Titus O.

I liked Rebecca Holland’s show at Barry Whistler. Her Serra-y slab, Newman-y zip, and Hesse-ian block-unit sculptures — made out of a concentrated beet sugar syrup that is mould-poured and urethane coated — are seductive, beautiful, and quietly commanding, in a subversive, post-feminist way.

You’re confronted though with the conundrum of much contemporary art, where many artists seem primarily bent on finding novel materials for fabrication, content be damned. The modernist program (once abandoned but now explored with nostalgic, non-dogmatic brio) was in essence geared to level/elevate material, psychological, cultural, political, and aesthetic grounds simultaneously, leading us toward a brave new world of equality and functional/absurd beauty. The legions now annually coming out of MFA programs nationwide are forced by art-historical conditioning and market-booming ambition to hunt for a unique material shtick to make their mark, so that we now have art made of everything under the sun, from blood to toothpaste to tapioca.

Luckily (or distressingly,) there is a whole lotta stuff on our terrestrial globe, and the chemical companies are busy, making the possibilities theoretically endless. Psychedelic hero and post-historical paterfamilias Sigmar Polke has even gone so far as to use meteorites, finding Earth rocks insufficiently cosmic for certain works. Taking their cue from McCluan’s dictum, viewers are left to analyze the medium’s messages, and judge for themselves whether the effort transcends the merely clever, and contains more poignant information.

Does Holland’s work lean too heavily on her sugar shtick? Rachel Whiteread continues to outdo herself with casts of the insides of things. While Holland’s translucent cast cinderblocks owe Whiteread a debt, her work generally doesn’t have the latter artist’s conceptual legs. While I enjoy the novelty of her objects surfaces – sugar does look lusciously different than plastic, or seems to – and her impeccable sense for installation, I’m left a little skeptical about the individual objects.

They look great in relation to one another, and fare well as yet another glossy take on the designerly formalism so popular in recent years; the fragile colors are in the fashionable pastels that define so much art in this vein (all leaving me to wonder if we don’t have Dave Hickey to thank for a lot of this work emanating out of the American West.) While Holland has the main gallery, the two artists who occupy the second gallery are (like her) recent Marfa transplants, further making her affinities clear. Whether or not her minimal linage, and a sensibility as refined as her chosen material, is enough to carry her sweet, process-oriented operation forward remains yet to be seen.