Carmen Herrera’s outdoor exhibit, Estructuras Monumentales, consists of four sculptures, ranging from 7 feet in height to over 12 feet in width.
Pavanne, Angulo Blanco, Gemini, Untitled Estructura. Acrylic & Alumunium.
These large scale works—all conceived between 2017 and 2019 by 105-year-old Herrera—are situated in Fondren Foundation Meadow at Buffalo Bayou Park. Estructuras Monumentales was first presented at Manhattan’s City Hall Park in 2019; however, Gemini (green) was not part of that exhibition and makes its world debut here, in Houston.
Gemini. Acrylic & Alumunium. 2019.
Although the weight of each sculpture is not disclosed, telescopic forklifts were needed to install each one and deep trenches were cut into the earth so the platforms on which the sculptures stand could be buried. But despite their massive weight (and the hours of labor their installation required), each of Herrera’s three-dimensionals (even Pavanne) appear uncannily buoyant atop their beds of mulch, especially Gemini, whose triangulated base gently kisses the ground at each end. The direct outcome of Herrera’s most celebrated series of geometric abstract paintings, Blanco y Verde (1966-67), Gemini demonstrates most sincerely Herrera’s obsession with color and line, and more specifically the piercing nature of the triangle.
Carmen Herrera. Blanco y Verde, 1959
The Gemini sculpture inverts the 1959 painting and uses two stacked green rectangular forms to create two triangles of negative space, a gesture that reimagines how one interprets the playful dynamics of force between color and line in the open outdoors. Gemini’s negative space, when standing before it, feels weirdly like positive space; not effect, but cause, as if the physical form of the sculpture was determined by an alien fissure in space rather than from the deliberate shaping of material, and this invisible space also recalls, if one is attuned to the muscles in their face, that odd form of intense looking: peering.
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It’s been a week since temperatures in Houston were in the single digits. Today, it is 80°. Someone on Twitter says our climate crisis is “colonialism persevering.” The tweet, which at current count has 25.5k likes (and has spawned hundreds of parody tweets) is written by a person whose voice I will never hear. I tap her profile pic and while feeling absolutely nothing, I zoom in on the account’s arm, where there’s a tattoo on what is presumably skin. Yesterday, Governor Abbott tweeted: I just announced Texas is OPEN 100%. EVERYTHING. I also ended the statewide mask mandate, guaranteeing that no one will be talking about power grids until they fail again.
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I tell Evelyn I’d like to shoot a video of her walking through Untitled Estructura (Herrera’s red sculpture whose symmetrical tensions rebel against the authority of gravity) and she agrees as long as we go to Walgreens afterwards. I shoot the video. Evelyn passes through the sculpture; cars pass through Evelyn and the sculpture. Like Gemini, Untitled Estructura incorporates the surroundings to near-perfection, negative space giving each sculpture a constantly fluctuating—and visible—consciousness: in this case, the city of Houston.
Untitled Estructura. Acrylic & Alumunium. 2018.
When I stop recording, I notice I’m half-thinking about the poet Wallace Stevens; thinking about his preposterous wonderful jar:
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
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Carmen Herrera. Adam Reich/Lisson Gallery. 2016.
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I went to a large public high school in Orlando, Florida. One of my best friends was Dave. I met him while on a bathroom pass. (I can’t recall which class I was dying to get out of.) As I roamed the network of empty hallways, killing time and lost in thought, I saw a kid kneeling at an open locker: “Hey,” he said, “wanna to buy some acid?” Those were his first words to me. I said, “Okay.” Like Herrera, Dave’s parents are Cuban, but unlike Herrera, who last visited Cuba in 1950, his parents lived through the Cuban Revolution and his father, under circumstances that were never made clear, eventually escaped to Miami in 1959 (the same year Herrera painted Blanco y Verde) just as Castro took power; meanwhile, his mother (Nereida) around the same time fled with her parents to Mexico City. (Dave’s parents would later meet in Los Angeles.) Dave’s dad, whose name is Santiago, is a nocturnal soul (or at least he was back then), and he often kept us company during our acid trips, recounting stories from his time in Cuba that involved all manner of clandestine activities I found mesmerizing. Dave’s cousin, Hector, would come around occasionally too on nights like this and entertain us for hours with nothing more than two glow sticks and his charismatic personality. (The last thing I heard about Hector was that he filled a Honda Civic up with bullets during a road rage incident.) I message Dave on Facebook and ask him how his family is; ask him what he’s been up to. He writes back. It’s strange to be able to do this: talk directly into the past in the present. I know people who find this digital superpower grotesque, preferring to live with the shifting ambiguities of memory instead, but I find the ability to reach out to an old friend across the web as simply a prank on time; a banana peel for death to step on. Anyway, Dave’s doing fine; parents are good, although Hector has passed.
Dave and John: Antique Selfie, 1990.
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The last time I came across the word chevron was in Blood Meridian:
Already you could see through the dust on the ponies’ hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every devise like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and arches bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies.
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Angulo Blanco. Acrylic & Aluminum. 2017.
This morning, after taking Titus and Pickle out, Barbara and I walked the Buffalo Bayou, which gave me a chance to revisit Estructuras Monumentales. The first thing I saw was a child crawling under (and through) Herrera’s giant chevron. Outdoor sculptures, especially Herrera’s, not only absorb and aesthetically recirculate the environments they inhabit, but they invite kinetic engagement from the public as well, which gives outdoor art a Whitmanesque democratic aura; even if we don’t pause and contemplate the sculptures, we’re still civically enlivened by their bizarre presence in the attentional commons. (Each time I visited the exhibition, I saw all manner of people slowly approach a sculpture like it was a part of their own mind they had forgotten existed.) Although I like to think the child was drawn to Angulo Blanco because it’s the most toy-like of Herrera’s sculptures or because it looks like a compressed dextrose candy that shed its candy shell, the more plausible explanation is that its negative space provides the easiest passage (compared to the other sculptures) for a small body to traverse. But what attracted me to Angulo Blanco was that the shape of the chevron lacks the presence of despair, that melancholic element I can always sense in an artwork or poem, regardless of how formally impersonal. But here, it felt absent, which I found mystifying.
That being said, I didn’t have to go far to find despair. In fact, I only had to take thirty paces to my left (I counted) and stand before Herrera’s magnificent Pavanne.
Pavanne. Acrylic & Alumunium. 2017
This sculpture, made of three interlocking elements, is the only sculpture in the exhibit without negative space: rather than having a porous spirit, it’s surface is protective and indifferent. According to a nearby placard of text, Herrera conceived of the sculpture as a monument for her younger brother, Mariano, who at the time was dying of cancer. And the title references a slow processional dance, with “funereal overtones,” which is odd for such an overwhelmingly static object, although once I got over my initial bodily response to Pavanne (it’s hard to put into words what it feels like to stand before it), I suddenly noticed the lines within the sculpture’s surface that delineate its three sections, and after tracing those lines with my eyes, again and again, the sculpture suddenly disclosed itself in a new way: I felt my thoughts begin to dance somberly and quietly within those faint incisions and what at first telegraphed as inaccessibility turned out to be—through a simple reorientation of attention—a welcoming, a perceptual evolution that later reminded me of how the spectacle of grief transforms itself into mourning.
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Carmen Herrera’s Estructuras Monumentales is on view until April 23, 2021 in the Fondren Foundation Meadow at Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston, Texas.
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JOHN EBERSOLE is co-editor of Tourniquet Review. He lives in Houston, Texas.