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Sculpture
Magazine July August 1991
Michael Aurbach
Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York
Closing his 1964 survey of tomb sculpture with Bernini, art historian
Erwin Panofsky dismisses most funerary art since the 17th century. But
had Panofsky known Michael Aurbach's work, he might well have ended his
volume differently. Aurbach's funerary sculpture translates conventional
concepts and forms into contemporary terms, using parody and verbal wit
to defuse the emotional intensity associated with death.
All from the series Final Portraits, the five pieces exhibited
at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in New York demonstrate Aurbach's artistic
evolution. His "caskets" for a mail carrier (1986) and a truck driver
(1987) provide occupationally appropriate dwellings for the dead in their
otherworldly existence. The mail carrier's "casket" is a giant rural mailbox
with letter slots for pallbearer handles along the lower edge. The front
pulls down like a mailbox, opening to reveal the simulated nave of a longitudinal
Christian church, with columns lining the walls and a tiny apse at the
far end. Visual puns recall the postman's life. Upside-down rubber stamps
form capitals atop each column, and the clerestory windows look like those
in an old-fashioned post office. Ten thousand authentic one-cent postage
stamps serve as floor tiles and substitute for mosaics on the walls, each
repeating the portrait of Dorothy Dix (pun intended; there are many needs
in the next life). In a niche above the entrance, an actual postal scale
suggests the weighing of souls, a motif borrowed from Egyptian art by
Christianity.
Aurbach's good-natured humor turns more caustic in his "final portrait"
of the American Indian (1989), a more elaborate manifestation of verbal
wit. Choosing for the Indian a colorful slab tomb patterned after those
in European cathedrals, Aurbach gives visual expression to the term "to
rub out." Made to look like an oversized Pink Pearl eraser, the Indian's
casket is a parallelogram lined with rabbit skins, rawhide and horsehair,
the bottom covered by sand and a bright native blanket. The pink "eraser"
rests on a gargantuan Big Chief brand tablet whose edges are encircled
by rows of American #2~ pencils grouped to create stripes of red, blue,
yellow and green. The tablet, in turn, sits on a large map of the United
States, flanked by a border of chalkboard and several schoolroom erasers.
Two eight-foot pencils (erasers top and bottom) on either side of a red
carpet create a ceremonial gateway inviting the visitor "to walk on" the
tomb. A society "schooled" in eradication, the artist implies, has "erased"
the Indian from American life.
Aurbach's latest piece, Final Portrait: Vanitas (1990), is more
a portrait of every man. The artist parodies the domestic interior of
Robert Campin's 15th-century Flemish Mérode Altarpiece, undercutting
its transcendental references with a piercing look at life's transience.
Aurbach turns the Flemish altarpiece's tidy room with hearth and table
into a freight company office, delineated by segments of black pipe and
appropriate furnishings. A time clock signals temporality, and an empty
time card holder suggests vanished people. Stacked in the corner, three
caskets of different sizes and shapes are stamped "address unknown" (a
homeless person), "damaged freight" (a one-legged man) and "return to
sender" (an aborted baby). Once again a scale echoes the weighing-of-souls
motif. Despite the concrete reality of the objects in the office, however,
nothing works: the telephone and the buzzer are hushed, and the revivifying
water of the fountain has ceased to flow. Even more disturbing, each object
in the chilling space is purposefully isolated from the others.
A humor noir born of human cruelty, vanity, vulnerability and
neglect, has replaced the good-humored levity of Aurbach's earlier "caskets."
This devastating wit still engages, nevertheless, and still releases the
observer, if only momentarily, from the consternation concomitant with
the notion of death. It shifts, in Freud's phrase, the "psychical emphasis"
from discomfiting emotions into ironic and knowing laughter.
--Dorothy Joiner
Link to Final Portraits
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