Since “Pacific Standard Time,” the comprehensive survey of art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980, organized in 2011 at multiple venues, documentation of artists from that innovative and experimental period has been on reset. The early 1970s, in particular, were a watershed, as young artists emerging in the wake of the game-changing 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, turned to conceptual and performative practices the boundaries between them blurred. Some, like Ed Ruscha, extended the notion of object making into specific sites of investigation, the surreal nature of Southern California itself chief among them.

Raul Guerrero was born in 1945 in Brawley, California, and is currently living and working in San Diego. He was an active part of the groundbreaking scene of the early 1970s, and has continued in the decades since to contextualize the hybrid culture of Southern California.

In his second solo show in New York City, and his first at Ortuzar Projects, we’re introduced to over 20 years of Guerrero’s ongoing trajectory, from 1971 through 1993. That he began his career at a unique moment in Southern California isn’t lost on Guerrero—this is the time of Chris Burden’s most notorious performances, the 1972 Womanhouse of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the work of David Hammons, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari (his first teacher) and Doug Wheeler. Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, Vija Celmins, William Leavitt, and James Welling were all Guerrero’s peers.

In conversation, Guerrero often uses the phrase, “by coincidence,” usually in appreciation of the fortuitous events that marked his journey and aesthetic.

“Since I was a child, every summer my family and I would travel north and work as migrant workers,” he says. “All the accoutrements we’d need for the summer, the pots and pans, everything, were loaded into the back of my father’s flatbed truck. As we’d go over the 101 Freeway, from the back of the truck I’d gaze out at the Capitol Building, and think, ‘Wow, this is Hollywood.’  We’d stop and cook our meals right by the side of the road, and join the encampments by the Merced River, and suddenly there’d be so many other people, Anglos, Oakies, African Americans, gypsies, Mexicans, and Mexicans from Texas. My aspiring family eventually became middle class, and at 16, I’m lying under a vineyard, wondering, what I’m going to do with my life? I hitchhike down to Mexico City and 4 years later I’m in Chouinard Art Institute. On the first day of class, I found myself sitting next to Jack Goldstein. Can you imagine? He looked just like Paul McCartney, and we became close friends.”

At the Chouinard, which later became part of CalArts, Guerrero understood Duchamp’s work instantly and found it liberating, the essential foundation of his aesthetic philosophy. Not only was he drawn to the concept of the assisted readymade, but also to the subliminal power of a single, iconic object or image. This, for Guerrero, resonated with another influence—Carl Jung’s theories of archetype and the collective unconscious.       

Among the 46 pieces in the exhibition, the earliest are Guerrero’s Moroccan watercolors from 1971, shown here for the first time. These come with the intriguing backstory that sparked their creation. At the suggestion of his friend and mentor Ed Kienholz, Guerrero sold all his belongings and headed to Europe. “By coincidence” (again) he managed to meet everyone right away: sitting next to Francis Bacon at dinner in London, he meets Lee Miller, (Man Ray’s model and muse), and meets his idol, Richard Hamilton, and this is just the first week. He ventures down to Morocco, and soon was living on a few dollars a day in El Ksar Seghir, a small village outside of Tangier. The series of watercolors are intimately sized, as they were created to be postcards for his girlfriend. He shares the dazzling ambiance in beautifully patterned, detailed, and hallucinogenic pieces in which teapots, tiles and other domestic objects with their exotic symbols and arabesques vibrate in talismanic bands of energy—reverberations from the local hashish.

After that summer, Guerrero returned to LA blazing. In just a few years he made significant bodies of work in photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Each of these directions could have fuelled a lifetime of work. Guerrero is a gifted and emotional photographer, as evidenced by his California Sur Photographs from 1972. (He cites the Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel as a childhood passion.) These photos were his personal documentation of a two week road trip through Baja with artist friends. The compositions are effortless. Throughout his photographs, Guerrero’s utilization of light is mysterious, otherworldly, and exquisitely tender, as in the ethereal portrait, for example, of his elderly grandmother, who seems to hover between the tangible and spiritual realms.

