Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III Archives

Rosa Sittig-Bell: An Emerging Arts Leader’s Look at SAM

Seattle Art Museum on Nov 16 2022

Growing up in Seattle, I spent many years skipping school on the first Thursday of every month to wander the ever-changing exhibitions at SAM, picking out my favorite paintings and developing a personal relationship with them. I always knew that I wanted to be a part of creating the magic that happens when you enter a museum and experience the way one artwork can transform your perspective on the world and yourself. Through my internship at the museum, I was able to get closer to recognizable and historic artworks—many of which I have been enamored with for years—than I had ever imagined I would, as well as getting to intimately investigate, work with, and develop new relationships to new pieces in SAM’s collection.

Like a child being pulled away from a candy shop, as my Emerging Arts Leader Internship at SAM concludes, I want to look back on how transformative and fascinating working with the conservation team has been as I focused on conservation projects at the Olympic Sculpture Park and on objects in the museum’s reinstallation of its American art galleries, which debuted this October.

In the ever-increasing heat of Seattle’s newfound summer, I spent days running around the Olympic Sculpture Park with Senior Objects Conservator Elizabeth Brown as we treated the various sculptures that inhabit SAM’s outdoor location. This work ranged from re-waxing Louise Bourgeois’ Father and Son, to painting Alexander Calder’s The Eagle, to treating George Rickey’s kinetic sculpture Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III. I was struck by the public’s fascination with our process, stopping on their strolls with their Australian Shepherds to inquire about what we were doing. I would stop—blow torch and wax in hand—and explain these routine art treatments. These interactions made clear to me that the public is invested in the art around them, and that this work contributes to dialogues on accessible art.

The conversation around what it means to work in conservation tends to be slim outside of the museum sphere, and I believe it’s a majorly overlooked aspect of the processes artworks go through before they are sent across the world to various museums, acquired from collectors, or have been sitting on display for months. How do we interact with artworks in a way that will allow them to be experienced in the future? Conservation is a field that combines investigation in so many different directions: the hand-skills needed to replicate the movements of practicing artists, the chemistry knowledge that informs how to interact with various materials, and the knowledge of art history that is needed to investigate the unique mechanisms of every artwork. My understanding of how multifaceted conservation is has grown immensely during my time here at SAM.

Working at SAM has also revealed to me how museums and other art institutions can work toward greater equity. As part of my internship, I attended a few sessions of the American art project’s advisory circle, a group of 11 members of the community who advised on the reinstallation. These sessions were eye-opening. I was able to see and be a part of how SAM is working to eliminate an echo chamber of only museum staff in reflecting how communities would like to be represented themselves in the galleries.

I will look back longingly on my experience, wishing I could use the XRF machine (essentially a handheld X-ray) one more time or attempt to clean a 19th-century elevator screen using a CO2 gun with Objects Conservator Geneva Griswold and fellow conservation intern Caitlyn Fong again. I will forever cherish being able to work so closely with objects from around the world. Becoming so personal with the art that I grew up visiting in the museum and investigating it on a whole new, and sometimes molecular level, has been one of the greatest learning experiences I could have imagined.

In concluding my internship, I look forward to seeking out more opportunities in the conservation field and to make sure that the art that touches us can be seen for years to come.

– Rosa Sittig-Bell, SAM Emerging Arts Leader Intern in Conservation

Photo: Chloe Collyer.

Object of the Week: Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III

Seattle Art Museum on Aug 5 2022

As the wind picks up at the Olympic Sculpture Park, American artist George Rickey’s Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III (1973) uses the natural elements to transform from a still sculpture to a mesmerizing experiment in movement, allowing us to consider how that movement can in turn create its own forms.

Rickey’s kinetic sculptures come from an amalgamation of life experiences and technical skills. He was born on June 6, 1907 in South Bend, Indiana; his father was an engineer, setting the stage for the technical foundation that would become a pertinent aspect of his future work. Rickey went on to temporarily reject engineering to study history and eventually art, becoming a history teacher and painter. During and after World War II, he was majorly influenced by the work of Alexander Calder, Naum Gabo, and David Smith among others.

During the 1970s, Rickey began using flat planes in his kinetic sculptures, burnishing the stainless steel planes in order to create luminosity. He rejected motorized mechanics; instead the planes are able to create motion through the combination of weight, design, and ball bearings inside of the bearing housing. The laws of physics and the unpredictability of the natural world are his tools of choice.

Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III is inspected and treated annually by SAM’s conservation department to ensure that Rickey’s vision remains in motion at the sculpture park. In 2022, the sculpture was cleaned, examined for stability, spot treated to maintain an even and uncorroded exterior, and the access panels were opened up to inspect the stability of the rods and bearings. The sculptures at the Olympic Sculpture Park, including Rickey’s, require constant care to withstand weather, constant movement, and exposure to the Puget Sound’s salty water.

