This panel discussion, recorded the day after Alain Kirili received the insignia of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government in his New York loft, was both a tribute to that achievement, shared with the artist at the time, and a tribute to a great friend of artcritical and a major force in contemporary sculpture marking his death earlier this week at the age of 74. The diverse job descriptions of our panelists reflect the important roles Kirili played in different spheres, as a patron of free jazz, as a scholar in the history of sculpture, as an artist and a friend. My guests are Michael Attis, musician; Maria Mitchell, dancer; Dorothea Rockburne, painter; and Barry Schwabsky, art critic, poet and editor. In addition to this video, artcritical salutes Alain Kirili with two archived posts brought to our front page: an interview with the artist from 2018 by Mary Jones (where he made an early public acknowledgement of his battle with leukemia) and a review of an exhibition of iron works from Rouen at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation from two years earlier.  DAVID COHEN

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3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York 12508, diaart.org

“You don’t see birds’ nests along here anymore and I used to find hundreds along the Hudson River. It really troubles me.” Dorothea Rockburne and I are driving from New York City on the Palisades Parkway north toward Beacon, when she points out the absence of songbirds, a critical indicator of intact woodlands. I’m watching how she looks out the window, looking at her eyes—transparent pools of turquoise and malachite, anchored by the sharpest pupils.

Absence, presence, retrieval of the natural world, and our relationship to the universe are the topics that we discuss over several visits from July, 2018 until our December excursion.  At Dia:Beacon, Rockburne will spend the day refining the final installation phase of her long-term exhibition, which opened last year with a presentation of the artist’s large-scale works from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In January, it reopens with newly added galleries, featuring works produced in the early 1970s through the early 1980s.

Dorothea Rockburne, organized by chief curator Courtney Martin, encompasses a body of work that is informed by the artist’s lifelong investigations of astronomy, dance movement, mathematics, Egyptian and Classical art, and architecture. Existing paintings and works on paper are juxtaposed with recreated works made by the artist, and with Dia staff under her rigorous direction. Guided by her work diaries from the 1970s and documentary images of the original works when they were shown at the Spoleto Festival in Italy and New York’s Bykert Gallery, the exhibition catalyzes a set of questions about our capacity to perceive light, space and form, and to “…develop an empathic recognition of the human condition that is the substance of art.

For several months, Rockburne commuted to Beacon to experiment with new materials that replaced the original, non-art, industrial substances. In the late 1960s working from a studio on Chambers Street with little money to buy expensive art supplies, the artist found at the hardware store crude oil, cup grease, and chipboard, materials that mimicked the earth pigments of Renaissance painting. Today, reimagining works that were never really made to last underscores how deeply Rockburne continues to interweave her knowledge of ancient art and modern dance.

Receiving her early education at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Montreal Museum School, Rockburne studied at Black Mountain College, moved to New York in the mid-1950s and waited tables while raising a daughter. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art she worked in the finance office while helping to catalog the collection of Egyptian antiquities. She later worked for Robert Rauschenberg, remaining deeply devoted to him as a friend for years. In 1960, she participated in the Judson Dance Theatre, working with pioneers Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Lucinda Childs. The experimental vocabulary of dance that was being developed at Judson reconnected Rockburne with her growing up years in Quebec, and the athleticism she experienced in skiing and swimming. Her leitmotifs for the next two decades —the folding movements of the body and its engagement with gravity and space—were inspired by her joy in the activation of her own limbs in the domain of dance.

Today, the energy quickens in the cavernous yet inviting galleries of Dia:Beacon as Rockburne, self-directed and moving with steady power at 86, re-enters work mode. She is greeted by Heidie Giannotti, Dia’s director of exhibition design and installation, and her team as they discuss a checklist of final tasks to accomplish during the next several hours. The atmosphere is companionable, with an edge of intense concentration that feels like musicians tuning before performing a Bartók string quartet. A lot of decisions involving complicated processes have to be made in a short time frame, and these will depend upon how the new materials that have been painstakingly tested over the past several months respond to the humidity, light, and gravity. Like ancient Egyptian laborers who positioned the benben (the top stone of a pyramid), the strength and skill of Giannotti’s team is impressive. Everyone is invested in the project’s success, and Rockburne, who has developed precise (even poetic) instructions for the presentation/recreation of her works, appreciates their individual contribution.

