The vortices, palpable and impalpable, that swirl through Judy Pfaff’s three-dimensional installation extravaganzas can be taken as a leitmotiv of her work as a whole. Alternately centripetal and centrifugal, and sometimes both simultaneously, her compositional method has rarely found so hospitable an arena as the stairwell connecting the new and the old sections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Here, for the first time, the spectator was obliged to climb up into one of Pfaff’s pandemoniac microcosmos—to great effect. Rock/Paper/Scissors began at ground level with relative calm: irregularly shaped patches of blue paints brushed directly onto the wall suggested a move up the stairs. On the first landing the visual tempo increased markedly, the blues converting to large sections of aqua and orange which spread imperiously across walls and ceiling. Overpainted linear configurations—nervous, shattered grids—established the first complication, but as the eye adjusted actual three-dimensional elements emerged: a tangle of painted wire, or metal-filament “sketches” of cones (two circles of differing sizes joined by two extended straight wires). Midway up the next flight of stairs a copper wedge painted blue and black jutted out perpendicular to the wall, a stolid bellwether amid the other acrobatically suspended components, establishing for the first and last time an index of the relationship between architecture and artifice in the piece. From this point up to the small, classically appointed antechamber that forms the entry gallery to the old building the clamor swelled, and with it the range of constituent materials. Wood and wood surrogates dominated this upper space. Three planks of grained gray paneling jerked down from ceiling to floor, surrounded by upright, unpainted dowel stubs and shattered planes of woodgrained contact paper on the floor, pointing to two log shards, waist high, at center stage. Broken through, thus partly opaque, partly translucent, partly decorated, and partly “natural,” these two stumpy sentinels reveled in the idea/land-scape all around them. A dried evergreen tree trunk and branches, needleless, dangled upside down in one corner, while from an opposite wall spilled a mass of crumpled metal sheets in a reflective waterfall. Biomorphic shapes scurried through the frieze of wall reliefs, odd denizens of the netherworld between nature and ideation. In a broad sense, eliciting the sensations indigenous to that world can be seen as Pfaff’s primary motif.
