Charles Ginnever - 1970s

1970s

Ginnever's 1964 sculpture Dante's Rig, his first made from bought materials, marked another important turning point in his career and set the stage for much of his later work. According to Carol Squiers, "Dante's Rig explored non-western art ideas, especially about perspective," and "spawned a series of pieces based on the support system itself, and another series based on the aluminum sections, which foreshadowed his interest in 'forced illusory perspective'". From Dante's Rig, one can clearly see a linear progression in his major works from the 1970s and 1980s. Squiers goes on to say,

By solidifying the negative space in Fayette, 1966-71, Ginnever produced Détente, 1974. In the same way, by heightening the Renaissance perspective of the framework of Ithaca, he made Zeus, 1975, and Wakanhdi, 1976. Three Steel Plates, 1977, is a combination of both these derivations. Three cor-ten steel plates, each 5/8" X 5' X 22', are hung from steel cables and shackled together in a zigzag pattern. Each touches the floor at one end and then angles up, recalling both the slanted negative space of his "squashed box" pieces (Fayette, Troika), and the exaggerated perspectival lunges of Zeus and Wakanhdi, which extend and flatten space all at once. The sheets, poised on one point, each deceptively deny their own extreme weight.

By the late 1970s, Ginnever was also among the first members of ConStruct, the artist-owned gallery that promoted and organized large-scale sculpture exhibitions throughout the United States. Other founding members included John Raymond Henry, Kenneth Snelson, Lyman Kipp and Mark di Suvero.

Ginnever has been preoccupied with the notion of western perspective for many years, and continuously challenges the viewers of his work in this respect. Ginnever states, "The sculpture is not made to trick anybody. It's just that the way they are placed, they challenge our perception. Renaissance perspective was invented to help painters and draftsman extend the appearance of depth on the picture plane. Perspective has nothing to do with how forms of sculpture actually appear. Yet we expect things to behave in a certain way, which my sculptures intentionally refuse to do." As Mary Maggini points out in a catalogue essay about Ginnever's work, by "manipulating the appearance of depth and dimension, movement, and space", Ginnever presents the viewer with "a different work of art that vacillates between flattening into a one dimensional plane to expanding, or sometimes exploding, into three dimensions." Thus, when walking around one of Ginnever's sculptures, viewers are challenged when what they thought that they would see at another viewpoint turns out to be completely different form what they expected, and they are left questioning if they are even viewing the same piece.