, as a kind of ideal for these artists.

FH
Suzanne Delehanty called the „Twenty-Two Constructions from 1967“, which Sandback realized as a set of lithographs in 1986, Fred’s „lexicon of forms“. In how far do you think it’s right to talk about a form lexicon concerning Sandback and which forms have led to the most convincing sculptures, in your opinion?

HW
Aside from Fred’s sculptures, his prints are the ultimate, are fantastic. He materialises sculpture equally on paper, with the same haptics. They comprise their own artistic form-finding way. This has nothing to do with a repertoire of forms. It is the same with snowflakes, it’s an infinite universe. The most complex form is the U-shape.
Fred is not the line itself, rather the delicacy of the line, the tenderness, not the harshness, flashiness. His works are gentle, shimmering, sensuous, and not straight. They are actually smooth, wonderful; despite their tension they have this yieldingness, with the exception of his early wire sculptures. Fred has withdrawn sculpture of its body.

translated from: Franziska Hausmaninger. Fred Sandback – Vom Raum zur Fläche zur Linie. Vienna 2012