The work itself, if not insane, is certainly tremendous - as befits the tremendous scale of the urban environments it conjures. Walk into the gallery at RISD, and what you see is a wall-to-wall grid of chunky square plinths of varying height supporting a dizzying array of buildings, bridges, smokestacks, stairways, girders, beams, and bricks, as well as hundreds of gangly little people, all laboring away like hapless minions. It’s a heaving metropolis, and it’s all made from glazed stoneware, modeled and fired by Zimmerman himself.
As installed by the Portuguese architect Tiago Montepegado, some parts of the piece extend diagonally from the plinths to the wall; others are mounted on the walls themselves. The structures get quite fanciful at times. They can put you in mind of the sinister, vertiginous power of Piranesi’s imaginary prisons.
But because of the medium, they have a haphazard, homemade feel, too. They are enlivened by irresolute angles, knobbly surfaces, and various other imperfections. Consequently, the impression is not of some gleaming new Abu Dhabi, all glass-sheathed and immaculate, but of a city besmirched and forlorn - hints, perhaps, of 1920s and ’30s Brooklyn, where Zimmerman grew up, or of Manhattan, where he lives now. There are also various indirect allusions to Bruegel, Bosch, Ensor, and Guston - all artists who captured something of the heavy lyricism of human toil.
But as I wandered among the wonders and ruins of “Inner City,’’ bending to peer more closely at Zimmerman’s gauche figures in improbable headgear carrying miscellaneous tools, working alone or in convict-like gangs, I came to think of “Inner City’’ as a metaphor for the mind, too. And especially I thought of Saul Bellow’s haunting passage in “The Adventures of Augie March’’ - so apt that I’m going to quote it in full:
