March 22 to May 5, 2012
529 West 20th Street, 2nd floor
New York City, 212-366-6939

Installation view, exhibition under review, of Beryl Korot, Text and Commentary, 1976-1977. Five-channel video installation, black and white, with weavings, drawings, pictographic video notations, 30 minutes, stereo sound. Photo by John Berens. Courtesy of bitforms gallery nyc.

The three installations in bitform’s Beryl Korot mini-survey, incorporating no fewer than six different media formats to capture our attention, exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated dictum that “the medium is the message.”  One of Korot’s original motives, over thirty years ago, was to get us out of our homes, away from our TV sets and into a public space for viewing multichannel video work of intriguing complexity.  In this age of instant messaging and Twitter, it is refreshing to encounter a video artist whose labor-intensive use of the computer as an extension of her hand slows us down so that we can more carefully observe what is before us.

The show begins with Korot’s signature installation, Text and Commentary (1976-77), first shown the year it was made at the Leo Castelli Gallery. In this multi-modal piece she first prepared a handloom and then made a series of geometric weavings, simultaneously videotaping this rhythmic process.   The installation includes five delicate black, grey, and beige weavings hung vertically from the ceiling across from video screens that document their making.  On one wall at the entrance to the gallery are soft-edge geometric pencil drawings on graph paper of the central portions of the weavings.  The pictographic notations on another wall are used by Korot to choreograph the minute-by-minute coordination of the five different yet related 30-minute videos.  Some of the pictographs resemble a blend of computer bar codes and American Indian petroglyphs.   While these weavings and the drawings are finished works in their own right, at a deeper level they correspond to César Paternosto’s insight, proposed in The Stone and the Thread (1989/1996), that the Pre-Columbian Andean textile patterns are not merely decorative but served as a carrier of coded information in the absence of a written alphabet.  Quite literally, the medium was also the message.

Through her use of weaving as a medium, Korot links information processing and communications systems both past and future. She recognized how the Jacquard loom, which made modern weaving possible through the use of punch cards to guide the hooks and harness for the weave’s design, was a kind of proto-computer.  Focusing on the importance of line as the organizer of information across time, Korot has observed how “we read line by line, weavers create their patterns line by line, (and) electronic cameras read an image at 30 frames per second”.  This can be extended to computers, which use lines of data to perform their operations.  Korot stimulates us to see how an object—the weaving—can both encode the history of a culture and reflect the personal mark of the artist, something she herself accomplishes even in technologically based work.

Beryl Korot, Yellow Water Taxi, 2003 (video still). Single channel video, 2 mins, stereo sound, edition of 10. Courtesy of bitforms gallery nyc.

Yellow Water Taxi (2003, 2 minutes) is a visual treat of video mastery. We watch a ballet of bright yellow water taxis pass us by at different speeds.   At one point, the taxis stop and park on the right and left edges of the small screen.  But the water continues to move with the five blue bands of water becoming fewer as some of them are overtaken by white ones. Although devoid of a specific narrative, the variety of visual elements is more than sufficient to sustain our interest as it massages our sensory-motor system.   The video has a hand-made feel.  The backdrop is a piece of woven canvas whose texture is plainly seen and felt.  Learning later that Korot conceived of this work while taking a walk along the Esplanade where the Twin Towers had recently stood and watching the taxis ferrying people back and forth from New York to New Jersey added a layer of poignancy.

The final video, Florence (2008, 10 ½ minutes) is concrete poetry with a definite narrative structure.  The backdrop is another weaving, although this time without the threads. There is a black and white grid of snowstorms, waterfalls, and boiling water stitched together on the computer.  Superimposed over the visual grid and the sound track of driving rain is a visual display of actual words of Florence Nightingale, creating a haunting sensory experience.  The words enter the large screen at the top and move vertically downward at different speeds and in different sizes, pooling at the bottom.  The viewer is swept up by the challenges faced by Nightingale in caring for wounded men on the battlefield with no medical provisions. The power of Nightingale’s words bombarding us against a backdrop of darkness and rain is so compelling that we also empathize with her suffering.   Nightingale used her religious belief to overcome the doubts experienced as a woman to achieve a certain degree of power and autonomy in the male-dominated medical establishment.  Korot’s magisterial video conveys this struggle in a way that is far more powerful than would be possible from a straight reading of her diaries.  The complex combination of cascading words against a stormy background makes the viewer a more active participant in grasping Nightingale’s message.

The three works in this show each view art and mind as a palimpsest as Korot creates layers of organization that must be peeled back as part of an embodied search for meaning.  The result is a high-tech version of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  As with Dickinson, one sometimes has to strain to hear the artist’s voice hovering just below the surface.  But connection, once made, vindicates the effort.

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Mary Corse: New Work
February 2 – March 10, 2012, Lehmann Maupin Gallery
540 West. 26th Street, New York City, 212-255-2923

Installation Shot, Mary Corse: New Work, February 2 to March 10, 2012. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery

The concurrent exhibitions of Doug Wheeler’s environmental light installation at David Zwirner Gallery and Mary Corse’s light-infused paintings at Lehmann Maupin Gallery provide us with an exceptional opportunity to understand how L. A. Light and Space art can sensitize us to the subtleties of the world around us.  These two artists rely on fields of white, intense lighting and a mobile observer to provide some exhilarating surprises.  While both Wheeler and Corse privilege direct perception over thinking, there are also some significant differences in the ways in which their art creates heightened sensory awareness.

Over thirty years ago, the psychologist William Ittelson drew a critical distinction between environment and object perception.  In object perception, one surrounds the object; in environment perception, one is surrounded by it.  One observes an object; one explores an environment using many sensory modalities.  Ittelson noted that with environment perception “the very distinction between self and nonself breaks down: the environment surrounds, enfolds, engulfs….”  What makes the work of Wheeler and Corse so innovative is that it causes us to alternate between object and environment perception.   This is consistent with Venturi’s preference in Complexity and Contradiction for both-and over either-or.   As we will see, these two L.A. artists accomplish this balancing act in different ways.

Your adventure in Wheeler’s Infinity Environment begins in the antechamber where you appear to be facing a luminous translucent wall that makes you hesitant to move forward.  So you approach it very slowly.  Your initial surprise when you reach the “wall” is that it is not solid, but rather an opening into a space filled with what appears to be thick fog. The morphing of a diaphonous wall into a vaporous fog creates a shift from perceiving an object to perceiving an environment.  Once inside the space, you can’t see its perimeter, so you can’t figure out its shape without extended exploration.  As you reach out your hands in front of you, you can see your fingers clearly but your don’t know how much further the space extends.  So again you walk slowly.  The next surprise is that your feet provide you with some critical information.  Suddenly, the floor begins to curve upward and outward in front of you but your outstretched arms do not hit the wall.  Are you inside a giant egg?

Installation shot, Doug Wheeler: January 17 - February 25, 2012. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery

The effects Wheeler creates are most dramatic and thrilling if you inhabit the space alone, but this has generally not been possible due to the popularity of this exhibition.  Indeed, your entire experience is radically altered by the presence of other people who appear to be crystal clear, almost hyper-real.  By observing the positions of the other people, you can see how far the floor extends in each direction. In this space, “you feel with your eyes” (Turrell) and see with your body.  The sensations created by this Infinity Space range from disorienting to frightening to exhilarating, often alternating within an individual.   And to heighten the experience, Wheeler gradually modifies the ambience by shifting the lighting from dawn to dusk and back again over some thirty minutes.  This extreme environment attunes our sensory-motor system to differentiate things it never noticed before, a major goal of the Light and Space artists.

