Cube root

Published Feb. 25, 2010 at 12:36 p.m.
Roni Horn at the ICA, Andrea Fraser at Harvard
"I've been told it's the largest single piece of glass in the world," Helen Molesworth, the Institute of Contemporary Art's new chief curator, said at a press preview last week.

PINK TONS Horn’s is a kinder, gentler, more crowd-pleasing Minimalism.

"I've been told it's the largest single piece of glass in the world," Helen Molesworth, the Institute of Contemporary Art's new chief curator, said at a press preview last week. The object in question — Roni Horn's four-foot-tall, five-ton pink glass cube Pink Tons (2008) — is now sitting in the ICA's lobby as part of "Roni Horn aka Roni Horn," a show organized by New York's Whitney Museum and London's Tate Modern and representing the New Yorker's "first comprehensive" career survey.

PODCAST: Listen to John Waters interview Roni Horn at the ICA and follow along with their chat with our slideshow

Pink Tons' sides are frosty, with clear icy cracks at the corners. From certain angles, the cube looks as if it were filled with water, almost to overflowing. Look in the clear top and you can see a large wave seeming to ripple inside.

One way to define Modern Art is as a seven-decade project to break art down to its atomic elements — from Picasso's Cubism to Jackson Pollock's drips to Ad Reinhardt's all-black paintings. Arriving in the 1960s, near the end of this lineage, was Minimalism, which favored basic geometric forms, industrial materials, and repetition. Minimalism is best known for its sculptures — Carl Andre's grids of metal tiles displayed right on the gallery floor, Tony Smith's six-foot-tall steel cube Die from 1968. These works presented objects in it-is-what-it-is fashion, focusing on the space they share, and the subtle relationships among viewers. It was usually severe, hard-edged, macho, buttoned-up stuff predicated on the notion that if you concentrated on it hard enough and were worthy, you might attain transcendence.

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