September 4 to November 3, 2018
11th Avenue and 59th Street
New York City, shivagallery.org

The #MeToo movement has focused urgent national and global recognition on the problem of sexual abuse, rape and violence against women. Attention is also being paid in the art world. A significant exhibition, curated by Monika Fabijanska, took place this fall at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. THE UN-HEROIC ACT: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S., presenting the work of twenty female artists, closed November 3. [See artcritical’s interview with Fabijanska by Karen E. Jones.]

The exhibition’s title references and inverts a chapter heading, ‘The Myth of the Heroic Rapist,’ in Susan Brownmiller’s landmark 1975 study, “Against Our Will: Men, Women And Rape.”While Brownmiller explores a “direct connection between manhood, achievement, conquest and rape,” citing Genghis Khan’s notion of “women as warrior’s booty, taken like their proud horses.” Fabijanska sets out to demonstrate the “un-heroic” reality of rape by focusing “on the lasting psychological devastation of the victim.” Located on the ground floor of John Jay College, the gallery affords floor-to-ceiling windows onto Eleventh Avenue creating a dramatic effect even from the street, with the exhibition’s title boldly stenciled on the wall.  The first two works you encounter portray rape in a classical mode, though cunningly subverted.

Susanna and the Elders, Restored with x-ray, 1998, by Kathleen Gilje, originally part of a diptych, riffs on the famous 1610 painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, presenting in pentimento Gentileschi herself as Susanna. With stroboscopic effect, a violent motion transforms themute and defenseless Susanna into a screaming Susanna struggling furiously against physical violation. Carolee Thea’s installation, Sabine Woman, 1991, adjacent to Gilje’s piece, is a recreation of the 1998 Central Park Jogger rape incident. Depicting five men gang raping a woman (as the crime was understood to have taken place at that time), the figures, crafted from chicken wire, are hauntingly spot lit by overhead lights that cast an eerie reflective sheen over the grisly scene. The installation has a looped, tape recording of the artist reading “fragments of news reports” of rape incidents, seeming to emanate from behind curtains as she speaks in a low, slightly inaudible tone, forcing the viewer into quiet witness in order to grasp what is being said. Gilje and Thea provided substantive historical context as an exercise in power, laying the groundwork for the rest of the exhibition.

Fabijanska groups the assembled sculptures, photographs, fabric installations, text-based wall panels, films, paintings and drawings into subject categories. But key works like Guerilla Girls’ Broadband poster and Ana Mendieta’s five “performance documentation” photographs constituting Rape Scene, though categorized under “College Rape Culture,” are situated, oddly, at opposite ends of the gallery. This sort of inconsistent placement happens frequently enough throughout the show to confuse and distract anyone seeking to explore how the exhibited works thematically interact.

Guarded Secrets, 2015, a sculpture by Sonya Kelliher-Combs, based on “Iñupiaq walrus tusk trim designs,” consists of semi-translucent phalluses of varying lengths made from sheep’s rawhide and punctured by porcupine quills. Posed in a random manner, some closed at both ends, others opened at one end, and with quills protruding on all sides of each piece, they are ready to pierce the skin of any wandering hand. Peering into the open end of one of the penis sculptures I spied an interior maze, consistent with the idea of a hidden, inaccessible and thus unknowable secret, even as the forms clearly portrayed penile rape as a crude, quite unmysterious and grisly form of torture.

In a small walled-off screening room the film, First Person Plural, by Lynn Hershman Leeson, deals with “things she was told not to speak about as a child” that one eavesdrops through headphones, The film montages images of the Holocaust, physically abused children, and other signifiers of atrocity and helplessness

A second film, “RAPE”, by Yoko Ono, seems not to be about rape per se but rather how physical harassment and constant attention can illicit and heighten a person’s sense of fear and paranoia. Categorized under Gender and Abuse of Power the film shows a woman flattered by the attentions of a camera-wielding man, but as the lens follows her to the point where she falls down from intimidation and the invasive threat of physical violence that such constant attention can suggest, the theme of intrusive attention morphs into a metaphor for rape.

A third film, And Nothing Happened, by Naima Ramos Chapman forms, to my mind, a triptych with the work of two other artists, Suzanne Lacy and Ana Mendieta, hung close by. Lacy’s monumental wall piece, Three Weeks in May, is a map charted from Los Angeles Police Department reports in which crime scenes are stamped with the word, “RAPE.” One is struck by the irony of this piece appearing on one side of a wall on the other side of which Chapman’s film on the aftermath of a rape is projected.

