Gold and silver are noble metals. It's a technical term: such elements resist oxidization when heated in air, and are impervious to solution in inorganic acids. Being "of exalted moral character or excellence" (Webster's unabridged) is further to nobility's definition when it describes human attributes. Add aristocracy, and you have the fundamental triad of nobility's significations as they pertain to both people and precious metal: honorable, rich, stable, enduring. Physically, such metal is, in a pure state, inert and extremely dense; silver is heavier than bronze, gold is heavier than lead. And in their density and stability, in their rarity and visual allure, they are woven inextricably into the language of praise, reverence, avarice, and love.
Hence, tricky in the extreme as mediums for art. The surplus of associations precious metals bear, together with their sheer expense, might easily inhibit the risk-taking on which good artwork depends; indeed "precious" is a well-established epithet in art criticism, meant to condemn work that is finicky, or superficially self-concious. By the same token, it is just this kind of difficulty on which art thrives. The depth of this material's symbolic history, its supremely self-sufficient beauty, the very anxiety using it must induce, present challenges to which each of the dozen participants in this exhibition have responded with vigor, intelligence, and evident pleasure.
One approach led through the history - it could double as a kind of covert history of sculpture - of attempts at alchemical transubstantiation, whereby base materials are elevated, at the highest level of achievement to gold. That history is expressed with particular clarity by Kiki Smith, whose untitled quintuplet of silver sculptures was shaped, as can be plainly seen, by gently squeezing plaster between her palms. The primary gesture of Smith's work involves leaving her own imprint - her identity and, some would say, the map of her future - on these eminently impressionable, and suggestive, lumps of plaster. But she also invokes a connection between the urge to turn ordinary matter to material and spiritual advantage, and the will to find in the same substances the spark of animation recognizable as art.
St. Clair Cemin's Monkey could be described as an allegory of such a transformation. A blurry, protean, possibly proto-human figure (the nominal primate) strains mightily against a massive (by comparison; both forms are diminutive) boulder. Cast in gleaming silver, Monkey suggests and epic, if partly ironic, struggle to draw meaningful form out of inchoate matter. More explicitly iconic, William Harper's Tombtube drives from the conjunction of a calibrated glass test tube and the head of a baby doll, both found at a flea market. The two objects were joined with a gauze bandage before being cast in silver and brushed with gold, the doll's head further adorned with a headdress of actual peacock feathers. Harper, a renowned jeweler, is currently engaged in the construction of a large-scale installation that will simulate a multi-chambered ancient burial suite, for which Tombtube could serve as an accessory. A charm and fetish, an instrument of imprecation and worship, a censer, scepter, and wand, it is also, as its title suggests, evocative of chemistry experiments and of burial sites, and the hopeful speculation that can link them.
Being among the planet's basic elements, gold and silver lend themselves to the language of reductive but fundamentally earthbound abstraction, as can be seen in several artists' work. The scudding, windswept forms of Isaac Witkin's Giotto's Cloud, like the headlong spill of molten metal in Bryan Hunt's Study for Three Gorges, seem made of material drawn directly out of the earth, spun into shape by movements of air, shifts of tide, and gravity. First cast in the late 1970s in stainless steel, Giotto's Cloud was seminal sculpture for Witkin, marking a transition from welded, geometric forms to cast metal, and the formal freedom it offered. The spontaneity he found with this work, its quicksilver passage from two to three-dimensional readings and back, seems effortlessly evocative of fast moving clouds, and also of the fluid, malleable properties of molten metal itself.
Similarly, the luminous cascading forms of Hunt's "Three Gorges" (inspired by three spectacular gorges in China that will be flooded when the Yellow River is dammed) are eloquent of the equivalence, in visual wealth, between falling water and poured silver, and of the infinitely subtle surface variations they share. Maya Lin's two contributions, A Puddle of Gold and A Drop of Silver, take this association perhaps furthest, concentrating the two mediums into process-determined, profoundly self-reflective forms. The irregular pool of molten gold, spread thin as a spill of water, and the mounded drop of polished silver epitomize both particular characteristics of the metals in question - luster, viscosity, cohesion - and fundamental properties of the inorganic landscape that they bear witness to.
On the other hand, a few artists have found in these lively, highly associative metals connections to decidedly organic forms. The swaybacked and swollen configuration of Peter Shelton's bugeye strongly suggests a pregnant torso, but its bulging, hollow eyes support the reading suggested by its title. Aimed in altogether different directions, these mismatched eyes indicate incipient panic - but also, paradoxically, the same kind of unfocused laxity evoked by the form's heavy immobility. Shelton decribes the sensuality of bugeye as "slightly grotesque," and also stupefyingly voluptuous - a kind of "vibration of opposites" that is typical of his work, and, arguably, of the characteristics of precious metal itself. Also inviting courting paradoxical double readings, Ursula von Rydingsvard describes her rough silver ellipse, cast from an object chiseled (as is all of her sculpture) in cedar, as a kind of frame. What she has in mind is not a utilitarian object, but rather two ideas that might bracket it: on the one hand, she invokes a conceptual framework; on the other, various body parts, from eyelids to lips, that perform analogous purposes.
Some of the work in this exhibition explores the implication of radical shifts in scale and material. Such shifts are an impulse in Hunt's and Witkin's work, for instance, and are a major motivation for Frank Stella's. His Miami Bandshell involves transforming a massive public installation (for the Miami Heat Arena) into a swirling silver sculpture small enough to hold in your hand where it speaks clearly of the kinship between bandshells and seashells. Translation of another order can be seen in Earl Childress' rendition of an open book as a silver sculpture, in which the book (lost in the process of casting) finds its literal contents rewritten in an entirely visual language - with no loss, in quantity or subtlety, of information.
Perhaps the boldest engagement with ideas invoked by precious metals can be seen in the work of two artists who address the infinitely complicated relationship between art and money. Donald Lipski's The Gap is a silver casting of a pair of Gap brand men's jockey shorts, polka-dotted with dimes bent to conform to the underwear's various wrinkles. Loren Madsen's Battle of the Titans at the End of the Millennium is a devilishly clever work, its configuration determined by a trio of three-dimensional graphs, which plot earning at auction (Sotheby's and Christies, NY) of the top earning artists in the years 1990-1998: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. Lean years in the early 1990s produce spindly stretches on all three graphs (Rauschenberg's is the thinnest), but each (and particularly Warhol) mushrooms toward the end of the decade, reflecting the increasingly bountiful American economy (however unequal its distribution). There is a great deal of conceptual elegance and humor in both these works, and, no less in The Gap's mischievously easy fit than in "Battle's" sinuous curves, of formal elegance too. But both artists are willing to strip issues bare, to consider the intimate intersection of luxury, sensuality, and material desire, to look at the areas where the creative impulse borders both covetousness and eroticism. Both can be powerful engines for startling and deeply satisfying art. But for that to be so they need to be approached with the kind of integrity, intellectual and formal, that the artists in this show bring to their work.