In 2008, Edgewise Press published a special edition of Meg Webster’s Salt from the Dead Sea. The co-publisher, Richard Milazzo, wrote the following text about it and Webster’s work in general (excerpted from his The Mannequin of History: Art After Fabrications of Critique and Culture, and written on the occasion of EXPO MODENA 2015, published by, and available from, Franco Cosimo Panini Editore, Modena, Italy, info@fcp.it.):

“Meg Webster’s Salt from the Dead Sea (2008) is an edition of 6. Each member in the edition is unique, comprised of a beveled piece of glass – oval [No Longer Available], round, crescent, square, triangle, pentagon – tinted green, with a small chunk of salt from the Dead Sea placed on top of it, and encased in a glass, enamel and metal case, 14.7 x 10 x 10.25 in. The salt was brought from the Dead Sea by the author, Richard Milazzo, and presented to the artist, Meg Webster, after he visited the site, where he wrote the book With Grass Ropes We Dragged the World to Her in Wooden Boats: Poems of Jordan, Syria and Egypt, 2008, with accompanying works on paper by Alessandro Twombly (published by Libri Canali Bassi and Paolo Torti degli Alberti).

“The 6 chunks of salt reiterate the shapes of the 6 glass-encased pieces of glass, their shapes reflect the jagged coastline and the thickly encrusted waters of the sea (see author’s photograph). On a deeper level, the diminutive works in this edition remind us that this mineral-rich body of water is dramatically diminishing in size every year due to environmental abuses. Small but extremely poignant, Salt from the Dead Sea captures not only the manner in which Webster works with form and materials, but, more importantly, how she is able to translate major ideological, political, and social issues into a poetic way of making art profoundly grounded in the material or elemental world.

“Often the ‘containers’ or containing unit in Webster’s works are made of stainless steel (highly polished or unpolished), glass, or are self-containing, as in the early Stick Spiral (1986). In Salt from the Dead Sea, the salt is simply placed on top of the glass, as if it were floating on the sea, and the glass takes one of the 6 shapes – oval, pentagon, circle, crescent, square, triangle –, as if it were mimicking the shape of the Dead Sea as it continues to go through its various transformations (mostly those of withdrawal or diminishment). Whether referencing the classical geometrical forms or alluding to the surrounding features of the landscape or both, there is a poetic sensibility implicit in Webster’s sculptures that makes her work something other than a belated extension of the generation of Land Artists from the 1960s and ’70s. The crescent shape, for example, references the half-moon in a subliminal way and the green tint gives the impression of water, but both encompass a profound respect for their materiality. We do not have to read the substance of the salt and glass metaphorically to appreciate their physical properties. They demand merely that we appreciate them in the context of the physical world and the consciousness that has minimally intervened upon them. It is always about the immediacy of the materials and the hope that her presentations, or her bracketing of these materials, might somehow spark empathy for the elements of the natural world which can become the ingredients of art.

“That is the same idea behind Webster’s Substance drawings. Into thick square sheets of paper, she rubs substances such as sumac, ground pumpkin seed, wasabi, cocoa, turmeric, cornstarch, mustard, curry, onion powder, flour, ginger, salt, and even cement. It is Minimalism with a twist of spice and other organic substances, the various greens, yellows, whites, grays, reds, and the subtle differences in their facture, lending these wall works a certain aesthetic dimension. Instead of relying exclusively on the mannequin-like materials given to art (oil, canvas, bronze, photography), Webster is trying to establish aesthetic values by converting the basic elements of nature into the means and ends of her art, whereby she makes us aware of them by accentuating their inherent values.

“Webster has said ‘there is nothing more important than man’s connection to Nature and her creatures.’ ¹ And about her I have written the following: ‘regarding her latest project dealing with elephants and cows. I have been to Burma, Laos, and Cambodia, several times, and am familiar with the issues as she represents them. They are vital, and no artist is in a better position to deal with them, given the history of Webster’s work.

“‘Webster has dealt with the subject of Nature in all of its manifestations from the very beginning of her career, and even when she was a student at the Yale School of Art, having speared-headed, for example, the project of grass rooftops in New York, and having worked with landscape architects for years. But what is unique about her projects dealing with Nature and the natural forms they generate is the way she incorporates human beings into the relationship, seeing humans as only one part, but an important part, of the exchange. This is why her project dealing with elephants emphasizes the Mahoots’ role, literally and symbolically. After all, in this symbiotic relation we may see the way humans relate, or don’t relate, to nature. The way they treat nature reflects the way they treat each other as humans. You cannot respect others or the Other without self-respect. This is why the video part of her project, and her work in general, is so important: to document the actual ‘exchanges’ between humans and nature’s various species, a dualism that Webster generally questions in so far as she sees humans as one of nature’s unique manifestations, in that we are, for the most part, the only symbol-generating species. This dimension is important to her because she is an artist invested in producing, if not symbols per se, then abstract forms of symbolic expression that speak to the overall relationship we have with nature.