Sixteen minutes long, Chapman plays a restless young woman unable to regain any sense of who she once was after being raped. We see her lying in bed in her parent’s home, unable to sleep, or masturbating to porn on her i-phone. Whether showering, taking medication, eating a meal with her mother or dressing to go out, she is barely able to function. We hear her talk to herself as she walks about the apartment, and like the voice of rape consciousness in Thea’s installation, she cannot exorcise the demon of her trauma, or advance forward into life. I found this film to be a powerful Illustration of the damage that rape inflicts upon a woman’s psyche.

Exiting the screening room, I went to look at Ana Mendieta Rape Scene. Created when a student at the University of Iowa, , Mendieta’s “performance documentation” was made in response to the brutal, highly publicized rape and killing of a nursing student, Sara Ann Otten, by another student in March 1973. Mendieta replicated the rape with herself posed as the victim, and her much repeated comment about this work, “I can’t see being theoretical about an issue like that,” has the power of a mantra. While curator considers Mendieta’s Rape Scene to be a pinnacle of rape imagining and the undoing of “classical art depictions of rape,” by comparing Gilje and Thea’s works with Mendieta’s images in her press release commentary she unwittingly defuses the power of some of her own choices for this show. There is absolutely nothing “theoretical” about Mendieta’s work, which stands alone and apart in its power, and seeking to connect them to other works only underscores the others’ academically reductive perspectives—none of which possess the authenticity of Mendieta’s.

Mendieta’s work is also curatorially paired with Jenny Holzer’s series of color images, Untitled (Selections from Lustmord). But Holzer’s work requires extensive textual exegis to be understood in a way that weakens its immediacy and power in comparison with Mendiata. Fourteen images of tattooed sayings on bare skin are so cryptic as to verge on meaninglessness. I could not fathom, say, how a slogan such as “I try to excite myself so I stay crazy,” inscribed on skin, is illustrative of the show’s “un-heroic” theme. And while Holzer’s images are categorized under Rape in Wartime, ” Lustmord” (lust-killing) is a specific form of sex crime – almost always between lovers – from a very particular historical period, the Weimar Republic.

Holzer’s use of the term to characterize the mass rape and genocidal slaughter of Muslim woman during the Bosnian war in the 1990s feels not only inaccurate but wrong. The murder of Muslims by Serbs and Croatians were not private lover murders but acts of ethnic cleansing. Simply put, the linkage makes no sense.

Kara Walker, whose career is built on depictions of rape in the context of themes of slavery and race, has the the last wordt in this exhibition with a drawing hung at the end of the gallery. A large graphic depiction of the rape of a twelve-year old girl, it explicitly presents and personalizes in the face and posture of its victim the atrocity of rape as few or none of the other works in this exhibition succeed in doing. Not even her accompanying, hand-written account has the force of this picture. Yet, in the context of the exhibition as a whole, this drawing is a visual anomaly because it both represents Brownmiller’s use of the phrase “heroic rape” as a soldier’s prize, while successfully illustrating “the un-heroic act” in the face of its victim and the sense of dread and shame that hangs over the entire drawing. Both act and aftermath coexist in this drawing. If anything, it seems to linger in some kind of limbo between the historical crime and stag magazine pornography, adding another layer of meaning to an already complex work.

While looking at and studying these works on and about rape, I was impressed by how Fabijianska’s curation showed the complexities that arise when art and atrocity meet against the urgent backdrop of current events. Broadly conceived and explanatory in its narrative design, this was a powerful show that rewarded repeat visits.

The post Representing Rape: A Powerful Show at John Jay College appeared first on artcritical.

RICHARD SERRA: I wasn’t in New York when the Green gallery was going on. I was at Yale then. I only saw one show at the gallery.

ERIK LA PRADE: You mentioned in another interview that you saw Oldenburg’s 1962 show there.

I don’t know if it was a show. He had one big hamburger and I’m not sure if anyone else was in the show. I was really taken with the Oldenburg and the whole environment. But I was a Yale student and I really didn’t know what the New York scene was about. This seemed as foreign to me as anything I could have possibly conceived. But I was very curious about it.

Did you find Oldenburg’s use of material and space unusual?

I thought it was unusual and the scale was absurd. I thought it was coming out of a tradition that didn’t have anything to do with Dali’s soft watch, yet it was three dimensional and it was displaying spaces of volume and thumbing its nose at traditional sculpture. It was good as art and empowering because it gave you permission in a good way. I never thought that anybody, up until Oldenburg, used gravity as a force to build anything with. People may have taken the iconography of Oldenburg and thought you had to build bigger, Toys “R” Us. But I saw Oldenburg as a reason to deal with gravity as a builder and what that meant and what that implied.

You also said Dick Bellamy was “the most radical dealer on the scene,” extending limits.

I think Dick’s great gift was that he wasn’t into merchandising. He was into helping artists, trying to anticipate where they could possibility go and encourage their best moves, just by being a witness and a messenger; mainly a witness and a constant witness. If Dick decided he was interested in you, he stayed interested and he followed the work in a rather shy, vulnerable manner, but, unbelievably supportive.