Mary Corse’s wall paintings are essentially two-dimensional.  One would, therefore, expect them to function as objects and not environments.  But, almost magically, the tiny glass microspheres embedded in Corse’s five large white paintings invite you to treat them as environments to be explored.   You notice immediately that each painting changes dramatically as you cross in front of it so what you experience is not one painting, but multiple different paintings.  For example, the large work, Untitled 4 Inner Bands shifts from an absorbent matte cream-colored monochrome with barely perceptible vertical bands to a stark white mirror-like surface that glistens and reflects your head and body movements.  As you move back and forth in front of the painting, you see anywhere between two and five vertical bands which reverse their colors as you move, the darker ones becoming light and the lighter ones becoming dark.  From certain vantage points you can detect some horizontal brush strokes that first appear as ghostly vapors and then become eight defined horizontal bands that weave across the vertical ones to form a grid.   Careful looking and continual movement combine to provide an uncanny experience that simulates key aspects of environment perception.  The ambiguity of the overall encounter resembles a reversible-figure task used in Gestalt psychology research in which the  perceived image shifts dramatically from a vase to two figures or from a duck to a rabbit.  This effect results from the limitations of our perceptual apparatus that allow us to see only one of these images at a time.

Wheeler and Corse create different kinds of ambiguity to achieve their effects.  The ambiguity of Wheeler’s void is one of a homogeneous field in which you seek to discover its boundaries, so as to both find your place and try to locomote effectively.  With Corse, the problem is not lack of structure but competing structures.  Monochromatic surfaces, minimal geometric bars, and abstract expressionist brushstrokes inhabit the same canvas and alternate taking center stage.  However, in both Wheeler and Corse, what turns looking into seeing is the coordination between looking and doing.  What we do affects what we see; what we see affects what we do.

Finally, each artist takes you on a journey that explores the relationship between order and disorder in different ways.  In Corse, if conditions are right, one’s movements can control the fluctuation between order and disorder in a back and forth dance that can be highly pleasurable.  In Wheeler, there is a more entropic experience that, at least momentarily, is more frightening and disorienting.  Control is neither possible nor desirable for Wheeler.  In his “whiteout” environment a lack of control is central to the participant’s experience of boundlessness. Despite these differences, Wheeler and Corse provide something that is very atypical for the New York lifestyle: there is a slowing down of our internal clock.   We are able to surrender ourselves to a kind of stillness that sets the stage for retuning our sensory-motor system.  This sensory learning increases our ability to differentiate the essential from the unessential in the course of exploring realms where objects morph into environments and environments morph into objects.

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November 30 to December 4, 2011
at the Art Miami Pavilion, Wynwood, Miami, Florida

A view of Edelman Arts booth at Art Miami, showing Titian's St Sebastian and a contemporary interpretation of the same work by Michael Murphy. Courtesy of Edelman Arts, Inc.

Once again, in our opinion, Art Miami proved the strongest satellite fair this year. Now in its twenty-second year and Miami’s longest running art fair, Art Miami attracted some 50,000 visitors to over 110 galleries (22 first time) from 18 countries in Europe, Latin America, India, the Middle East and the United States.  With works that ranged from Titian to Pop to cutting edge contemporary, Art Miami offered many surprises and unexpected pleasures.

A real Titian at Art Miami?  His St. Sebastian, dated to 1530, at Edelman Arts (NYC) was the centerpiece of a smart thematic show of more than a dozen painters and sculptors, including Red Grooms and Carlos Betancourt who used images of the androgynous saint in their work.  Further proof that powerful portrait painting thrives came in the form of Captain, by David Bates, at Arthur Roger Gallery (New Orleans).

Among the strong examples of familiar American artists was a quintessential Milton Avery painting at Lewallyn Gallery (Santa Fe), Chinese Checkers (March Avery with Vincenzo Spagna), circa 1941, with his characteristic muted colors and quirky rendering of figures that bordered on folk art.  At Antoine Helwaser Gallery (NYC), an impressive early Olitski with a large red orb and a small green one was one of many Olitskis and Kenneth Nolands at this fair, as at Art Basel/Miami Beach, suggesting a resurgence of interest in Color Field painting.  Helwaser also displayed several Abstract Expressionist works including a red and black Adolf Gottlieb sunburst painting and a Robert Motherwell collage painting.  His reclining nude painting by Tom Wesselman was one of many Pop artists in evidence at the fair with a suite of Andy Warhol’s Marilyns at Arcature Fine Art (Palm Beach, FL), a brawny Alan D’Arcangelo highway painting from 1964 at Mark Borghi (NYC), and several Robert Indiana sculptures, including Hope and its Hebrew counterpart, Tikvah, both at Rosenbaum Contemporary (Boca Raton, FL). There were artists who bridged a number of styles including the still underappreciated Jack Tworkov who was represented by a second-generation Abstract Expressionist work from his Barrier Series (1963) at Mark Borghi (NYC) and a geometric work from his Knight series (1976) at Hollis Taggart (NYC).  Other artists’ artists from the 1950s and 1960s who do not fall easily into a single style included Perle Fine at Spanierman Modern (NYC) and Ward Jackson at David Richard Contemporary (Santa Fe, NM).  It was also a treat to see an uncharacteristic one-foot square monochrome painting from 1960 in by the sculptor, John Chamberlain using automobile lacquer and a square metal template.

David Bates, Captain, 2010. Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans

Several examples of Los Angeles artists currently featured in Pacific Standard Time, the Getty Museum’s initiative of more than 60 museums between Santa Barbara and San Diego (read our review here) were also in evidence at Art Miami.  Scott White (La Jolla) brought numerous examples of De Wain Valentine’s light and space sculpture including two knockouts–the massive Column Mauve from 1968 and the exquisite Circle Blue-Magenta Flow from 1970.  Charlotte Jackson (Santa Fe) exhibited some recent Ron Davis two-tone red paintings, David Richards Contemporary (Santa Fe) displayed a lively geometric abstract painting, Apertures-Eyesights from 2000 by Roland Reiss and Leslie Sacks Contemporary (Santa Monica, CA), featured two crisp red and black striped acrylic paintings (2011) by Charles Christopher Hill.

Not surprisingly, there were several first-rate examples of Latin American art including Jesus de Soto’s geometric optical constructions at Leon Tovar (NYC) and Victor Lugo’s figurative paintings at the Ginocchio Gallery (Mexico City) including a smart diptych with a landscape painting that appeared to be cut from its frame alongside a trompe l’oeil painting of the frame and stretcher supports from which it had been cut.

A new art medium that emerged this year at the fair is the use of fiber optics in tapestry. The Catherine Clark Gallery (San Francisco, CA) displayed 50 Different Minds by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese that used hand-woven fiber-optic thread, custom electronics and software, and RGB full-spectrum LED lights.   Connected to the Internet, the colors in the nine squares of the weaving changed continuously according to the real-time content of Twitter messages. There were two other notable examples of woven fiber-optic art in Miami Beach—one by Daniel Buren, Two Rectangles of Electric Light: white and blue situated work, 2011 using LED at the Lisson Gallery (London) at AB/MB and the other at Design Miami at Galerie Maria Wettergren (Paris) who showcased the seductive floor to ceiling fiber-optic textile draperies of Astrid Krogh of Denmark that continuously changed color.

There was a lot of buzz around a relatively small Gerhard Richter painting, Abtraktus Bild, 2001 at the Michael Schultz Gallery (Berlin, Seoul, Beijing) when it was reported sold for $1.6m. Seeing the new intimate documentary film, Gerhard Richter Painting by filmmaker Corinna Belz at Art Basel gave us a deeper appreciation for the arduous and self-critical process Richter uses in making one of these paintings.  Another German booth, Galerie Renate Bender (Munich) was particularly appealing with intricately folded felt sculptures by Peter Weber, new monochromatic abstract paintings by Matt McClune, and ambitious amoeboid wall sculptures by Bill Thompson, reminiscent of L.A. Finish Fetish sculptures. Also compelling at John Roger Gallery was Dawn DeDeaux’s plank leaning against the wall (reminiscent of John McCracken). Entitled 8 Feet of Water, it recorded the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in a digital transparency mounted on a tall narrow acrylic support.