Standing at the opposite end of a large gallery, Rockburne scrutinizes a group of four art handlers who are executing the placement of the components of Set (1970), a work that spans a huge wall. They gradually raise and lower an unwieldy rectangle of chipboard that will anchor a large sheet of ibis-colored white paper against the wall. Rockburne judges its placement, Giannotti looks at Rockburne, nods decisively, and everyone channels their effort so that the revealed vertical edges of the paper will curl just-so (for the love of Pythagorus, don’t tear!). Board, paper, and nails ultimately form a set of harmonious positive and negative shapes that visually interlock with the wall.

Classical Greek architects utilized entasis, a sophisticated geometry to correct for optical illusions or distortions in their temples, and Rockburne similarly adjusts her elements to solve the equation of perfection within her mind’s eye. “Set Theory,” the artist explains, “signifies the desire to classify group situations, both numerically and symbolically. The ancient Greeks were the first to value groups of things like people, angels, and numbers. But the German mathematician Georg Cantor articulated this as a mathematical form to describe this principle, in 1874.” Do not underestimate the mental repetition required to engrave remarks like this into this writer’s brain.

Tropical Tan (1967-68), a severely elegant polyptych at 94 by 144 inches, reveals the artist’s concerns with light, weight, and the potential for apparently unchanging materials to exist as liquids or solids. Four pig iron (black steel) panels were sprayed with wrinkle-finish paint to form a contiguous horizontal band across their centers, with exposed bands of steel along their upper and lower edges. Inspired by air ducts in the artist’s studio, each panel was crimped, forming a low-relief cross (visualize the Roman numeral for ten) within the bend. Depending upon the light and your position, the steel takes on a blue cast against the soft, chamois-gold of the paint color. This chromatic duet, along with the employment of geometry evokes the drapery of figures in Giotto’s divine Scrovegni Chapel frescoes at Padua, an important touchstone for the artist.

In Domain of the Variable (1972-2018), a multifaceted installation, there is a small V-shaped groove carved into the wall around its entire perimeter. The groove sits about waist-high, referencing a proportion in Egyptian art but also suggesting a miniature version of the negative space in Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. It takes time to absorb each element of this installation but for me—a painter and gardener—the effect of a gelatinous substance called lithium-complex red grease (the color of pomegranate seeds) that has been applied to and absorbed into a length of that luminous paper is deeply moving.

Follow that Egyptian groove, turn the corner, and enter a room whose floor and walls are painted an almost blinding white. Drawing Which Makes Itself (1972-73) exists in a continuum of time. The dirt particles deposited by your footwear on this continent of white will accrue with those of previous and future visitors, satisfying Rockburne’s intention for its completion by your presence. On the walls are the artist’s corresponding carbon paper drawings, which were motivated by her desire to “investigate the geometry intrinsic to every sheet of paper.” Rockburne developed a process for folding the matte, deep blue paper and transferring its mark onto the wall. These drawings remind me of the tracery of prairie grasses against a field of winter snow. Rockburne mentions how much she loved the lines of the modified white parachute that Robert Rauschenberg wore on his back in Pelican (1963), his first performance piece.

At Black Mountain College in 1950, Rockburne studied with Max Dehn, a mathematician who came to the United States as a refugee of Nazi Germany. Teaching “mathematics for artists” Rockburne credits him with igniting her lifelong pursuit of math and her efforts to develop a language of visual equivalencies. It should be noted that Rockburne does not believe that viewers of her work must be learned experts in math, because the experience of the work is ultimately visual, emotional and physical. Nevertheless, Rockburne herself does the math, as I witnessed when she pulled out a stack of equation-packed math notebooks from her studio bookshelf. “This is what I did late at night when all the guys were out partying!”

In the Golden Section Paintings, and the Egyptian Paintings Rockburne prepared her surfaces with chalk ground and gesso. She sees, in the rigor of construction, an expression of the unchanging proportions of beauty described by the Golden Mean, articulated in the temples of Pythagoras, and in the timelessness of abstraction in painting. Unrelenting in her process of refinement, she understands the limitations that time imposes on her vision. “My idea of divinity is that I am in this form only temporarily.”

When Greece was the superpower of the Mediterranean, Pythias (the Oracle at Delphi) answered inquiries about everything from the timing of a farmer’s cultivation to shifts in political power and natural disasters. Delphi as a result became the most important and wealthy shrine in Greece. To me, another form of wealth is the capacity that we have to perceive, limb by limb and to retrieve, effort by effort, the secrets of our universe.

At dusk, we gather our belongings to leave Dia: Beacon. A flock of swallows flies past the clerestory windows, casting brief shadows against a wall. The squeal of a power drill cuts through from an adjacent gallery. A preparator is staging the space for the return of Andy Warhol’s monumental work Shadows (1978-79) after a long absence. Eye’s flashing, Dorothea Rockburne says: “Good timing.”

