David Rabinowtich: Works from 1962 – 2018
By David Carrier
October 1, 2024
In 1989 I was enchanted by David Rabinowitch’s Tyndale Constructions in Five Planes with West Fenestration: Sculpture for Max Imdahl (1988), five large sets of concentric circles carved into the walls at Barbara Flynn’s gallery in SoHo. And so I met him, and eventually after much discussion, we published an interview together. Born in 1943, Rabinowitch studied Spinoza, Kant, and Hume as a teenager, reading which later informed his sculpture. Art as entertainment, art as political critique or social commentary—these fashionable concerns of the 1960s were never of any interest to him. Nor was he interested in the later development of identity politics. His sculptures and drawings remained firmly grounded, always, in the concerns of high modernism. Richard Serra and Donald Judd were the two near contemporaries he acknowledged as peers, but Rabinowitch’s interests differed; his art was not easy to accurately describe. I wasn’t able to relate it to the theorizing in Rosalind Krauss’s then well-known book Passages In Modern Sculpture (1977), which I had also reviewed.
Rabinowitch said that he wanted his sculptures to “engage in a program of construction that would expose and work directly with reality.” But I didn’t understand how that goal involved his philosophical considerations, so I reread Hume, Kant, and especially Spinoza, seeking to comprehend his art. These three philosophers, none of them, apart from Kant, interested in visual art, have general theories of knowledge and perception, but their writings don’t tell what kind of art to make. And in any case, Rabinowitch was not, so he said, seeking to illustrate philosophical theories. How then could a contemporary artist use their theorizing? When we talked back in 1989, I never received any satisfying answers to this basic question. And so, at this memorial exhibition, I inevitably returned to these reflections.
Some of the drawings presented here are representations. Fluid Sheet Sketch (1964) is a graceful pencil drawing of a glass beaker; Drawing after a Beech Tree in Central Park (1976), a gorgeous, to-die-for charcoal and beeswax drawing of limbs of the tree in the title. Others, like Untitled (Drawing for the Phantom Group) (1967), are drawings of Rabinowitch’s sculptures. But Rabinowitch takes us to the heart of his philosophical concerns by getting inside the very act of perception, as if unpacking that process, in some of his more challenging drawings. Thus, Construction of Vision (2 color properties) (1973) shows the act of seeing, as if taking a viewpoint outside of the perceived world. It is a representation of the activity of mental representing. This is what the three sculptures on the floor—Place of 3 Masses, I (1968–69) is the best of them—also do. As for the various works all titled Birth of Romanticism Drawings: Untitled (2010) and also the selection of drawings all called Untitled: For Lucretius (2011), I can only speculate how to interpret these works, which were made after Rabinowitch and I lost touch. Here, it seems to me, he is allowing himself a marvelous freedom to draw that was absent in his earlier art, thus creating a style in his older age that was highly personal. His fundamental philosophical concern was always the relation of everyday visual experience to the specifically aesthetic experiences provided by art.
In our interview Rabinowitch said, “The only way a work can stand outside of mystification and provide at the same time a sufficient foundation for freedom of experience is by laying bare its means, providing for a skeptical stance regarding its unity. Apart from this, acceptance of the unity of a thing is tantamount to acquiescence in the face of mystery.” He is a great, too little known artist who showed more in Europe than in New York, and so this exhibition by his long-time Manhattan dealer is an important memorial. I hesitated writing about it, knowing that he would surely have found my description inadequate. He always was a challenging interlocutor. Certainly no one looking just these works on paper and the three tiny floor works here on display could possibly imagine the massive sculptures that made Rabinowitch’s reputation. Seeing this exhibition is like reading a two-page sampling of the philosophers who interested him. I hope soon there will be an exhibition in New York of his large sculptures with a full catalogue that will give the full breadth of his work its due.