Friday, October 23, 2015

Peter Plagens' Review in Wall Street Journal

Suzanne Goldenberg: Work
Molly Krom
53C Stanton St.
Through Oct. 4


Every radical art style eventually becomes academic, and every pointed and propelling art philosophy eventually becomes an overall sensibility. Take what used to be called Postminimalism, for example. Artists such as Eva Hesse and Richard Tuttle rebelled—in works of art, not in words—against the literally rigid, antipersonal and disdainful-of-the-human-hand manifest philosophy of Minimalism. Cloth, rubber and wire replaced steel, plexiglass and plywood, and works of art became soft, stringy, ephemeral and delicate. As small and as gossamer as some Postminimal art was, it had, in its time, a reformative anti-industrial thrust to it.
Since then—the late 1960s and early ’70s—making art that’s assembled with wire, thread, ribbon or bits of glue has become harmlessly conventional. Add to this the fact that the color of much current art in the Postminimalist vein is subdued—black, brown, beige and off-white—and you end up with a kind of easy normality in gallery fare.
Suzanne Goldenberg operates within this newish norm, where the evidence of the personally poetic—seemingly casual construction, lightly abject materials, etc.—is fairly standard. Ms. Goldenberg is, on the other hand, extremely good at it, and her range—from roughly woven wood-and-ribbon gridded wall hangings to smaller shelf pieces that look like the ruins of long-ago shipwrecked toy boats—transcends any easy formulas.
Work like this, however, needs breathing space to give each piece room to make its individual case. The 20-plus works on display in this small gallery are too many. A Minimalist maxim might have been usefully applied to the installation: Less is more.