There are many pleasures to be had from “Plant, Animal, Body,” a group show that ranges from exquisite antique Mongolian works on paper to entries by self-taught artists such as Ignacio Carles-Tora, with many compelling mainstream contemporary artists represented as well.  One of the greatest pleasures afforded is the opportunity to view the recent output of Daniel Wiener who, by presence and numbers, is a major focus of the exhibition.

Pushing off from the bright pebbled beach of the earlier work and plunging into a dark stalagmitic underworld, Daniel Wiener’s newest sculptures leave in their wake ripples of ancient and medieval physicks and metaphysics.  The term ”black bile” comes to mind, that bleakest of the four humors, tending to the saturnine and satanic, to melancholy (from the Greek “melan” or “black” and “chole” or “bile”).  Melancholy was believed to hover between madness and divinity, so it makes sense to view Weiner’s latest endeavors in a gallery noted for “visionary art,” since its practitioners are likewise linked in the popular imagination, however erroneously, to inspired madness.

If sculptures can be said to display “dyscrasia,” or an imbalance of humors, then these would ally themselves particularly to autumn and earth.  According to medieval logic they should also be aligned with “cold and dry,” but the earthiness here is volcanic; the eruptions (literally extrusions—more of this later) are lava, basalt.  Indeed, one must go to mid-career Anish Kapoor—before the leap into spectacle—for a comparable evocation of the geologic.  So “hot” do these pieces seem—Twistedconecoloredribbon is a tongue of flame—that the glass exuding from some of them might have been newly annealed, fresh from the work’s internal furnace.  And thereby hangs another ancient trope—that of the alembic and dross in the crucible of the alchemist.

But Wiener eschews transcendence—no gold fever here.  For these are absolutely contemporary works with a new take on the “informe,” accomplished in part through a new material—apoxie-sculpt—and process.  Wiener extrudes the compound, thus allowing for a physical continuity in the additive process, different from the previous bricolage.  Accumulation is now achieved through evacuation.  The color of the product is grey to begin with so that even touches of yellow and green remain bilious.  Compare the great precedent of Lynda Benglis’s latex and foam puddles and drips.  Benglis’ seepages are wonderfully garish and gargantuan, implying a somewhat comic Brobdignagian citizen.  Wiener’s crepuscular palette and intimate scale are congruent with the viewer’s own body secrets.  His excremental offerings take the bigger risk of pushing the audience beyond their squeamish tolerance.

Humor takes the edge off.  When reaching for verticality, for instance, shapes comically impersonate various creatures from innumerable carboniferous lagoons.  Witty hybridity is a hallmark, not just in the mix of seemingly incompatible materials, such as glass and epoxy, but in the shifting contexts.  Red Black Glass Ribbon rests on its own extruded table—itself a cross-fertilization of George Nakashima design, scholar rocks and cypress knees. Elsewhere, outside this exhibition, similar “tables” function as tables, pure and simple.

Ultimately, however, it is the nocturnal organicism that makes the deepest impression, the twisted, reptilian colonic piles.  H.D., in a similar vein, wrote:  “In me (the worm) clearly/ is no righteousness but this—“  And “this” is a formally brilliant and metaphorically potent updating of the abject.

Through January 23, 2010
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