On the occasion of Alma Allen on Park Avenue, the artist’s largest outdoor exhibition to date, art historian and curator Steven L. Bridges considers the relationship between language, thought, and perception in Allen’s sculptural investigations of form. Highlighting a set of philosophical and linguistic inquiries that animate Allen’s process, Bridges affirms the sculptures’ ability to “speak” in gestures that language cannot capture. Alma Allen on Park Avenue remains on view in New York until September 2025.
“I am interested in the spiritual work of sculptors, of communicating without language, the effort to communicate, sometimes across time or understanding, with something that is incapable of returning speech.” –Alma Allen
The relationship between language, thought, and the experience of reality has long been a subject of philosophical inquiry and debate. In 1922, Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) offered one of the more famous and quotable arguments on the topic, stating, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”(1) With this, Wittgenstein posits that the limits of one’s ability to describe or put words to an experience—to translate an experience as such—are the very limits of that experience. The dimensions of experience beyond the framework of words are ungraspable, unknowable. Communication plays a crucial role in these experiences—it is a prerequisite for intelligibility.
Other philosophers and linguists have picked up the threads of this inquiry over time, including Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), whose most well-known and contested book was titled Language, Thought, and Reality (1956). Following a similar philosophical path as Wittgenstein, Whorf writes, “Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” The role of poets and other writers in expanding our linguistic universes is certainly relevant here and speaks to the ways in which new forms of language and speech are often necessitated by new realities. The German-speaking Romanian poet Paul Celan comes to mind. In the wake of World War II, and as a Holocaust survivor, Celan embarked to radically reconceive the German language to better account for the traumas inflicted during that moment in history.
But within these ruminations, how does the vast expanse and multitude of visual languages factor in? How might an image, a surface, an object “speak” beyond the faculties of language and rational thought to communicate our sense and understanding, our experience of reality? The work of sculptor Alma Allen enters here, announcing itself not so much with an exclamation, but with its presence. Allen recently unveiled a body of ten new large-scale works that currently inhabit the Park Avenue Malls in New York City, from East 52nd and East 70th Streets. It’s a trek to see them all, a kind of durational viewing that blends the sights and sounds of the city with the unexpectedness of Allen’s organic forms at such a scale. They are familiar, they are of a place, but to say what that is—the familiarity, the place—that’s another matter entirely.
Allen grew up in rural Utah, but left home at the age of 16, heading first to San Francisco for several years and eventually to New York City. In these early days of his arrival to this mythical place (it had been the subject of so many books he read, or stories shared with him over the years), the artist spent a lot of time walking the city, tracing it like the lines on the palm of one’s hand. Specifically, though, in a recent conversation, Allen recalled one of the very first walks he took upon his arrival, which carried him from the Lower East Side all the way up to Harlem.(2) It took him the entire day, weaving and bobbing across the city’s grid. And for a good part of that walk, Allen traversed the stretch of Park Avenue that now features his work—a return after some 30 years.
How might an image, a surface, an object “speak” beyond the faculties of language and rational thought to communicate our sense and understanding, our experience of reality?
This way of knowing—walking the city—brings to mind a passage from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980, trans. 1984). Training his mind on New York City (the city that “never learned the art of growing old”), de Certeau describes “[t]he ordinary practitioners of the city…They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandermänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.”(3) Along Park Avenue, Allen’s sculptures join this writing of an urban text, and while they may be momentary interludes in the longer form writing of the city, they nevertheless become protagonists within it. They are also informed by Allen’s own walking-writing. Looking back across that expanse of time, his early experience of New York City on foot blended and mixed with countless other life moves and new landscapes. It is this accumulation of time and experience, often distilled into an instant, an action, a gesture, that helps create the forms of Allen’s sculptures.
The works were all fabricated in Tepoztlán, Mexico, where the artist has established a studio that provides the space and grounds to work at increasingly larger scales. With the assistance of studio team members and a robotic arm repurposed from the automotive industry, the possibilities of production have expanded and opened new doors to an artistic process that is at once improvisational and precise. The monumental works that line Park Avenue originally started as small models, around two inches in height. There are hundreds of variations and attempts before a form moves on to more advanced stages of development, which Allen works laboriously and meticulously to prepare in these initial processes. Hours of preparation create the formal elements in clay—coils, strands, blocks, blobs, all biomorphically resonant—that are then brought together in an instantaneous movement or gesture. The shapes grow more complicated through these rapid movements, and when the moment is over, the work is assessed. Either the form stands, or the process starts again.
Through this calculated yet highly intuitive process, Allen enters a meditative space where his hand motions respond to the material and evade the influences of conscious thought. Working through the many variations, the artist works in a state of flow, something he likens to lucid dreaming. For him, the works are best when he loses the thread of the original thought, tapping into something pre-conscious, perhaps even primordial.
