Slow Hand
Richard Berger's "Couch" & New Episode of Private Life: Robert Gluck!
Incredibly moving to see my beloved teacher Richard Berger’s 1976 sculpture My Couch at the top of the Guggenheim, kicking off Carol Bove’s show. I saw images of this work in my first week at the San Francisco Art Institute (RIP) where Richard had been teaching sculpture since the 1970s. He explained it was pivotal in his own understanding—that by hanging a thousand lead fishing weights at precise increments from an overhead grid he could reproduce the topography of an upholstered couch in such a way that anyone—immediately, and with apparent delight—could recognize it as “a couch!” despite the fact that as a material, utilitarian, and experiential object it negated all the qualities and requirements of actually being one. What’s left is something barely there, an illusion, a ghost, a projection, a desire to perceive a fullness that was absolutely absent. This connected to Richard’s experience as an amputee, having lost a leg in a motorcycle accident, in that he became interested in sculpture as a psychic and spiritual act, capable on some deep level of addressing what isn’t there. He died over a decade ago and it is rare to see his work anywhere, much less a major NYC museum. (I included a long digression on taking his classes in the deluxe monograph Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery (2025).)
The story as I remember it was that as a child Carol Bove saw Richard’s sculpture at the Berkeley Art Museum shortly after it was made and it had an outsized impact on her ideas about objects, space, and her future life as a sculptor. Haunted by it, in the mid-2000s she tracked it and him down, paid to have it reconstituted (I believe Richard said all that was left was the plan, that the extant parts were rusted to shit and it had to be totally re-fabricated) which she then bought . The inclusion of it in her museum survey is such a meaningful gesture: a tribute to the power of that childhood encounter and the recognition that we are shaped by other’s art and ideas in such profound, oblique, and ultimately unknowable ways. A few ramps down she reconstructed a “positive” doppelgänger in response, a real couch you can sit on, facing out into the void of the museum’s spiral.
This little note is also to let you know that the new episode of “Private Life” is out, a conversation with New Narrative writer Robert Gluck about his trio of books published by NYRB: Jack the Modernist (1985), Margery Kempe (1994), and About Ed (2013).
I hope you enjoy: “Robert Gluck on his Books, Frank O’Hara and Dreams”