He wanted to facilitate the work but not encumber it. Or, he gave you the space and you did what you wanted to do.

When I first started, he also, was more receptive to some of my experiments than others and let me know that. He thought that some ways of proceeding were better than others, just by a casual statement like, “Why don’t you do more of that and less of that.” He would always say something like that after hanging out for an hour and getting stoned, and looking out the window, whatever. Did you know Dick?

I met him once in January 1998 for an interview. I was planning on writing an article on Larry Poons. I went to the Oil & Steel gallery and we hung out for three hours. He was decisive talking about Poons’s work and what he thought happened then with his work and his career and how the best artists make the most radical moves. I attempted to meet with him again in late February, but I think he died March first. That was the extent of my meeting Bellamy. Bellamy was called the “poet,” or the “inscrutable Dick Bellamy,” but from what Alfred Leslie told me, Bellamy had a very extensive reading background.

Very literary. Dick was very, very well read.

So I wonder if his reading and training in literature and apparently just reading everyone, like Elliot and Pound, might have been the best training for him to develop a radical sense. Do you think there was a cross over from his reading in literature to his style as an art dealer?

I don’t think Dick was a dealer in art. I think Dick liked to encourage people to make things and he liked the activity that surrounded the showing of things. He liked bringing people together and the kind of underground, sociological mix of the artists, poets and dancers. He liked getting high. But, the idea of Dick being a businessman or a dealer was just…

Ludicrous?

Yes. Dick wasn’t that. If he knew how to negotiate he would have been a great dealer but he didn’t know how to do that either. I remember once, I was living with Joan Jonas and Dick hired her as secretary and she couldn’t type. It was just ridiculous.

I guess Bellamy had help in his attempts to sell work.

He may have had a few people supporting him like the Skulls or the Tremaines or List, but I wasn’t privy to that. I think Dick was one of these people who was beloved; he was exceedingly vulnerable. So it was hard to make a very, very close contact with him, unless he was really stoned. Then you could. Other than that, he maintained a kind of disquiet.

His guard was up?

He was just a vulnerable, fragile guy.

After the Green gallery closed, he curated a show at Noah Goldowsky for you, Mark di Suvero and Michael Heizer.

No, it was Walter de Maria.

How did you find he looked at the work when he installed it?

That was for me, a break through. I was new in New York and to be in that show with those people; I thought I was in with these older figures already on the scene and it was my first step into the scene. It was like bringing somebody up from a double A club and putting him on the third base of the Yankees.

It was a big step?

For me! For Dick it may have just been doing another installation: “take those older guys and put this younger guy in with them.” But for me it was a big step.

Do you remember what year that was?

1968.

You got your training at Yale but after you graduated, did your education develop on another level?

I was a painter at Yale and before that I majored in English literature at University of California, Santa Barbara. I got a grant because I sent Yale twelve drawings, but they said we want you to get an undergraduate degree in art history, so I did that. I got my graduate MA, then my MFA, so I stayed there three years. Then I got a Yale Traveling and I went to France for a year, then I got a Fulbright and went to Italy for a year, and when I was in Italy that second year, I met Dick. I went to the Venice Biennial. I had had a show of live and stuffed animals and Dick heard about that show, and said to me, “When you’re in New York, look me up.” So, New York for me was a traffic accident. I didn’t know anybody. I was driving a truck, moving furniture with guys in the neighborhood: myself, Michael Snow, Philip Glass, Chuck Close and Steve Reich. We started a little furniture company. We would move furniture three days a week and the people, who weren’t moving furniture, would have the remaining four or three or five days a week off, however it turned out that the truck was booked to work. So, we had a kind of bedrock notion of time and process and matter. None of us wanted to claim that we were a filmmaker or composer, sculptor or painter at the time. We were just all involved with making something and tying to make a living. We were all pretty much involved with the dancers down here, either as lovers or as inspirations. So, it was small collective.

When you went to the Green gallery that day, did you also go to some of the other galleries?

No. I may have gone over to Tenth Street and looked at those galleries, but I hardly remember them. Pop art had just started to come in. I think there was some notion that Morris and Judd were doing things that seemed to involve circular saws and plywood. But, Mark di Suvero was always a very big figure for me. I’d grown up near to him, so I knew about of him.

Did you find Bellamy was consistent throughout his life, in his relationship to people’s work?

Bellamy was a continuous support for me. I didn’t even ask. He would show up at every show. I suspect he did that with other people. His relationship with Mark di Suvero was very, very close but I suspect he had that relationship with a lot of artists he cared about. He made it his responsibility to follow their work.

Certainly, that’s true of Myron Stout and Alfred Leslie’s work.

Yes.

