I was riding up the elevator in the Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building in the spring of 1977, “minding my own business” as it were, and unaware of a forthcoming shock, when the large elevator doors opened. I was stunned and thrown backwards by a John Cage-type experience of nothing. At first, I timidly stood still, but then with the danger of a closing elevator door, I stepped out onto the fourth floor of the museum where I encountered Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977) by Robert Irwin.
A conceptual-spiritual engagement with embodied ritual, and a fascination with the literal and metaphorical transformation of natural materials (including bodies), are recurrent motifs in All These Different Things Are Sculpture, Fox’s first institutional solo show in New York in four decades.