Another standout in his multifaceted career is the assisted readymade: Rotating Yaqui Mask(1974) is a seminal, declarative work. Guerrero describes this piece as a formal exploration of, and direct response to, Duchamp’s “Rotating Glass Disc,” but the personal choice of the Yaqui mask can be unsettling. For me, the psychic energy released from the mechanized spinning of this ritual object multiplies seismically in a fearsome way, the context feeling both taboo and dangerously displaced. Similarly, in his movie “Primitive Act” of 1974, Guerrero is squatting and naked among rocks and shrubs, reenacting the primitive discovery of fire.

Seeking a more subjective, and pliable medium, since the 1980s Guerrero has focused on oil painting. Among those on view are four selections from his Oaxaca series from 1984 plus La Mujer of the Puerto from 1993. The Oaxaca series was done on location and, like the Moroccan watercolors, he entrenches himself in the history and culture of this particular place. Guerrero treats stylistic representation like a local language and adapts a flat colonialist style relevant to his theme. Like many of the painters he admires —Walter Robinson, Neil Jenney, Lisa Yuskavage and Alida Cervantes — Guerrero opens the door to Kitsch and pulp desire. As if he is writing a detective novel, heembeds layers and clues in his post-conceptual approach.

Much of Guerrero’s process involves honing his attention and allowing his emotional responses to connect him not only to his own history but to that of the culture at large.He interprets his painting Vista de Bonampak (1984) for me:  “I want to capture not only what represents the place for me, but also a critique of the culture, so after visiting the archeological ruins of  Bonampak, once a Mayan city near Chiapas, Mexico, I imagined a jaguar, coveted within Mayan culture for ferocity and strength, stumbling on the scene of the murals, depicting men dressed as jaguar knights, in jaguar skins, capturing enemies for sacrificial purposes who are also dressed in jaguar skins.  Although I might question who is the most vicious creature in the jungle, I also want to make paintings that are interesting and beautiful.

“There’s a lot that can be said about the brutality of the system, especially with our current president, but I prefer images that don’t delve into it overtly.”

After 40 years of structured study of North America, Guerrero has a new theory:  “Because we’re living on a continent that was occupied by indigenous people through millennia, and their voice has been suppressed, their culture, especially in the artworld, is changing things subliminally by gaining a voice though artists, one way or another. It’s a philosophical and cultural virus that’s spreading. For example, John Baldessari grew up in National City, like I did, ten miles from the border. Now, here’s a major artist, he goes to Mexico and is exposed to all this stuff that you see coming out of Mexico that’s really interesting, but in fact it’s all indigenous culture.

“If you dig tacos, you’re being affected by an indigenous culture. You’re consuming part of that philosophical virus. It’s full of indigenous material: tortilla, beans, corn, the way it’s prepared—it changes the way you see your reality. What that reality is I’m not sure, but somehow that essence, that philosophy, is expressing itself nonetheless into the culture unbeknownst to us.

“In this encounter between culture and things,” he says, “your sense of reality is shifted. Artists like Baldessari, who’s making art about culture on a large scale, has had his view shifted, and then he turned all these other guys on at CalArts. Bizarre, right?”

Guerrera is planning a trip to the Amazon sometime later this year.

The post A Multifaceted Career: Raul Guerrero talks with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

Mary Corse: New Work
February 2 – March 10, 2012, Lehmann Maupin Gallery
540 West. 26th Street, New York City, 212-255-2923

The concurrent exhibitions of Doug Wheeler’s environmental light installation at David Zwirner Gallery and Mary Corse’s light-infused paintings at Lehmann Maupin Gallery provide us with an exceptional opportunity to understand how L. A. Light and Space art can sensitize us to the subtleties of the world around us.  These two artists rely on fields of white, intense lighting and a mobile observer to provide some exhilarating surprises.  While both Wheeler and Corse privilege direct perception over thinking, there are also some significant differences in the ways in which their art creates heightened sensory awareness.

