Dorothea Rockburne has the distinction of having produced the closest thing to an oil painting in the Brooklyn Museum’s conceptual/process art survey, Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on the 4th Floor through February 3, 2013. In those heady days of dematerialization, art took a bureaucratic turn with grainy black and white photographs, typewriter-printed instructions and scrawled index cards becoming the materials of choice. Enter Rockburne with Scalar (1971), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a work that mitigates a harsh mathematical logic and the reductions of minimal art with the warm and fuzzy optical and textural possibilities of the chance staining effects of chipboard soaked in crude. Post 9/11 an artist can’t procure crude oil very easily – it’s what you use in a homemade bomb apparently – and yet Rockburne’s piece feels like the least dated of all the works on show in Brooklyn’s intellectually energetic yet visually arid Lippard fest. And nicely timed, Craig F. Starr has a gem of a show, Dorothea Rockburne: Works 1967-1972, closing October 20, (5 East 73rd Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues) that features studies for Scalar alongside vintage fold drawings. David Levi Strauss, in the accompanying catalogue, compares the “perspectival shifts, transparency and luminosity of [their] mottled and flowing patterns” to Chinese landscape paintings—a good call. DAVID COHEN
Rockburne will be in conversation with me at the Bard Graduate Center on Thursday, October 25 at 6 PM, 18 West 86th Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues, in a program supporting their exhibition of Benoit Mandelbrot drawings.
Dorothea Rockburne, Studies for Scalar, installation shot of exhibition at Craig F. Starr Gallery. Photo: Light Blue Studio, Inc.
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