Jene Highstein
Sculpture

Jene Highstien installed two seamless steel pipes (each 16″ in diameter and 36.5′ in length) were installed. The one nearest the door was 8’4″ from the floor; the other was 6’4″ from the floor. The pipes were set into the brick walls parallel to the floor and to each other. The artist recalls, “I had a huge studio in Coney Island and at a certain point, I realized that I could make a sculpture wherein the entire volume of the space was the sculpture. I suddenly started thinking of lofts in terms of shoe boxes or arbitrary rectilinear volumes and putting pipes in the spaces as markers for key junctures. Anywhere else I would have thought that doing this was impossible, but at 112 it simply became a technical problem which I solved with the help of my friends, Robert Grosvenor, Suzanne Harris, Richard Nonas, and Ned Smyth.” Suzanne Harris explained, “It was pretty horrendous getting those pipes in I was the mason who knocked out those holes. When we were taking the pipes out, we decided that each one of us would put something in each of the holes. No one knows what the others put in. The contents have never been removed, as far as I know.”

Excerpted from Brentano, R., & Savitt, M. (1981). 112 Workshop, 112 Greene Street: History, artists & artworks. New York: New York University Press.