This very idea emerges in the relationship between two of the great artists and minds of the 20th century: French writer and poet Jean Genet and Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. A magnetism reportedly bound these two men together, who enjoyed a long and fruitful friendship. Giacometti’s work intrigued Genet so much that it became the subject of a short publication by the writer, The Studio of Giacometti (1962). Among the many observations, anecdotes, and musings, Genet searches for the meaning of art within Giacometti’s haunting works, dotted around the artist’s studio in various states of coming-into-being. Throughout his winding and elliptical text there are moments of self-discovery, and he realizes, “I see all the better—if only still very obscurely—that every work of art, if it wants to reach to the grandest of proportions, must with patience, and with infinite care from the moments of its first planning, descend back through millennia, rejoining if it be possible that immemorial night inhabited by the dead who will recognize themselves within the work itself.”(4)
Genet goes on to more plainly assert that “the work of art is not destined for the generations of children to come. It’s offered to the innumerable dead.” In reading those words, Allen’s work comes alive with new dimensions of meaning. These amalgamations of forms and surfaces do not simply emanate from the world around us, the world of our experiences, but across eons of time and worlds that once existed that are a part of our own, buried deep beneath our feet and rising in our atmosphere. With Genet’s urging, I read them anew as embodiments of all life, from the microscopic to the gigantic, from the “primordial soup” of the early universe to the genetic engineering of today. Like nature, the artist experiments with every possible outcome, always searching, making, creating in a compulsory manner. The works are evolving and devolving, moving so slowly that their movement is beyond our perception, our conception. If they rest, it is only in our minds.
From the initial seed of a form, Allen then freezes the clay models to preserve their qualities, and they enter the queue to be three-dimensionally scanned. The use of technology and this translation from hand to digital model has been instrumental in the growth in scale of the works, yet the hand carries through to the final forms. Glitches from the scans also become a part of the works at times; they are part of the improvisatory nature of the process, the “hand” of the digital creator leaving its own marks and traces. The materials have also changed over time. Where Allen once found most, if not all, of his materials from his immediate environments, he now brings in specific types of stone or other materials to join a cadre of specimens to be considered in relation to the alien, organic forms of the models. For this is the next step in the process, which is the marriage between form and material. It is not simply a rendering of one of Allen’s forms into a material, but a drawing out of an image from the material itself. Both change through this relationship. They become something else—a thing.
Allen’s work asks each of us, invites each of us, to write our own “text;” illegible as it may be, we still feel it.
In his essay “Thing Theory” (2001), Bill Brown presents exactly that, his theory of “things.” He writes, “Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects. If this is why things appear in the name of relief from ideas (what’s encountered as opposed to what’s thought), it is also why the Thing becomes the most compelling name for that enigma that can only be encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarily negates.”(5) One could easily describe the entire project of writing this article as an attempt to encircle an enigma, to offer words and thoughts to works of art that exist beyond the order of objects—and an immensely enjoyable project at that. The fact that it is a seemingly unending journey to describe Allen’s works speaks exactly to their thingness, if we take up Brown’s arguments. For if they were objects and presented intelligibly as such, the space to dream and ruminate would contract, all the rabbit holes would lead to the same final conclusion. Instead, we are left with something far more interesting: wonder.
The new works are all Not Yet Titled. That doesn’t mean they will be titled at all, though. The de facto title does not commit to anything other than the idea that they do not, yet, have a name. In this way, and even for the artist, these works exist beyond language. And yet, are they not real? A part of our reality? Allen confided recently that he rarely thinks in words unless he is speaking to someone.(6) Words are not the vehicle by which to experience these works, or any of Allen’s works, for that matter. The relationship of bodies—our bodies, the sculptures’ bodies—are an important way of knowing, as is the walking between and among them. In this way, Allen’s work asks each of us, invites each of us, to write our own “text;” illegible as it may be, we still feel it. The experience is somatic. And so if language and thought contribute so much to defining our sense and understanding of reality, then we must continue to look around the corners of reality for those hints of what exists beyond—and what exists right here, before us.
Alma Allen’s sculptures in stone, wood, or bronze evoke a curiosity regarding the life of objects and the ways in which form and material can circumnavigate the utility of language. Over the last decade, Allen has staged solo and group exhibitions at Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center, Garrison, NY (2024), Museo Anahuacalli, Mexico City (2023), Van Buuren Museum & Gardens, Brussels (2022), Rockefeller Center, New York (2022), the Palm Springs Art Museum and Nevada Museum of Art (2018-19), the Whitney Biennial (2014), and other venues. A major monograph of his work was published by Rizzoli in 2020. His work is held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum, among other collections.
Steven L. Bridges is a curator, art historian, and writer based in Lansing, Michigan. Currently he holds the position of Interim Director & Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. His present research and curatorial interests focus on the intersection of social, racial, and environmental justice, as well as the relationship between art, geopolitics, and scientific inquiry.
Photos: Installation views, Alma Allen on Park Avenue, 2025. Photography by Charlie Rubin; Alma Allen’s Tepoztlán studio near Mexico City. Photo by Alejandro Ramirez Orozco. Artwork © Alma Allen
Notes
(1) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc., 1922.
(2) Interview with Alma Allen, March 21, 2025.
(3) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
(4) Jean Genet, The Studio of Giacometti, London: Grey Tiger Books, 2013.
(5) Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Critical Inquiry vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001), pp. 1–22.
(6) Interview with Alma Allen, March 21, 2025.