Chul Hyun Ahn, Visual Echo Experiment, 2011. Plywood, fluorescent lights, mirrors, color gels, 91 x 91 x 5.5 inches, edition of 3. Courtesy of C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore

Chul Hyun Ahn’s work presented by the C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD) was a showstopper. Using lights and mirrors, his works appear to recede indefinitely despite the fact that they are less than six inches deep.  His 2011 Visual Echo Experiment placed in one of the large fair crosswalks was particularly arresting as was Forked, 2003 in the C. Grimaldis Gallery booth.  An interesting complement to this western art of illusion was a refreshing variety of optical aboriginal painting from Australia at the Leslie Smith Gallery (Amsterdam).

Thanks to Julia Draganovic, the fair’s curator of six videos in the Persol Art Video and New Media Lounge, “ZOOOM! Decoding Common Practice”, we were treated to a trip along Beijing’s major east-west artery in Ai Weiwei’s 10-hour, 13 minute video, Chang’an Boulevard. All strata of the city’s society are depicted in riveting fashion in fixed, one-minute long segments, taken at intervals of 50 meters (approximately 164 feet).

The Richard Levy Gallery (Albuquerque, NM) exhibited Constance deJong’s intriguing bronze and wood wall sculpture, Section, 1991 highlighting an important aspect of this and the other satellite fairs—the opportunity to see regionally well-known artists receive the broader exposure they merit.

As we were leaving the fair, we spotted a vertical work at the Persol display by Chiara Moreschi and Rodger Stevens whose message took us a minute or so to decode but seemed very appropriate: “Beauty is never useless”.

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Doug Wheeler, DW 68 VEN MCASD 11, 1968/2011. White UV neon light installation, 18 x 34 x 33-3/4 feet. Courtesy of the artist

If ever there was a moment to reassess the 1960s Light and Space artists of Los Angeles, that moment is now.  At the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a recently reinstalled permanent gallery places three works from L.A. Light and Space art in critical dialogue with four works of New York Minimalism, which also had it defining years in the middle 1960s.  Simultaneously, a representative sampling of the Light and Space movement is presently on view at more than a dozen museums and gallery exhibits throughout Southern California participating in the Getty Foundation’s omnibus initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.  The pivotal survey, Phenomenal California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through January 22, seen together with more focused shows at the other venues, listed at the end of this dispatch, allows us to grasp the fundamental characteristics of the Light and Space tradition that differentiates it from the Minimalism that was being practiced in New York by the likes of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Frank Stella et al.

At a meta-level, the L.A. aesthetic may be characterized as “truth equals beauty” as distinguished from the “truth to materials” aesthetic prevailing in N.Y.  The N.Y. aesthetic embraced impermeable industrial materials and downplayed shadows and reflections in favor of the concreteness and stability of the specific object.  In contrast, L.A. artists, especially the Finish Fetish group, rejected concreteness and turned instead to newly available translucent and transparent materials—polyester resin, Plexiglas, fiberglass, coated glass, and plastics of all kinds.  These materials reflected, refracted, and filtered light, thus opening up new options for sculpture.  They were particularly well suited to capturing and transforming the ephemeral luminosity of the ocean and the smog-besmirched sky, as well as the high gloss brilliance of surfboards and autos that were primary everyday experiences for these artists.  In this context, the L.A. artists turned Stella’s reductive, “what you see is what you see” inside out by appending a question mark.

Indeed, these L.A. works could be Michael Fried’s worst nightmare—their theatricality is an integral part of their aesthetic DNA.  They make us keenly aware that what you do affects what you see, and what you see affects what you do.  The properties of an effective resin piece don’t belong to the work alone.  Their color, shape, and surface effects are contingent on the spatial/temporal positions of observers as they move across, walk around, or enter the piece.  The spheres of Helen Pashgian and some of the boxes of Larry Bell change dramatically depending on the trajectory of the observer’s movements.  Certain works also depend upon the presence or absence of other people to bring out their complexity.  This occurs with Robert Irwin’s acrylic column and Bell’s five large coated glass panels, both installed strategically in busy and visually noisy locations on the Museum’s first floor.   These are socially contingent works that reach their potential when the movements of other people are reflected and refracted.

De Wain Valentine, Diamond Column, 1978 (video still). Polyester resin, 91-1/ 2 x 44 x 12 inches. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.© 1978 De Wain Valentine. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

Light and Space artists play the role of Shamans.   They have the uncanny ability to make the immaterial material and the material immaterial. They take liquid resin and make of it solid forms (Peter Alexander, Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine) or use light (James Turrell) or scrim (Irwin) to create the illusion of solid forms.  In doing so, strange things happen.  The observer is forced to confront objects and spaces that have hallucinatory properties not unlike the drooping watches in Dali’s Persistence of Memory (1931).  These works challenge our assumptions about ordinary reality to a point where, using our perceptual, sensory-motor apparatus, we try to disambiguate forms as they appear to morph before our eyes. We feel compelled to walk up to and look behind a “floating” Irwin disc to see if it is attached to the wall or we stop short and gaze intently as soon as we detect an Irwin scrim that resizes a room by appearing to be a wall.  We feel compelled to check out whether the top portion of a tall Alexander Wedge is really still there when the bottom is deep orange and the color gradually fades to clear near the top;  to walk around Valentine’s Diamond Column to see how it is possible for people passing behind it to first appear, then disappear, and then return as three simultaneous images facing in different directions;  to walk up to Irwin’s dot painting and Pashgian’s white disc to explore how they are able to hover and pulsate;  to walk right up to the front of a Mary Corse painting with reflective glass microspheres after walking across it and seeing how it changes dramatically from matte to shiny and from totally uniform to containing grids or columns.  And we feel compelled to approach the wall works of Pashgian, Corse, Ron Cooper and Doug Wheeler, to see if there are lights embedded within them.  In all of these explorations, labeling is futile.  We have no choice but to trust our senses.

Several Light and Space artists are particularly good at making color diffuse into space.  Wheeler’s 35 foot-square room installation with one wall completely outlined in white neon UV lights suffuses the entire space in an ethereal atmosphere of blue air.  Other effects are achieved by introducing a temporal dimension to heighten color intensity.  Turrell’s installation (Wedgework V, 1975) requires several minutes of adjustment time in an initially pitch black space before a red wall begins to appear and then intensifies to a fiery glow.  Bruce Nauman’s narrow tunnel with two parallel walls one foot apart and forty feet long lit with green lights seduces us to inch slowly through it sideways.  When we exit this disorienting light tunnel into a wider space, everything appears purple for several seconds— the people, the walls, and the Pacific Ocean seen through an immense glass window.

The other museums and galleries showing Light and Space work (listed below) give us an appreciation of the career trajectories and new options being opened by several of the artists already mentioned (e.g., Alexander, Irwin, Pashgian, Valentine).  In particular, their new work, by utilizing the wall, reinvigorates a dialogue between painting and sculpture, begun earlier by John McCracken and Craig Kauffman.   These shows also introduce us to established but less well known artists like Tom Eatherton at Pomona College who has created an intensely blue space that creates the illusion that you are walking into the middle of a room-size painting.  And, thanks to storefront spaces like Ice Gallery, we can see emerging artists like Michael James Armstrong who is advancing the use of scrims in new and exciting directions.

After seeing these works in many different settings, we were left with three concluding observations. First, the Light and Space artists were determined to make us reexamine how we perceive the world—what is illusory and what is real.  Second, these artists shamelessly court beauty, an aesthetic questioned by postmodern art but openly embraced in the design aesthetic of Steve Jobs and in the reflective surfaces of Frank Gehry’s signature architecture—two iconic Californians who may be seen as heirs to the Light and Space culture.  Third, the relationship between Minimalism and the Light and Space tradition is a complex one, as can be seen, in the MOMA reinstallation, in the atmospheric effects of Dan Flavin’s light sculpture and the exquisite use of colored Plexiglas by Donald Judd. The fruitfulness of this exchange calls out for further study.  The next step?  We suggest a comprehensive exhibition combining Light and Space and East Coast Minimalism that would be seen on both coasts.  Such an exhibition would enable us to appreciate more fully the unique and shared strategies that animate those aspects of Minimalism that dare to flirt with beauty.

