Notes on Iconoclasts
Glenstone on a fall afternoon
You enter through a corridor that prepares you for nothing. The architecture at Glenstone is designed to slow you down before you arrive — long concrete walls, a path that turns without explaining why, the October sky visible above but the destination hidden. By the time you reach the first gallery, you’ve already stopped hurrying. The building has taken your pace away from you, gently, without asking.
The exhibition is called Iconoclasts (November 16, 2023, through January 4, 2026, curated by Mia Matthias and Yuri Stone). The word means image-breakers — artists who refused the inherited terms of their medium and made something else from the refusal. But the works in these rooms don’t feel like refusals. They feel like arrivals.
Man Ray’s Dust Breeding (1920) is a photograph of dust. Specifically, it is a photograph of the dust that had accumulated on the surface of Duchamp’s Large Glass over the course of months — the artist’s studio left undisturbed, the glass lying flat, time settling onto it as fine particulate. Man Ray photographed the result from above, and what the photograph shows is a landscape: craters, ridges, valleys, a terrain that looks planetary in scale and is in fact a few square feet of neglect.
You stand in front of it longer than you expected. Not because it’s beautiful, though it is, in its strange gray way. Because the light in the gallery — even, unhurried, falling on the surface of the photograph the way dust once fell on the surface of the glass — seems to be doing the same thing the photograph describes: settling. The image absorbs light the way the glass absorbed dust. There is a patience to it that you feel in your body before you understand it with your mind. Something has been allowed to accumulate without interference, and the result is not clutter but density — a surface that has become a world by being left alone.
In another room, Alberto Burri’s Grande Bianco Plastica (1964). White plastic, heated until it blistered and warped, stretched across a frame. The surface is wounded — melted, pulled, scarred — but the wounds have a precision to them that makes violence feel like craft. You move closer. The folds catch shadows differently depending on where you stand. Each step changes the topology. The work is not flat; it breathes, barely, in the way that burned skin holds the memory of the heat that made it.
You find yourself slowing to a crawl. Not because the work demands it — it doesn’t demand anything — but because moving quickly past it would be like walking past someone who is showing you something they have not shown anyone else. The scrutiny it asks for is not analytical. It is the kind of attention you give to a face.
Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1962) pushes outward from the wall. Canvas stretched over welded steel, black voids opening at the center — not holes, exactly, but presences, dark fields that pull your gaze inward the way a well pulls sound. The piece has a gravitational quality: it doesn’t hang on the wall so much as emerge from it, asserting a space around itself that you enter without deciding to.
You step back. The voids don’t follow you, but the sensation of having been near them does. There is something about a dark opening in the center of a constructed form that the eye cannot resolve. It isn’t empty. It isn’t full. It is the specific quality of a space that has been made for looking into and that returns nothing — no reflection, no resolution, no answer to the question your gaze carried into it.
Rooms pass. Franz Kline’s bold gestures after the stillness of Marisa Merz. Cy Twombly’s calligraphic whisper — Untitled (Rome) — leaning against a wall in a quieter gallery, its marks so light they seem to be withdrawing even as you look at them. Mildred Thompson’s Wood Picture, warm against the cooler metal forms nearby. Ming Smith’s photograph of Sun Ra — Space 1 — a portal made of light and music and a man who believed he came from Saturn, hanging in a room where it orbits quietly, long after your eyes have left it.
Each work has its own rhythm. Each asks for a different kind of attention. And Glenstone gives each one room — actual room, physical silence, the architectural generosity of space between things that allows each thing to stand in its own weight without being crowded by the next.
This is rare. Most exhibitions pack the walls. Here, the emptiness between works is as deliberate as the works themselves. You can feel the curators’ restraint — what they chose not to include, how much wall they left bare, how long the corridors are between rooms. The building is practicing something: the discipline of not filling every available space.
Then you step outside.
October. The sky is low, muted, clouds threading the air. And Richard Serra’s outdoor installations stretch across the grounds — torqued steel planes, taller than you are, curving through the landscape with a slowness that has nothing to do with your pace.
You approach one. The steel is cold to the touch. You walk along its path, inside the curve, and the sound changes — your footsteps on gravel resonate between the planes, caught and held by the steel the way a valley holds an echo. The sky narrows above you. The trees disappear. For a few steps, the world is reduced to the curve of metal, the sound of your feet, and the gray light falling from above.
You come around the bend and the landscape opens again — trees, grass, the faint green still holding against the season. The transition is physical. Your body registers the release before your mind names it. You were enclosed. Now you are not. The sculpture didn’t represent enclosure. It was enclosure, briefly, and then it let you go.
The other sculpture rises at the edge of the grounds, a torqued presence that frames the trees beyond it. Each pivot catches a different shade of the season: the brown of leaves, the silvered light of late afternoon. You move as if in dialogue with it — not interpreting, not analyzing, just responding to the way the steel changes the space it occupies and the way your body changes in response.
Here, the difference between the indoor works and the outdoor ones becomes something you feel rather than think. Inside, the encounter was with surface — texture, mark, void, gesture, the way light falls on a material that has been acted upon. Outside, the encounter is with scale and passage — the body moving through a form that is larger than the body, the experience of being briefly contained and then released, the October air on your face when you emerge from between the planes.
Both are encounters. Neither is better. But they ask for different things. The indoor works ask you to stay. The outdoor works ask you to move. And the afternoon, without your planning it, has become a practice of alternation — stillness, then passage, then stillness again, the rhythm of attention shifting between the intimate and the monumental, the surface and the surround.
You pause on the terrace. The galleries are behind you. The sculptures are ahead. The afternoon has settled into something you didn’t arrive expecting: not a survey of works, not a tour, not an exhibition visited and completed, but a specific quality of attention that the place and the works and the weather and the season have, together, made possible.
Nothing has been explained. Nothing has been argued. A few works held you, each in its own way, and the spaces between them — the corridors, the outdoor paths, the October air — held you too, differently, with the particular generosity of emptiness that has been designed rather than neglected.
You could stay. You don’t need to see anything else. What you’ve seen is still arriving — Burri’s scars, Bontecou’s voids, the sound of your footsteps between Serra’s planes.
The light shifts. The afternoon is almost over. You’ll carry this, not as a list of things you saw, but as the specific weight of a few hours in which several works were allowed to appear — slowly, one at a time, in their own silence — and you were allowed to be there for it.
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