Jim Isermann's art over the past 40 years includes a series of mixed works that are critical to the emergence of design as a discipline as powerful as painting and sculpture. Despite false historical doubts about design abilities, and with different artists such as Scott Burton, Jorge Pardo, Pae White, and Andrea Zittel, he played an important role in changing the conversation.

In a new monograph on Isermann's art published by Radius Books this month, I think this change is rooted in a radical commitment to family life—private shelters provided by the family and refuge from hostility—will Isermann is positioned as the embodiment of queer culture. For the sake of context and clarity, an excerpt from this book has been edited:

In 1997, Jim Isermann started making a set of textile sculptures. Most are in the form of a cube. We are not talking about cubist cubes here. For sculpture, the cube is a minimalist art form. As a composition, it does not provide a formal hierarchy-neither upward nor downward, no unique front or back or side, no one point of view is more important than any other point of view. The cube confirms the balanced form and structure assumptions.

This is not to say that the cube has no meaning except form. Iserman's art insists on evoking history and its social complexity.

For his cube sculpture, starting from "death", it was conceived by the architect and sculptor Tony Smith in 1962, and later made of oil steel. Smith’s cube sculpture, six feet on one side, is therefore equal to the height of the standing person. It was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's famous Renaissance Vitruvian Man painting . His idealized male image is characterized by spreading his legs to form an equilateral triangle. The outstretched arms engraved his limbs in a perfect circle and a complete square. Triangles, circles, squares-throughout history, abstract expressions of sacred geometry can be found in global architectural practice.

In the tool and die workshop, the die is the mother component of the punch tool that punches a metal plate into a certain shape. The human-scale "dead" sculpture is a void that replaces space. It evokes an ancient architectural structure called a monument—cubic tomb markers, used to commemorate and venerate missing bodies. (The artist once quoted the poet WH Auden to talk about human death: "If we can respect vertical people, even if we only value horizontal people.") The funeral connection of Smith's sculpture is inseparable from the violent social atmosphere. The 1960s was an era marked by bloody civil rights riots, the American Vietnam War overseas, and domestic political assassinations.

Also inevitable is the non-personal quality of the blank form of crude steel: Smith's cube shows no trace of the artist's hand. In fact, the artist did not fabricate "death." He picked up the phone, called the Industrial Welding Co. in Newark, New Jersey ("You specify; we make"), and gave them the specifications ("A 6-foot cube of quarter-inch hot rolled steel, diagonally Line internal support") and ordered a sculpture.

The artist's hand, as a symbol of unique and individual status—emotional autobiography—was highly praised in the abstract expressionist art that immediately preceded minimalism. An emerging commercial market for local painting and sculpture, which has been elusive during the first half of the so-called American century, has also made recognizable hands a true symbol of currency value. "Death", in the process of apparently deliberately erasing the artist's hand, contemplated death—not just a single, specific death, the death of a hero or notorious villain, just like sculptures and monuments in history In that way, it takes death as a condition for humanity itself, and the immortal passion and commitment reflected in the constantly evolving and changing artifacts of culture. Abstract expressionism was declared dead.

"Die" is the source of minimalism. After that, the cube came quickly and fiercely.

"Cubi I" (1963) is the first in David Smith's last series of metal sculptures, made of stainless steel cubes welded together. Donald Judd started using rectangular stacks in 1965, alternating solids and voids of the same size to make cubes of metal, plywood or concrete. Larry Bell's vacuum-coated glass "cube" (1966) injects a moving halo into the form, which can transmit, absorb and reflect atmospheric color light, transforming rigid and rational form into organic perception problem.

Eva Hesse's "Accession" series (1967-68) is composed of galvanized steel or transparent glass fiber cubes with an open top, perforated on the side, and pierced by tens of thousands of short and inductive detection rubber tubes. Chris Burden's "Five Day Locker" (1971) combines performance art with cubes, starting with a discovered example-a common two-foot-square student locker in schools ——The artist locked himself inside and performed a painful human endurance test.

Sol LeWitt's mathematically determined "Incomplete Open Cube" (1974-82) performed a calm and self-contradictory demonstration of all 122 methods. As he said, "If you don't make a cube, all methods of the cube are incomplete. "Burnt Piece" by Jackie Winsor (1977-78) places a cube made of wood, wire mesh, and cement in a campfire. Charles Ray's "Ink Cartridge" (1986) creates a perceptual and conceptual mystery. It consists of a smooth black cube, three feet on each side, painted with clear steel, with a sparkle The glowing, trembling face, it only slowly appeared as a light meniscus printer ink made of messy black liquid.

there are more. In a quarter of a century of American art, the proliferation of minimalist and post-minimalist cube sculptures has been breathtaking. Such a variety of abundance seems to have exhausted this form-which is the more impressive reason Isermann decided to adopt it in the 1990s.

