In the archive that was late-20th-century art, Fred Sandback (1943-2003) is usually cross-filed under Minimalism and Conceptualism. His sculptures, composed of a few lengths of yarn or wire stretched taut, are materially spare. They are based on one driving idea: to create art that is object-free but perceptually solid and present.
Sandback himself resisted association with both movements. He found the thinking too abstract and prescriptive, and he didn't see his own art as particularly reductive. How he did see it can be discerned, perhaps, in a pair of related Manhattan gallery shows, at David Zwirner in Chelsea and Zwirner & Wirth on the Upper East Side. From them two impressions of Sandback's sculpture emerge: that it is primarily an optical experience, and that it can be a disconcertingly intense theatrical experience.
When you enter the main room at Zwirner & Wirth you find almost nothing there. Then, as if your eyes were adjusting to a change of light, you see four large squares in outline on one wall. But they don't look like drawings, and they aren't. Their edges are defined by pieces of red-brown yarn. The yarn's texture gives the lines an odd softness. They seem to float on the wall but also to eat into it. A Minimalist might simply see geometry; Sandback sees something more organic, body-related, a little disturbing.
At David Zwirner, similar elements yield more complicated results, which again don't register right away. Long strands of yarn in a side-by-side row stretch diagonally from high on a wall to the floor. They look as if they could be propping the wall up or, like tent ropes, holding the ceiling down. But either way you get only a partial and shifting view of them, because most of the yarn is white and blends into the white gallery wall. At certain points as you move past them the only evidence you have of lines at all is from the shadows they cast.
Such optical play -- and it is play, the way a magic show is -- becomes genuinely disorienting in Sandback's large free-standing sculptural installations. In them he used yarn to delineate whole complex planar environments of walls, doors and passageways, somewhat on the model of a scrim-built stage set.
When you're standing near or inside the environment, your mind understands the nature of the illusion at work. But your body, if only for a split second, is fooled by it. You find yourself instinctively hesitating, as if faced with walls you can't penetrate, doors you can't open, boundaries you can't cross.
The effect is dizzying and sort of thrilling. Sculpture has upset your sense of grounding in the world, the way immersive theater and child's play can. The effect doesn't come so much from looking at art, or thinking about it, but from just being where it is. Anyone can have the experience: of the optical sleights of hand, the theater of yarn-drawn illusions. And anyone, the hermetic art world included, is the audience Sandback deserves.