from this month's ArtScope . . .

David Lang: OK, NOW WHAT? Inventions, Contraptions and Flights of Fancy
James Foritano

I thought of Brancusi. Both because Brancusi’s driven essentialism reminded me, by opposition, of David Lang’s Byzantine indirection and because, after driving through hellacious heat from Cambridge to Lang’s Natick outpost, I deserved some high-flying reference to begin my disquisition.

Lang was no help. His references were Mickey Rooney, Monty Python and Rachel Carson. Hmm… Rachel Carson? Perhaps later.

If Brancusi’s iconic “Bird in Space” speaks of Modernism’s search for pure essence, David Lang’s post-modernism follows pure plumbing, the sleek guts of the essential. His kinetic sculpture lofts icons, wishes, perverse puns (not to mention various unmentionables) above a fantasy of copper wire twisted into a concatenation of crank-shafts, pinion gears, cams… which do, when the viewer’s body breaks a light-beam, actually grind into mesmerizing 3-volt motion.

Take the unforgivable “The Swine Flew.” In the crowded distances of Lang’s studio, you spot their white wings and, as you move closer, hoping against hope, three pinkly porcine bodies do actually take flight. Under feathered wings as flexible as wishes, gaping maws, and limbs rigid with ecstasy, they climb hillocks of air so effortlessly that they, and you, have forgotten the complication of engineering that underpins them. Until you move away, thus breaking the dazzle of motion and exposing the “machina” of these porcine deities: a scribble of still, copper wiring.

So don’t expect slick surfaces á la Brancusi, or oodles of slick, modernist angst either. Expect yards of anecdote, tumbling back on itself until, leaning toward a speaker poised too casually against a cracker barrel, his audience, us, imagines, maybe hopes, that he’s lost his point in untraceable divagation. And then… it’s there.

Take “The Castinetti Sisters.” A syncopation of clams clap their shells, talking clam-talk as we lean closer to eavesdrop, and then we glimpse, within each clacking confine, a nude, reclining. The Castinetti sisters appear and disappear like an advert in neon against a night sky. Like that Renaissance guy’s Venus de Milo, all blond nudity, coasting toward shore forever, on the elegant flutes of a scallop shell, on a racing cursive of wavelets, breaking, breaking… but never arriving.

So take the Castinetti sisters, ya dummy! They’re available! Or, take those bedpans your approach shifts into tilting flight, but… watch out! Or take a listen to those authentic American voices in “Play by Play” as a crowd of vacuum tubes transforms to organ pipes sounding the lilting, urgent vernacular of old-time sportscasters.

Read the entire article in our magazine pages...