Steel Notes series 1988–89

Betty Goodwin’s Steel Notes series resembles memorial markers. It also signals the spectre of the Holocaust that begins to emerge more clearly at this point in her work.

In 1989, Goodwin was chosen as the artist to represent Canada at the 20ª Bienal de São Paulo. Her participation was organized by France Morin, whose eponymous Montreal gallery had exhibited Goodwin’s works for two years until Morin left in 1983 to direct the 49th Parallel gallery in New York. She was now a curator at New York’s New Museum and was appointed by the National Gallery of Canada to curate Goodwin’s inclusion at the biennial. Along with several drawings, six pieces from the artist’s most recent series, Steel Notes, were shown in São Paulo. In these works, Goodwin scratched cryptic phrases by Romanian American writer Elie Wiesel and Italian chemist Primo Levi, both Holocaust survivors. Four years later, she wrote the phrases into her notebook in the context of a quotation from Stanislaw Rozycki’s Warsaw Ghetto diary.

In this particular piece, there is a heavy futility—“everything is already counted”—a sense that there is nothing more to do, no way out. This condition is reflected in the tiny, furnace-like hole found in the centre of a small wedge of steel, iron filings spewing like billowing smoke from a protrusion resembling a chimney funnel: the references are unmistakable. Other works in this series include phrases such as “one little gate” and “bestially contrived walls,” suggesting the scant possibility of escape. The body, long a preoccupation of Goodwin’s—whether indirectly, as in her Vest series, 1969–74, or in her drawings—is absent in her Steel Notes, but the related themes of confinement and suffering prevail. Goodwin’s increasing interest in finding sculptural methods that would convey the cruelty she observed in the world led her to experiment with using magnets as the principal element in this series of succinct, concentrated works that, like drawings, are essentially flat and graphic in effect.

Magnetic force binds her compositions of ferrite elements including chunks of steel, unstable accumulations of iron filings, wires, and nails, capturing metaphorically the way great power can be exerted invisibly. Goodwin commented, “The words ‘Steel Notes’ connote for me some kind of note taking, a tough understanding, a tough coping with painful information we get that just seems hopeless. Steel seems to me to have this impenetrable quality, like some of the issues that are so overwhelming and so desperate. I have incorporated quotes by various writers on the Steel Notes that have been in my notebooks for a long time. I found a way to use them to say what I wanted to say…. I see the magnets as having an aura… and also as exerting a tremendous pressure.”

The magnetic field presented Goodwin with an ideal medium to impart an element of chance or tenuousness, aspects she strived for in her drawings. As is found throughout her oeuvre, the effect of these small pieces depends on a play of visible substance and intangible presence. Steel Notes represents an important pause in Goodwin’s work that witnesses her search for new material effects and methods, which she expands in later sculptural works.