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The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

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September 21, 2013 to February 2, 2014
11 West 53rd Street, between fifth and Sixth avenues
The Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries, third floor

In 1973, Dorothea Rockburne asked herself a question: “How could drawing be of itself and not something else?” Her answer, in a way, constitutes MoMA’s presentation of her works from 1972-73, “Drawing Which Makes Itself. ” Materiality enters the process of making with a visual and conceptual concision that turns a support for drawing, such as paper, into an active and equal participant capable of making varied compositions of solid and linear geometric elements. A conflation of means and ends combined with stark and beautiful meditations on numbers and their inherent relation to form, resulted in a graphic process that is both intuitive and systematic.

Immersion in the consequences of mathematical sequence linked to a visual correlative was something that Rockburne established early in her career.  Born in Canada in 1932, she studied at Black Mountain College in the the first half of the 1950s..  Attending a class at the famed North Carolina institution that was described as mathematics for artists turned out to be hugely formative for her.  The course focused on the underlying geometries present in nature and was taught by Hamburg-born mathematician Max Dehn (1878 –1952) (Robert Creeley was a classmate.) Dehn, who taught at the college from 1945 until 1952, was the sole mathematician on the faculty where he continued his research into geometry, geometric group theory, and topology. Geometric group theory concerns the active influence of equations on geometric symmetries or fluid geometric transformations in a particular space, a theory that didn’t become a discrete area of study within mathematics until the late 1980s. Its premise should appear somewhat familiar, even if not theoretically understood, upon viewing Rockburne’s MoMA exhibition, which in turn revisits the installation of a show of the same title at the Bykert Gallery in 1973.  Various square, diamond and arced shapes are poised along one wall in dialog with each other and with the works situated  on two white low, wide pedestals raised inches from the floor. Originally, carbon from the floor based work spread around the gallery as visitors walked close to and around them, and used their hands to touch them, but the pedestals and a prohibition on touching prevents anything similar happening at MoMA.

The effect of the pedestals  — although their purpose is to prevent the spread of carbon underfoot — is to reflect the wall-based works horizontally and emphasize a perspective that is dependent on the angle and distance of viewing,  This actually enhances rather than detracts from the floor works and equalizes the space of wall and floor, echoing the equalizing of support and drawing within each work. The way in which geometry and surface generate extra visual content brings Ellsworth Kelly and Kasimir Malevich to mind., Kelly for activating of gallery wall through shapes connected to prior visual experience, Malevich for his use of black and white and his ambitions for transcendence.. Rockburne has said, “I came to realize that a piece of paper is a metaphysical object. You write on it, you draw on it, you fold it.” Quotidian gestures, in other words, that have the potential of embodying and reflecting much more.

Neighborhood, 1973, comprises a series of diagonal and vertical lines in pencil and colored pencil on the wall, with a sheet of semi-transparent paper in a central position between them. The orientation of the lines and the regular geometry of the paper suggest a relationship between the two of movement and a tracing of action.  There is a visceral identification with the artist’s construction of the piece in the evidences of performativity. There is a speed and subtleness in the turning and overlapping of line and the open center of the paper around and under which the action takes place visually and to which memory is caught up in reading the marks imaginatively. The folding in of different notions of media is referred to in Natasha Kurchanora’s interview for MoMA with the artist when directly citing Vladimir Tatlin as a point of reference. Drawing, sculpting and performance are all present, though it is drawing that is explored. Given the moment of its making it is impossible not to think of the expansion of possibilities in American art in this decade and the sense of discovery and invention, a connection to tradition not withstanding.

Different papers and material are utilized as support and device in the exhibition. Roman VI, 1977, , for example, is made using Kraft paper, Copal oil varnish, blue pencil and Mylar tape. Scalar, 1971, is made with chipboard as well as paper, with nails and crude oil. In its wall position, altthough touching –and therefore appearing to be based on — the floor, it is both sculptural and architectural.  The raw physicality of this piece, with its irregular perimeter edge of both vertical and horizontal elements, together with a surface that is subjected to a staining process (like weathering) – as if an exterior wall found inside – demands a complex associational reading. For Rockburne this is still within her definition of drawing as those associations further the idea of drawing.

Rockburne has said that her work contains sexuality, which of course in its surface and process sensuality, it certainly does. Often times intellectual rigor and sensual presence are easily separated, and in American culture sexuality is not so much connected to sensuality, as Rockburne herself has observed. It is striking that mathematic and geometric form is here always made as a very present surface, tangible and exposed to touch.  Thought is therefore anything but disembodied, even if this idea might seem alien to Rockburne’s searching formal and conceptual endeavor.

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