KEY POINTS:
Against the long wall of the gallery, a triple line of black acrylic string is strung into a triangle, the top point just below the ceiling, the bottom corners pushing out into the room. In another space the piece could be larger or smaller, but the proportions would remain the same.
Whatever room you want to construct it in, that piece, that instruction set, is unique. The act of buying a Fred Sandback work confers on the buyer the sole right to construct a particular formula wherever they want.
"In a way the room becomes an armature for the work. It's determined by the space it lives in," says Amy Baker Sandback, Fred's widow and the administrator of his estate. "There is a piece related to this triangle in the Pompidou [Centre, Paris]. It's either small or large depending on the space they put it in, but the proportions are the same."
Like much good sculpture, it makes the viewer aware of their own physical mass. "The term Fred used was pedestrian space. The work lived in an open space and, when a viewer participated in that space, they were activating the sculpture."
There is also an almost physical sense of the plane described by the string. Amy Sandback says one of Fred's works on permanent display at Dia Beacon, a former biscuit factory in upstate New York turned into an art museum, consists of a line along a corridor with two verticals rising to the ceiling at either end.
"People don't step across it. They go round. There is such a feeling of a plane being present, they don't feel like violating it at all."
Sandback was one of a generation of minimalists who emerged from New York in the 1960s, along with fellow sculptors like Donald Judd and Robert Morris. Drawing on traditional constructivist ideas, their art was about form rather than external ideas or emotions. It could be seen as a reaction against the machismo of abstract expressionism and the New York School of painting, and the studied superficiality of pop.
"That's true, if you have this excess of emotion and personal angst thrown in front of you, and of course as a young person you do not want to do what someone else has done, so you go in an opposite direction," Amy Sandback says. "This was the haiku, the zen ... you have what is basic form and line and that's it."
It also leaves the space that the line exists in. The main Jensen Gallery is a large industrial space, the ceiling exposed beams, the cement floor marked by previous use.
"It's a pleasure to do this [show] because it is such a nice raw space, and the environment comes alive when the work is in it," she says.
"Alive" is a word Amy Sandback uses a lot to describe the work of her late husband, who took his own life five years ago at 60.
"Art stays alive. A person may die, but if the work has value, you hope there is a life in the work," she says.
"It's interesting to go into homes of collectors and see how Fred's work has been integrated into their lives. One young family in New York bought a vertical construction. They needed to take down the piece to have some work done, and the children were the ones who were upset, because it was one of their fantasies to move through the construction, because it was their forest. When it was reinstalled, the children had a lot to say ... "
Sandback left drawers full of projects which are gradually being realised in museum and dealer shows around the world. "There are diagrams for everything, very precise instructions, sculptures by the numbers," she says.
Apart from the string works, also showing at Jensen are drawings and one of Sandback's wooden relief works, specified in 1973 and fabricated by his son, Peter, in 2003. "That's interesting because it is a negative space. It is the light in the grooves that creates the line."
Sandback's first degree from Yale was in philosophy before he switched to sculpture. Success came rapidly. In 1968, he held solo shows in Dusseldorf and Munich, and was included in that year's Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual exhibition.
"He was still in school as a graduate student when he did his first show. On one hand, it was remarkable and exciting he had a chance to show his work, but there was terrific pressure."
Sandback's work is uncompromising. It makes no attempt to ingratiate the viewer, but it doesn't need words to justify itself.
"If you have to describe something or justify it with words, there is probably something failing in the work," says Amy Sandback, a former editor of ArtForum.
"You can talk about it, but what art does to you is kind of visceral. You need the real object in front of you."
What: Fred Sandback exhibition
Where and when: Jensen Gallery, corner McColl/Roxburgh Sts, Newmarket, to June 21
