Collection Study
Sterling Ruby, Monument Stalagmite/P.T.A.C, 2012

Text by Alessandro Rabottini
June 2015

Translated from Italian by Catherine Bolton

Monument Stalagmite/P.T.A.C. is a sculpture by Sterling Ruby from 2012. It is composed of urethane resin, poured over a structure of wood, PVC pipe and expanding foam. The work was produced in Los Angeles in 2012 and entered the David and Indrė Roberts Collection in 2013. Similar spray paintings and works from the Monument Stalagmite series were exhibited at EXHM, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work at Hauser and Wirth London in 2013.

The first works in the Monument Stalagmite series were made in 2005 and exhibited at Ruby’s MFA degree show at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena in 2005. All works produced after and including the third work in the series (Monument Stalagmite/Pink, 2005) incorporate a wooden

armature. They are made in a process of pouring that takes over two months. The bulk of the material is monochromatic (an ‘offwhite’), colour is added in the very last layer, using tinting dye added to crystal clear urethane resin, producing a ‘still-wet’ glossy surface. The sculptures vary in colour and height, the largest being over five and a half metres tall. Monument Stalagmite/CDC SHIV, 2010 stands at 5.6 m, as compared with Monument Stalagmite/P.T.A.C.’s 4.9 m. Works from the series are held in the following collections: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum, Newport Beach, CA; MART of Trento and Rovereto, Italy; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; MOCA Miami, Miami, FL.

Also on display from the David And Indrė Roberts Collection, SPCE (4036), 2012 is a work made of collaged material, paint and urethane on cardboard measuring 304.8 x 203.2 cm. Ruby’s cardboard collages came about as a way of repurposing material used to cover his studio floor during the production of urethane sculptures such as the Monument Stalagmite series. The work is layered with roughly-cut cardboard geometries, imagery of celestial bodies and sci-fi machinery, an aerial image of a California state prison, packaging fixed to the surface (a pregnancy test and the medication Proventil HFA, used to increase air flow to the lungs). Finally, spattered paint suggestive of stars is juxtaposed with the dusty imprints of shoes.

The first works in the Monument Stalagmite series were made in 2005 and exhibited at Ruby’s MFA degree show at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena in 2005. All works produced after and including the third work in the series (Monument Stalagmite/Pink, 2005) incorporate a wooden armature. They are made in a process of pouring that takes over two months. The bulk of the material is monochromatic (an ‘offwhite’), colour is added in the very last layer, using tinting dye added to crystal clear urethane resin, producing a ‘still-wet’ glossy surface. The sculptures vary in colour and height, the largest being over five and a half metres tall. Monument Stalagmite/CDC SHIV, 2010 stands at 5.6 m, as compared with Monument Stalagmite/P.T.A.C.’s 4.9 m. Works from the series are held in the following collections: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum, Newport Beach, CA; MART of Trento and Rovereto, Italy; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; MOCA Miami, Miami, FL.

Also on display from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, SPCE (4036), 2012 is a work made of collaged material, paint and urethane on cardboard measuring 304.8 x 203.2 cm. Ruby’s cardboard collages came about as a way of repurposing material used to cover his studio floor during the production of urethane sculptures such as the Monument Stalagmite series. The work is layered with roughly-cut cardboard geometries, imagery of celestial bodies and sci-fi machinery, an aerial image of a California state prison, packaging fixed to the surface (a pregnancy test and the medication Proventil HFA, used to increase air flow to the lungs). Finally, spattered paint suggestive of stars is juxtaposed with the dusty imprints of shoes.

Monumental Sadness

Since his debut almost ten years ago, the work of Sterling Ruby (b. 1972, American Air Force Base in Bittburg, Germany; lives and works in Los Angeles) has confronted the viewer through a large variety of media, from ceramics to collages, videos, spray paintings and sculptures in a wide array of materials. The artist’s crosscutting approach to techniques, his almost overwhelming visual output, initially disoriented critics and the public, but then they rapidly became the place for thematic and conceptual coherence that is as deep as it is rigorous.

Monument Stalagmite/P.T.A.C (2012), in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, London, is part of a broader series of works – all titled Monument Stalagmite – made through a slow process of

pouring liquid urethane over an armature of PVC and foam. The liquid urethane is poured over a structure hanging from the ceiling and subsequent layers are accumulated over a long period of time (nearly two months for each sculpture), evoking both processes of geological sedimentation and instantaneous formation. The ensuing form, which closely resembles a stalactite, is then removed from the ceiling to which it was anchored and is displayed upright on a pedestal, so that it visually evokes a stalagmite. Liquid urethane is a material that has been part of Ruby’s artistic production from the very beginning: works made with it were already present in Monument to Interiority, the thesis exhibition the artist held in 2005 at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena. This complex installation of various materials also included another of the artist’s iconic types of works: ceramics.

