in wood. (Its presence at Hunter was especially welcome since the Museum of Modern Art, which purchased Ten in1976, rarely displays it.) Standing over 7 feet high and 5 feet wide, stretching to almost 12 1/2 feet in length, Ten initially presents itself as a single,self-enclosed, smoothly contoured white form, looming up in the space like a svelte igloo. Quickly, however, its reliance on separate components becomesevident. As the title subtly tells us, the sculpture is composed of 10 distinct, differently configured forms which have been set within inches of one another.The narrow spaces between these tall verticals allow you to peer into the physically inaccessible interior. These gaps are carefully situated to bring light intoparts of the interior, while other areas are left in darkness. The play of light and shadow is further complicated by the fact that the vertical elements are notsimple walls but forms which loop up and down like towels hanging on a rack. Truncated, footlike extensions along the bottom of these looping elementshelp stabilize the piece as well as establish a formal connection to the floor on which the sculpture sits. In addition to its understated technical brilliance, Ten also exudes powerful symbolism. Holliday T. Day, the curator of Sugarman's traveling retrospectiveof 1981-82, has drawn attention to the work's female and male polarities: the three narrow forms at one end suggest a phallic lingam form, while the oval atthe other end is emphatically egglike.(7) Brad Davis, an artist who worked as Sugarman's assistant during the making of Ten, has described the work asbeing "somewhere between an Egyptian sarcophagus and a tantric cosmic egg."(8) The work also presents a paradoxical situation of a shelterlike structurewhich is impossible to enter. It's a tribute to the undogmatic nature of Sugarman's imagination that Ten should forgo so many of the qualities thatcharacterized his work of the previous decade (bright...
