e sensual spirituality of Ten and is equally devoid of the gracefully proliferating, vegetal forms that markmany of Sugarman's public works. The "hanging men" of the title--three black, bladelike forms impaled on a white spar that projects from the sculpture'sside--are less the sculpture's subjects than they are its victims. Yellow Fringes (1990) shows Sugarman's continuing involvement with eccentric, disparate forms. The core of this sculpture, which is installed high on thewall and suggests a spiky, half-open fan, is a bundle of three black-and-white girders--one sporting sawtooth edges, another punctuated by bentflaps--which jut out several feet at about a 40 degree angle. Wedged between these girders and the wall are five flat aluminum forms, alternately black andwhite, that resemble oversized Christmas stockings. Bristling from the outside of the girders are three bright-yellow aluminum forms (the "fringes") cut intorhythmic, fencelike patterns. With a formal unpredictability as great as his "one thing after another" floor sculptures of the mid 1960s, Sugarman hereinvites viewers to exercise their vision by focusing attention in an unusual place (where the wall meets the ceiling) and, there, to engage in retinal battle with athrusting sculpture that keeps its complexities partly hidden. Yellow and White (1995) is a roughly 5 1/2-foot-high aluminum work composed of two elements: a gracefully twisted white shape at once suggestive of acurving funnel on a ship, a megaphone and the pistil of a flower, and, at its base, a boxy yellow form with irregular folds and scalloped edges. Sugarmanworks against our expectations by placing the more brightly hued, petal-like form on the floor rather than at the top of the stemlike white form. He alsocreates a work which, with its tapering edges, torqued planes and opened and closed volumes, offers the mobile viewer an equally mobile set of formalrelations. In his introduction to the catalogue that ...
