February 27 to April 10, 2016
205 Hudson Street (at Canal Street)
New York, 212 772 4991

“Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni,” an exhibition of work by the short-lived group BMPT (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni) now at Hunter College, is sparse. It consists of only four artworks and two vitrines of documentation, mainly in French. Yet, given its subject, it is complete, though also thoroughly lacking. The show in the main gallery consists of one painting by each of the group’s members; in this sense the exhibition is complete. As for the deficiency, the show’s smallness is in part compensated for by the exhibition “Critical Gestures & Contested Spaces: Art in France in the 1960s,” which documents the varied groups, artists and political practices that constituted the neo-Dadaist and high Modernist art scene of ‘60s France (mainly Paris). This exhibit recounts the context from which BMPT emerged. For some, this history and the artists and groups that participated in it may be fairly unfamiliar. The inclusion of this exhibition demonstrates that BMPT was not unique in their endgame strategy, its political endeavors, or, for that matter, were they the most radical.

In the main gallery, one painting consists of alternating vertical green stripes and bands of raw canvas. At each end, the stripes are hand-painted opaque white. The stripes are all of equal width. Another painting has a black circle with a pristine white dot at its core, which marks the center of the canvas. The stripe painting and the painting of the black circle are both on stretched square canvases of equal size. The third work, un-stretched canvas pinned to the wall, consists of five alternating horizontal bands of gray and white. The last white band, at the bottom of the canvas, is about a third of the width of the others. The fourth is a piece of oilcloth pinned to the wall and imprinted with uniformly spaced, brick red, marks made using a number 50 brush at 30-centimeter intervals. (It is important to note that all four paintings in this exhibition vary slightly in format, size, proportions and dates, yet are representative of each artist’s motif.)

BMPT’s works structurally consist of a horizontal, a vertical, a configuration, and mark-making, respectively. Buren paints vertical stripes, Parmentier horizontal ones, the black circle on a white ground is made by Mosset, and the uniform brush marks, repeated at 30-centimeter intervals, are Toroni’s. Each of these artists was committed to producing only their own motif, which serves as a logo. While these works are handmade and authored by different artists, they are stylistically anonymous. Together, these four paintings by BMPT represent an index of a type of abstract painting that is identified with the anti-relational, anti-compositional ethos of Minimalism in the States, and in Europe it would be understood to be derived from Art Concrete, or perhaps Zero.

Between January and December 1967, BMPT had the opportunity to manifest their critical stance in four highly public events. The nature of these events was influenced by the Situationist notion of intervention — a disruption of the norm. The documentation of these events is displayed in two vitrines, and they’re described in a supplement, which also supplies us with BMPT’s manifesto of January 1967 in which they conclude “We are not painters.”

In all four events their paintings serve as tropes; in the case of the 18^th Salon of Young Painters, they produced their works in public under a banner with their names. This was accompanied by an audio tape that advised their audience to be more intelligent. At day’s end, they took their works away, installing a second banner so that the two banners together stated “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni Do Not Exhibit.” In another, their paintings served as décor, the setting for a performance that never occurs: the audience sits waiting for 45 minutes, staring at their paintings. In their fourth and final manifestation, slide shows of traditional painting subjects — such as landscapes, nudes, etc. — were projected onto their works. These projections were also accompanied by an audio track that admonished their audience that “Art is an Illusion,” “Art is a Dream,” etc. With the fourth manifestation BMPT’s artistic and political experiment came to an end. Parmentier, in December of 1967, denounced Buren, Mosset, and Toroni for their willingness to deviate from the agreed upon formula; he proclaimed that by abandoning strict repetition they “situate themselves in a regressive manner with respect to this moral position.”

In each of their manifestations, BMPT reduced their works to mere props, and in doing so, sought to expose art’s commodification, the rendering of culture as spectacle under capitalism, as well as their own complicity (and that of everyone else). Problematically, with this exhibition, we are given a painting show: an exposition of trophies, emptied of their critical function. BMPT works have been captured, and tamed and are now loaded (down) with the aura of art — the very thing these works were meant to escape. Consequently, the critical nature of BMPT’s position is lost. They now signal some other message, one more aesthetic and formal than political. We are shown examples of the standard motifs agreed to in 1966, and even these diverge from BMPT’s standard model in that they do not adhere to their initial commitment to uniformity and repetition. In this, exhibition, BMPT’s radical proposition, meant to challenge notions of artistic authorship and originality, is also lost.

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Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1920, Lygia Clark was deeply influential in her native country, but remains lesser known internationally. Trained under the modernist landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, Clark’s early abstract, geometric paintings plot a trajectory that increasingly corrupts the unity of two-dimensional imagery. The 1960s saw her producing sculptures aligned with Neo-Concretist and empiric principles, and her later output coincided with a period of psychoanalysis, focusing on various objects intended as conductors of direct experience with participants, as well as the performative application of materials directly to the body. MoMA’s current exhibition, “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988,” is organized around these themes.

