Works from The Estate of L. Budd & Popular Productions
2 July - 2 August
Preview Wednesday 2 July 6-8pm
Blanche Ready-Made [L. Budd] is a master of what might be called expressive minimalism, in that she searched for
subjective resonance without surrendering to any predetermined sense of the subjective. The central issue of expressive
minimalism is the restoration of aura—not as a spiritual radiance emerging from the object, but as a material radiance
that seems to drop steeply into it, as though its material were an abyss and the aura its emanation.
Indeed, colour seems to emanate from, as well as inhabit, her plaster casts as in nine clearings #6, 1993. In several
works, particularly those that utilise the shape, light permeates the work which becomes simultaneously transparent and
opaque.
Budd often utilised standard rust to give surfaces elegiac interest and nuance, but this made her works all too
matter-of-factly expressive. No doubt the combination of rusted steel and atmospheric glass plate that appears in many
works—untitled, 1978–1986, is a major example—creates a subtle tension, but still the rust seems too predictable. The
work becomes perceptually unbalanced, one-sided—interest tips to the glass. Balance is an important part of the work,
but it sometimes seems a gratuitous effect because of the tendency to downplay the familiar.
The attempt to merge the two- and three-dimensional, generating a new sense of the transcendent ‘thereness’ of the
object, is a standing ambition of 20th-century art. Blanche [Budd] gave it new passion and sublimity and clarified its
import. She seemed to want to sum up the whole soul in an object that is, in effect, a materialised dense sigh. Plaster
works subliminally convey the transience and poignancy of that sigh; they become an echo of deep reflection and
interiority. Indeed, they articulate time in their textures and in the shifts within their structures; the tension
between rust and light, for instance, reflects the different atmospheres of time and timelessness.
In the last incommunicado works (untitled 1 & 2, 1987) the sense of self and of time fuse, become inseparable, and the sense of time that is implicit in the self
becomes increasingly explicit. These pieces maintain a formal, all-over sense of structural completeness and coherence,
while being internally disintegrated. Each broken part has its own poetic, even dramatic, integrity. Nothing is lost or
left to chance.
p. mule