TONY TASSET
Tasset’s art refers to and comments on concepts of minimalism; his sculptures exist to repeat and elaborate on the intellectual artwork of the 60s and early 70s and to seek some new insight by reconfiguring it and searching for new forms of presentation. Open Sculpture Bench brings to mind the ultrastatic cube forms of Robert Morris and Tony Smith. An even closer comparison can be made with Eva Hesse’s Accession II of 1967, a perforated sheet-metal cube almost exactly the same size as Open Sculpture Bench (32 inches on a side). The three interior sides and bottom of Hesse’s piece are lined with a grasslike surface of small plastic tubes. The effect on the viewer was similar to that of Tasset’s work; the piece created an inside/outside dichotomy, tempting the viewer to get in. (Hesse’s piece proved irresistible when shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968; it was destroyed by people climbing inside.) Accession II lured with its tactile interior and presented a paradox. The interior seemed natural–in a way the sculpture seemed to be a box of nature–but in fact the inviting “grass” was created from a manmade industrial material. Hesse’s cube, in other words, ingeniously transformed materials through application. Tasset’s version, by contrast, is a postmodern one-liner, an 80s BMW version of Hesse’s deeply felt tactile experience from the 60s.
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Tasset’s sculpture attempts to address issues of modernism, specifically minimal and conceptual art, in a blatantly calculated “postmodern” way. His involvement in the calculation resembles that which is required to solve a single algebraic equation, when the problem at hand calls for the solution of a conglomeration of interrelated equations. Looking at these pieces feels like eavesdropping on an inside joke: you know a story has been told and that it merits a reaction, but without having heard all the rhetoric related to the subject matter, you can only feign a reaction.