Di Suvero told me when he was involved with the Park Place gallery, the first one and the second one, Bellamy would almost never go down there and didn’t like the idea.

When I first came to New York, Mark asked me if I wanted to join the Park Place gallery and I said “no.” I didn’t like the idea either.

What was it you didn’t like?

It was one idea about sculpture, “ra, ra.” It was too clubby. It reminded me of a fraternity for something. A boy’s club. I didn’t like it.

The idea was based on the Bauhaus group.

I understood it was a collective and people threw in their money for dues. There were people in it I thought were interesting but I just couldn’t see myself as part of that situation. It seemed like Mark’s scene.

As I’ve been told, Bellamy felt it wasn’t a commercial venue.

That was probably a good thing about it. Maybe, Bellamy didn’t want to get involved with some of the artists that were involved with it. I think, he wanted to handle Mark’s work, but he certainly didn’t want to deal with that group in total. Dick had a very broad range.

From 1960 to 1962, there is no particular language, art-critical language to describe this work. Except it was called neo dada, fracturalist, commonists. When I asked Rosenquest what it was called, he said “it wasn’t called anything.”

I don’t think it was called anything.

Then in 1962, when Janis had his New Realists show, other shows began to spring up and the terms began to be applied. Charlotte Bellamy said to me, “When you label something like that, it’s easy to dismiss it.”

It’s also easy to exclude other people.

But, Bellamy was consistent in his perception and choice of whom he showed and who became standard in those categories.

I think Bellamy contributed more to the cultural evolution of art in the second half of the century than anybody else. He sent all those people to either Janis or Castelli. And without Bellamy, there would not have been what happened with Janis or Castelli. He was the pipeline to them.

They then created a mainstream highway for the work.

They knew how to merchandise it, how to turn it into a movement, how to take it to Europe and put it on the map. Dick never could have done that. Nor, do I think it was Dick’s intention to do that. I don’t think he was capable of doing that and it wasn’t his interest.

It seems the scenario was, Bellamy would work with an artist for two or three years, then encourage them to move on, even though it might have been detrimental to his interests.

Detrimental to his financial interests. Nor did he ask for a percentage if you sold something when you went to another dealer. There were some pieces I had made while I was with Dick. So, if I went on to Leo and showed some pieces, or some people reserved some early pieces, I would always give Dick a cut. But at the time we were selling the pieces for nothing. I sold five pieces to the Museum Ludwick, for less than a thousand dollars and I was happy to get it.

It was a lot of money then.

Also, it meant a museum was interested in my work.

Di Suvero told me that one piece from his first show sold, one small piece was brought by Skull for one-hundred twenty-five dollars. However, Skull was the so-called official backer of the gallery, giving stipends to artists and perhaps paying the rent, I don’t know. But, he seems to be vilified now.

Why?

Because he bought a lot of good or great art and then eventually sold it off and made a mint.

That’s the nature of the beast.

It outraged a number of people, one of them being Rauschenberg.

I can understand that. If that outraged Rauschenberg at the time, then he should have taken steps to insure that he had first right of return if pieces were sold. There are things you can do.

Did you read any of the art-critical literature at the time the Green gallery was operating?

No, just the journals. I hadn’t read Greenberg or any of that.

One person told me he believed Bellamy came out of an abstract expressionist sensibility. But perhaps that’s a little bit limiting.

If you look at the diversity of what he liked, that seems unlikely. I remember a guy who showed at Goldowsky; he was a very interesting painter. He painted realistic-Surrealist paintings.

Was it Milet Andreyevich?

Yes. So, it went from him to Oldenburg, to Rosenquest, to Segal, to Morris, to Judd. It’s hard to pin that down to Abstract Expressionism.

Again, it’s a way of pigeonholing Bellamy’s sensibilities, which may be impossible.

Bellamy was a kind of poet who found his extension in other people’s visual expressions.

Yet, he never wrote criticism. But apparently, he wrote great letters to collectors and people. His criticism was to show the work.

I don’t know that Bellamy saw himself as an intellectual or as a writer. He might have wanted to be a writer but he never expressed that. Did you have any sense of Dick at all?

Once he began to relax when I was there, he would take long pauses to answer a question. I would just sit there, patiently. Or, he might throw up his hands at a question I asked, but he’d just sit there.

I think Dick had an uneasiness and he wanted to let things settle and let them be, and wait for the moment that things could come together. If they didn’t, they didn’t, if they did, fine. He’d come to see me and he wouldn’t say much, just lie on the floor. “Have a joint, Dick,” and we’d go from there.

He went to the School of Radio and Television in Connecticut. He was a DJ for a year. Apparently, he got fired for reading T.S. Elliot on a radio station at two a.m. in the morning when he should have been playing jazz music. He worked in the post office for two years and he painted houses. One day, he got a call from an artist named Miles Forst, inviting him to be the director of the Hansa gallery.