Over thirty years ago, the psychologist William Ittelson drew a critical distinction between environment and object perception.  In object perception, one surrounds the object; in environment perception, one is surrounded by it.  One observes an object; one explores an environment using many sensory modalities.  Ittelson noted that with environment perception “the very distinction between self and nonself breaks down: the environment surrounds, enfolds, engulfs….”  What makes the work of Wheeler and Corse so innovative is that it causes us to alternate between object and environment perception.   This is consistent with Venturi’s preference in Complexity and Contradiction for both-and over either-or.   As we will see, these two L.A. artists accomplish this balancing act in different ways.

Your adventure in Wheeler’s Infinity Environment begins in the antechamber where you appear to be facing a luminous translucent wall that makes you hesitant to move forward.  So you approach it very slowly.  Your initial surprise when you reach the “wall” is that it is not solid, but rather an opening into a space filled with what appears to be thick fog. The morphing of a diaphonous wall into a vaporous fog creates a shift from perceiving an object to perceiving an environment.  Once inside the space, you can’t see its perimeter, so you can’t figure out its shape without extended exploration.  As you reach out your hands in front of you, you can see your fingers clearly but your don’t know how much further the space extends.  So again you walk slowly.  The next surprise is that your feet provide you with some critical information.  Suddenly, the floor begins to curve upward and outward in front of you but your outstretched arms do not hit the wall.  Are you inside a giant egg?

The effects Wheeler creates are most dramatic and thrilling if you inhabit the space alone, but this has generally not been possible due to the popularity of this exhibition.  Indeed, your entire experience is radically altered by the presence of other people who appear to be crystal clear, almost hyper-real.  By observing the positions of the other people, you can see how far the floor extends in each direction. In this space, “you feel with your eyes” (Turrell) and see with your body.  The sensations created by this Infinity Space range from disorienting to frightening to exhilarating, often alternating within an individual.   And to heighten the experience, Wheeler gradually modifies the ambience by shifting the lighting from dawn to dusk and back again over some thirty minutes.  This extreme environment attunes our sensory-motor system to differentiate things it never noticed before, a major goal of the Light and Space artists.

Mary Corse’s wall paintings are essentially two-dimensional.  One would, therefore, expect them to function as objects and not environments.  But, almost magically, the tiny glass microspheres embedded in Corse’s five large white paintings invite you to treat them as environments to be explored.   You notice immediately that each painting changes dramatically as you cross in front of it so what you experience is not one painting, but multiple different paintings.  For example, the large work, Untitled 4 Inner Bands shifts from an absorbent matte cream-colored monochrome with barely perceptible vertical bands to a stark white mirror-like surface that glistens and reflects your head and body movements.  As you move back and forth in front of the painting, you see anywhere between two and five vertical bands which reverse their colors as you move, the darker ones becoming light and the lighter ones becoming dark.  From certain vantage points you can detect some horizontal brush strokes that first appear as ghostly vapors and then become eight defined horizontal bands that weave across the vertical ones to form a grid.   Careful looking and continual movement combine to provide an uncanny experience that simulates key aspects of environment perception.  The ambiguity of the overall encounter resembles a reversible-figure task used in Gestalt psychology research in which the  perceived image shifts dramatically from a vase to two figures or from a duck to a rabbit.  This effect results from the limitations of our perceptual apparatus that allow us to see only one of these images at a time.

Wheeler and Corse create different kinds of ambiguity to achieve their effects.  The ambiguity of Wheeler’s void is one of a homogeneous field in which you seek to discover its boundaries, so as to both find your place and try to locomote effectively.  With Corse, the problem is not lack of structure but competing structures.  Monochromatic surfaces, minimal geometric bars, and abstract expressionist brushstrokes inhabit the same canvas and alternate taking center stage.  However, in both Wheeler and Corse, what turns looking into seeing is the coordination between looking and doing.  What we do affects what we see; what we see affects what we do.

