Fred Sandback
Until May 14; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

What’s so big that it fills the Fruitmarket Gallery upstairs and down, and yet so small that it would fit into one ordinary envelope? The answer to this riddle, and to many others, is the sculpture of American artist Fred Sandback.

Sandback switched from philosophy to art in the 1960s, at a time when Minimalism was at its height. Carl André was busy arranging his bricks on gallery floors over in New York, and Donald Judd and Robert Morris were among Sandback’s teachers at Yale. It’s no surprise that Sandback’s first cord sculpture in 1967 was a long, low rectangle on the floor, like an empty outline of André’s bricks.

Sandback immediately knew that he wanted to reduce his sculpture even further. The rectangular outline, made of elastic cord and metal, seemed to represent a self-contained object that was temporarily missing. In line with the Minimalists, Sandback wanted to escape this kind of second-hand representation, and instead present us with an immediate experience of the here and now.

From 1967 until his death in 2003, that’s exactly what he did. With elastic cord and metal rods, he drew straight lines in space. In 1973 he switched to wool (or more precisely, acrylic yarn), stretching it tight from ceilings to floors, and across gallery walls. With these most economical of means, he summoned up entire planes and volumes inside the spaces we inhabit.

It was 2002 when the show’s four European host institutions came up with the idea of a retrospective. Little did they know that Sandback would die in 2003, leaving them with a considerable challenge. This would be the first time that a Sandback show would not be installed by the artist himself. Although he rejected the term “site-specific”, the artist was enormously careful about the way his pieces related to the surrounding architecture.

Fortunately, good documentation survives of Sandback’s works, each coming with a certificate containing detailed instructions for drilling holes, measuring angles and everything else one might need to know. That the Fruitmarket is fully committed to the artist’s legacy is demonstrated by the holes they drilled through floors, ceiling beams and metal heating systems to create the optimal Sandback experience.

Despite the gallery’s loyalty to Sandback’s original intentions, it’s possible to suffer a pang of uncertainty when viewing his work in a space Sandback never worked in. The artist accorded his interpreter “the same freedom of movement” as he enjoyed, with “some grace notes at her disposal.” But he also acknowledged that in the wrong hands, “things happen that are terrible, or funny, depending on your sense of humour”.

Few people in the UK are well-enough acquainted with Sandback’s work to know the difference, but the Fruitmarket has chosen the right path: to build a confident show without recourse to exhibiting reams of documentary self-justification. What we can all rely on is our own instinctive reactions to the works, and while some works leave me uninspired, the majority send my eye-brain coordination into unprecedented overdrive.

It’s amazing how many spatial assumptions your brain can make on the basis of one or two tiny bits of information. We don’t need to see the whole of something in order to think we’re seeing it. One or two clues will do. That’s why drawing works; a line here, a line there, and we can imagine the rest. Only this time, it’s in the space all around us, and we start to get the unsettling feeling that we’ve slipped inside the drawing.

At the top of the stairs sits Untitled (First Construction), made in 1978. Five strands of black wool create a huge U shape with two separate verticals on either side. The central shape suggests a massive pane of some invisible substance, like a glass shop front, and I can’t bring myself to step through it even though I know it’s nothing but space.

There are two kinds of space in a Sandback work: empty space and full space. With just two lengths of wool, the artist can reshape a void. I’m told that people do walk through the constructions which resemble doorways, but that they steer clear of the ones like this, which contain a horizontal line across the floor.

It looks so substantial from the front, but from the side, this U shape aligns so precisely with the flanking verticals that all you’re left with is one thin, black, vertical line. Sway a few inches to the left or right, and the effect is vertiginous. The single line swings out into a deep plane, and back again. This is power steering for your perceptual motors, the world’s dimensions slipping in and out of alignment faster than your brain can grasp. Sandback claimed to work around “the point at which all ideas fall apart”. That point is here.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 26.03.06