There is a direct relationship between the use of ceramic and that of urethane, a relationship worth exploring as it magnifies the subject of ‘monumentality’ that is central to understanding Ruby’s work as a whole. In fact, the large sculptures in the Monument Stalagmite series can be viewed

as an extension and consequence of the formal and conceptual preoccupations the artist began to explore during the years of his academic training, when he began to experiment with ceramics in amateur courses. While Ruby was initially attracted to the associations between the malleability of clay and its use in therapeutic settings, he later grasped the possibility of transforming the different phases of ceramic production into a figure of individual education and constraint. The expressive and spontaneous gesture that exists before irreversible formalisation is what piqued Ruby’s interest in ceramics:

'Once fired, the clay becomes a kind of monument to its prior malleability or expression. As soon as it hits the kiln it takes on the status of what once was, and it becomes a truncated or frozen gesture.'¹

¹ Sterling Ruby in conversation with Catherine Taft, in Sterling Ruby, (ed. Alessandro Rabottini) catalogue of the exhibition Sterling Ruby: GRID RIPPER, curated by Alessandro Rabottini at GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Sept 30, 2008 – Feb. 8, 2009, p. 110.

Once fired, a material whose malleability managed to contain and express gesture and subjectivity becomes irremediably hard, fixed in its acquired features: a monument to that malleability, an exuberant monument to what has been lost. For Ruby, the freezing of a lost characteristic becomes the metaphor for an existential condition, of individual expressiveness captured in a condition of constraint. The artist expands on this concept:

'The process of truncation via the kiln, which produces the monumental object, is in connection with a violation or trauma; it halts the clay from ever being liberated again, and it is without doubt related to bereavement. . . [T]he sincerity I am trying to get at in my work comes from a contemporary sadness; that the suffering associated with this sort of current lamentation is real, that it arises from an insight knowing that we are conditioned subjects, not innate subjects. The ceramic sculptures are the most obvious example in that direction.'²

² Ibid., p. 112.

Whilst perceiving the artistic potential inherent in ceramic, Ruby began also to note its limitations in terms of scale and intimacy. It was this need to bring the subject of constraint to a further level, literally a “monumental” one, that inspired him to develop the Monument Stalagmite series. Here again we find a malleable material – liquid urethane in this case – that in its solidification becomes a figure of a process of freedom and transformation that quickly moves towards fixity and castration. The same dialectic – between movement and stagnation, between fluidity and ossification, between what is irreducible (to rules, to rationality and to institution) and what is made the object of correction – is a leitmotif the artist explores, from both a thematic and formal standpoint, in nearly all the series of works he has produced so far. In his works with minimalist forms (like Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity / Single C.U.M.I.D or Inscribed Plinth / 1 P V 7, both from 2007), for example, urethane is set into rigid transparent blocks, inside which coloured dye is captured in a state of total fixity, as if to emphasise – paradoxically – the geometric constraints of its own form.

His famous Spray Paintings³ perform these dynamics almost subliminally, through the immediate solidification of an ethereal and elusive material. The issues of psychological and spatial limitation are more evident when we examine the choice of spray paint on a semantic level, in light of its urban use in graffiti tagging, in Ruby’s paintings the medium shifts from an individual or gang identity to a form of meditative abstraction.

³ The work SP229, 2013 is also on display for this Collection Study

The inversion from stalactite (formed from the top down due to gravity) to stalagmite (which rises from the ground) gives Monument Stalagmite an immediate and inescapable phallic and assertive connotation. When he started developing this body of works, Ruby perceived these characteristics as problematic, since most of his works – despite its muscular appearance – address the deconstruction of machismo and its power both on a level of culture (and the perception of the American identity and politics around the world) and sexuality, understood as an area of continuous transformation and indeterminateness.⁴

⁴ A summary of this specific aspect, along with more general information on the Monument Stalagmite series, can be viewed at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjNj5N2iF44. The video was produced by MoCA – Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles for the solo exhibition Supermax 2008, curated by Philipp Kaiser.

The artist adds wooden crutches to the stalagmites, as if to suggest a state of reduction and congenital weakness, and it is on this prosthesis that he paints the title of the work (in this case “PTAC”). The device of incorporating the base into the sculpture runs through the history of contemporary art, from Constantin Brâncusi to Cy Twombly and Franz West. In some cases this form of integration was marked by the continuity of materials between the base and the sculpture, but in others marked explicit dissonance between the two identities. Ruby establishes a form of tension between the assertiveness of the stalagmite and a deconstructive and corrosive impulse towards its very monumentality.

The titles of many of the works in this series have references – some more explicit than others – to the medical and pharmaceutical field (above all with regard to psychiatric treatment), drug dealing and consumption as codified in major urban areas through slang and government, military and penitentiary terminology. The letters “P.T.A.C” visible on the wooden structure that buttress this work are an acronym for “Party to a Crime”, a police expression for a person directly implicated in or associated with a crime through any form of intentional connivance, even before the crime was actually committed. The subjects of crime, detention and correction recur often in Ruby’s works, above all in reference to the penitentiary facility known as “Supermax” (short for “super-maximum security”), a special detention unit inside prisons used to house inmates considered a threat to national and international security. In this type of incarceration, the inmate is kept in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day for an unlimited period of time, drastically curtailing any contact with prison guards or other inmates.

The concept of “supermax” can be interpreted as a sort of metaphorical construction in which we can grasp the discordant forms and symbolic figures that populate Ruby’s work: an extreme architecture – one of utter solitude and constriction – that generates a desolate and irreducible monumentality. In his restless artistic output, Ruby scrutinises the concepts of individual freedom and constraint, resistance and abandonment, constant transformation and frustration, through figures of urban anguish and vandalism, induced and self-induced annihilation, transsexualism, mental alteration and physical transformation. In effect, what filters down through the visual ambition and visceral quality of Ruby’s work is an imagination that explores the mental and cultural recesses of our present.