Helen Pashgian, Untitled, 1968-69, cast polyester resin. 8 inches diameter. Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

Los Angeles Light and Space Works on View in Southern California, Fall, 2011

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
September 25, 2011 to January 22, 2012
700 Prospect Street, La Jolla, CA and 1100 & 1101 Kettner Boulevard, San Diego, CA, between Broadway and B Street. (858) 454-3541 (Catalogue available)

and

Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.  October 1, 2011 to February 5, 2012.  Light and Space art is a subset of the exhibition. (Catalogue)

From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Grey Column at Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.  September 13, 2011 to March 11, 2012. (Catalogue)

California Art: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation at Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. August 27 to December 2, 2011.  Light and Space art is a subset of the exhibition. (Catalogue)

It Happened at Pomona at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969—1973; Part I Hal Glicksman at Pomona, Pomona College Museum of Art, 333 N. College Way, Claremont. August 30 to November 6, 2011.   (Catalogue)

James Turrell’s Dividing the Light (2007) at Draper Courtyard of the Lincoln & Edmonds Buildings, corner of 6^th Street and College Way, Pomona College, Claremont.  Permanent.

Mary Corse Recent Paintings at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through October, 2011.

Robert Irwin Column (1970) at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through October 18, 2011.

Helen Pashgian Columns and Walls at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through November, 2011.

De Wain Valentine Early Resins 1968-1972 and New Work at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through November, 2011.

James Turrell Present Tense at Kayne, Griffen, Corcoran, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica. September 15 to December 17, 2011.

Larry Bell Early Work at Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, B5B, Santa Monica. October 22 to November 26, 2011.

Fred Eversley: Four Decades—1970-2010 at William Turner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, E1, Santa Monica.  September 24 to October 30, 2011.

Robert Irwin Way Out West at L & M Gallery, 660 Venice Boulevard, Venice. September 17 to October 22, 2011.

Peter Alexander, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, New Out West at Quint Gallery, 7547 Girard Ave., La Jolla. September 23 to November 12, 2011.

Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, De Wain Valentine, Eric Johnson: Shift. Space. Slick at Scott White Contemporary Art, 939 W. Kalmia, San Diego. September 9 to October 8, 2011.

Michael James Armstrong: A Study in Transparency at Ice Gallery, 3417 30^th Street, San Diego. September 18 to October 9, 2011.

James Turrell, Wedgewood V, 1975, Fluorescent Light, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Abstract Select Ltd. UK

March 9 – April 16, 2011
45 East 78th Street
New York City, (212) 861-0020

Günther Uecker, Chair II, 1963. Nails on wood, 34-1/4 x 18-1/2 x 17-3/4 inches. Courtesy of L&M Arts, New York

Günther Uecker is a significant and complex artist who has built a career out of interweaving nails and light in ways that often require the active participation of the viewer.  His art is not, in terms of Matisse’s famous aphorism, “art for a tired businessman”.  Indeed, one of the major targets of Uecker’s aesthetic mission is not to allow our hypothetical tired businessman even a chair to sit on.  Instead, we are presented with a chair (Chair II, 1963) that has its sitability undermined by an infestation of nails.  This chair represents Uecker’s attempt to create an art that “invades the everyday world in which we live” (to quote the exhibition catalogue) in order to subvert the slick consumerism of his day. In this work and others, nails appear to function simultaneously as a source of protection and as an icon of suffering.

Indeed, Uecker’s moral complexity undermines the very movement that he was initially associated with—the Zero Group—as its third founding member with Otto Piene and Heinz Mack.  While Uecker shares with this group an interest in kinetic art and the use of machines to play with light and shadow, he is not merely reacting against the subjectivity of the dominant aesthetic legacy of his time, Abstract Expressionism.  Aspects of Uecker’s work are a reaction against the “zero hour” in Post-war Germany that allowed people to begin anew without coming to terms with their complicit role in the Holocaust.  Like other children of the perpetrator generation, including Anselm Kiefer, he acknowledges the past but seeks to do better—to transcend “the silence of the elders” as Uecker indicated in the sensitive catalogue interview with Hans Obrist.

What has emerged is an art in which time plays a significant role.  This dynamic strategy is well illustrated in Sand Mill (1970), a ten-foot round “earthwork” taken indoors that celebrates the work of the farmer laboring with a plow.  Installed by the artist, using an electric motor, wood and a cord to drag stones around a low mound of rocky earth, Sand Mill cyclically creates and erases concentric furrows, powerfully depicting destruction and renewal. The circular format of this work is anticipated by a wall work like Spiral, 1958, in which Uecker used a nail to laboriously create a target-like structure.

Another major kinetic work is Five Light Disks, Cosmic Vision, 1961-1981, a configuration of five disks with nailed surfaces that expose us to Uecker’s rough beauty.  Like Sand Mill, there is a concern with time, but here time slows down, producing a new reality for these nailed surfaces, which both reflect light and partition it.  They are Uecker’s Impressionist paintings of the cosmos.  Varying the colors of the five disks and their rates of movement serve to counteract the aggressive aura that some of his nail structures create.  Further, they require the observer to participate in completing the work by moving up to and across the disks that span more than 23 feet.  In so doing, one can notice that two of the disks move almost imperceptibly, one has a red floor pedal that requires the observer to power the pulley, and one does not move all but appears to do so because it is the only one in which the black nails are of different diameters and lengths.  This work demonstrates that what we see affects what we do and what we do affects what we see – a basic tenet of J.J. Gibson’s model of perception.

Günther Uecker, Five Light Disks, Cosmic Vision, 1961-1981. Nails on cavnas on wood, wooden case, electric motor, spotlight, 94-1/2 x 283-1/2 x 15-3/4 inches. Courtesy of L&M Arts, New York

Other works border on the figural but ultimately focus less on the object and more on our encounter with it.  Perhaps the most powerful example is New York Dancer I, 1965, which is a human-scaled vertical cloth structure covered with nails that stands on the floor and rotates feverishly and noisily when you press a foot pedal.  While it was in motion, we backed away, afraid that a nail might escape.   This piece has the visual impact of many African fetish figures that are invested with powers ranging from protection to revenge.  But Uecker is an artist of many moods.  There is a more lyrical five-foot square wall piece that is composed of white nails and uses multiple shadows to create the sensation that a spectral bird-like figure is levitating off the canvas (White Bird, 1964).

Taken together, this exhibition is like Benjamin’s “angel of history” where we are driven simultaneously to look backward and forward.  The blend of geometry and expressionism is Post-Minimal at a time when Minimalism itself was largely nascent.  Moreover, it appears that Uecker’s generativity has opened up options for several artists over the past forty-five years, as seen in Eva Hesse’s breast-like wall pieces and cubes with black rubber protuberances, Tara Donovan’s recent pin ensembles at PACE last month that created fields of movement, and Mona Hatoum’s, Plus and Minus sand installation at MOMA in 2007 that created cycles of creation and destruction.

Kudos to L & M Arts for mounting this show with loans from museums and private collections.  Whereas Uecker’s work has been well known and appreciated in Europe for more than five decades, it has received little attention in New York.   This eye- and mind-stretching exhibition of his early paintings, sculptures, and installations should have gone some way toward rectifying this omission.

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John McLaughlin: Hard Edge Classicist
Paintings from the 1950s to the 1970s
January 7 – February 13, 2010
Greenberg Van Doren Gallery
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City 212 445 0444

Laddie John Dill: Contained Radiance
January 15 – February 20, 2010
Nyehaus
358 West 20th Street (East of 9th Ave.)
New York City, 212 995 1785

Ronald Davis: Monochrome Paintings From The 1960s
Franklin Parrasch Gallery
January 6 – February 20, 2010
20 West 57th Street
New York City, 212 246 5360

Doug Wheeler, Untitled 1969. Acrylic, neon tubing, and wood, 91-1/2 x 91-1/2 x 7-1/2 inches. All images this article courtesy David Zwirner Gallery.

“Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970” at David Zwirner Gallery, curated by Tim Nye and Kristine Bell,  is a must see for anyone who wants to appreciate the creative energy that boiled over in the mid-to late 1960s in Los Angeles.  While seven of the ten artists in this show have had one person shows in New York within the past few years, it isn’t until you see these artists together that you can appreciate the multiple ways in which they shared an L.A. aesthetic at the same time as maintaining easily recognizable individual styles.
Several artists in this show reflect the Light and Space Movement (Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, and Laddie Dill) while others represent the Finish Fetish Group (Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine).  However, the boundaries are permeable:   Alexander, whose tall wedges disappear at the top and Bell, whose cubes are both solid and transparent, belong in both groups.

The Light and Space artists make us question the reliability of what we see.  The Irwin room has three works that are best seen in midday light.  Some visitors experience the room as empty when they first enter it.  The large slightly convex almost square dot painting by Robert Irwin (Untitled, 1963-65) is like a fuzzy Josef Albers painting observed from behind a scrim.  This is a slow work where patience is rewarded.  You begin to see a series of soft-edged nested squares that hover on the surface.   Directly opposite it is Irwin’s white formed acrylic plastic convex disc  (Untitled, 1969).  A black horizontal line in the center of the diameter first captures your attention.  After that, the disc became visible and then its sides and bottom edge slowly disappear into the wall surrounding it.  There is visual magic and ascetic beauty here: virtually everyone seeing this work walks up to the wall to look at its acrylic lacquered surface and what lies behind it.

A few steps away in a perfectly proportioned, dimly lit, sterile, white room with white painted floors is Doug Wheeler’s Untitled (1969).  This soft-edged acrylic and wood square box, the same color as the walls, has a perimeter of fuzzy white neon light that provides an experience of a transcendental floating rectangle. In two totally darkened rooms, Turrell’s mastery of light goes one step further.  Projections of light read as solid forms.  Juke Green (1969) appears to be a green cube that is leaning against the back corner of one room.  Gard Red (1969) reads as a solid pyramid that has been chiseled out of one corner wall in the other room.  Irwin, Wheeler, and Turrell expand our perception by forcing us to use our eyes, our bodies and our minds to disambiguate what we’re seeing.

A dimly lit room on the way to the Finish Fetish works contains a mesmerizing floor installation by Laddie John Dill, an artist whose in-between location is a bridge between the two L.A. groups.  Untitled (1969) consists of graceful mounds of brown and tan sand that are sliced through at an angle by large squares of glass revealing marble-cake sand patterns.  Smaller pieces of square glass are placed horizontally to the viewer above a row of green argon with mercury lights that are hidden below the sand.  The lights can only be seen in the reflections at the top and fronts of the glass, creating an otherworldly landscape.

The last two rooms of the show are devoted to artists captivated by new industrial materials available to them largely from the aerospace industry.  It is widely acknowledged that these artists were inspired by the glossy finishes used on the fast cars, sleek motorcycles, exquisite aerodynamic surf boards, and alluring billboards around them.  When Walter Brooke advises Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967), “I want to say one word to you… Plastics”, his advice had already been heeded in L.A.  Plastics of all types opened up new options in the realms of color, shape, translucency and size.  But, less well known is that some of these artists (for example, Alexander, Valentine, and Dill) also turned to nature for their inspiration. They tried to capture the transient beauty of sea, sky and sand, a beauty that extended to smog besotted colors.  As a result, some of their works transgressed the boundaries between Light and Space and Finish Fetish.  In this connection, Peter Alexander’s work is particularly interesting because he creates immaculate objects that also have the perceptual concerns associated with the Light and Space artists.  However, when his works merged into their surroundings, he was less concerned with formal considerations than with capturing the transiency of the L.A.. sea and sky.  Two cast polyester resin pedestal pieces, Untitled (Window, 1968) and Green Wedge,(1969) and a tall floor piece (Blue Wedge, 1970) virtually disappear at the top as they become thinner and fade from dark pigment to no pigment.  De Wain Valentine, the acknowledged alchemist of the group, also made resin pieces (some of them vast and weighing several tons) during this period.  In this exhibition, he is represented by Triple Disk Red Metal Flake—Black Edge (1966), a sensuous molded fiberglass reinforced acrylic piece with the speckled iridescent finish of a car, motorcycle, or boat.  In fact, its gracefully rounded forms can allude to a series of breasts or the bows of three oncoming ships.

Craig Kauffman, Untitled 1969. Acrylic and lacquer on plastic, 73 x 8-1/2 x 50 inches

Laddie John Dill, Untitled 1969. Glass, sand, wood, and argon with mercury, dimensions variable (architecturally specific).

Helen Pashgian’s two small polyester and resin sculptures (both Untitled, 1968-69) have a complexity that belies their size.  One, a murky crystal-ball shaped work reveals two cylindrical forms that cut through the piece.  The other, a clear igloo-shaped work has two mirror-image half-spheres embedded at the top and near the bottom.  Larry Bell’s cubes are magical.  Placed in the center of the room, several of them reflect the works and the people that surround them.  Others can also be seen as allusionistic, as vessels that capture the L.A. smog. Two are particularly arresting.  The first is a small vacuum coated glass and chromium plated brass cube (1966) that has both bronze and turquoise vertical edges depending on where you stand.  The second, Glass Box with Ellipses (1964), with oval mirrored areas allows you to see yourself and then look inside the piece and straight down for an illusion of infinite depth.  Craig Kauffman used Plexiglas to create sensuous vacuum formed molded reliefs of intense colors with varying degrees of translucency.  Spray-painted on the back, three of these acrylic and lacquer Untitled Wall Reliefs (1968) in seductive hues of green, orange, and blue were attached to the wall. Among the John McCracken pieces are two of his signature polyester and resin planks (Think Pink and Red Plank, both 1967) that combine seductive color and immaculate surface with minimalist rigor of form, while functioning both as paintings and sculpture.

It is important to note that while others in the Finish Fetish group showed in New York in the 1960s, McCracken and Bell were more often included in Minimalism surveys in New York and Los Angeles.   It is perhaps not accidental, given Donald Judd’s friendship with Bell and his trips to L.A. that Judd, in the middle 1960s, began designing boxes and stacks using seductively colored Plexiglas.  The result was works that easily could fit in with aspects of the Finish Fetish L.A. culture.  Indeed, in reviewing a Judd exhibition, Rosalind Krauss observed that Judd’s works were both beautiful and illusionistic, properties that sharply transgress Judd’s own writings regarding what properties “specific objects” should have.  Even more telling, Robert Smithson’s labeling of “uncanny materiality” to aspects of Judd’s oeuvre could easily be applied as a general description of the Primary Atmospheres exhibition.  Indeed, perhaps the increasing use of plastics in New York eventually eroded some of the phenotypic differences between East and West Coast Minimalism, creating what James Meyer in his scholarly essay in “A Minimal Future?” (2004) referred to as a “Bicoastal Minimalism”.

It is indeed fortunate that concurrent with the Primary Atmospheres exhibition, there are three other Southern California artists exhibiting who relate either directly or indirectly to the David Zwirner show.  In particular, the exhibition of John McLaughlin’s work at Greenberg Van Doren is highly informative regarding the evolution of the L.A.  minimalist aesthetic.  His hard-edge reductive paintings created a climate for L.A. Minimalism.  McLaughlin progressively reduced his paintings to allow geometry and color to move from figure to ground, as line increasingly became a vehicle to explore space as pure form.  One could argue that the de-materialization of McLaughlin’s painting from its constructivist roots in geometry of varied forms and color—his “Finish Fetish” phase, exemplified by Untitled, (1952) – leads to his “Light and Space” phase in the 1960s and early 1970s (#8, 1963).  These largely black and white paintings synthesize Western Modernism and Eastern Philosophy.  They resonate with the attempt by Irwin, Turrell, and Wheeler to make the boundaries of their images merge with their surroundings.  In each case, the simplicity, clarity and self-discipline of the void creates a phenomenological experience that allows the observer, in McLaughlin’s terms, to learn more about himself than the artist.

