BOMB 118/Winter 2012
David Rabinowitch, Metrical Construction in 12 Masses, 1991. Collection of the artist.
When first I met David Rabinowitch, seven or eight years ago, it was immediately apparent that he was one of those very few extraordinarily self-sufficient artists whose work had almost nothing to do with the art world surrounding him. His sculptures, so obviously austere, deeply serious and very formally intelligent, came out of a different tradition than most 1980s art. Over the years that we talked, and the more I learned of his work, which has developed in highly complex ways for more than three decades, the more I realized the difficulty of finding adequate ways of responding to his body of work. The individual pieces themselves were highly demanding, and the internal logic of his development took time to understand. Art as entertainment; art as political critique or social commentary: these have never been of interest to him. Nor have the problems dealt with by post minimalist or post modernist American art been relevant to his achievement. His sculpture and drawing have remained firmly grounded, always, in the concerns of what might be called High Modernism. From early on, Rabinowitch had taken a great interest in philosophy; and so one of my tasks, as our relationship developed, was to return to Hume, Wittgenstein, and, especially, Spinoza, to think about the ways in which the practice of an articulate sculptor might be informed by such an intellectual background. Although deeply involved in this reading, Rabinowitch emphatically is not a philosopher-sculptor, and so one important goal was to ask in what ways the practice of his art might be informed by such reading of texts which are not much concerned, in direct ways at least, with art. His intellectual concerns, and also his working ways of thinking, were influenced by texts which he encountered early on. Born in 1943, he began reading Spinoza’s Ethics in 1951; in 1959 he started to study Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and in 1961, he started to concentrate on David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, particularly its first section.
The first sculptures he thought worth preserving, the Box Trough Assemblages and the Fluid Sheet Constructions, were made in 1963 and 1964. The goal of his reading, he has said, “was always and completely bound up with my desire to engage in a program of construction that would expose and work directly with reality. I had no wish to study philosophy as such. To me, to study philosophy is to engage in problems of philosophy. And I never did that.” That statement may seem surprising, for would not philosophy take a sculptor away from direct concern with the reality of his medium? Rabinowitch’s fundamental philosophical concern, I believe, is with the structure of perception as a source of knowledge, and the relation of everyday visual experience to the specifically aesthetic experiences provided by art. But this claim can only be understood by looking in some detail at his individual works, and by reflecting upon his numerous written accounts, some of them published in his exhibition catalogues. Few artists so quickly do deeply innovative work or develop in as self-sufficient a way; a proper account of his work would require rethinking the history of sculpture since the 1960s.
Canadian by birth, Rabinowitch is a part-time Manhattan resident who remains much better known in Europe than in his adopted country. As the numerous catalogues published by European museums make clear, his work is extremely well regarded for its absolutely original development of the traditions of modernist sculpture. When I knew that this Fall he would be having a show of early work at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, accompanied by a new collection of essays by Whitney Davis, I thought that it was an ideal time for an interview. It began as a discussion, and what we produced in the end was a text around that discussion, tracing some of his concerns, seeking to sketch the story of his development, and, most especially, getting him to provide some sense of his relationship to the sculptural tradition within which he has worked.
(Interview, Sculpture)