Watch what you eat 
Terry R. Myers 
Once again I find myself turning inside out one of my favorite Jasper Johns lines, '"Looking' is and 
is not eating' and 'being eaten"’. Let's look at this Uz Larner and say '"EATING' IS AND IS NOT 
LOOKING' AND BEING LOOKED AT'”. Why this perpetual urge to reverse these terms? Maybe my 
new Version is more to the point when it comes to sculpture and its alleged (butch) realness - and 
not only because any Cartoon prey” never really "loses" its form at the expense of any so-called 
predator (or vice versa). After all, there will never be a Donald Judd in the cartoon world, and 
none of his specific objects" with which to contend or get hit over the head. Making the speedy 
transition to the real world, and keeping in mind the liberatory promise of post-1968 and/or post- 
structuralist practices, the most important sculpture since minimalism (post- or not) has 
been made by those like Larner who have with purpose resisted both the mishandling of 
objectification, and the false premise that looking is an acquisition. 
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Larner s work asks the following: if the Johnsian visuality of "looking” is so clearly 
(naturally?) understood in relation (or in Opposition: "is and is not") to something so 
physical, mechanical, and non-visual as eating, then can the physicality of "eating” 
that so much of her sculpture does (not just her well-known, to-the-point Corner 
Basher) swallow something so absent, unintentional and illusory as looking? Put 
another way, if what you see or more importantly think you see is a REAL part of the 
thing itself, then can we put such faith in - meaning “Limit" - the “thereness” of the 
sculptural object? 
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Yes and no, of course. Larner's interlocking chains of blue/yellow drops pile up 
in the space submitting the necessary and sufficient conditions of their inter- 
stitial "integrity", confident in their connectiveness, their in-between-ness, their 
ability to suggest something somewhere eise while throwing shade (color) at 
the space they inhabit at that moment. Color’s role as the connector between 
this accumulation of links, the space, and us, is social in its (light-filled, 
pulsing) essence/substance, a “place" of ongoing activity and use-value defined as 
much by what it is and what it isn’t as what we make it out to be. Last year I wrote 
something to the effect that Larner's work demands that leaving structures as they are 
amounts to misuse; today l'm more convinced than ever of the radical resolve of her 
Position. Attending to the space between things at a time in which more and more 
supposed “focus" continues to be exposed as oppression, Larner turns again to the 
potential that something which also takes you to something happening somewhere 
eise does not by (modernist) definition diminish the presence of the thing itself, newly 
expanded and expansive. Suggesting that her hybrid sculpture ultimately cannot be 
eaten” because a part of it actually and always exists in our “looking” (and, once 
again, this relationship is also vice versa; in fact, maybe instead of saying "look at”, we 
should say something closerto "look with"), Larner's sculpture 
demonstrates what real presence is when materialization can be 
mutual and liberatory, when self-determination endures as equivalen- 
53 ce ' when ideas (will) exist in free exchange. 
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