One question kept surfacing: where is the art itself in relation to her objects? In the work of Nina Yankowitz, this varies hugely. Is it in the physical fabric of her objects? In the images that emerge from woven or painted surfaces? Or does it dwell somewhere more elusive and further afield, in the mental space where I, as a viewer, complete her open-ended sentences? Moving through Yankowitz’s career retrospective, In the Out/Out the In, at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg this question would not settle.
Oh Say Can You See – A Draped Sound Painting (1967–68), starts the exhibition, and highlights Yankowitz’s political and collaborative interests. It’s a moody, bruisy, heavy draped canvas nailed to the wall; its gradient is mirrored audibly in Phil Harmonic’s distorted rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, composed on an early Moog synthesizer. The art happens between the painting on the wall and the audio projected in front of it, the viewer a necessary node in a circuit. This is one of the more overtly political works, but by no means didactic. Here, the decentralizing of the art models the action of citizenship: like this work, your country will only exist if you participate.
The art is more humorously displaced in her “Cantilever” series. These works jut out of the walls at 45-degree angles, each canvas hiding half its surface from view, as if caught mid-leap into another dimension. Yes, the object is the work, but the work opens into an unfinished proposition. Will you complete it by imagining the lower half of the painting—the unseen leg extending from the painted foot? Or will you accept the absurd alternative: that the entire wall is an opaque white substance existing in a universe tilted 45 degrees from ours, hungrily sucking paintings into itself?
Born in New Jersey, Yankowitz attended the School of Visual Arts in the 1960s and later taught at multiple art schools. She threads in and out of the dominant movements of the decades. A member of the Heresies Collective, she is unabashedly feminist, but doesn’t label her 1970s works as explicitly so. If anything, what she makes relates to or teases Minimalist art, but she doesn’t turn it into a manifesto. Her work continually engages with emerging technologies, and—perhaps due to her continuous, playful evolutions across aesthetic, materials, and subject matter—her work evaded the streamlining force of the art market and remained half obscured.
In the central room, eleven large textile works make clear the magnitude of what has been overlooked in Yankowitz’s career. Each pursues distinct avenues of experimentation and formal play. Her “Draped” works, Pleated Diptych (1972), and Puckered Painting (1970–71) bulge with beautiful, airy fatness into the room with a volume accessed by abandoning frames and stretchers. Yankowitz worked with a sailmaker for Opened Flat (1971), which hangs from its straps on the wall like an apron. It is heavy, dense fabric handled as if much easier to manipulate. Yankowitz’s black-and-grey gradients turn granular as you approach, separating into color up close. It reminds me of physicist Carlo Rovelli’s description of atom clouds resolving into matter and solidity only because of our relative scale and perception.
To hang most of the fabric works, curator Katherine Pill referenced archival photos. But for Goldie Lox (1968), a luminous gold-orange-pink canvas installed in the permanent collection wing of the museum, the installation has gone from horizontal to vertical. The artist tweaked the upper corners into points, calling and responding to a pair of huge antique mirrors gracing the other side of the room. Goldie Lox swells in the lower half into a sensuous bulge, almost humming with gourmand pleasure.
Many of Yankowitz’s works flirt with Minimalism, but the label doesn’t stick. If Minimalism puts the art right inside the material, trying for absolute thereness, these let the art part bulge and slip, often becoming flat-out funny. With Sagging Spiro (1969), the folds of the canvas become jowls and the viewer is presented with the discomfort of how attractive this rendering of a despicable face can be.
My favorite way of displacing the art of the artwork happens with performance—when it dissolves into ripples of recounting and gossip. I’d like to start this one traveling again: in “Personae Mimickings / Or Voices from the Piano” and “Ethnographic Weavings/Exchanging Contexts Changing,” her early eighties sound works, Yankowitz sat at a piano (which she doesn’t play), and sang (though untrained) an opera she wrote with colored squiggles. Usually in Yankowitz’s work, she shares the visual part of her synesthetic mind, with works such as Dilated Grain Reading: Scanning Reds and Blues (1973) translating the music she “sees” into images, suggesting a reading, or scanning, or musical interpretation. This, again, leaves the viewer to complete the work and place it inside their own experience. The opera, however, presented the sound of her synesthetic pairing instead. It was devastating and delightful, as a trained singer, to hear just how perfect her opera was. All the bluster and affective emotionality is there, her phrases of gibberish sounding so like the also-incomprehensible texts of opera recitative.
Across all her wide-ranging practice—whether in paint, ceramics, video, interactive computer programs, or sculptural installations—one feels Yankowitz’s ultimate respect for the intelligence of her audience. She doesn’t need to spell everything out; instead, she trusts that we already have the tools to navigate her visual and sonic worlds. Implicit in her work is a quiet, generous invitation: You already speak this, you already read it, you already know what you need to know.