Finally, each artist takes you on a journey that explores the relationship between order and disorder in different ways.  In Corse, if conditions are right, one’s movements can control the fluctuation between order and disorder in a back and forth dance that can be highly pleasurable.  In Wheeler, there is a more entropic experience that, at least momentarily, is more frightening and disorienting.  Control is neither possible nor desirable for Wheeler.  In his “whiteout” environment a lack of control is central to the participant’s experience of boundlessness. Despite these differences, Wheeler and Corse provide something that is very atypical for the New York lifestyle: there is a slowing down of our internal clock.   We are able to surrender ourselves to a kind of stillness that sets the stage for retuning our sensory-motor system.  This sensory learning increases our ability to differentiate the essential from the unessential in the course of exploring realms where objects morph into environments and environments morph into objects.

The post See First, Think Later: The Art of Doug Wheeler and Mary Corse appeared first on artcritical.

If ever there was a moment to reassess the 1960s Light and Space artists of Los Angeles, that moment is now.  At the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a recently reinstalled permanent gallery places three works from L.A. Light and Space art in critical dialogue with four works of New York Minimalism, which also had it defining years in the middle 1960s.  Simultaneously, a representative sampling of the Light and Space movement is presently on view at more than a dozen museums and gallery exhibits throughout Southern California participating in the Getty Foundation’s omnibus initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.  The pivotal survey, Phenomenal California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through January 22, seen together with more focused shows at the other venues, listed at the end of this dispatch, allows us to grasp the fundamental characteristics of the Light and Space tradition that differentiates it from the Minimalism that was being practiced in New York by the likes of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Frank Stella et al.

At a meta-level, the L.A. aesthetic may be characterized as “truth equals beauty” as distinguished from the “truth to materials” aesthetic prevailing in N.Y.  The N.Y. aesthetic embraced impermeable industrial materials and downplayed shadows and reflections in favor of the concreteness and stability of the specific object.  In contrast, L.A. artists, especially the Finish Fetish group, rejected concreteness and turned instead to newly available translucent and transparent materials—polyester resin, Plexiglas, fiberglass, coated glass, and plastics of all kinds.  These materials reflected, refracted, and filtered light, thus opening up new options for sculpture.  They were particularly well suited to capturing and transforming the ephemeral luminosity of the ocean and the smog-besmirched sky, as well as the high gloss brilliance of surfboards and autos that were primary everyday experiences for these artists.  In this context, the L.A. artists turned Stella’s reductive, “what you see is what you see” inside out by appending a question mark.

Indeed, these L.A. works could be Michael Fried’s worst nightmare—their theatricality is an integral part of their aesthetic DNA.  They make us keenly aware that what you do affects what you see, and what you see affects what you do.  The properties of an effective resin piece don’t belong to the work alone.  Their color, shape, and surface effects are contingent on the spatial/temporal positions of observers as they move across, walk around, or enter the piece.  The spheres of Helen Pashgian and some of the boxes of Larry Bell change dramatically depending on the trajectory of the observer’s movements.  Certain works also depend upon the presence or absence of other people to bring out their complexity.  This occurs with Robert Irwin’s acrylic column and Bell’s five large coated glass panels, both installed strategically in busy and visually noisy locations on the Museum’s first floor.   These are socially contingent works that reach their potential when the movements of other people are reflected and refracted.

