Roland Reiss: Personal Politics, Sculpture from the 1970s and 1980s
In his review of Reiss' most famous and groundbreaking works, Peter Frank notices how these scenarios "make us feel less as if we’re peeping through a keyhole and more as if we’re walking in at an inopportune moment."
Well known in academe as a proponent of abstract painting, veteran southern California artist Roland Reiss remains best known for his figurative sculptures. These he produced between about 1971 and 1993; before and after (indeed, overlapping at the outsides), he was and remains an abstract painter. Significantly, however, in his paintings of the last two decades – no less than in those of the ‘60s – Reiss has emphasized plastic values, composition and contour at least as much as color and certainly more than image. But his sculptures, with one big exception, brim themselves with color, and certain series rely on color as a crucial signifier of emotion and dramatic interaction. Although “Personal Politics: Sculpture from the 1970s and 1980s” includes no wall-hung work of any kind, it is full of painterly strategy.
It is also full of boxes. The sculptural works displayed here – with, again, one notable exception – are carefully, even exquisitely crafted human terraria, adult dollhouses – or, more accurately, doll-offices, doll-sets, and dollscapes – dynamized by the lives people live. In some of the boxes (particularly those of the “Adult Fairy Tales” series) human figures confront one another animatedly, enacting agitated tableaux suspended somewhere between drama and psychodrama – imagine a 3-D Edward Hopper scripted by David Mamet – often surrounded by what seem to be contemporary sculptures or furniture acting as their emotional doppelgängers. (It’s telling to compare these to the much more overtly erotic interactions taking place in Robert Graham’s voyeuristic figure boxes produced a decade or so earlier; Reiss’ scenarios make us feel less as if we’re peeping through a keyhole and more as if we’re walking in at an inopportune moment.) In other series, including “The Dancing Lessons,” “The Morality Plays,” and “FIX,” it’s all scenery all the time, albeit scenery so dense and complicated – and so clearly evincing recent use – that they speak volumes without relating a single line of inferred dialogue.
Tellingly, the centerpiece of “Personal Politics” is a lifesize tableau, a living room strewn with objects (mostly having to do with eating – cups, plates, TV dinners – but not entirely – ashtrays, a gun) fabricated out of unpainted particleboard. The lack of color here, replaced by the tonality of the board (which itself can read as a kind of bleached “old master brown”), physically puts the visitor in the same sort of dramatic suspension implied in the figureless boxes: we are walking into a place where something either has happened, is in the process of happening, or will happen. Predating the “Adult Fairy Tales” by several years, The Castle of Perseverance even infers that we could be not simply the viewers, but the actors. What proves most unsettling about this installational sculpture, then, is not its oddly homogeneous fabrication, but the 1:1 scale of its elements.
Superbly crafted, the sculptures in “Personal Politics” (and, for that matter, the towering figures Reiss produced in the mid-1980s, absent here) are not all that sculptural in conception. Even The Castle of Perseverance invites narrative association far more than it does somatic interaction or even the appreciation of objecthood. The boxed tableaux may crucially complicate our reading of things and events with their details counterpositioned in space; but that space is restricted entirely to our field of vision, and those details, very knowingly and deliberately, are arranged as if on a game board or in a model-train set-up (the boy’s equivalent of the dollhouse). Myriad unnatural touches – the frequently weird coloration of things in particular – not only skews our interpretation of apparent events, toward metaphor and dream and away from prosaic reading, but signals Reiss’ deliberate, even aggressive emphasis on the artificial. These are not trompe-l’oeil fabrications but exercises in storytelling, their resonance cinematic, not anecdotal – and their impact, for all their materiality, more or less entirely pictorial. These are a painter’s sculpture.
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