For the past 15 years Liz Larner has been discovering new, unexpected approaches to making sculpture and imparting what she has learned to a new generation of sculptors whose work evidences Larner’s influence as both artist and teacher. In recognition of the significant role she has played in the Los Angeles art community, the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. has organized a comprehensive mid-career survey of the forty-one year old artist’s work. If there is a unifying thread to be found running through the exhibition’s range of heterogeneous sculptural objects and installations, then it is, paradoxically, her consistent and candid exploration of the flux perpetua present in all things. Larner is committed to continually searching for new ways to address sculpture and her intentional, category-defying work makes a strong case against quiescence.
     It has been suggested that our initial encounter with an artist’s work leaves an indelible impression on us that can never be eradicated, regardless of subsequent experiences which may deepen our understanding of it. Larner’s sculptures flout this axiom, despite her interest in the creation of subjective constructions that are highly sensitive to context and angle of view. My first encounter with her art remains imprinted on my memory – some friends of mine climbed Forced Perspective (Reversed, Reflected, Extended) (1992) at the opening party for ‘Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 1990s’. A perspectival grid of steel chains spanned wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and filled the entire space of the gallery with perfectly straight rows and columns of rigidly stretched chains that resembled lines drawn in space – I recalled the installation, however, as a flat chain grid.
     The MOCA exhibition starts off with a bang of almost nuclear proportions. To enter the first gallery is to step into a vortex of space drawn around the slow fissioning of what appears to be a massive nucleus on the verge of self-division. Twelve feet high, wide and deep, the untitled protoplast is modelled on a 3-D animation of the crystallization of a sphere into a cube into a sphere. The final shape is a combination of six frames superimposed over each other and fabricated from fibreglass panels covering an armature of lightweight steel. The variegated sheen of purplish green iridescent paint seems to gulp light and then glow with the metallic lustre of a dragonfly’s wing, depending on the viewer’s angle of vision, suggesting an infinite potentiality of shifting shapes beneath the surface.
     The mass, volume and monumentality of Untitled (2001) contradict Larner’s earlier work, which reflected the suspicion of object-making that was predominant when she attended Cal Arts in the mid-1980s. Her interest in redefining formal sculptural relationships of mass, volume and spatiality is clearly evident in Bird in Space (1989). Challenging the solidity and self-containment of Constantin Brancusi’s original from 1928, Larner created an arched web of nylon cord stitched together with silk. The result is as light as a feather, despite its impressive wingspan. Here is proof that, even without mass or weight, linear constructions are capable of impacting real space.
     Larner’s ‘culture’ pieces demonstrate the sculptor’s fascination with transformation and decay as well as her rejection of the ‘essential’ elements of sculpture, such as form and stability. When the glass beaker containing her culture of Gold, Collagen, and Water-Soluble Fluorescent Dye (1988) exploded, antibiotics were added to the noxious mixture and it was resealed in a new flask. When the cultures didn’t blow up, Larner’s neat containments of putrid processes generated circular colour fields of delicate beauty from Petri dishes of rotting goo.
     I laughed out loud at the sight of the sagging, limp form of Larner’s anti-monument Lash Mat (1989). For several years I lived with one of John McCracken’s flawless, monolithic black planks propped against a wall at a seemingly precarious angle which enervated the space around it with the heady feeling of standing beneath a tree that’s about to topple. Larner’s appropriation of McCracken’s über-phallic monument transforms the rigid plank into a soft mat furred with a swirling pattern of silky fake eyelashes in a dual homage to Louise Nevelson and Bridget Riley. Successfully liberated from the rigid boundaries of form, the mat seems almost to be on the brink of sliding down the wall with a sigh to assume a less demanding position prone on the floor. And why not? An eventual return to the horizon is implicit in any exploration of the reflux of life. Yet, one can be certain that when Liz Larner decides to take on the horizontal, it won’t be anything like you remember it. It may be much better.

Zoey Mondt