April 23 to July 23, 2010
35 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome
New York City, 212-219-2166

A piquant pleasure of gallery-going is an encounter with unfamiliar and challenging work by an artist whom you thought you “knew:” had dealt with, figured out, mentally filed away. “Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion?” on view at The Drawing Center through July 23, provides exactly that order of pleasure. The exhibition includes fifty drawings, primarily in ink and oil stick on 8 by 10 inch sheets of bristol or vellum, from the artist’s last six years. It is an object lesson in late, great stylistic surprises.

At the height of his visibility, Golub (1922-2004) painted on a grand and public scale in global if didactic terms. Among art-world observers in the 1980’s, Golub might have been known as “the Interrogations guy” for his depictions of brutal, blasé torturers and their hooded and helpless victims. The work touched a nerve at the time of the Iran-Contra affair and the American public’s mushrooming awareness of our country’s “dirty little wars.” Closely related canvases featured similarly monstrous groups of leering mercenaries and screeching white trash. Golub’s politics of human rights is unassailable but, unlike the more open-ended of that decade’s Neo-Expressionism (e.g., Francesco Clemente’s kitchen-sink, fetishistic symbolism) his polemics stipulate a narrow path of approach. He illustrated sources of outrage without illuminating their psychic blood and guts.

Later, Golub’s profile waned. His work was increasingly weird and elliptical. In the measured words of Thomas McEvilley’s April 2002 Art in America feature, the canvases of the 1990’s “consistently show less resistance to the sensual aspects of the painterly tradition.” Oh, and he started drawing like a sonovabitch.

No Escape Now (2002) reprises the theme of the torture victim, here tethered to a post and slumped forward, unconscious or left for dead. Scratchy ink and oil stick suggest stressed, exhausted musculature. In Blue Movie and Blue Movie II (both 2004), passionless couples strenuously copulate. Sex is more fun in Satyr Love II (2004), in which a male of that species lifts his hirsute partner’s shapely hoof and guides himself into her. Satyrs abound in Golub’s late oeuvre, as do licentious women, guys with oxymoronic tattoos (“think HATE”), hyperventilating lions, and inscrutably gesticulating skeletons. Often, image vies with lettering for primacy; “FUCK DEATH,” screams a skull in FUCK DEATH (1999).

Taunting the viewer, the skeevy couple in Bunnie & Quyde (2003) pull at their underwear and fondle a gun. The work is based on a newspaper photograph on display in a vitrine among other source material culled from fashion magazines, straight porn, and the sports pages. Drawing as ever from his pool of print-media images, Golub loosened his grip on message, on meaning, and allowed it to become diffuse. In the catalogue accompanying this exhibition, Curator Brett Littman quotes the artist: “I want to throw drawings in all directions. That’s my ultimate intent: to have them be political, to have them be erotic, to have them be neurotic, to have them be just rotten.”

That rottenness is everywhere, and economically expressed. Each drawing is two or three colors, rarely more, and looks like it took maybe ten minutes to do. Sure, into his eighth decade Golub was getting tired. But what the aging artist might have lacked in physical stamina he made up for in pictorial smarts. The diminutive scale and material modesty of these droll, sour little icons of discontent contribute mightily to their punch. Funny and morbid, they track the efforts of an old man, a lion of our tribe, to deal with his own extinction. Dreamlike and inward-looking, they might be confessional in tone if they were not so ferocious.

A second vitrine houses a number of “unfinished drawings,” inchoate smears or stains of color that divulge the works’ procedural origins in abstraction. Golub valued image above form, having denounced Abstract Expressionism in its heyday, so it is amusing to think of him relishing the triumph of his iconography quite literally “over” the abstract. In fact, the distinction between figure and ground, ever clear in his epic canvases, is artfully scrambled in most of these late works. When it is not, the artist’s title sounds the alarm, as in a 2002 work depicting a steely-eyed, grinning contractor kicking back among blood-colored, Hans Hofmannesque rectangles, titled GUNMAN CAUGHT IN RED ABSTRACTION! SITUATION COULD BE SERIOUS!

The most haunting of these images are not the heartless couples, the skulls or lions, not even the abandoned corpses, but Golub’s dogs. They roam this exhibition, pacing its perimeter, snarling at the sky, dumbly staring down the viewer. Bones (2002) is the best of these wickedly strange postcards from the edge. A skulking mutt approaches a crumpled human skeleton, sniffing for meat. The joke’s on him: nothing doing! It’s a desiccated archeological dig, no juicy corpse. After decades confronting the void of the empty canvas, Golub enlists man’s best friend to help him confront the void of his own bodily demise. The possibly feral dog that lopes across A Sentimental Story (2003) looks a bit beaten down. He shoots the viewer a baleful glance, and you just know that this lunatic hound will soon find something to howl about.

cover image: Leon Golub, Live & Die Like a Lion?, 2002.  Oil stick on Bristol, 8 x 10 inches. Collection of Anthony and Judith Seraphin, Seraphin Gallery Philadelphia © Estate of Leon Golub/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph by Cathy Carver

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If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, consider the remarkable resemblance some musical scores bear to architectural drawings.  The quintessential example of this phenomenon is composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), whose complex ideas sprouted from a natural love of architecture and mathematics.  In a tightly constructed show now at the Drawing Center curators Sharon Kanach and Carey Lovelace have created a heady glimpse of the visual side of Xenakis, the composer who worked for Le Corbusier.

