Dark Visions Of Primal Myth

By ROBERT HUGHES

ARTIST: MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ

WHERE: MARLBOROUGH GALLERIES, MANHATTAN; P.S. 1, LONG ISLAND CITY

WHAT: SCULPTURES

THE BOTTOM LINE: In bronze, burlap and tree trunks, a powerful Polish artist forges the drama of human loss and survival.

In American culture, Philip Roth remarked before the fall of communism, everything goes and nothing matters, whereas in Central Europe nothing goes and everything matters. One remembers this when looking at the work of the Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, who lives and works in Warsaw but whose American reputation has been growing steadily since the early '80s. Her two current New York shows -- one at the Marlborough Galleries through June 5, the other, curated by the art critic Michael Brenson, at P.S. 1 in Long Island City through June 20 -- ought to be seen by anyone who cares about today's sculpture.

Abakanowicz, 63, has a huge talent. Her work draws on deep wells of feeling, myth and metaphor. Its images strike to the heart, not in any sentimental way, but equally without any of the clever-clever flittering of Postmodernism. Some of her sculpture has a strong political undercurrent, not in the feeble, travestied sense of much current "political art," but in a deeper level of articulation: "My whole life," she once remarked, "has been formed and deformed by wars and revolutions of various kinds, mass hatred and mass worship." To have lived in Poland through the successive waves of its disastrous history since 1939 -- right up to the post-Soviet present when, she wrote in 1990, "hand-to-hand-fighting has begun, each against each, zealously trying to drag everything toward a private nest" -- such a background cannot help giving a special character to a sculptor's use of the "heroic" figure, to her ideas on the body's status as a container of esthetic feeling, to her sense of the monumental. How can you imagine a monument in a culture that has been ideologically corrupt for half a century?

Abakanowicz's work meets this problem head on. It moves between nature and culture, referring to earlier art and yet coming out of intense experiences of the real world of rocks and trees and human bodies. She interrogates and reimagines the language of figurative sculpture with the same degree of intensity that Richard Serra's work brings to the idea of abstract minimalism. Until a full retrospective of her work is done in the U.S., these two shows give a fair idea of it.

There are small sculptures at Marlborough, Abakanowicz's hallmark figures, molded from resin-stiffened burlap. Headless and repetitious, they look "expressionist" but aren't: their true ancestors are ancient kouroi and Egyptian scribes planted on their plinths. It is amazing to see how much inward dignity Abakanowicz can give to a human figure made of cloth, and how many subtle variations she can infuse into a whole row of them. They are funereal: the wrinkled burlap reminds you of mummified skin. When Abakanowicz lines up 10, 20 or 30 more or less identical figures, as in Infantes, 1992, you think of prison lines and victims of firing squads.

These cloth shells also have their distinct grace. Several figures of circus performers, riding on iron-wire wheels, refer to Giacometti's famous charioteer and, through that, back to common sources in Etruscan antiquity; the precarious poise of the acrobat's body is part of Abakanowicz's general imagery of human vulnerability and risk.

She loves series and variation. The biggest single work at Marlborough is Embryology, 1978-81 -- a whole landscape of some 600 stuffed burlap "rocks," ranging from mere pebbles to big boulders, an extraordinary array that suggests cocoons and gravid wombs as well as stones. Her chief metaphor, as Brenson (who wrote the catalogs for both shows) points out, is "the enchanted forest," which "can be traced back to animistic peoples for whom trees and forests were fearfully and delightfully alive." The tree trunk refers to, and sometimes becomes, the human torso. The "mutilated Eden" of Poland's forest turns into a metaphor of human loss and survival. In the Marlborough show are four bronzes, each 10 ft. to 12 ft. high, called Hand-Like Trees, whose vertical trunks do resemble arms: their looming profiles recall Rodin's standing Balzac, and their vigorous modeling around a split core provokes a distant memory of Matisse's bronze Backs.

To get the full impact of what Abakanowicz can do with this primal image, one must see her sculptures at P.S. 1. These are all part of the same series, titled War Games -- 16 sculptures so far, a growing family. Each piece is a trunk, a dead tree salvaged from the dying forests of the Mazury Lakes region, 200 miles north of Warsaw. Abakanowicz works these trunks to a degree -- stripping the bark, smoothing out some excrescences with chain saw and hatchet and applying some surface treatment -- but she does not carve them beyond that. Each wrinkled bole with its splayed limbs and fissures keeps its tree-ness and does not become mere timber, raw material. Abakanowicz preserves the body of the tree, and then she fits this body with metal shells, prongs and armatures, sometimes binding it as well with strips of burlap like mournful bandages. Thus you find yourself looking at something large, somber, mutilated and of irresistible physical power. Brenson points out that the War Games pieces are all, in some degree, elegiac; they convey a mourning for < violated nature, because nearly all the forests of Poland have been cut down and sold off as timber to Scandinavia since World War II.

Each trunk is laid horizontally on trestles or a steel frame. All are, in some legible or at least imaginable way, figures. Great Ursa, 1987, suggests a woman giving birth. The wooden trunk of Giver, 1992, is shaped like an enormous hand. The metal beak of Sroka, 1992, juts at you like the ramming prow of an ancient galley, while the big blade of steel that splits the body of Winged Trunk, 1989, could be read either as a weapon that has given the body its deathblow or as a protective shield. Sometimes the metal fittings read as shells or tusks, sometimes as prostheses and sometimes as primitive tools from a remote past haunted by medieval forest fears. This passive- aggressive imagery is strongly affecting. It also makes you realize how sharply metaphors drawn from the natural world can still affect us. Abakanowicz's art insists that the organic cannot be evaded or denied -- not, at any rate, without a cultural loss that amounts to mutilation. For through the organic, myth is repaired.