I didn’t know any of that.

He didn’t think it was important or interesting to talk about. Bellamy’s mother was Chinese and he grew up during the Second World War. The idea is you’re alien in America and their fighting the country that you came from.

The Japanese were interred and he could’ve just as well been seen as a Japanese person.

The idea that you didn’t say anything or very little maybe had a certain impact on him for the rest of his life.

I never thought about that but that probably true.

The mid-West. Bellamy must have had a sense of “don’t say the wrong thing”.

Better to say nothing. He would recede unless he got drunk or stoned, then he liked to have a good time.

All out socializing?

No. It was more like it was Halloween for him. It was an occasion for him to be somebody other than who he was. He could participate in the masquerade of self, but you knew it wasn’t him. For Bellamy, getting drunk or getting stoned, it was a way of escaping his own repression. Also, not worrying about his other self when he was in that state and then he could easily crawl back into his hibernation the next day.

I think towards the end of his life, he was probably having a heavier coke problem, which wasn’t doing him to much good.

There is the fact that the art world consisted of various social scenes and the Green gallery was one of the scenes.

I think the Green gallery was for a while the electric scene. If everybody wanted to plug in, that’s where you would go. I always thought of Dick as someone who went on people, but I might be wrong. In my relationship with him, I thought he sized up the person and if he liked the person and was interested in how the person thought and how the person conjured up thoughts or what the person’s poetic language was or what he could glean from the person’s intention or poetic imagination, I think Dick went on that. But I’m not sure if it was Bellamy’s eyes or if it was his assessment of the person.

Claire Wesselmann said everyone back then had “eager eyes.” Who knows how many studio visits he made.

I think a lot.

What was your experience with a dealer like Castelli or Janis?

I just went from Dick to Leo. How did I see Janis? He was a high-powered businessman and you might as well be going into a fancy shoe store. Florsheim’s.

And Castelli?

Castelli wasn’t like that. Castelli was like a mom and pop store. He was a very elegant, Italian gentleman who wanted to create a scene of young people around him, who had an interchange with each other. And he created a situation where all the artists would come to each other’s shows. So, it was kind of an extension of Leo’s family and he tried to keep it together like a mom-and-pop store. Everybody had a relationship and he would have parties where everyone would come together; the artists, friends of the artists. He made a collective around that. So, most galleries divide up between the artists and their immediate friends and the other artists have their friends. These galleries become race-horsing stalls against other galleries that have their eight or ten horses. Castelli’s gallery was really run like a stable where everybody paraded together and supported each other.

He wanted these people to be in one particular universe.

A constellation. A team.

It certainly worked. How did you view his relationship with Bellamy?

I didn’t know what their relationship was like. I thought Leo really liked Bellamy. Leo was an equally terrible businessman. So, I don’t know what their business relationship was. Leo was a jobber who didn’t sell things; he sold things to other dealers. He certainly liked to sell things for a lot of money, or sashay about with museum directors, but the idea of cutting the deal, like the dealers are now, that wasn’t what Leo primarily did. He’d sell to other dealers then take the cut from other dealers. Dealers would say to Leo, “Send me five Judds” in L.A., or “send me three Oldenburgs to the Kansas City Art Institute”, or whatever. Leo would accommodate them but I don’t think he invoiced a lot, himself. That was my take on it.

Both Rosenquest and Billy Kluver, at different times, told me they thought, Bellamy and Illena Sonnabend had the eyes, but not Castelli.

That may be true.

But I’m sure Castelli had a sense of the work.

Leo had a sense of how to put together a scene. If he was going to show Morris, he would back it with Judd. If he was going to show Warhol, he would back it with Rosenquist. He had an idea of how to put artists together to create different genres of activity that would branch out into different ways of thinking about the diversity of movements. And he did that continuously. Then finally, he did that with the three Italians: Chia, Clemente, and Cucchi. When I came up he did it with me, Nauman and Sonnier. That’s how Leo put a scene together. So, he had a sense of the coherence and cohesion of various languages. But, whether or not he could put the best work out of anyone of those three people, I don’t know. If Leo didn’t have the eye, he had good radar and he kept his ear to the ground, and he had enough people feeding him information, so he knew what was going on.

On the other hand, Bellamy never showed Robert Indiana. If Bellamy didn’t like the work, he’d call it “Bonwit Teller art.”

Maybe he thought it was too designee or too fashion oriented. I don’t know. I can understand that maybe he didn’t like the graphic quality of early Warhol or Indiana, if that’s true.

Indiana I don’t know. But I have been told he didn’t like Warhol’s work.

