Keith Sonnier at Castelli

Now that many artists are paying particular attention to the material constitution of the objects they make, it is both sobering and exhilarating to revisit a few early, major pieces by Keith Sonnier some 40 years after their initial appearance. Fresh from Rutgers, Sonnier turned heads with physically and visually delicate floor- and wall-based works made of antiheroic materials like cheesecloth, plaster and Mylar. He has cited his rural Louisiana upbringing as formative to his outlook, which may also be a response to a northern, urban, industrial esthetic embodied in, for example, Richard Serra's contemporaneous "prop" pieces. Sonnier's work of the time was as much about atmosphere, ephemerality and pictoriality as Serra's was about weight. More than anyone in the genre-bending generation that includes Richard Tuttle and Eva Hesse, Sonnier blurred the distinction between painting and sculpture and laid the groundwork for the interdisciplinary, "pluralistic" model ascendant today.

His work distinguished itself by being wildly tactile, as in Mustee (1968-69). A 5-by-7-foot swath of brownish liquid latex brushed vigorously across the wall received a generous dusting of blue-gray flock, as if pollinated. It dried to form a membrane that was peeled downward from its upper edge to its midline--an action that picked up tiny shards of white wall paint. It was delicately tethered to the floor by lengths of string at left and right. The piece reveals the underlying imperative of the studio: move some stuff around and stop when the result intrigues. Here the string may be original, but the latex and flock were necessarily new. Sonnier supervised this installation and maintains that it was no reconstruction of Mustee but the work itself. Owing in part to the townhouse architecture of the gallery, this Mustee looked less rambunctiously grand, more domesticated than it does in period photographs. But issues of presentation (and, for that matter, provenance) pale in light of the ontological conundrum the artist's claim presents.

Still, it's a great piece. It's alive on the wall. So is Rat Tail Exercise (1968), a slithering, skeletal, two-tiered arrangement of horizontals and verticals some 9 feet wide, made of string, latex, rubber and flock. The more-or-less regular subdivisions establish a visual rhythm quite different from the syncopated intervals seen in old photos of the piece. As did Fred Sandback's, Sonnier's foray into sculpture-as-drawing uses limited material means to whistle up a thing of enormous visual presence.

Hotel Delacourt (1968) is among Sonnier's first works to use neon (and its conspicuous cables and naked, boxy transformer). A trio of fecal smears of autobody filler defiles a diaphanous veil of Dacron behind which the cheesy, sexy blue glow from two neon tubes lazily pulsates. Within a few years, the artist would work extensively with neon, as well as in video and installation, always with a sly, persistently erotic blend of tactility and humor. Artists in thrall to unorthodox or humble materials arranged in unmonumental configurations should scrutinize Sonnier's sleight-of-hand, through which he can conjure a resounding something out of nothing much.

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