“‘Like Gretchen Bender in video in the early 1980s, Webster paved the way early on, also in the early 1980s, toward a reprise of Land Art, and by implication Performance and Body Art, of the 1960s and ’70s. While such forms have become fashionable and, by now, almost academic, unlike many other artists Webster continues to push the envelope of what it means to make socially committed art that can still maintain, indeed, advance, the formal stature of art, whose claims she has always projected as monumental. Webster is deeply invested in the monumental role that Nature can play in the way we formulate not only our symbolic systems of art and culture but our social systems, as well. How we live in our world today, in relation to nature, how we respect and indeed celebrate its role, is at the essence of all of Webster’s projects. And it speaks to how we respect ourselves as a species.’” ²

“In relation to one of these projects, Webster writes movingly: ‘The use of sculptural objects to accompany the Elephant and Cow videos provides abstract elements to the work. The pure forms relate to the notion of the animals and their care in a gentle way. Six Lightest Metal Spheres are like a family. They can be moved on the floor. They engage the body with their proximity, volume, scale. They predicate an abstract form of nature. Water Arc pushes water like an abstract trunk. The sun powers the work as the sun powers the ecosystem. Making a beautiful artificial ivory work speaks to the notion of the possibility of alternatives to the slaughter for tusks. It creates a third ground element.

“‘The making of and giving away of cheese within the Care of the Cow creates a process element and extends the process of care of a domesticated and very useful creature. The stainless steel table and vessels are the sculptural objects on and in which this process takes place. They are domestic and industrial, and yet intimate. The visiting Cow is a surprising natural living object within the city. One that is both warm and unusual.

“‘The objects strive to not make a straight narrative connection but attempt an emotional one. A soft and open one.’” ³

“Among many the many objects or sculptural works Webster has made over the years, we should note Four Mounds (1980), Slipped Cone with Flat Top (1982), Long Gates (1983-84), Hollow (1984-85), Concave Earth (1986), Nearest River Water (1986), Volume of Outside Air (1986), Contained Pond Water (1986), Earth Disc with Radishes (1987), Double Bed for Dreaming (1988), Water of a Dead Lake (1988), Moss Bed (1988), White Lingam (1988), Cono di Sale (1988), Hollow Volume for Viewing the Sky (1988), Nose Cone (1989), Nearest Ocean Water (1989), Bench for Two Backs Leaning (1989), Wall of Wax (1990), and more recently, Contained Crude Oil, Polished Bronze Hemisphere, Salt Oval, Nine Gold Hemispheres, Contained Gravel. If I mention this litany of works, it is only because I want to emphasize the degree to which the basic elements of existence – water, earth, air, and, by implication, fire (you cannot shape metal without it) – are seminal in the creation of her art.

“In February 1988, we (Collins & Milazzo) curated an exhibition that featured Meg Webster’s and Sal Scarpitta’s works, along with those of Suzan Etkin and David Carrino, entitled A Deer Manger, A Dress Pattern, Farthest Sea Water, and a Signature at 303 Gallery in New York City. We exhibited one of Scarpitta’s most pivotal works of the 1970s, Starlaera (1977), and two works Webster had made specifically for the show, Double Bed for Dreaming and Water from a Dead Lake (both 1988). This show followed the one that we had just curated three months earlier at John Gibson Gallery, The New Poverty, in October 1987, which included such artists as Saint Clair Cemin, Abraham David Christian, John Dogg, Suzan Etkin, Peter Fend, Joel Fisher, Ronald Jones, Ange Leccia, Joel Otterson, Lucio Pozzi, Holt Quentel, Not Vital, Michael Zwack, and, of course, Scarpitta and Webster, several of whom had similarly placed a high degree of value on the elemental or on the primary or primal world of nature. The New Poverty was paradigmatic in that regard, documenting the radical shift that had occurred in the art world in just four or five years, and particularly since our exhibition, The New Capital, at White Columns, in New York, December 1984, which had already summarized, well before the Sonnabend exhibition in October 1986, the radical consumption ethos of the early 1980s. ⁴

