As time plods along, her lawyers maintain, artwork that might be fixed runs the risk of becoming irreparable. In an ideal world, Ms. Rockburne would have the pieces restored now and hope for reimbursement later. But, as she explained, she is without the extra half-million dollars that it would demand. Even with her place in the firmament — pieces bought over the years by MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, and work currently on display at Dia Beacon and the Pompidou Center — her wealth resides largely in her real estate asset, one she was fortunate enough to acquire in 1979, with the help of bank loans, when the building went co-op.
Obviously there are many artists of the same period who were not as lucky, either in terms of the recognition they received or the investments they were able to make. And yet it would be easier to find a billy goat on an expressway than locate anyone in SoHo who still lives the way Ms. Rockburne does — in perfect consonance with creative purity.
In place of a proper kitchen — instead of the 60-inch Wolf range with a companion set of wall ovens that you would ordinarily find in a loft of this size today — she has a row of white appliances that seem to date from the moment of her arrival. With the exception of a single small bedroom and a grouping of furniture covered either in bedspreads or drop cloths — I couldn’t tell — the space is entirely given over to her work.
Not long after I showed up, Ms. Rockburne…