Light and Space artists play the role of Shamans.   They have the uncanny ability to make the immaterial material and the material immaterial. They take liquid resin and make of it solid forms (Peter Alexander, Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine) or use light (James Turrell) or scrim (Irwin) to create the illusion of solid forms.  In doing so, strange things happen.  The observer is forced to confront objects and spaces that have hallucinatory properties not unlike the drooping watches in Dali’s Persistence of Memory (1931).  These works challenge our assumptions about ordinary reality to a point where, using our perceptual, sensory-motor apparatus, we try to disambiguate forms as they appear to morph before our eyes. We feel compelled to walk up to and look behind a “floating” Irwin disc to see if it is attached to the wall or we stop short and gaze intently as soon as we detect an Irwin scrim that resizes a room by appearing to be a wall.  We feel compelled to check out whether the top portion of a tall Alexander Wedge is really still there when the bottom is deep orange and the color gradually fades to clear near the top;  to walk around Valentine’s Diamond Column to see how it is possible for people passing behind it to first appear, then disappear, and then return as three simultaneous images facing in different directions;  to walk up to Irwin’s dot painting and Pashgian’s white disc to explore how they are able to hover and pulsate;  to walk right up to the front of a Mary Corse painting with reflective glass microspheres after walking across it and seeing how it changes dramatically from matte to shiny and from totally uniform to containing grids or columns.  And we feel compelled to approach the wall works of Pashgian, Corse, Ron Cooper and Doug Wheeler, to see if there are lights embedded within them.  In all of these explorations, labeling is futile.  We have no choice but to trust our senses.

Several Light and Space artists are particularly good at making color diffuse into space.  Wheeler’s 35 foot-square room installation with one wall completely outlined in white neon UV lights suffuses the entire space in an ethereal atmosphere of blue air.  Other effects are achieved by introducing a temporal dimension to heighten color intensity.  Turrell’s installation (Wedgework V, 1975) requires several minutes of adjustment time in an initially pitch black space before a red wall begins to appear and then intensifies to a fiery glow.  Bruce Nauman’s narrow tunnel with two parallel walls one foot apart and forty feet long lit with green lights seduces us to inch slowly through it sideways.  When we exit this disorienting light tunnel into a wider space, everything appears purple for several seconds— the people, the walls, and the Pacific Ocean seen through an immense glass window.

The other museums and galleries showing Light and Space work (listed below) give us an appreciation of the career trajectories and new options being opened by several of the artists already mentioned (e.g., Alexander, Irwin, Pashgian, Valentine).  In particular, their new work, by utilizing the wall, reinvigorates a dialogue between painting and sculpture, begun earlier by John McCracken and Craig Kauffman.   These shows also introduce us to established but less well known artists like Tom Eatherton at Pomona College who has created an intensely blue space that creates the illusion that you are walking into the middle of a room-size painting.  And, thanks to storefront spaces like Ice Gallery, we can see emerging artists like Michael James Armstrong who is advancing the use of scrims in new and exciting directions.

After seeing these works in many different settings, we were left with three concluding observations. First, the Light and Space artists were determined to make us reexamine how we perceive the world—what is illusory and what is real.  Second, these artists shamelessly court beauty, an aesthetic questioned by postmodern art but openly embraced in the design aesthetic of Steve Jobs and in the reflective surfaces of Frank Gehry’s signature architecture—two iconic Californians who may be seen as heirs to the Light and Space culture.  Third, the relationship between Minimalism and the Light and Space tradition is a complex one, as can be seen, in the MOMA reinstallation, in the atmospheric effects of Dan Flavin’s light sculpture and the exquisite use of colored Plexiglas by Donald Judd. The fruitfulness of this exchange calls out for further study.  The next step?  We suggest a comprehensive exhibition combining Light and Space and East Coast Minimalism that would be seen on both coasts.  Such an exhibition would enable us to appreciate more fully the unique and shared strategies that animate those aspects of Minimalism that dare to flirt with beauty.

Los Angeles Light and Space Works on View in Southern California, Fall, 2011

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
September 25, 2011 to January 22, 2012
700 Prospect Street, La Jolla, CA and 1100 & 1101 Kettner Boulevard, San Diego, CA, between Broadway and B Street. (858) 454-3541 (Catalogue available)

and

Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.  October 1, 2011 to February 5, 2012.  Light and Space art is a subset of the exhibition. (Catalogue)

From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Grey Column at Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.  September 13, 2011 to March 11, 2012. (Catalogue)

California Art: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation at Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. August 27 to December 2, 2011.  Light and Space art is a subset of the exhibition. (Catalogue)

It Happened at Pomona at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969—1973; Part I Hal Glicksman at Pomona, Pomona College Museum of Art, 333 N. College Way, Claremont. August 30 to November 6, 2011.   (Catalogue)

James Turrell’s Dividing the Light (2007) at Draper Courtyard of the Lincoln & Edmonds Buildings, corner of 6^th Street and College Way, Pomona College, Claremont.  Permanent.