“With The New Poverty discourse, it was clear there was a shift in the cultural dynamics from the mediated world of signs to the relatively unmediated world of the nature. This is why the work of Scarpitta and Webster, along with the sculptures of Christian, Cemin, Vital, and the paintings of Lawrence Carroll, would become pivotal. As were the works of Ross Bleckner earlier on. And we encouraged the shift, not that we wholly abandoned The New Capital related-work of Richard Prince, Peter Nagy, Sarah Charlesworth, Gretchen Bender, Steven Parrino, Allan McCollum, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, and such artists in between, like Ross Bleckner, James Welling, Peter Nadin, and Philip Taaffe. But we started looking more intensely at the work of Robert Gober, Vital, Cemin, Annette Lemieux, Carroll, Vik Muniz, Fabian Marcaccio, Nancy Shaver, James Hill, among others.

“Where Webster was using earth, water, wax, stones, salt, and even formulating objects that would coax the viewer to look up at the sky, all in an effort to galvanize a more primal experience of the world through the re-configuration of these elements in her sculptures, Christian, in a similar vein, was using nothing but paper to create generic sculptural icons that referenced African, Middle and Far Eastern cultures, to devise a subtle but more erotic architectonic, a more global ethos but one that incorporated the various local cultures he encountered on his many travels around the world. Vital was using hydrocal and sometimes marble in monumental dimensions to dredge up primordial creatures and objects that were rooted in the collective unconscious of the people in the local village and valley where he was from – the Engadine in Switzerland –, but also from around the world – Stone Eater (1981), World Animal (1982), Wheel Animal (1982), Pole Animal (1982), Paw Pow (1984), and later, camel heads, dear antlers, giant tongues, sleds, the Golden Calf, cow dung, Egyptian noses, giant testicles, glass snowballs. Once the images of his creatures and creature-like objects enter your brain – especially the early ones – it is hard to get them out. It is almost as if they had always been nomadic in the mountains and deserts and valleys of the world, and now they were meant to return home via the being of those who experience the perception of these works. Here, I also cannot help but think of Mimmo Paladino’s Montagne di Sale (Salt Mountain) (1995), with his black horses ‘returning’ to the bottom of the mountain by falling from the top, in effect, unclimbing (sic) the mountain of salt. ⁵

“In the same spirit that Webster built a Double Bed for Dreaming, whereby we may achieve a synthesis between the most abstract parts of ourselves (the dream-swept unconscious) and the most earth-bound, and Christian built pagoda-like structures to synthesize and ultimately transcend the male and female parts of our psyches, and Scarpitta made Starlaera, ostensibly to feed the deer in winter time when foraging for sustenance becomes difficult, but in reality to fill the void in himself and us, Vital built three houses and a school in Aladab, Niger: House to Watch the Sunset (2005), House to Watch the Moon (2006), House Against Heat and Sandstorms (2006), and Makaranta School (2006), perhaps to entice his creatures to return home.

“In Carroll’s Heaven (2014), we have a painting that has been cut into thin horizontal segments, implying a double accretion going from top to bottom or bottom to top. In formal terms, this descent/ascent trajectory is not unlike Paladino’s black horses in Mantagna di Sale (Salt Mountain), falling, as it were, in an upward direction. ⁶ The trajectory in Carroll’s painting is built up (or down) through a ceaseless accumulation of cuts. The assertion of ‘heaven’ (in evidence as a palimpsest in his picture) is ironically accomplished simply through a series of negations or cuts, a descent into the ‘body’, skin, or surface of the painting. This relation to the physical or material world is not dissimilar to the way Webster connects the abstract realm or heaven-bound sleeping mind of the dreamer to the bed made of earth in her Double Bed for Dreaming.

“Depending upon the direction of the meta-ontological arrow in the Carroll and the Webster – that is, whether we are descending or ascending, although, in reality, we are always going in both directions simultaneously –, we may assume the hypothetical subjects in Webster’s double bed are either resting in peace within the final parameters of the dream world or have, simply by sleeping, allowed the elemental world of nature to draw just a bit closer to them, perhaps not through ‘a straight narrative connection but [through] an emotional one. A soft and open one.’ ⁷ We are never inside our bodies more than when we are sleeping, and perhaps, Webster is saying, this is when we as humans effect our greatest, our most intimate connection with nature. We are, when asleep, almost at one with Nature.”