Dancing at the Edge of Chaos

By Kelly Klaasmeyer

When Judy Pfaff creates an installation, it’s a messy, expressive endeavor. Pfaff’s installations grow out of her responses to materials and to the exhibition space, and they evolve on site.

A 2004 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Judy Pfaff is regarded as a pioneer of installation art, though she began her artistic career as a painter. While pursuing her master of fine arts degree at Yale, Pfaff told her professor, the noted painter Al Held, that painting on canvas seemed too restrictive. He encouraged her to spread things around the walls, and she has yet to stop.

Pfaff’s work came of age in the 1970s, at a time when minimalism was all the rage. Her unruly and expressive environments, described as dancing at the edge of chaos, were groundbreaking—the antithesis of cool, clinical restraint.

Pfaff’s work often is characterized as existing somewhere between painting and sculpture, but entering her Rice Gallery installation, “… all of the above,” filled with linear elements upended and overlapping in space, was like walking into a three-dimensional drawing. The spring installation featured vines, dyed black, meandering overhead like trails of ink and day-glo colored string stretched taut across the room and down to the floor like lines of sight. Drippy lines covered the gallery walls, created by Pfaff as she dipped rope in dye and snapped it against the wall like a chalk line. Giant coils of steel spiraled up to the ceiling like dimensional doodles. With no focal point to the space, the entire visual environment begged to be experienced and explored.

“… all of the above,” wasn’t just about abstract form, however—an emotional narrative ran through the space. There was light and dark. Half of the gallery felt joyous and ethereal; white disks were piled like stacks of dishes into leaning towers, reaching precariously toward the ceiling and transitioning into exuberant soaring spirals of white-painted steel. The other half of the gallery felt somber and bound to the earth, the tangle of dark vines looking like the charred skeleton of some alien being. Lank strands of black rubber dangled from the vines, creating the impression of tentacles. In contrast to the white towers, concentric rings of black-painted plywood created a dark vortex on the floor. Interspersed throughout the installation were otherworldly hues: the day-glo string activated by black lights and luminous circles of florescent Plexiglas dotting the floor.

Pfaff’s installations are incredibly effective at addressing every aspect of their exhibition space, and those spaces often are monumental. “Cirque, Cirque,” a permanent installation by Pfaff at the Philadelphia Convention Center, is considered the largest suspended sculpture in the world. Pfaff’s approach to her materials is intuitive, but the effort required to manipulate them often is highly physical. The artist works out of a 2,100-square-foot studio in upstate New York, packed with industrial equipment for lifting, hoisting, welding and moving objects.

Pfaff arrived in Houston to create “… all of the above” with a trailer full of materials and tools. Aside from a few elements she’d precut in her studio, there was no set plan for the installation. In describing her working process for a previous show Pfaff said, “I didn’t know what it was going to look like, but I did know what it was going to feel like.” Pfaff essentially works without a net, creating site-specific work with a daring and experimental approach to space and materials. Her work succeeds so spectacularly because she is willing to take tremendous risks.