Mary Corse Recent Paintings at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through October, 2011.

Robert Irwin Column (1970) at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through October 18, 2011.

Helen Pashgian Columns and Walls at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through November, 2011.

De Wain Valentine Early Resins 1968-1972 and New Work at Ace Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Through November, 2011.

James Turrell Present Tense at Kayne, Griffen, Corcoran, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica. September 15 to December 17, 2011.

Larry Bell Early Work at Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, B5B, Santa Monica. October 22 to November 26, 2011.

Fred Eversley: Four Decades—1970-2010 at William Turner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, E1, Santa Monica.  September 24 to October 30, 2011.

Robert Irwin Way Out West at L & M Gallery, 660 Venice Boulevard, Venice. September 17 to October 22, 2011.

Peter Alexander, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, New Out West at Quint Gallery, 7547 Girard Ave., La Jolla. September 23 to November 12, 2011.

Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, De Wain Valentine, Eric Johnson: Shift. Space. Slick at Scott White Contemporary Art, 939 W. Kalmia, San Diego. September 9 to October 8, 2011.

Michael James Armstrong: A Study in Transparency at Ice Gallery, 3417 30^th Street, San Diego. September 18 to October 9, 2011.

The post No Choice But To Trust The Senses: California Light and Space Revisited appeared first on artcritical.

John McLaughlin: Hard Edge Classicist
Paintings from the 1950s to the 1970s
January 7 – February 13, 2010
Greenberg Van Doren Gallery
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City 212 445 0444

Laddie John Dill: Contained Radiance
January 15 – February 20, 2010
Nyehaus
358 West 20th Street (East of 9th Ave.)
New York City, 212 995 1785

Ronald Davis: Monochrome Paintings From The 1960s
Franklin Parrasch Gallery
January 6 – February 20, 2010
20 West 57th Street
New York City, 212 246 5360

“Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970” at David Zwirner Gallery, curated by Tim Nye and Kristine Bell,  is a must see for anyone who wants to appreciate the creative energy that boiled over in the mid-to late 1960s in Los Angeles.  While seven of the ten artists in this show have had one person shows in New York within the past few years, it isn’t until you see these artists together that you can appreciate the multiple ways in which they shared an L.A. aesthetic at the same time as maintaining easily recognizable individual styles.
Several artists in this show reflect the Light and Space Movement (Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, and Laddie Dill) while others represent the Finish Fetish Group (Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine).  However, the boundaries are permeable:   Alexander, whose tall wedges disappear at the top and Bell, whose cubes are both solid and transparent, belong in both groups.

The Light and Space artists make us question the reliability of what we see.  The Irwin room has three works that are best seen in midday light.  Some visitors experience the room as empty when they first enter it.  The large slightly convex almost square dot painting by Robert Irwin (Untitled, 1963-65) is like a fuzzy Josef Albers painting observed from behind a scrim.  This is a slow work where patience is rewarded.  You begin to see a series of soft-edged nested squares that hover on the surface.   Directly opposite it is Irwin’s white formed acrylic plastic convex disc  (Untitled, 1969).  A black horizontal line in the center of the diameter first captures your attention.  After that, the disc became visible and then its sides and bottom edge slowly disappear into the wall surrounding it.  There is visual magic and ascetic beauty here: virtually everyone seeing this work walks up to the wall to look at its acrylic lacquered surface and what lies behind it.

A few steps away in a perfectly proportioned, dimly lit, sterile, white room with white painted floors is Doug Wheeler’s Untitled (1969).  This soft-edged acrylic and wood square box, the same color as the walls, has a perimeter of fuzzy white neon light that provides an experience of a transcendental floating rectangle. In two totally darkened rooms, Turrell’s mastery of light goes one step further.  Projections of light read as solid forms.  Juke Green (1969) appears to be a green cube that is leaning against the back corner of one room.  Gard Red (1969) reads as a solid pyramid that has been chiseled out of one corner wall in the other room.  Irwin, Wheeler, and Turrell expand our perception by forcing us to use our eyes, our bodies and our minds to disambiguate what we’re seeing.