As a part of my Emerging Arts Leader Internship in conservation, I am working alongside SAM conservators to examine, record, and treat a number of SAM collection works, focusing specifically on the outdoor sculptures in the Olympic Sculpture Park. It is very special to have the opportunity to work directly with sculptures that I have spent years studying or admiring. I’m glad to have contributed directly to the preservation and future enjoyment of modern and contemporary public art.

– Rosa Sittig-Bell, SAM Emerging Arts Leader Intern

1 George Rickey Foundation, “Glossary of Technical Terms,” https://www.georgerickey.org/art/glossary-of-terms.

2 Hayden Herrera, “George Rickey,” in George Rickey in South Bend (South Bend: The Snite Museum of Art University of Notre Dame, 1985) 11–17.

3 Vero Beach Museum of Art, George Rickey Kinetic Sculpture: A Retrospective (Vero Beach: The University of Washington Press, 2007).

Image: Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III, 1973, George Rickey, stainless steel, 97 x 68 x 68 in. Gift of Martin Z. Margulies, 2007.263 © Estate of George Rickey/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Object of the Week: Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on Oct 6 2017

It’s early October and the sun is still shining in Seattle. These early fall days in the Northwest always feel like something special: a lull between the over-scheduled blaze of the summer and the damp grayness of winter, when Seattleites can still take advantage of the great outdoors. And what better way to do so than with a stroll through the Olympic Sculpture Park, visiting some old favorites—or maybe some sculptures you may have missed among the summer crowds.

Tucked away at the top of the park’s signature Z-path is George Rickey’s Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III (1973). A deceptively simple composition, the sculpture consists of two stainless steel square elements, mounted slightly offset from each other on a tall pole. The surfaces of the squares are burnished in a gestural, almost painterly pattern, perhaps belying Rickey’s early background as a painter. Overall, its simplified geometric forms, lines, and planes are reminiscent of a history of constructivism—an early 20th century avant-garde movement on which Rickey published a book in 1967—and the aesthetics of the New York minimalist artists who were his contemporaries. What really distinguishes Rickey’s work, though, is not its form or material, but a different element altogether: movement.

Rickey was one of the pioneers who brought movement to abstract sculpture. Referring to them as “useless machines,” his kinetic works are meticulously engineered so that their components shift, rotate, or spin with even the slightest breeze. In the case of Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III, the seemingly simple squares are in fact compound pendulums, spinning around a central point (the heart of the plane) in parallel paths. They respond directly to the effects of nature, from the most dramatic windstorm to the lightest gust of air.

It is fitting that Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III is located so near Alexander Calder’s iconic Eagle, as Calder’s kinetic sculptures were a major influence on Rickey’s own “useless machines.” But where Calder’s work exudes a playful, organic, biomorphic quality, Rickey’s is rooted in geometric exactitude, an interest in the poetry of a precisely engineered object. He recalls the development of these ideas when he began making kinetic works in 1949:

I committed myself to a completely new technology, a new esthetic, new criteria, a new kind of response from others and a new antiphony between myself and the new object I held in my hand. I had to wonder whether Calder had said it all; when I found he had not, I had to choose among the many doors I then found open. I had to learn to be a mechanic and to recall the physics I had learned at 16. . . . I had embarked on a long-term project—to make an art in which every object had to be preconceived and had to be able to go through its motions completely and satisfactorily, or I had made nothing at all.¹

The sculpture is only truly activated when this order with which it was designed—based in an acute understanding of mathematics, engineering, and physics—comes into contact with the disorder of nature. Rickey intended this interaction—he meant for his kinetic sculptures to be installed outdoors, bearing all of the elements—and it is in this interplay between science and nature where the work is its most lyrical. So the next time you’re taking advantage of a sunny fall day in the sculpture park, I invite you to stay awhile and watch the sculpture at work—spinning precisely and gracefully as it heralds every change in the weather.

– Carrie Dedon, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

¹ George Rickey, interviewed by John Gruen, in “The Sculpture of George Rickey: Silent Movement, Performing in A World of Its Own,” ArtNews, April 1980, p. 94.

Image: Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III, 1973, George Rickey, stainless steel, 97 x 68 x 68 in., Gift of Martin Z. Margulies, 2007.263, Art © Estate of George Rickey/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

1 George Rickey, interviewed by John Gruen, in “The Sculpture of George Rickey: Silent Movement, Performing in A World of Its Own,” ArtNews, April 1980, p. 94.

Image: Two Plane Vertical Horizontal Variation III, 1973, George Rickey, stainless steel, 97 x 68 x 68 in., Gift of Martin Z. Margulies, 2007.263, Art © Estate of George Rickey/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

¹ George Rickey, interviewed by John Gruen, in “The Sculpture of George Rickey: Silent Movement, Performing in A World of Its Own,” ArtNews, April 1980, p. 94.