Alice Thorson “Lester Goldman at KCAI Crossroads Gallery”. Art in America.

When back problems spurred Lester Goldman to seek a lightweight material for a series of new sculptures, he found it in gourds. Their bulbous shapes and phallic protrusions meshed perfectly with his established esthetic of animated organic forms, and they were easy to procure from an Ozarks farm. For millennia, gourds have been used for functional and artistic purposes in many cultures. Following traditional practices, Goldman began by removing the flesh from the gourds and drying the hollow shells before beginning his process of creative transformation.

He spent the summer of 2004 stacking and linking the dried gourds into elaborate configurations that he coated with auto lacquer and mounted on metal tables and pedestals. Goldman stopped working in the studio that fall, when he was diagnosed with cancer. He also stepped down as acting chair of the painting department at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he had taught since 1966. The sculptures remained in the studio while he sought medical treatment.

In spring 2005, Goldman’s Art Institute colleague Warren Rosser got the artist’s agreement to organize a show. Mounted in July with the help of students and friends, the exhibition, called “Issachar’s Surveillance” (Issachar is Goldman’s Hebrew name) looked like the laboratory of a mad but disciplined scientist. [Goldman died Sept. 24, 2005, two months after the show closed.]

Kinked and curving compilations of gourds, many emitting flailing ropy appendages, perched on low white metal pedestals or simple tables topped with luminous lime green Plexiglas boxes. Rising from the tables or from metal plates on the floor, sinuous armatures of metal rods bore several of these creatures aloft, while trailing plastic tubes attached to metal canisters provided life support. Goldman accentuated their mutant qualities by coating them with Cyber Green automobile lacquer, chosen because it evokes vision through night goggles and television war scenes.

A major influence on this body of work was Goldman’s 2000 visit to the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where the Nazis had performed medical experiments on Jews and members of other groups they deemed undesirable. But with titles such as Biotech, Spinaltech and Totemtech, the works also reference current debates over cloning, genetic engineering and stem cell research. Madchen, with its tiny red “egg” within a black cavity borne on a curving stem, calls to mind in vitro fertilization.

Goldman’s view of these scientific breakthroughs seems skeptical at best, as expressed in the uncomfortable gyrations performed by many of his forms. Yet despite their mutant aspects, the main feeling they project is one of vulnerability. In a career that encompasses manic installations and performance, muscular paintings and a variety of sculptural constructions, Goldman’s vocabulary has always borrowed from the early modernists, particularly the biomorphic forms of Miro and Arp. The gourd sculptures also reflect his admiration for Minimalist art, renewed by a 2002 visit to Dia:Beacon.

Goldman maintains his characteristic fusion of the wacky and the hapless in many of the works on view. A piece titled Dildotech provides comic relief from the sober tenor established by the show’s centerpiece, Issachar’s Surveillance, a low, chamberlike construction strewn with deformed and broken gourd “bodies.”

Under Goldman’s direction, an auto customizer constructed the chamber component from two truck windshields the artist scavenged from a junkyard. The fabric lining the bottom was sewn by two students according to Goldman’s design, which combines the black and white stripes of concentration camp uniforms with a color he calls Guantanamo orange. Rendered all the more sinister by the light that periodically illuminates the horrors within, Issachar’s Surveillance rolls the Nazi gas chambers and U.S. atomic attacks, the doings at Guantanamo and the torture at Abu Ghraib into a single chilling apocalyptic vision.