A dimly lit room on the way to the Finish Fetish works contains a mesmerizing floor installation by Laddie John Dill, an artist whose in-between location is a bridge between the two L.A. groups.  Untitled (1969) consists of graceful mounds of brown and tan sand that are sliced through at an angle by large squares of glass revealing marble-cake sand patterns.  Smaller pieces of square glass are placed horizontally to the viewer above a row of green argon with mercury lights that are hidden below the sand.  The lights can only be seen in the reflections at the top and fronts of the glass, creating an otherworldly landscape.

The last two rooms of the show are devoted to artists captivated by new industrial materials available to them largely from the aerospace industry.  It is widely acknowledged that these artists were inspired by the glossy finishes used on the fast cars, sleek motorcycles, exquisite aerodynamic surf boards, and alluring billboards around them.  When Walter Brooke advises Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967), “I want to say one word to you… Plastics”, his advice had already been heeded in L.A.  Plastics of all types opened up new options in the realms of color, shape, translucency and size.  But, less well known is that some of these artists (for example, Alexander, Valentine, and Dill) also turned to nature for their inspiration. They tried to capture the transient beauty of sea, sky and sand, a beauty that extended to smog besotted colors.  As a result, some of their works transgressed the boundaries between Light and Space and Finish Fetish.  In this connection, Peter Alexander’s work is particularly interesting because he creates immaculate objects that also have the perceptual concerns associated with the Light and Space artists.  However, when his works merged into their surroundings, he was less concerned with formal considerations than with capturing the transiency of the L.A.. sea and sky.  Two cast polyester resin pedestal pieces, Untitled (Window, 1968) and Green Wedge,(1969) and a tall floor piece (Blue Wedge, 1970) virtually disappear at the top as they become thinner and fade from dark pigment to no pigment.  De Wain Valentine, the acknowledged alchemist of the group, also made resin pieces (some of them vast and weighing several tons) during this period.  In this exhibition, he is represented by Triple Disk Red Metal Flake—Black Edge (1966), a sensuous molded fiberglass reinforced acrylic piece with the speckled iridescent finish of a car, motorcycle, or boat.  In fact, its gracefully rounded forms can allude to a series of breasts or the bows of three oncoming ships.

Helen Pashgian’s two small polyester and resin sculptures (both Untitled, 1968-69) have a complexity that belies their size.  One, a murky crystal-ball shaped work reveals two cylindrical forms that cut through the piece.  The other, a clear igloo-shaped work has two mirror-image half-spheres embedded at the top and near the bottom.  Larry Bell’s cubes are magical.  Placed in the center of the room, several of them reflect the works and the people that surround them.  Others can also be seen as allusionistic, as vessels that capture the L.A. smog. Two are particularly arresting.  The first is a small vacuum coated glass and chromium plated brass cube (1966) that has both bronze and turquoise vertical edges depending on where you stand.  The second, Glass Box with Ellipses (1964), with oval mirrored areas allows you to see yourself and then look inside the piece and straight down for an illusion of infinite depth.  Craig Kauffman used Plexiglas to create sensuous vacuum formed molded reliefs of intense colors with varying degrees of translucency.  Spray-painted on the back, three of these acrylic and lacquer Untitled Wall Reliefs (1968) in seductive hues of green, orange, and blue were attached to the wall. Among the John McCracken pieces are two of his signature polyester and resin planks (Think Pink and Red Plank, both 1967) that combine seductive color and immaculate surface with minimalist rigor of form, while functioning both as paintings and sculpture.