Larry Bell, Untitled 1968. Vacuum coated glass and chromium plated brass, 4-1/4 x 4-1/4 x 4-1/4 inches

John McCracken, Red Plank 1967. Polyester resin, fiberglass, and plywood, 104-1/4 x 18-1/4 x 3-1/4 inches

The other two L.A. exhibits deserving of attention are Laddie John Dill at Nyehaus and Ron Davis at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery.  In Dill’s exhibition, we can observe the evolution from his horizontal and vertical pure “light sentences” affixed to the wall to his glass, sand, and light floor installations similar to the one at David Zwirner Gallery.   Light Sentence (1973) was inspired by the changing daylight during an average day in Taos, New Mexico.   While his light and sand works parallel Sonnier’s light pieces and Smithson’s dirt, gravel, mirror, and glass installations, his light sentences anticipate the fluorescent light pieces of Spencer Finch who sets about simulating the light at a specific time and place. The most dramatic piece in the Nyehaus show isDeath in Venice (1969), a large floor piece on the second floor of the gallery that calls to mind the canyon fires Dill experienced in the California landscape.  The red, yellow and blue neon and argon tubes lying on and under the sand create an aura of smoldering heat.

Ron Davis’s monochromatic pastel-colored, shaped canvases have never been exhibited in New York.  Of particular note are two works—the beautiful and majestic Big Orchid (1965), an angular pink painting in two sections and Bent Corner Slab (1965) a diamond-shaped green gold painting that is highly illusionistic with apparent folds in the canvas somewhat like Dorothea Rockburne’s work of the early 1970s.  These “in-between” works are the beginning of Davis’ move from painter to object maker.  Specifically, they anticipate his large geometrically shaped floor pieces (the Dodecagon Series) that use Finish Fetish materials of resin and fiberglass along with new technologies to trap the splatters and abstract forms of his expressionist brush strokes while maintaining the clarity of his high key colors.

These four exhibitions provide a nuanced view of Californian Minimalism that includes some of the most perceptually challenging, technically innovative, and downright beautiful works of the last fifty years.  We still have much to learn about California’s cool recasting of New York’s cold Minimalism, but these shows provide a good place to start.

Anish Kapoor, Memory 2008. Cor-Ten steel, 47 x 29 x 15 feet (approximate). Installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Anish Kapoor’s Memory, a 24-ton metallic blimp measuring approximately 47 x 29 x 15 feet overall, is imposing at a number of levels.  It requires the viewer to use his/her own memory to create an image of the piece.  It also manages, as Kapoor recently conceded in a talk at the Guggenheim in New York, to accumulate meanings that are context dependent.  “Memory”, while powerful in its own right in a museum setting, is also a magnet for associative responses that intrude from the broader setting.  It is more than an autonomous aesthetic object.  Therefore, it is not surprising that our reactions to seeing it in New York are quite different from our reactions to seeing it at the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin this past January.  In Berlin, in the context of Peter Eisenman’s “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Berlin, we could not help but experience Kapoor’s sculpture as sharing with these works an attempt to capture the void, the gap in history created by the Holocaust.

In New York, the fragmentation of “Memory” is more directly carried by the properties of the installation.  To see the complete work in New York you have to enter three successive vantage points in the Annex Level 2 Gallery.  The first requires you to mount a few steps to a cordoned-off space to see a taller than life-size rust-colored metal structure of indeterminate shape pressed tightly against the left and right walls of the room.  It isn’t until you walk around to the second viewing area that you can see the shape of this object.  It resembles a large dirigible that feels like it has crash-landed into the museum and is protruding at an angle from its landing site.   It appears to be bursting the boundaries of the room, thereby dramatically increasing its scale.  You can stand back at least 10 feet but you can’t walk around the edges because of their proximity to the wall.  You’re temped to squeeze by, but it’s impossible.  At the Berlin Guggenheim one also had to experience the piece from three different viewing areas, but they were visually more generous with lots of room to enter the spaces and walk right up the piece.  As a result, “Memory” in Berlin seemed like it had been installed whereas in New York it seemed to have landed.  It looked more contained, more static and smaller in scale in Berlin than in New York.

A third space within the sculpture, as experienced in both cities, seems to open to “A Heart of Darkness”, a setting where one is confronted with a void, a black aperture, where the massive work is suddenly revealed to be open and cave-like.  The void greatly complicates one’s experience of “Memory”.  First, it slows one down.  Active exploration suddenly shifts to quiet meditation.  Physically, the strong impressions of massive materiality are undercut by what now seems to be the hollowness of the work.  The void functions as a kind of reversible figure, shifting from a radiant black monochrome painting to a pitch-black terrifying abyss.  A long sonorous echo gives further evidence of its deep space, one that draws you in (see Homi K. Bhabha’s 1998 essay, “Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness”).  Such voids can be interpreted as an embodiment of the unconscious or a womb-like portal for creation.  Overall, the void shifts one’s impression from the materiality of “Memory” to its immateriality, what Kapoor has referred to as a proto-object, built out of fragmented experiences that the viewer needs to integrate over time.

Freed of the weight of the Holocaust in its New York venue, the work becomes less of a dialogue between long and short-term memory and more a demonstration of psychologist J. J. Gibson’s proposition that memory can become collapsed into perceiving-acting cycles.  What one sees is informed by what one does; what one does is informed by what one sees— in a continuous loop.  In this context, memory is an extension of perceiving, of the processional aspects of the sculpture, not unlike the effects of Richard Serra’s massive sculptures of Cor-Ten steel (such as those currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea).  Both Kapoor and Serra create complex viewing experiences.  Apart from the more obvious similarities of massive pieces of rounded Cor-Ten steel, both are physically and psychologically disorienting.  Both require you to explore the entire piece in order to create a mental image of the whole.  And both have either a dark void or a closed in void-like area in the center.   However, while the center of Serra’s “Blind Spot” (2002-2003) creates confusion and feelings of being trapped, Kapoor’s void offers the possibility, or better the aura (given the limitations of a museum setting), of a meditative experience.  As one is drawn into Kapoor’s seemingly endless black hole, it is possible to begin a mental  journey of self-exploration.  Kapoor’s “Memory” is not as disorienting perceptually as Serra’s “Blind Spot” within which one loses track of how to depart.  Yet, “Memory” is disorienting at another level—one has difficulty categorizing what one has seen and one’s relationship to that experience.  For example, is what I am experiencing fear, surprise, or exhilaration—or perhaps all three, as in a Hitchcock film like Vertigo?

Anish Kapoor, Memory 2008. Cor-Ten steel, 47 x 29 x 15 feet (approximate). Installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Robert Smithson’s perceptive interpretation of the minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd is useful here.  His term “uncanny materiality” seems even more apt for Kapoor’s “Memory” sculpture than it was for Judd’s.  Kapoor’s sculpture creates various dilemmas of inbetweenness.  “Memory” is both material and nonmaterial.  It resembles both agents of destruction, a bomb or grenade, and those most generative of forms, an egg or womb.   We don’t think, however, that Kapoor meant for us to choose.  In “Memory” opposite states can co-exist.  Most generally, Kapoor’s work is about complementarity—it is this and that, rather that this or that.

So, what is it that makes “Memory” memorable?  In both cities, it defamiliarizes the act of seeing and leaves us feeling uncomfortable.  We are not accustomed to being offered only partial views of an object and having to use our eyes, our bodies, and our minds to construct an image of the whole.  Furthermore, the parts we do see are alien—like a space ship with a seemingly endless dark hole.  In Berlin, “Memory” is also engulfed in the force-field of the Holocaust and takes on added meaning.  Therefore, whatever Kapoor’s specific intentions, in Berlin, the piece reflects the intertwining of collective as well as individual memory.

Jack Tworkov, Crossfield I 1968. Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 inches. Collection of Beatrice Perry, NY.

Although the formal title of the UBS exhibition is Jack Tworkov:Against Extremes, we find the title of a just published volume of Tworkov’s writings more apt.  The Extreme of the Middle, edited by Mira Schor (Yale University Press) better captures the aesthetic tensions that define Tworkov’s approach.  For him, the extreme middle served as a weigh station for achieving creative solutions to the classic problems in doing abstraction in his time—how to balance,  “external pressures to conform to a particular style, while also fighting an internal battle of self-definition” (Tworkov’s Diaries).  The middle was thus not a position of indecision or tentativeness in the traditional sense.  Rather, it was a strategy to achieve a creative inbetweenness—an art that was not this or that, but this and that—on the way to creating an art that could “overcome all inhibition, to probe all possibilities” (Tworkov Diaries).  This allowed Tworkov to remain on the cusp between order and disorder, a perch from which all was possible.

