| Madeleine Dietz [german/deutsch] Years ago, in small town
in central Texas, I encountered a farmer who had
just come
from his fields. He was uniformly
caked from his hat to his boots with a thin yellow
dust: he looked like a clay cowboy that had become
somehow animated. And then it began to rain, and the
dust on his lothes turned to mud. The farmer
continued to walk through the town and to go about
his business. The mud, he decided, was natural,
and he wore it with the pride of a man who had spent
his entire existence working with the very
matter that sustains all human life. When I look at
Madeleine Dietz's art, I think about that
dirt-covered farmer. Despite their cultural and
geographic distances, Dietz is connected with
him; the farmer's earth is hers, and ours too.
We all relate to the earth in different ways, but
the actual soil remains aloof and indifferent.
It is heedless of our ideologies and feeds us and
bears us up just the same.
In an essay titled
"The Untroubled Mind", Agnes Martin flatly
declares: "If you don 't like chaos you're
a classicist; if you like it you're a
romanticist". If one accepts this polemic,
it would be tempting to insist that Dietz's
monolithic steel-and-dirt sculptures fall
simultaneously into both categories. Indeed, Dietz's
works derives much of its power from tension
created by juxtaposing refined, stable material -
steel - with unrefined and structurally unstable
bricks made from dried mixtures of earth and
water.
Such oversimplified categorizations,
however, are always hazardous, particularly when
discussing Dietz's work. Although esthetically
linked with Donald Judd and other minimalists,
her formal concerns lie elsewhere. Like Judd, Dietz
relates her sculptures to the spaces that
contain or surround them, and the objects she
creates are themselves enclosures that echo
Dietz's theme of protection and preservation of
the earth.
It may, in fact, be more helpful
for Dietz's American audiences to examine her
wholly occidental art from an Asian perspective.
Despite her penchant for Euclidean geometric
forms and for creating the large volumes and
material heaviness found in works such as Not a
Well (1998) and Wrapped Altar (1997), Dietz displays
tendencies towards dematerialization, a central
theme of Japanese art and esthetics. The volumes
suggested by Dietz's fragile bricks may allude to
platonic notions of eternal forms and natural
laws, but they also recall the Japanese concept of
wabi-sabi, an 0sthetic paradigm based on the
Japanese notion that the greatest artistic delights
may be found in natural or "imperfect"
forms. Dietz strikes a delicate balance between
the ephemeral and concrete, between the ancient and
the modern. Her diminutive slipcases recall the
Japanese penchant for complex exteriors enclosing
substances that recede or do not exist at
all.
In much of Dietz's work, the hard
encloses, or refers to, the soft; permanent
architectonic motifs grate against crumbling
soils; the monumental collides with the modest.
While contemplating Dietz's work, we think of things
that possess similar structures, such as insects
or buildings. Dietz's somber, simple edifices become
chapels, or gardens in which seeds have not
manifested themselves as actual plants. A moment
later her metal boxes are tombs, and the dirt is
what we have been and shall again
become.
Dietz is surely working something
out - something beyond the statements she makes
about protecting and preserving earth. She will not
define this part of her work for us, and she
shouldn 't. No artist should. Dietz delights in the
pleasure of making, of feeling and seeing and
thinking, and that is enough.
Brett Davidson,
Houston zur Ausstellung Madeleine Dietz in der
Galerie Sonja Roesch Houston, Texas 1998
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