Martha Friedman’s new sculptures deftly perform an unlikely transformation of a simple machine—the inclined plane—into artworks that amusingly remind us of the body’s frailty. Layers of cast concrete wedges stacked into impersonal towers are interrupted by flaccid, pizza-paddle-shaped strips of bright-orange silicone, while a giant hair ball on a huge pink pedestal is both monumental and gross.
Wedges bring to mind high-heeled shoes and doorstops, but the ones used to create the show’s three main sculptures appear more like the sort that forces something open, summoning a subtle violence that is reinforced by the presence of shims stuck into the pieces like knives. Each work is titled Mechanical Disadvantage, though the wedges themselves appear quite serviceable. Rather, the disadvantage arises from phallic or tonguelike sections of rubber that droop as if spent, suggesting the cold functionality of the machine thwarted by human limitations à la Duchamp’s Large Glass.
Friedman has explained that the work was sparked by the story of a Yale student killed when her hair got caught in a lathe, but this show is no memorial. Instead of tragedy, the full roundness of Hairball, a sphere of teased-up synthetic hair nearly three feet in diameter, evokes fecundity, in spite of its repulsive, apelike pilosity.
A sense of failure or danger is evident, however, in the back gallery, where a pile of wedges, toppled like dominoes, plays antimonument to the front room’s sculptures. Four nearby photos depict wedges helping to hold up the ceiling of a mine—momentary stopgap measures, perhaps, to avert a disaster. Whether as a tool, a phallus, a life-saving device or an aesthetic object, Friedman makes sure we no longer look at the wedge in the usual way again.—Merrily Kerr