Maybe the early Warhol compared to early Raushenberg or Johns, seemed a little, window-shopping interior. Maybe he didn’t like it for Warhol’s commercial aspect. You have to think, Warhol, during his lifetime, never had a show at the Modern. Warhol was taken seriously after he died; very, very seriously. And then, I think, Gagosian really made the market for Warhol.

There must have been hesitancy about giving Warhol credit?

Photography never really became understood as a full-blown-important subtext of what was going on until way after Warhol had been into silk screening photographs. So, then people go, “What’s really going on here is photography and it’s speeding a lot of new painting. Not only Warhol but a lot of other people.” It would be difficult to think of any post-modernist art that doesn’t begin with photography.

Seeing that Bellamy was interested in the most radical work, do you think it also had to do with the materials that were radical?

I don’t know. A lot of people were using non-industrial material, art-off-the street, whatever. It probably started as early as Raushenberg and di Suvero dragging in timbers, or whatever, and that may have appealed to Dick.

I don’t know what his idea of Surrealism or Dada was but I suspect it is interpreted that he had a dada sensibility.

That sounds a little sophisticated. Bellamy wasn’t the kind of guy to thumb through a book on surrealism or dada and then go out in the neighborhood and find an artist who fit that pigeonhole. I doubt that.

He seemed to like the coincidence of the moment.

Yes. I think he showed Flavin pretty early, also.

Yes.

Now, you can say that comes from Neo-Dada, but I don’t think so. It comes from a department store.

What you’re saying about Bellamy’s taste is certainly true. But in this day and age, everybody wants a direct answer for these phenomena.

To try to apply something in a rearview mirror about different concepts and a different time and postulate a narrative that makes sense is really hard to do.

The post “A Constant Witness”: Richard Serra on Richard Bellamy appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 25, 2014
514 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-988-2200

The recent show of Richard Nonas was the first in Fergus McCaffrey Gallery’s new space in Chelsea.  On entering this former printing plant you had to pause and survey the cavernous room to orient yourself to the large array of thirty-three works displayed on the ground floor.  But the show was comprised of groupings of works and not as disparate as it may originally have appeared.

The white, renovated walls of the building’s interior contrast with the dark, rough, unpolished surfaces of the sculpture.  Despite the difference in scale, Nonas is as engaging an artist as his better-known contemporary, Richard Serra.  Both artists’ styles were partly influenced by the scope of the large, Soho industrial spaces in which they exhibited during the early 1970s, a feeling recalled by this exhibition.

Nonas was also influenced by a ten-year experience as a field anthropologist.  In his own words, he wants us to “doubt” our judgment when trying to decide if his sculptures are ritualized art objects or emblematic artifacts.

Skid (2014), composed of nine steel, T-shaped pieces spread across the floor was the first work encountered.  There is no way to avoid seeing it when you first entered the gallery.  The whole piece divided the floor, trailing off to the right into a rear gallery.  It’s like walking in a field and coming across a fence or trail markers indicating a direction you should take.

It lead the eye to Deadfall (1975), a gunmetal dark, steel floor work, shaped like a piece of pie and positioned near a corner of the gallery.  Deadfall and two, smaller oxidized square pieces created an intimate corner.  Nearby, amidsta group of three wall pieces, was a wooden ladder with steps cut into it reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column”.

The second floor was smaller than the first and the 16 works displayed there seemed more evenly spaced.  A group of five red, yellow, and gray steel plates (Steel Drawing, 1988), leaned against the East wall.  To the left hung four steel pieces shaped like a fist, ready to strike (Fist Series, 2014).

Nonas’s minimal sculptures have a totemic quality.  These ritualized objects have a physical reality and a cultural dimension.  As an anthologist, Nonas collected and unearthed pieces, and then attempted to fit them together into a narrative.  In his sculpture, minimal aspects of physical and cultural reality are also held together through or with an interaction of these parts of the world.  Nonas has written that his sculpture “exists, and is placed in a world whose strongest reality is cultural ambiguity and paradox – continual and necessary shifts in meaning”.  Nonas’s minimal sculpture denies us a sense of clarity because it frustrates our attempts to explain it.

The small works in Nonas’s show invites comparison with Joel Shapiro’s early sculpture.  In the late sixties and early seventies, both artists made process-oriented sculpture that reconfigured the space it occupied. And there is a human scale in both men’s sculpture.  But the physical world of Shapiro’s early works invites a debate over forms and meanings.  The rough, unevenness of Nonas’s works offers us a metaphor for the physicality of a world that exists with or without us.  In this respect, Nonas’s works can be described as urban earthworks.

Although a number of works in this show feel incomplete, they present us with questions.  Why do we collect objects?  What motivates us to pick up something we might find in the street, in a field, or on an archaeological dig and keep it?  Through Nonas has taken us on an anthropological tour of artifacts, his work does not offer us definite answers and therein lies its strength.

