At first glimpse, Fred Sandback’s minimalistic sculptures don’t seem to attract your eyes with stunning effect as you’d find in works created by Sandback’s contemporary peers. There is no such hard labor as Richard Serra’s lead casting on walls, nor is there such industrial cool looks as Donald Judd’s metal boxes or Carl Ander’s building material. Viewers are not shocked with awe experience as when they encounter Robert Morris’ magnificent L-formed beams, however, the simple lines Sandback made with such domestic material as acrylic knitting yarn create such an environment of sculptures that it demands viewers as much physical participation as other spectacular works by minimalists. His collections of works in Dia:Beacon outside New York are good examples of Fred Sandback’s thoughtful use of space and environment and how they coherent with environment and beyond that become profound and wonderful artworks.
The large spacious old industrial building in Dia: Beacon is a perfect location for viewers to experience minimalistic artworks, where viewers’ physical awarenesses become crucial in experiencing artworks. Fred Sandback was one of the pioneers of minimalists that emerged in the U.S since the middle of 1960s. He graduated from philosophy department in Yale University, but continued study sculpture and architecture in 1966 together with Robert Morris and Donald Judd. Their common interest in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology became the starting point of their experiments with material, space in relationship with viewers’ physical presentation. The emphasis on physical perception is one of the key issues for minimalistic artworks that radically changed the concept of sculpture compare with traditional sculpture.
For Sandback, his goal was to produce sculpture that “ does not has an inside” . Through plenty of experiments with different materials, Sandback was attracted by the simple knitting yarn, their fluffy surface, fragile character and various color and hue that absorb light instead of reflecting light. “The first sculpture I made was a piece of string and a little wire was the outline of a rectangular solid … lying on the floor. It was a causal act, but it opened up a lot of possibilities for me.”
Since then, with colorful yarn in his backpack, Sandback dedicated his whole life in creating different kind of site-specific-works in different part of the word. Untitled (1977) from ten Vertical Constructions, is thus a work dedicated to Dia: Beacon’s stunning open space. Two groups of black yarn parallel to each other seamlessly stretch themselves from ceiling to floor as if being touched by some magic hands. The strings have perfect tension without being too tight or too loose. Such seemingly simple gesture embodies an artist’s definitive perfection. Such precision can only be accomplished by an artist who leaves nothing to chance but has everything under his control.
Fred Sandback was such an artist. Before he’d start work on any site, Sandback always had the building’s blue print at hand and worked in detail on the architectural drawings. The installation of the lines, the color, hue and thickness of it, everything was well calculated. At Dia: Beacon, the black yarns were carefully chosen so that they coherent with the black iron window fences at the far end of the room, the width between the parallel yarns reflects the width of the iron fence, even the reflection on the glass screen which locates between windows and Sandbacks artwork are well coherent and detailed calculated. As we walk in between these vertical black yarns, we see how our own reflection on the glass screen melt with the reflection of the black lines, we feel how our eyes get blurred as we start to mix the lines in front of our eyes with the iron fences on the window at the far end of the room and the naked rocks and stones outside the window.

As his minimalists peers who pursued unity in their works instead of traditional hierarchy in aesthetic values, Sandback’s works are simple and direct just as lines draw in space. They are no engineering complexity. However, these lines create another kind of space among a familiar milieu of our existence. A keystone shaped green line leaning against the wall separates the unity of the space and create a world from within. A combined world of real and unreal where we can jump in and out brings us back the childhood experience of soap bubble blowing: they are transparent, they are colorful, they are imaginary, they are real for only a few seconds. Sandback’s lines create such tension that would bring us back to our origin and make us swing between the sweet memory of childhood and uncanny atmosphere of a strange yet familiar reality.
With such simple construction, Sandback created such magic space that involve the participation of our perception and imagination. While we are wondering in this phenomenological experiment, we are stepping into the void and plentitude, reality and illusion, Yin and Yang, vacancy and volume… all at the same time.