Longing to Belong

James Lingwood on Mens Suits, 2009
(page 4 of 4)

Photograph by Julian Abrams

Mens Suits remains resolutely mute. Though the sculpture encourages all kinds of associative thoughts, the clothes keep their secrets. The sculpture emanates a quality of suspended time - not unlike the stilled interiors of Edward Hopper’s paintings of city life – with their glimpses of solitary figures and suggestions of everyday struggles to survive and get on. Hushed and concentrated, they are like sculptural still lives, studies of fragility and instability in a material world.

Although LeDray’s work engages in such a consummate way with the languages of sculpture, and he can be associated with a generation of sculptors who emerged in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mens Suits equally brings to mind an American artist from an earlier time, the great photographer Walker Evans. In his essay for Evans’s first book American Photographs published in 1938, Lincoln Kirsten commended the unsparing, unrhetorical qualities of the photographs as they showed “the visible effects, direct and indirect, of the industrial revolution in America, the replacement by the machine in all its complexities of the work and art once done by individual hands and hearts, the exploitation of men by machinery and machinery by men” and testified “to the symptoms of waste and selfishness that caused the ruin and to salvage whatever was splendid for the future reference of the survivors.”

The dust jacket to American Photographs states that “the physiognomy of a nation is laid on your table.” In all its subtly calibrated complexity, Mens Suits does something similar. Though the materials in LeDray’s sculpture tell no stories, Mens Suits embodies a human condition at a specific cultural moment as well as art’s attempts to find a specific language to bear witness to it.

James Lingwood is a Co-Director of Artangel

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