At issue is Tworkov’s increasing interest in making paintings which, while not primarily an expression of personal concerns and conflicts, are still deeply felt.  On the one side is his increasing use of geometry, a formal move out of synch with Greenbergian aesthetics.  At the same time, he developed a brush stroke that harnessed aspects of the energy of Pollack’s drips.  It is in the middle period where we can best experience the creative tension generated by this approach.  In paintings like Crossfield I (1968) line in the form of a grid creates an order that is subverted by a painterly touch with brush strokes that flow like wind-blown sheets of rain.  Another middle period work, Partitions (1971) is both architectural and lyrical.  Pinkish building-like rectangular structures with triangular tops appear to overlap one another, an illusion achieved by darker green areas made from vertical brush strokes carefully positioned close together.  Upon inspection, there is once more a combination of order and chance, of geometry and energy created from a synthesis of artfully placed brush strokes with their random vertical drips landing on a calm, geometric field.  Since we believe that this was Tworkov’s most innovative and important period, it is unfortunate that there are all too few examples from it in the exhibition.  It is in these paintings that he breaks the shackles of Abstract Expressionism and bends Color Field Painting, Geometric Abstraction, and Minimalism to his own purposes.

The earlier more expressionistic works are more plentiful.  The exhibition includes strong works such as Pink Mississippi (1954), East Barrier (1960) and Thursday (1960) which, while still redolent of expressive self-definition, anticipate the poetry of the formal synthesis between the Apollonian and the Dionysian that he achieved in the Middle Period.  Hence, the trajectory of his paintings through the early, middle, and later work is one where there is a progressive jettisoning of the self in favor of creating a new situation where “the painting is the presence not the painter” (Tworkov, 1981).  All is risked to create increasing harmony among line, color, and painterly texture of surface.

Jack Tworkov, Pink Mississippi 1954. Oil on canvas, Rockefeller University, New York

As Tworkov moves from his earliest quasi-representational works such as Still Life with Pitcher and Grapes (1946) to his middle and late abstractions, he progressively moves toward an almost platonic geometry of pure line and color.  For example, the Knight Series from 1975 are transitional works done between the agitated strokes on relatively quiet geometric areas of the Crossfields and the simpler more serene and irregularly shaped forms that followed them in the seven years before his death in 1982.   Knight Series #2(1975) on view here is an exquisite geometric painting in delicate colors which is saved from the danger of being “too pretty” by its strong conceptual underpinnings—the range of moves allowed to the knight in a game of chess.  Tworkov in his last works such asCompression and Expansion of the Square (1982) and Roman XI (1981) achieved a kind of “aesthetic morality” that comes from finally seeing both where he wants to go and having the means stylistically to achieve these ends.   Despite their apparent surface calmness, in many of them there is still a very human hand at work.  A discernable syncopated brush stroke is evident in the most successful of these last cool and controlled abstract fields.

Finally, we cannot neglect to mention the 800 pound gorilla in the exhibition—the question of influence.  As Tworkov readily concedes, early on, he was influenced by Willem de Kooning but such influence was transient and more than compensated for by the fact that unlike painters such as Mark Rothko and Franz Kline he did not ride a single style.  Moreover, there are aspects of Tworkov’s paintings of the early 1950s (cf. Nausica, 1952 and Adagio, 1953, and especially in House of the Sun, 1952) that anticipate the line and palate of de Kooning’s paintings some thirty years later.  Given that they had studios next to one another, it is not surprising that there might have been a mutuality of influence.  Indeed, there is a striking similarity between Tworkov’s House of the Sun Variations (1952) and de Kooning’s Morning: The Springs (1983) that is reproduced in the de Kooning biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.

Tworkov was a painter’s painter and a beloved teacher at Yale who took countless chances throughout his career.  Seldom has a better synthesis been achieved among raw power, exquisite color, and the organizing effects of line.  In Tworkov’s best works of all periods, the one constant is his ability to use his superior drawing skills to create a line that explodes with energy while simultaneously keeping disorder at bay.  It is his version of E=mc².

Note: Not to be missed is an exhibition of Tworkov memorabilia assembled at the Archives of American Art’s New York Research Center and Gallery located down the hall from the Tworkov show.

Booker: 30 April to 30 May. 2009
545 West 25th Street
New York City, 212-463-8634

Skreber: 9 May to 27 June, 2009
535 West 22nd Street
New York City, 212-680-9467

Dirk Skreber, Untitled Crash 1 2009. Red Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider 2001, 115 x 127 x 93 inches. Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

The automobile and the art world have engaged each other in a variety of ways during the past fifty years.  Los Angeles artists like Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Bill Al Bengston, Dwayne Valentine, and Peter Alexander based a new Finish Fetish/Light and Space movement on their fascination with car finishes.  On the east coast, John Chamberlain used abandoned car parts to make sculptures as early as 1961.  In the auto world in1975, BMW began commissioning artists to paint images on its vehicles.  Four of these cars—painted by Warhol, Stella, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein—were shown in Los Angeles (LACMA) and New York (Grand Central Terminal) this past spring.

Three exhibitions in New York this month show that despite lagging sales of American cars, the car’s role in art works remains undiminished.  Today, it is not the car’s finish that is of primary importance.  Rather, in two of these shows, it is the car parts that are recycled to make sculptures.  John Chamberlain’s impeccably installed show of Early Works at the L & M Gallery includes examples from the first twenty-five years of his career.  Chakaia Booker’s somewhat overcrowded third solo show of recycled tires at Marlborough Chelsea includes work from the past five years.  Both shows contain a wide range of work—large and small scale—presented on pedestals, as wall reliefs and as free-standing floor pieces.  A third show by Dirk Skreber at Friedrich Petzel Gallery uses the whole car, albeit smashed.

John Chamberlain, Remnant Gardens 1986. Enamel on chromium-plated steel, 108 x 60 x 40 inches. Courtesy L & M Arts.

In the sculptures of both Chamberlain and Booker, you are not immediately aware of the materials used.  The forms are more obvious than the materials and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  It isn’t until you approach and walk around them that you realize what they are.  In Chamberlain’s case, the steel bumpers and body parts are angled and bent to powerful assemblages that transcend their humble origins.  There are largely monochromatic works along with others works that play with color to achieve lyrical passages that could be either found or painted—you’re not sure which. Relative to Chamberlain’s loud, more jazz-like works, Chakaia Booker’s are quiet, more like visual chamber music.  The tubes and treads seem beautifully balanced and appear to be woven together like the baskets Booker made early in her career.  The result is more mysterious, verging on the sinister, as compared with the more extroverted, playful Chamberlains.

Chakaia Booker, The Fatality of Hope 2007. Rubber tire, wood, steel, 85 x 201 x 32 inches. Courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.

Chamberlain (Miss Remember Ford, 1964) and Booker (Conversion, 2006) can both bring to mind birds or insects.  In addition, both have some anthropomorphic works. The scale and majesty of Chamberlain’s nine-foot tall Remnant Gardens (1986) is reminiscent of Rodin’s heroic The Burghers of Calais and the two smashed steel cans in Socket (1974, 1975) capture the alone-together tension in the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”.  Formally, these cans also resemble Eva Hesse’sRepetition Nineteen—two versions of which are current installed at MOMA.    Booker’s 65-inch high, The Feeding of Men (2007) with its protruding steel pipes suggests a somewhat frightening many-breasted female life-giving form.

The ghosts of two dueling AbEx giants can also be found in these shows. Chamberlain’s use of color and dynamism (e.g., Big E, 1962) is reminiscent of DeKooning’s landscapes and seascapes—a point made convincingly in the side-by side exhibition of these two artists at PACE gallery in 2001.   Booker’s large and dense The Fatality of Hope (2007) resembles a Jackson Pollock all-over painting, but with thin lyrical rubber loops extending on all sides.   As with Pollack, her line is set free from form.