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Between 1959 and 1962 Robert R. McElroy was virtually the only professional photographer attending and taking photos of downtown happenings at venues like the Judson Memorial Church, the Reuben Gallery and the Green Gallery.  He took thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of these early avant garde artists’ performance, although less than a hundred have been published and republished in books and anthologies.  The recent show at Pace provided an opportunity for an in-depth look at this historically vital photographer.  But what of the man himself?

McElroy was born in Chicago on January 1, 1928 and grew up poor in a working-class Irish Catholic Depression household. He developed his interest in photography at Lane Technical High School where he joined the camera club. He left school to enlist in the Army, but only after the recruiter guaranteed that he would be assigned to the Still and Motion Picture unit.  He was stationed in Vienna as a cameraman in the 63rd Signal Corp movie team, making short films for the occupying forces, like a documentary on the Salzburg Orchestra.  He returned home in 1948 and received his high school degree, but was recalled for the Korean War and sent to a school for combat motion picture and still cameramen. He was never sent abroad, but it is clear that this very specific training informed his photographs of the happenings, making them as lively and energetic as the performances themselves.

Despite this training in filmmaking it seems he was committed to still photography.  When he enrolled at Ohio University on the G.I. Bill in the fall of 1952 their photography program, headed by Clarence White, Jr., was one of only two in the country at that time. Ohio proved his first step on his road to New York, not only because of the technical training but because of the fellow photographers he met there, especially Paul Fusco, a fellow G.I..

McElroy and Fusco also met a group of younger students who shared similar attitudes and interests in art, photography: I.C. [Chuck] Rapoport, a future freelance photographer for Life and Paris Match; Adger Cowans, future assistant to Gordon Parks; Don Moser, a Life photographer and later editor of Smithsonian Magazine; and Jim Dine who joined the group when he transferred from University of Cincinnati in 1955.

Their experience as veterans set Fusco and McElroy apart from younger members of this creative group. Pat Sayer (Fusco’s future wife) recalls how “Mac and Paul spent hours and hours in the darkrooms and studios of the photo department.  In fact, Mac didn’t really hang out with the rest of us very much.”  McElroy’s “lone-wolf personality” came through: “Mac was far too anti-social to sit and schmooze with the crowd that was there….  Like the other veterans there on the G. I. Bill, he would usually run out of money toward the end of each month and I remember Paul saying that Mac lived on fried egg sandwiches.” To make ends meet, McElroy worked as an assistant in the photography lab.

He kept an emotional distance from people and it was a quality that would define him for people who came to know him later.  But McElroy’s passion for taking photographs was also evident and perhaps “his way of interacting with people.”

New York soon beckoned. The two big picture magazines of the period, Life and Look, were based there.  When Fusco graduated in 1957, he landed a job on the staff of Look. As Fusco remembers, “by 1958, [we] were all kind of in the same place, starting our careers in the impossible, unbelievably competitive city of New York.”  Fusco’s apartment on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village was the scene of numerous parties as well as temporary sleeping quarters for college friends relocating to the city.

McElroy was one of the last of the Ohio group to come to New York, having stayed on at Ohio University as a teaching assistant, completing a master’s degree in 1957.  His master’s thesis was a study of the “physical characteristics of the camera on the manner in which the photographer sees his subject.”

He moved back to Chicago and started working for the Montgomery Ward Department Store but with encouragement from Fusco he moved on to New York in June 1958. A few months later he was working as a studio assistant at The Lionel Friedman Studio, whose clients included Karastan Rugs and Seagram’s Seven.  McElroy and a second studio assistant, a young Ron Galella, assisted in building sets or moving props for in-studio shoots.  They also developed film and printed for Friedman and even did stand-in modeling before the real model arrived.  McElroy would work freelance at night, or would go around photographing in New York, trying to sell photos to magazines.

Dine also arrived in New York at this time and was soon contacted by Marcus Ratliff, a high school friend from Cincinnati. Ratliff, who was studying at Cooper Union, had plans to start a small gallery in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church to show his own and his friends’ works.  Ratliff also invited another high school friend, Tom Wesselmann, to join the venture, and it was a group show of Dine, Ratliff, and Wesselmann that opened the Judson Gallery on February 14th, 1959. Meanwhile, Ratliff had seen and admired some ink drawings hung in the library at Cooper Union by Claes Oldenburg, who was working there one day a week and Oldenburg’s first Judson Gallery show, Drawings, Sculptures, Poems, opened May 22, 1959.

During 1959 McElroy was still working at Friedman’s studio, and had begun attending theater events in and around Greenwich Village, taking headshots of actors, many now forgotten, but some, like a young Anthony Zerbe, went on to become famous.  By the end of the year he was sharing an apartment on East 19th Street with Ohio graduate Don Pasternak.  He also found himself pulled into the orbit of another new gallery, The Reuben Gallery.

