Tom Scicluna has an uncanny way of bringing things together. He shuffles and reshuffles existing objects until they do more than they should. For a show at Miami Art Museum a few years ago, he produced Tableturn (2003). He simply stood a folding table in such a way that it seemed as if it was leaning against a wall, but between wall and table there was a glass of water held in place only by the pressure that the leaning table exerted. Precarious and understated, the work really began to gain some heft when one realized not only that the table came from the museum’s storage space but that it’s a hand-me-down from the county’s electoral vote. Quietly mining the fucked-up history of elections in South Florida, both locally and - as we all know - nationally, Scicluna plugged his nearly non-descript sculpture to a much larger social narrative. The glass of water on the verge of falling spoke volumes when placed at the center of all this.

For his most recent show, matter-of-factly titled Mast (2007), Scicluna simply introduced a 35-foot aluminum mast from a 1968 sailboat into the gallery space. The object, bisecting the space diagonally, just sits there dumbly, reminding us just how little needs to be done to tickle art into happening. And yet, it has a way of activating the space. Cutting things in half, it theatrically destabilizes our own relationship to the neat cubic volumes of the gallery. In the style of those old gray-dead objects that Robert Morris once placed in galleries, Scicluna’s mast has robust phenomenological ambitions.

Beyond inviting us to groove on the tweaked spatial relationship between viewer, object, and space, the mast also invites close scrutiny. Marked with all kinds of nicks and dents rendering it an index of lived experience, it rewards inspection, particularly as one begins to conceptualize how it fits into the social context of South Florida from which it was extracted. One thinks of the relationship of leisure to wealth, of the changing demographics of the region and the permanent underclass it is creating (the gallery is, after all, located in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood), etc. It’s hardly surprising that the 1968 date appended to the project invites us to fantasize about student uprisings and the self-assured ascendance of conceptual art, but only in regards to how these things seem utterly foreign to our present situation.

Although Scicluna’s gestures are often witty and economical without being simplistic, there is a low-frequency anxiety about them. It’s as if they don’t quite understand their place, historically speaking. What is their role in a culture that can co-opt even the most low-key effort and turn it into money? How do they function if they can’t really make their oppositional stance that is so central to the conceptual efforts they claim as predecessors? And yet, Scicluna keeps going. It’s this tension between his very Beckettian going-on and the fear of working with a depleted aesthetics that enlivens Scicluna’s project. At times, his sculptures almost quiver.

Gean Moreno, Tom Scicluna, artUS, issue 20, Winter 2007, p. 29