It is important to note that while others in the Finish Fetish group showed in New York in the 1960s, McCracken and Bell were more often included in Minimalism surveys in New York and Los Angeles.   It is perhaps not accidental, given Donald Judd’s friendship with Bell and his trips to L.A. that Judd, in the middle 1960s, began designing boxes and stacks using seductively colored Plexiglas.  The result was works that easily could fit in with aspects of the Finish Fetish L.A. culture.  Indeed, in reviewing a Judd exhibition, Rosalind Krauss observed that Judd’s works were both beautiful and illusionistic, properties that sharply transgress Judd’s own writings regarding what properties “specific objects” should have.  Even more telling, Robert Smithson’s labeling of “uncanny materiality” to aspects of Judd’s oeuvre could easily be applied as a general description of the Primary Atmospheres exhibition.  Indeed, perhaps the increasing use of plastics in New York eventually eroded some of the phenotypic differences between East and West Coast Minimalism, creating what James Meyer in his scholarly essay in “A Minimal Future?” (2004) referred to as a “Bicoastal Minimalism”.

It is indeed fortunate that concurrent with the Primary Atmospheres exhibition, there are three other Southern California artists exhibiting who relate either directly or indirectly to the David Zwirner show.  In particular, the exhibition of John McLaughlin’s work at Greenberg Van Doren is highly informative regarding the evolution of the L.A.  minimalist aesthetic.  His hard-edge reductive paintings created a climate for L.A. Minimalism.  McLaughlin progressively reduced his paintings to allow geometry and color to move from figure to ground, as line increasingly became a vehicle to explore space as pure form.  One could argue that the de-materialization of McLaughlin’s painting from its constructivist roots in geometry of varied forms and color—his “Finish Fetish” phase, exemplified by Untitled, (1952) – leads to his “Light and Space” phase in the 1960s and early 1970s (#8, 1963).  These largely black and white paintings synthesize Western Modernism and Eastern Philosophy.  They resonate with the attempt by Irwin, Turrell, and Wheeler to make the boundaries of their images merge with their surroundings.  In each case, the simplicity, clarity and self-discipline of the void creates a phenomenological experience that allows the observer, in McLaughlin’s terms, to learn more about himself than the artist.

The other two L.A. exhibits deserving of attention are Laddie John Dill at Nyehaus and Ron Davis at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery.  In Dill’s exhibition, we can observe the evolution from his horizontal and vertical pure “light sentences” affixed to the wall to his glass, sand, and light floor installations similar to the one at David Zwirner Gallery.   Light Sentence (1973) was inspired by the changing daylight during an average day in Taos, New Mexico.   While his light and sand works parallel Sonnier’s light pieces and Smithson’s dirt, gravel, mirror, and glass installations, his light sentences anticipate the fluorescent light pieces of Spencer Finch who sets about simulating the light at a specific time and place. The most dramatic piece in the Nyehaus show isDeath in Venice (1969), a large floor piece on the second floor of the gallery that calls to mind the canyon fires Dill experienced in the California landscape.  The red, yellow and blue neon and argon tubes lying on and under the sand create an aura of smoldering heat.

Ron Davis’s monochromatic pastel-colored, shaped canvases have never been exhibited in New York.  Of particular note are two works—the beautiful and majestic Big Orchid (1965), an angular pink painting in two sections and Bent Corner Slab (1965) a diamond-shaped green gold painting that is highly illusionistic with apparent folds in the canvas somewhat like Dorothea Rockburne’s work of the early 1970s.  These “in-between” works are the beginning of Davis’ move from painter to object maker.  Specifically, they anticipate his large geometrically shaped floor pieces (the Dodecagon Series) that use Finish Fetish materials of resin and fiberglass along with new technologies to trap the splatters and abstract forms of his expressionist brush strokes while maintaining the clarity of his high key colors.

These four exhibitions provide a nuanced view of Californian Minimalism that includes some of the most perceptually challenging, technically innovative, and downright beautiful works of the last fifty years.  We still have much to learn about California’s cool recasting of New York’s cold Minimalism, but these shows provide a good place to start.

The post West Coast Minimalism: Four New York Shows appeared first on artcritical.