Dirk Skreber doesn’t recycle car parts in the same way.  But, like so many others before him, the car—specifically car crashes—is central to his work.   After colliding into poles at a crash test site at the speed of 50 mph, the two cars— each wrapped around a pole—yield riveting sculptures.  It’s hard to take your eyes off them as you circle them.  The red Untitled Crash 1 (2009) of the Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider 2001 enables you to see the entire underbody of the car and resonates with the large tool paintings of Lee Lozano and the late stacked discards of Philip Guston.  The black Untitled Crash 2 (2009) of the Hyundai Tiburon 2001 makes salient the light green cracked glass on the rear window evoking Robert Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass at DIA.  However, Skreber’s cars have a more one-dimensional impact than Chamberlain and Booker’s sculptures that gradually unfold, rewarding repeated viewing.

While the car companies may be on the brink of financial ruin, the artists who use their discarded parts are a long way from artistic bankruptcy.

November 16, 2007 – February 24, 2008

Installation shot at the Albright Knox Art Gallery: Max Cole, Manzano 1993, left, and Piute 1979, 52 x 63 inches, right, both acrylic on linen, 52 x 62 inches; seen in distance through doorway: Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi Senza Titolo, Blu (K23050) 2004, pigment on stone, 28-1/2 x 23-1/16 x 1-1/4 inches; all The Panza Collection. Photos © A.Zambianchi-Simply, Italy

There are two stories in this Albright-Knox exhibit.  The first is Giuseppe Panza’s inspiring quest to use collecting to realize Keats’ ideal world where “truth is beauty, beauty truth”.  The second is the magnificent installation of these 70 works by 16 artists orchestrated by Dr. Panza (over three years of planning) and expertly implemented by a wide range of people at the Albright-Knox, including most prominently, the director Louis Grachos and the senior curator, Douglas Dreishpoon.  The result is that they have created a series of rooms—each a kind of Rothko Chapel containing the work of only one artist.  Indeed, the result is an overall impression of light, color and joy whose only potential downside is that whole threatens to upstage the parts; the individual artists become role players in the Albright-Knox/Panza production.

In an age of cynicism and appropriation, how can one sustain our “truth and beauty”
framing of the Panza exhibition?   By truth we refer to the relentless use of painting as a form of experimentation, the outstanding modernist example being Cézanne.  Truth-seeking here becomes a way of constantly posing problems to oneself regarding the act of seeing.  With regard to beauty, our model is Monet’s exploration of light and color which eventually teetered on the edge of abstraction.   Using this framework, we first focus on the monochrome painters in this exhibition.  We suggest three visually striking examples in the Monet tradition.  Anne Appleby’s sensitive abstract oil and wax paintings of greens, rusts and creams evoke both the majesty and mystery of Nature’s march across the seasons.  Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi’s intense pure pigment paintings on porous Italian limestone create a riveting visual experience that is both timeless and contemporary.  David Simpson’s metallic interference paint creates romantic symphonies of lustrous color that constantly change with the movements of the viewer.  The result is sublime eye candy.

In the Cézanne tradition are the artists who achieve their visual seduction by building up an underlying structure that supports a layering of color.  These include Phil Sims with his Cézanne-like organization of brush strokes and Ruth Ann Fredenthal with her all-but-invisible, yet strong, underlying organization of regions of different colors that function as a foundation for building subsequent layerings of color mixtures that somehow create the illusion of a single overall color.  Fredenthal’s serene paintings are sensuous and contemplative; they give us chamber music for the eye.  Sims uses scale to make an architectural statement—his paintings capture color and light, functioning like stained glass windows that, depending on their color, texture and scale, are either introverted or extroverted.   If Sims and Fredenthal achieve their effects “bottom up, Winston Roeth and Timothy Litzmann work “top down”.   Roeth, in the tradition of Albers, plays with often unlikely combinations of color involving both a framing edge and an interior space.  His tempera paint on fiberglass and other materials creates surfaces that are both immaculate and sensuous, alternately cool and warm.   Litzmann, using either unnamable or delicious colors, paints on the back of very thin translucent cast acrylic structures.  By painting the side edges with a contrasting color, he literally traps the light inside these stunning paintings, thereby extending the American Luminist tradition.

Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled No. 176 1997-1998 oil on oyster linen, 66 x 66 inches The Panza Collection. Photo: Joan Boykoff Baron

Other artists in the exhibition literally created objects of color as opposed to colored objects.  Examples of this strategy are the tiny wall-mounted painted wood and steel cubes of Stuart Arends and the just larger than human scale standing columns of color constructed by Ann Truitt, both of which operate between painting and sculpture.  Arends oil and wax painted cubes have a rubbed surface that speaks to the effects of time and memory.  Truitt’s painted wooden columns with their thin contrasting edges on the bottom or sides can be seen as relating to the explorations of color framing effects by Roeth and Litzmann.

The simply complex character of much of this exhibition is well personified by Max Cole, who uses a rigorous interplay of dense small vertical strokes and complementary horizontal chords to create abstract paintings that hover between musical notation and elaborate weavings.   Cole’s restless visual exploration has a kind of austere beauty that is reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s grid paintings of the early 1980s.  Cole’s largely black, grey and beige paintings, like Seurat’s drawings, manage to derive the kind of color that exists when the first rays of light appear at dawn and the last ray of light disappears at dusk.  Her horizontal bands, reminiscent of the endless horizons of the great plains, are composed of hundreds of vertical lines that silently pulsate giving some of them an almost optical effect.  We also suggest that although Cole, Roeth, and Fredenthal differ in many ways, their paintings share in common the ability to slow the viewer down and reveal themselves quietly over time, requiring an observer who is almost as dedicated and obsessive as their creators.

If it appears from this description that Cole doesn’t fit the monochrome theme, it should be noted that she is not the only exception.  As if to remind us that Dr. Panza can never be pigeon-holed, we find other non-monochromatic art that plays with light and color.  These include Kosuths’ enigmatic phrases as embodied in neon light of red, yellow, and green and Bruce Nauman’s two rooms of bright yellow fluorescent lights that perform a kind of architectural Albers.  In one room, both the bright red wall and the viewer’s skin color becomes greenish brown when bathed in intense yellow light.  There is also a classic white cast and coated acrylic disc by Robert Irwin projecting from the wall with a thin rectangular band across its center.  Four lamps strategically placed on the ceiling and floor create overlapping mysterious shadows that cohabit with the white disc to induce a Zen-like meditative mood.  Dan Flavin casts a misty, almost sexy, red light with four groups of red and white fluorescent bulbs placed low on the long wall of a large dark room.  Near the exhibition’s egress, we pass a wonderfully subtle penciled wall drawing by Sol Lewitt, so ineffable that we walked by it several times before noticing it.  Robert Therrein’s four whimsical bronze sculptures of a hat, a pitcher, and snowmen are sometimes oversized and sometimes undersized.  Despite their beautiful surfaces, they seem out of place, a bit too playful for this exhibition—more entertaining than contemplative.

Anne Appleby, Peace Valley, October 10, 1999 1999 oil and wax on canvas, 3 panels, 68-1/2 x 106 inches overall The Panza Collection. Photo: Joan Boykoff Baron

In sum, this celebration of light and color could not have come at a better time.  As the skies become grey, the sunlight becomes scarce, and the air becomes frigid, we find in snowy Buffalo at the Albright-Knox, a respite for all of this, an oasis of color and light that nourishes the soul, soothes the eye, and stimulates the mind.  We are transported into a special place where Keats’ world of Beauty and Truth comes to life.

Finally, while there is really little substitute for seeing this show first hand, there is for those who can’t visit the Albright Knox or make a trip to Dr. Panza’s villa in Varese, Italy, a beautiful catalogue with images of every work.  It also includes a sensitive historical essay by David Bonetti and excerpts from the videotaped interview with Dr. Panza that plays continuously at the show’s entrance under a majestic orange Phil Sims.