Encouraged by Alan Kaprow, Anita Reuben, an occupational therapist, whose sister Renee was an artist and who had seen exhibitions at the cooperative Hansa Gallery, found a loft space on Fourth Avenue at Tenth Street, and opened the Reuben Gallery in October 1959 with Kaprow’s first ‘happening’, Eighteen Happenings in 6 Parts. The Reuben Gallery brought together artists from the Judson Gallery as well as artists who had studied with Kaprow at Rutgers or shown with him at the Hansa.

Ratliff remembers McElroy as “part of the scene…He was a bit stocky, had a pock-marked complexion, had straight slightly blondish-brown hair parted on the left, always had his camera slung over his left shoulder and usually wore a faded Levi jacket; he smoked a lot.”

Although McElroy might have been around the Judson Gallery, his first photos of artists’ events were taken at the Reuben Gallery in January 1960, at the opening of a group exhibition of Dine, Robert Whitman, Lucas Samaras, Red Grooms, Kaprow, Oldenburg, Pat Passlof and others. One month later he photographed Dine’s performance at the Judson, The Smiling Workman. Dine remembers McElroy “sticking to you like glue.  He was this silent figure just photographing.  He never had a tripod.  The fact that he recorded so much of my work is an accident because I never asked him too.  But now, we’re all very happy he did.”

For the next three years McElroy photographed the works, exhibitions and performances of the artists associated with the Judson and Reuben Galleries in-depth and then followed some of them to photograph their activities in storefronts and other spaces in downtown Manhattan and the Green Gallery on 57th street.

McElroy often found dramatic angles from which to shoot outdoor happenings and installations.  He captured Kaprow’s 1961 Yard installation of “used tires, tar paper mounds, barrels,” for instance, in Martha Jackson’s courtyard with an aerial color photograph from about two or three stories above.  He shot Kaprow’s Courtyard (November 1962) in the  courtyard of The Mills Hotel on Bleecker Street, both from the roof of the hotel and from the ground looking upwards. Whitman comments on how McElroy’s “photographs are very helpful to see what was going on in the piece in terms of its construction or formulation of various parts.”  In one picture of The American Moon (December 1960) McElroy points his camera down as the audience looks up at Lucas Samaras swinging above their heads.  This “wasn’t part of what the audience saw.”

In addition to the inherent artistry of his work, another thing that sets McElroy’s photographs of happenings apart is his use of color.  None of the other photographers working downtown at this time – Fred McDarrah, John Cohen, or Rappoprt – photographed performances in color.  Thus, McElroy’s color photographs of these events are unique, a first for the time.

McElroy was Oldenburg’s “favorite photographer” and Oldenburg invited him to take photos of his works and performances during December 1961. He photographed Oldenburg’s sculptures in The Store on East 2nd Street, and after the space was converted to The Ray Gun Theater, he shot all the performances held there each weekend, from February to May 1962.   According to Patty Muschinski, the performers gathered at The Store on Sundays to clean up, have films made of the performance, and recreate particular parts of their performances so McElroy could photograph with better lighting conditions and without the distractions of a live audience.  Color film demanded better lighting and more complicated and an expensive developing process, but it also meant that McElroy captured the range of Oldenburg’s performances with fidelity.

During the summer of 1962, McElroy came every day to the Green Gallery where Oldenburg and his then wife Patty began creating works for Oldenburg’s Green Gallery show, working all day sewing, stuffing, painting and arranging each piece.  He also photographed Oldenburg’s one-time performance called Sports, which took place “in the show after the show closed.”

McElroy started working at Newsweek in January 1, 1962, printing in the darkroom, for about a year, until he was promoted to staff photographer, a position he held until he retired in 1990.

However, Oldenburg and Whitman continued to invite McElroy to photograph their performances into the late 1960s. In the spring of 1965, he photographed Oldenburg’s Washes, held in Al Roon’s health club swimming pool. In December 1965 it was Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse and Whitman’s Prune Flat, on the same program at Filmmaker’s Cinematheque.  It was obvious both these artists appreciated that McElroy was capable of photographing any event, whether it was in a small, poorly lit space on the Lower East Side or an open theater space with a huge crowd of spectators.

Robert McElroy’s photography of the Downtown scene is something completely unique in the history of that era.  He captured events in all their multiplicity and continues to give new life to the happenings and performances he recorded.   As Oldenburg later recalled: “I recognized, and I think everyone did, that although happenings were supposed to be done one time and then never remembered; it was part of the theory that we were supposed to make art and then throw it away.  Nevertheless, it was very important to photograph it because it was very visual and remembering it was best done through photographs.” McElroy’s photographs make it possible for us to ‘remember’ performance experiences that, were it not for him, would be lost forever.

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