Acquisition: Orly Genger at Indianapolis

When I saw Orly Genger work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art last year, I was a little bummed out. I'd seen Gengers before: At Lemberg Gallery outside Detroit in 2007, I remember walking amidst the clumpy installation as if I was navigating a field that featured strategic plops of lava. That same year a New York museum director and I literally traversed MASSPEAK, a Genger installation at Larissa Goldston in Chelsea. He and his loafers handled the nylon rope just fine. I was wearing sneakers and I slid around like a clumsy fool.

So when I saw Gengers at the Indianapolis Museum of Art last year, I was a little disappointed that I couldn't climb on them. Now the IMA has acquired Genger's Len (2008), one of the pieces installed in 'Whole,' a show of Genger's work that's on view in the IMA's atrium. The exhibition is up until June 14. (In the image above, Len is in the bottom right.)

Genger mines minimalism, but mostly so she can find ways to move on from it. Gone are high minimalism's hard surfaces and sleek, fetishized patinas, replaced by nylon rope and ordinary acrylic paint. Genger's materials aren't machined, they're hand-made. She accepts rectilinear forms, but rejects their straight, masculine lines and their immovable edges. She accepts the repetition of shapes -- as in Len -- but rejects minimalism's adherence to detail with her tugged-into-place stacks. Many minimalists works look like touching them would make a permanent, damaging mark; the IMA's lead promotional photograph for the installation shows someone (Genger?) happily handling the art.

Genger also learns from the post-minimalist generation. Some of her larger pieces -- dwarfed here by the enormity of the IMA's initial atrium -- loom, fill and suggest what Richard Serra might make if he had a soft side. Often Genger's work, such as her 2007 MASSPEAK installation at Larissa Goldston, sloppily spill into rooms, filling negative space in a way that vaguely recalls Rachel Whiteread, minus the anal retentiveness.