Wednesday evening, March 13 was cold and rainy in Rome, and to the inauspicious weather was added the jubilant chaos and complete gridlock induced by the Vatican’s announcement, in St. Peter’s Square, of the election of Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. In spite of these distractions, a hardy band of art adventurers trekked up the Janiculum hill to experience what was perhaps the most spare and conceptually elegant art show offered at the AAR in recent years: twinned installations by American artist Jason Dodge (in the Art Gallery) and Italian artist Martino Gamper (in the Cryptoporticus). The show was made possible by the Franco Noero Gallery in Turin, which represents both artists, and the installations were supervised by Matteo Consonni from Noero.
The show represented a homecoming for Jason Dodge, whose father, sculptor Robert Dodge, had spent 1974-76 at the AAR as a Fellow, when Jason was 5-7 years old-- more or less the same age, in fact, as Jason Dodge’s own eldest child, who accompanied the artist, his wife Christine Roland and their youngest child when they toured the McKim building and gardens in October of 2012. Reestablishing a connection with the AAR after almost forty years has in fact put Jason Dodge in touch with other artists from the AAR of his father’s generation, such as architect Peter Carl (now at Cambridge).
Seldom has the Cryptoporticus been put to better use than it was in hosting Martino Gamper’s nine designed works, each one extending the beautiful and ingenious work included in Gamper’s 2007 London show 100 Chairs in 100 Days, in which cast-off and recycled materials virtually redefined the sculptural and gestural possibilities of that everyday object we call the chair. The starting point for the current show was a series of brightly-colored plastic octagons that Gamper sells as stools (with part of the proceeds going to charity), and to which he had added various fanciful chairbacks, so that the geometrical shapes of the stools were embellished by what rose from and extended beyond them. One such octagon bore a white marble octagon on top of it, making a small table; three additional installations each consisted of four superimposed wooden boxes, one such installation resting on one of the octagons and two constructed to rest on recycled tubular steel chair legs: the fusion of utilitarian purposes by means of design is one of the most playful and attractive features of Gamper’s work. In each installation, the four differently-sized boxes, open on one side, presented themselves as stacked bookshelves, and the interaction of rectangular geometry with the light and dark woods and the burl and diagonals of their grain created a kind of sensuous and rhythmical sculpture. Indeed, the effect of these nine pieces arranged under the imposing vault of the Cryptoporticus was to create a private gallery of whimsy and design in which the pieces all seemed to be in dialogue with each other, amid their austere surroundings.
Jason Dodge’s six installations, as he deployed them in the Art Gallery, achieved a felicity similar to that of Gamper’s work, in not only inhabiting, but also enlivening and transforming, the spaces to which they were assigned. Perhaps most striking of all, given the evening hour of the opening, was Dodge’s work a hole through speaking, which consisted of a short metal tube, open at both ends, invisibly and horizontally suspended so as to form a kind of connector between the two Gallery rooms. The effect of this was to create the illusion of a thick clear glass wall (pierced by the tube) between the two rooms. As curator Matteo Consonni explained to a group of visitors, the cumulative effect of Dodge’s work was to slow time and enlarge space, exploring the hieratic qualities of the sculpture in the space around it. Dodge’s piece called the mourners consisted of pairs of yellow lamps “at the height of dogs’ eyes” shining at each other from opposed walls of the two Gallery rooms through the doorway. A piece called voice obstructions, likewise situated in the doorway (which seemed to emerge as the ideational omphalos of the space and the works inhabiting it), consisted of a small white china cup filled with a tiny pink barrette, a coin, and metal shelf-pegs that might also have been spoons. Dodge’s piece Carrier (mute) consisted of a square wooden organ pipe with a floodlamp attached, both turned to the wall just past the doorway. Scattered on the tile floor of the inner Gallery room were six “pillows that have only been slept on by children,” comprising Dodge’s work the children are sleeping, while in front of the window in the first Gallery room, also made intriguing by the darkness of the evening hour, a black package bound in white twine lay on the floor. This work had no title, but was described with the following caption: “In Tblisi, Georgia, Nino Kvrivishvili wove twelve kilometers of woolen yarn that is the color of night, and the distance from the earth to above the weather.” Thus in keeping with the idea of sculpture and the space around it, this package of fabric invited the viewer to unweave it, spooling it out to measure vertical distance. Dodge’s installations created a unique landscape of emotional warmth and intellectual coolness in the two rooms of the Art Gallery.
The works of both Jason Dodge and of Martino Gamper take as their starting point the found object. Through craft and design, and working with castoff and recycled materials, Martino Gamper creates chairs that are both sculptural and utilitarian, whereas for Jason Dodge the found object-- six apricot-colored throw pillows, a short length of pipe, headlamps, a small china cup-- are made resonant with narrative and meaning, in part through the titles they are given. Jason Dodge / Martino Gamper paired an American artist with an Italian artist, and through the spaces of the Art Gallery and the Cryptoporticus, gave their work room to expand, in its enigma, its beauty and its promise, in the minds of viewers.