It can better explain what his new sculpture is for.

In fact, the feeling of exhaustion and exhaustion is inherent in his 1997 "Cubeweave". Isermann made this sculpture out of hand-woven rainbow-colored plaid fabric, which he mounted on a 52-inch solid foam box. In other words, the sculpture is composed of a sleeve placed on the iconic minimalist cube.

A cover is something you put on a tired sofa or a worn-out armchair, which can rejuvenate the worn-out items. After a quarter ton of steel was "dead", Isermann's lightweight textile cube was resurrected-a subject with a long history in sacred art, but here is publicly secular and clearly domestic in form.

Iselman made 10 such sliding cube sculptures, two large and eight small, each 25 inches long on one side. Their wit belies the potential seriousness of this move. It is simple and unexpected, labor-intensive and conceptually powerful. He approached an established, or even prototype, art form in a way that one might consider any precious heirloom, and he made a covering to protect and renew it immediately. In the process, he wondered about its legacy.

The family field energizes Iserman's art. In the six months before this, he taught himself a lot of simple handicraft techniques collected from the operation manual. Stained glass panels, wall hangings with spliced ​​fabrics, woven textiles and hand-woven carpets are technologies that include home, life, and DIY aesthetics of objects, across art and design, functional and non-functional.

The textile he wove for "Untitled (Cubeweave)" is a colorful plaid. In essence, plaid is made of interweaving right-angle stripes. The stripes of his sculpture are composed of the six colors of the rainbow. The rainbow can be regarded as a pure color along the diagonal line from the upper right corner to the lower left corner of the five visible sides of the cube. When the color stripes intersect, 30 mixed tones appear.

In the 1990s, when Isermann made his cube sculptures, the cold, hard, and confident edges of historical minimalism were also actively criticized as inherently masculine. As a sculpture, the contradictory warm, soft, and seductive edge of his "Cubeweave" contradicts critical analysis and easily makes it weird.

The elaborate handmade grid of the quirky sofa cover is abstract and has no symbolic meaning, but it is still evolved from the cross of the rainbow flag. Designed by gay activist Gilbert Baker in San Francisco at the request of Harvey Milk in 1978, it became a global symbol of LGBTQ pride in the 1990s. The embedded rainbow flag comes from the hustle and bustle of popular culture, not the silence of a museum. Coupled with the elegant artistic pedigree of Ellsworth Kelly's minimalist spectrum paintings, the core of Iselman's sliding cube is strange.

This is an irreducible fact: the normative heterosexuality suppresses the family realm as a place of value, intellectual insight, and cultural power. In stark contrast, Isermann's quirky, DIY cube with a cover happily expresses this.

For homosexuals who grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan in the suburb of Kenosha, Wisconsin, the recognized heartland of the United States, Isselman is no stranger to the restrictions of gender cultural norms. In the first place is the deep-rooted, even pathological, insecurities of masculinity, which permeates a society based on the principle of patriarchy.

Homophobia is an aspect of misogyny. Viewing women as occupying subordinate social status is consistent with suppressing male homosexuality—that is, a man “playing the role of a woman” with another man or using another man “like a woman”—a deep-rooted global Sexism.

Therefore, the domestic world has become a platform for the vigorous development of queer culture. As a traditional field of activity and operating base in a hostile society, houses and homes have become a challenging place that must be invented from the ground up-and then re-invented. Compared with professional producers of studio art such as painters and sculptors, Iseman's passion for design, handicrafts and DIY projects is more directly related to domestic amateurs, which is an unmistakable and bold act of opposition.

To be sure, Iserman’s hidden minimalist cube cannot serve as a narrative commentary on current issues. The themes in his works are neither current events nor politically partisan. On the contrary, misogyny and homophobia are the inner backstory of his choices as an artist.

Not surprisingly, the radical family life that promoted Iserman's art is reflected in the artist's own family life. In 1997, he acquired an abandoned prefabricated steel house in Palm Springs earlier designed by modernist architect Donald Wexler. This abandoned house was once the epitome of avant-garde home design. It is a factory-made modular unit, transported to the site by truck and assembled, made of steel to withstand the strong winds of the desert, and made of glass to maximize the transparency of sunlight.

In the next few years, with Iselman’s partner David Blomster (David Blomster) restored the original beauty of the past, the steel house fulfilled Le Corbusier (Le Corbusier) motto "Une maison est une machine-à-habiter"-the house is a living machine. The restoration project to restore and restore the life of the dilapidated family house coincides with the production of the queer, minimalist sculpture "Untitled (Cube Weave)" with a cover as expected.

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The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight (Christopher Knight) won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (he was shortlisted in 1991, 2001 and 2007). In 2020, he also won the Art Journalism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rabkin Foundation.

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