There are over 100 documents on view—including a letter from Corb informing Xenakis that his services are no longer needed—many borrowed from the composer’s papers at Bibliothèque nationale de France.  These latter show a complex mind fleshing out musical ideas in blizzards of dots, robotic rows, glyphs that waver and shimmer, and storms of tiny lines and colored boxes.  The collective brilliance of these is that they remain powerful statements on their own, even if they were to be completely disconnected from the music they ultimately represent.  Many are derived from Xenakis’s love of stochastic (i.e., chance-generated) principles, which became evident in his landmark orchestral work Pithoprakta(1956).  Other drawings are derived from computer programs, then in their infancy. James Harley observes, in notes for the JACK Quartet’s CD of the four string quartets (on Mode), that the IBM-France computer used by Xenakis in 1962, may have been the only one operating in Paris.

For one of his most renowned compositions, Metastaseis (1953-54), Xenakis used ink, pencil and colored pencil to map out hyperbolic paraboloids resembling fragments of suspension bridges, with each line representing a different instrument.  These sketches later became traditional notation, yet the flavor of the music is evident in their swooping curves.  Terretektorh, from 1966, was composed for 88 musicians “scattered among the audience,” and one striking study (ink on paper) resembles a beehive of scribbles, with every instrument and the conductor floating within.  Erikhthon (1974), one of Xenakis’s dazzling piano concertos, pits the pianist against the orchestra’s waves of rising and fallingglissandi—one of the composer’s favorite devices, in which musicians slide from one pitch to another.  His visual representation of these ideas resembles tiny, gnarled branches, or perhaps lightning spikes, etching the air.  It is not surprising that some of his scores are infrequently played, as musicians must learn an entirely new language to do so.

In the early 1960s, Xenakis contributed sketches for Francoise Choay’s Urbanism, Utopia and Reality (1964), and envisioned Cosmic City, a set of vast communities with gigantic structures resembling nuclear cooling towers, each with a capacity of 5 million people.  Not surprisingly, this project, like some others, remains unbuilt. Some of his ideas did come to fruition; a handful of photographs show Xenakis’s elaborate installations called “polytopes” (Greek for “many places”) in the 1960s and 1970s, combining architecture, light and music.  One of the studies for Polytope de Montréal, a vast installation from 1966, sprawls over one of the show’s largest pieces of paper.  The confluence of the medium (blueprint) and the size, all gently weathered by the passage of more than 40 years, gives it the aura of a map unearthed from a long-entombed civilization.

Some of these site-specific events, such as the glittering six-story environment in Montréal, cry out for a larger photograph, but the peephole effect is tantalizing, and makes one long to turn back the clock.  The most celebrated of his environments was the Philips Pavilion, a collaboration with Le Corbusier, designed by Xenakis for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair.  The building’s soaring peaks housed an elaborate array of loudspeakers inside, playing Edgard Varèse’s Poème Electronique, commissioned for the occasion, accompanied by graphics and colored lights devised by Le Corbusier.  In addition to photographs of the exterior of the pavilion, the show includes a gem of a colored pencil sketch from 1957, disarming in its spiral notebook, in which Xenakis envisions the sound world inside the building.  It is as if Alexander Calder were having a mild hallucinatory episode.

Other artifacts include a clutch of LPs from the period, many with detailed liner notes containing illustrations and arresting graphics, and a cover of the Swiss music journalGraveseaner Blätter, to which Xenakis contributed essays.  Also included is a page from unpublished comments on Wagner’s opera, Die Meistersinger, one of many items from the collection of Françoise Xenakis, the composer’s widow.  A few well-chosen photographs round out the show, including a shot showing the composer as a Greek resistance fighter atop a truck, and from years later, a casual portrait with two special guests: Seiji Ozawa and Olivier Messiaen.

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September 18 – December 18, 2009
35 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome,
New York City, 212-219-2166

Ree Morton is known for her fast development and short career, for being a woman and for giving us a glimpse early on of what would become important much later.   Looking back on her career we see the formative stages of a kind of art practice that has become a given today.  Does this mean that Morton was influential, or someone for whom what was essential only became apparent or noteworthy to others much later?

Morton’s drawings in The Drawing Center’s main gallery exhibit a wide variety of styles and seemingly divergent concerns.  What might make for an unsettling experience is grounded in the drive of her inquiring mind, subtly apparent underlying these works.  From the serial repetition drawings of the early 1970s, which seem to reflect a coming to terms with the dominant trend of the time, to the highly idiosyncratic plant drawings from a few years later, which realize her move from grids to living things, Morton begins what are to become intense investigations of the decorative and the daemonic.  Though many of the drawings struck me as pieces that would have been edited out had the artist had a longer career, the Drawing Center’s exhibition affords a view of the diverse origins of an artist and a chance to see what Morton might have synthesized had her oeuvre had more than a ten year span.

