Stephen Haller Gallery
542 26th Street
New York 10001
212-741-7777

February 26 to April 5, 2005

One of the down sides of the Greenbergian formalism in the 1960s was its insufficient appreciation of how the energy and aggression, first of the Civil Rights movement and then the anti-Vietnam War protests, may have infiltrated the art of the period. While this synthesis of reductive art and aggressive energy is perhaps more apparent in non-painterly pursuits such as the complex, geometric sculpture of Barry Le Va (good examples of which can be found in the current survey of his work at the ICA in Philadelphia through April 3. 2005), I would like to argue that a similar, if more low key, synthesis can be found in a range of Larry Zox’s works currently on view at the Stephen Haller Gallery in Chelsea. There is perhaps a rough correspondence between Le Va’s broken plates of glass and Zox’s broken planes of color. Each artist creates a broken geometry that releases an energy that encourages the viewer to do more than meditate as his or her responsive eye becomes embodied. It is this energy that I propose gives the edge to the dynamic, hard-edge paintings of Larry Zox. This edgy energy manifests itself in the way the color field is split into angular color areas separated by canvas channels, the earliest example in this exhibition being the splendid “Diagonal I” (1965). Despite this separation, the colors interact dynamically as they try to complete the broken geometries; triangles and polygons trying to reconstitute themselves create a color field under tension. Further tension is created by Zox’s ability to juggle both sour and sweet colors–orange, red, yellow, green, purple and unnamable blues vie for attention. These spatial and color dynamics are jointly present in “Green Diamond Drill: Keokuk” (1968), perhaps the most realized single work in this survey. And then there are the wonderful blacks. It is black that I propose that enables Zox to orchestrate color combinations that, in the best works, are simultaneously hot and cool as in jazz. Indeed, these interlocking units of color achieve the kind of shared rhythm we experience with a good dance partner. But this is no waltz; it is the era’s twist in all its funky joy.

More generally, Zox’s “tough love” color-field formats whether they be in the Diamond Drill, Rotation, Scissors Jack, or Diamond Cut series, more than hold there own with competing color field painters, be they Stella, Olitski, Frankenthaler, Noland or Dzubas. These so-called Post-Painterly Abstraction painters look soft and “pretty” compared to Zox’s best work such as “Green Diamond Drill: Keokuk” (1968), Diamond Cut series (1966) or “Scissor Jack for Jean” (1965). Indeed, looking a fresh at these works and seeing the “Protractor” paintings of Frank Stella from the same general mid-to-late 60’s period (currently at Jacobson-Howard (March/April, 2005) and Kasmin (through March 26, 2005), Zox’s paintings hold up better. They are less decorative and hermetic; they are more dynamic both pictorially and in terms of being better attuned to the energy of the period. As, however, Zox becomes interested in seeing color in more puristic terms, the energy literally flags. First, slowly in the Gemini series, then more quickly in the static but coloristically beautiful color-field works of the early 70s (not included in this show). Zox temporarily appears to lose his color compass in works such as Weshcubb (1993). Here the drawing elements interfere with the color field interactions. The good news, however, is that in the most recent Zox painting in the exhibition, “Algonkin I” (2004), color and line have begun once more to work well together.

Whether the new work can match the best of Zox’s work from the mid-to-late 60s may, however, be besides the point. In the sixties, Zox achieved a brilliant synthesis of form, line and color that transcended the softness of Greenbergian Post-Painterly Abstraction. In effect, Zox reached back to the rhythmic geometrics of Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie”, adding to Mondrian a dazzling array of color pyrotechnics.

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Richard Serra’s initial reaction upon seeing Jo Baer’s orchid-inspired “Wraparound” paintings, Baer has recalled, was to ask, “How does it feel to do revolutionary work?” [quoted in Stein, see below]. Moreover, the first important art-world article on Baer’s work — a cover article by Carter Ratcliff in Art Forum (May, 1972) — focused on her wraparound paintings, two vertical and three horizontal, from her Orchid series. So why did the predominant critical reaction to her recent DIA exhibition strongly favor Baer’s earlier black band paintings over the wraparounds? Roberta Smith, in the New York Times, and Carol Diehl, in Art in America, both strongly praised the black band paintings while disparaging the wraparound paintings. (A notable exception was Jim Long’s review in the Brooklyn Rail, (Winter 2002) which strongly preferred the wraparound paintings exhibited in the third room at DIA.)

To fully appreciate these disparate claims, one needs to consider a range of historical, psychological, and conceptual issues. First, from a psychological point of view, there is likely to be a primacy effect-the black band paintings came first and were well received. The likelihood of a primacy effect is heightened by the fact that the wraparound Orchid paintings were so different from the black bands that Diehl describes them as looking as if they were done by a different artist. There are also art historical reasons why a favorable reaction to the band paintings might have occurred. The black band paintings appear to be a direct reaction to the claims of the prophets of Minimalism — Judd and Morris — that painting was dead. In effect, they are attempts to produce minimal works that are clean, cool and direct and yet retain a certain singularity peculiar to painting. It is as if the blinders were removed from Greenberg’s eyes and he could see that such paintings were nearer to specifying the unique properties of painting than had ever been achieved in the 1960’s by his favorite color field painters, Noland and Olitski.

Clearly then the black band paintings are historically important, but from another point of view they are more limited and less original than the wraparound Orchid paintings. Indeed, their optical glow appears somewhat reminiscent of certain of Flavin’s neon rectangles. On the other hand, if one assumes that an important antecedent of Baer’s paintings comes from her training in the psychology of perception, we can view her wraparound paintings as an attempt to explore more complex modalities of perception than she attempted in the black band paintings. In the words of James J. Gibson’s (1966) seminal work, Baer was in effect exploring “the senses considered as a perceptual system.” Viewed from this perspective, the wraparound works are a considerable advance over the black band paintings. Specifically, the black band paintings are disembodied-all the action is in the eye, giving in Carter Ratcliff’s (1972) prescient words, “a reduced version of seeing.”

Elaborating on Ratcliff’s observation, it may be claimed in contra-distinction to the black band paintings, the wraparound Orchid paintings entrain the body in terms of requiring various postural adjustments to solve the manifold perceptual puzzles posed by Baer. Such explorations supply kinesthetic feedback so that what the eye sees is augmented by information from other sensory modalities. Thus, it may be argued that these paintings draw upon an embodied view of perceiving-they compel us to repeatedly shift our bodily orientations if we want to detect Baer’s edgy messages which are never fully in view from a single point of observation. Such perceiving by doing fits J.J. Gibson’s (1966) concern with perceiving-acting cycles whereby what we do affects what we perceive and what we perceive affects what we do.

These paintings are embodied in a second sense-they make claims on architectural space. They teach us about how perception works in the real, cluttered architectural environment. Here, angles of vision are constantly cut off and/or obscured. Ordinary seeing involves sightings in between, over or under environmental structures. Viewed thusly, the wraparound paintings go beyond creating a visual pop based on retinal responses. Rather they bring us closer to how in Gins and Arakawa’s (2002) terms, we partition the world in the process of landing in it. Like the real world, they open us up to the inexhaustible information provided by the perceptual system when it is allowed to operate naturalistically. These paintings make perceiving a sited process involving our responses to line, color and space.

In these terms, Baer’s wraparound Orchid paintings prepare us for navigating the real world in its inexhaustible complexity rather than eyeballing a cool, beautiful object in a virtual world that is in the end an optical tease. Such navigations provide a multi-modal aesthetic experience that is deeper and longer lasting than “the cheap thrills” of the black band paintings.

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