1952 marks a rapid progression from Clark’s heavier Cubist tendencies — seen in the comparatively cumbrous Composição (“Composition,” 1952) — to a more precise approach, employed in a series of gouache works on cardboard and paper and an oil on canvas, including Composição, versão 01 (1953). The latter consists of layered triangular planes in greens, blues and oranges, bisecting each other in a multiplicity of harmonious shards that bristle with dynamism, leading the eye beyond the edge of the work. The balanced, interlocking grids of Composição no. 2 (1954), and the spectral grace of Composição 1 (1954), illustrate the subsumption of Clark’s architectural influences, and the legacy of her modern predecessors, such as Malevich, Tatlin, Mondrian and Braque, within the concerns of her own emerging visual language.

In her series Quebra da moldura (“Breaking the Frame”), Clark eschewed structural standards by including the frame as an element of the painting, at once collapsing and revealing the space between them — what she called the “organic line” — by breaching it with abstract motifs extended across the gap. In doing so Clark achieved a kind of pictorial hydrostatic equilibrium exemplified in the stark joists of Quebra da moldura (P x B), versão 01 (“Breaking the Frame [P x B], version 01,” 1954).

The remainder of the ‘50s was largely devoted to the series Superfície moduladas (“Modulated Surfaces”)and Planos em superfície moduladas (“Planes on Modulated Surfaces”). Through the use of juxtaposed geometrical forms and the constancy of the organic line, these works further rupture the flat surface. Several pieces of the former series depict jagged patterns of industrial paint on wood, tightly set against each other like a puzzle. Typically in blues, greens and black, they are redolent of the dazzle camouflage found in naval deception, with Superfície modulada no. 20 (1956) being a particularly compelling example.

The latter series consists primarily of black-and-white paintings and studies, often formed by cutting and pasting larger paper elements onto paper backgrounds. Optically, these works appear wholly three-dimensional, while their unfolding angles can be seen as predecessors of her later Neo-Concretist sculptures. Several pieces from 1957 are presented in Plexiglas mounts perpendicular to the wall, so that both sides can be viewed. Noteworthy is a suite of similar works called Study for Espaço modulado (“Study for Modulated Space”), collages that are totemic in nature, emanating spiritual gravitas through the confident simplicity of their design.

In 1959, Clark was a signatory of the Neo-Concretist Manifesto, published in the Jornal do Brasil newspaper, which rejected the mathematical Concretist principles of non-referential abstraction, denial of the natural world, and machine-like detachment from sentiment. The Neo-Concretists claimed instead that the art object could only be fully understood by a tactile, phenomenological approach and a relationship with the audience. Her Bichos (“Critters”) from the early 1960s were her invitation for the viewer to engage directly with her work. Dozens of these aluminum sculptures are assembled, often evoking animal or plant forms. Each piece consists of multiple reflective shields, hinged across the still-present organic lines between them and capable of being manipulated into different iterations. Relógio de sol (“Sundial,” 1960), with its eons-evoking gold patina, and Projeto para um planeta (“Project for a Planet,” 1963) are standouts.

From the mid-sixties, coinciding with an increasing interest in psychotherapy, Clark rejected the effectiveness of conventional artworks as modes of expression, radically relocating her intellectual focus toward the dissolution of emotional and actual space between sensorial vessels and the human body, through what Clark termed “Propositions.” They include Diálogo: óculos (“Dialogue: Goggles,” 1968), a pair of connected goggles for two people, with reflective surfaces causing an altered sense of surrounding and connection, and A casa é o corpo: penetração, ovulação, germinação, expulsão (“The House is the Body: Penetration, Ovulation, Germination, Expulsion,” 1968), a thrilling and consuming fusion of Clark’s aims, in which visitors pass through various chambers — including darkened sections where one initially cannot see — furnished variously with balloons, soft fabrics, blown air and rubber balls, in a manner intended to evoke the birthing process. Baba antropofágica (“Anthropophagic slobber,” 1973) is one of several works recreated by facilitators, here involving reels of thread unraveled from their mouths and dropped upon a near-naked decumbant participant. The resultant cobweb is then torn up in an act of physical separation and social conjoining.

By her transference from the individual object, to public, emotive connectivity between multiple participants, Clark can be seen as a progenitor of the shared feelings, reactions and perceptions of reality, disseminated today through social media. A difference is that the bodily locus of her interactive works ensures that their experiential efficacy cannot yet be imitated by the immaterial nature of Internet-based relationships as one sits alone at a computer. Clark retains profound resonance, in part because the intimacy and physicality through which she operated speak to opposing concerns about detachment and isolation, allied with loss of control and privacy over ourselves, in an increasingly virtual arena.

While the title of the show is dramatic, it would be unrealistic to say that artistic production was absent entirely from Clark’s later endeavors; rather her practice evolved drastically upon the shifting emotional sands of her personal experiences, to a point where in her words, “The work is the act.” Also, without any works originating after 1976 — only a couple are listed as “1976-1988” — the neat 40-year span of this exhibition seems a stretch. Either Clark abandoned art making as she claimed, or she did not. The organizers’ position on this is confusing. Almost 300 works, in combination with the immense breadth and scope of Clark’s oeuvre, make this retrospective an enlightening trove, but its presentation is exceedingly dense and would have benefitted from more space. Constraining an artistic legacy as abundant as Clark’s, within such modest volume, underserves this riveting artist.

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