Thoughts on fences (and Robert Grosvenor)

When you have a "theme" in your head, it's a filter catching thoughts and images that otherwise would have slid right past you. This piece by Robert Grosvenor is in the Whitney Biennial, the 2010 "state of American contemporary art" survey (more info here). I don't instantly know what it's about, or "like" it even, but it does make me think about fences, security gates, shops' metal shutters - zoos, even. "Inside, outside, in between" - fences, and what's beyond them. I'm surprised that the idea of fences hasn't come up before...

As for the piece in the picture: "Grosvenor has increasingly concerned himself with a theatrical elaboration of place, and his range of materials has broadened from wooden beams to include all manner of structural materials, such as corrugated metal, cinder blocks, fiberglass, plastic, and industrial paints. His recent large-scale sculptural tableaux take this more inclusive approach still further: they seem imbued with a degree of cartoonish self-consciousness, as though dimly aware of their being in the world" it says in this 1996 article.

His roots are in Minimalism, and he "has evolved into an artist governed by sensibility rather than theory".