A trio of totemic wood block pieces from 1974, encased in plexiglas boxes at the entrance to the main gallery  are studies for her Whitney installation of that year, To Each Concrete Man.  Her use of living materials like skin or wood is consistent both with the anima one feels in them and her interest in Kachina dolls and Sumerian idols, items on her ‘like’ list, in a notebook displayed nearby.  In attempting to locate her sensibility, the eroticism in the orifices of her early repetition drawings suggests the beginnings of a deeper interest in what moves from within.  Another notebook entry from 1975 reads “The point in all cases is that the deities must be made to laugh.”

A series of plant drawings taking off from “Wild Flowers Worth Knowing,” a 1917 text by Neltje Blanchan, reflects Morton’s preoccupation with Nature.  There is a curious relationship in these drawings between figure and ground.  A hazy blending of colored pencils create a sensitive landscape where most of the drawing’s energy resides and which seems to be Morton’s real interest, and yet you can’t see much of it because of the headline banners hastily drawn in crayon that occupy most of the foreground.  For example, “Conspicuous advertisements” is the banner text in Trumpet Weed (1974) which also lets us know that “The ranks of floral missionaries need recruits.”

Seen from today’s perspective Morton looks like an early ecology advocate, and the drawings betray her striving to relay that agenda. Yet her endeavors cannot be so reduced.   On one hand, she has made an 180º turn in the plant drawings from the way the totemic pieces communicate and yet in terms of subject both they and the sculpture Devil Chaser2nd version (1975-76) speak to the loss of spirit in the landscape that the totemic works depend on for their efficacy.  Morton’s language is highly individual yet at the same time doesn’t close itself down.  It’s the opening of these kinds of problematics that give the exhibition its sustaining tension.

It’s no wonder she would portray the “Swamp Cabbage”  or “Skunk Cabbage,” which according to Blanchan “ proclaims spring in the very teeth of winter, being the first bold adventurer above ground.”.  Blanchan also tells us that these plants have their unpleasant odor in order to attract the flies that pollinate them.   The rhythm of Morton’s colored pencil lines in “Swamp Cabbage” mimic the rise and fall of the stomach when encountering the banner text “Putrid nest”, giving a glimpse of the kind of synthesis that might have developed in her work between text and form.  These drawings are for the most part awkward and as in the more purely decorative works that confront the legacy of Louis Sullivan, they evidence an uncomfortable collision of her formal acumen, intellectual pursuits and intuitive knowledge.  Their latency gives us space to imagine, however, that her work would have born much fruit as evolution of her interests worked themselves out through her mind’s eye.

In the project space across the street Wood Drawings, in various drawing materials on found wood from 1971, are spaced carefully on a long wall. Her sculptural drawings are tasteful and clean in contrast to her funky approach to wood where sometime two or more pieces are fashioned together and then drawn on and painted on with hardware occasionally attached.  The repetition of shapes against the wall brings irregular rhythms into play against the more regular patterns drawn on them.  The bare nothingness of her found materials forces a hinge or a screw to appear in a new way, or the details in a piece of wood to reveal that it was once a living form.  In one of them, Morton mimics the pattern of a hinge’s screw holes in pencil so that it feels like it is a knot in the wood. Many of the pieces have a strong aura that leaves one searching for a way to account for their being.

The repetitions in Morton’s work raise issues of counting in a way that recalls Yves Bonnefoy’s remark on the primary significance of number in the quatrocento: “There is a moment of seeming victory, when Number is taken to be a sort of gnosis”. Morton draws on a rich history – from the so called ‘dark ages’ to ritualistic objects – to give ballast to the whimsy of her execution, an opposition that brings these pieces to life.

Her move away from purely animistic works comes quickly and finds expression in Untitled (stretcher piece). Two tree stumps sit on a stretcher-like platform, the handles of which look like roughly hewn pencil ends.   Each of the stumps is covered with doodling patterns in silver marker on the bark, which is partially hidden underneath.  While doodling is also a way of foregrounding unconscious impulses, Morton’s redrawing of the patterns of the bark seems closer to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum which the French critical theorist was putting forward around the time these drawings were being made.

There is a subtext running through much of Morton’s works that laments the death of the soul in the things of the world around her, and certainly the tree stumps reinforce this reading.  This bring to mind Joseph Beuys, both particular works such as his sled pieces and also the tenor of his shamanistic concerns. Morton’s Untitled (stretcher piece) serves as a warning.

The installation of Morton’s works in the Drawing Center opens more questions about her intentions than it resolves. At this point when Morton’s work is being revisited it serves as a welcome provocation.

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In Matt Mullican’s smart show of more than 200 drawings spanning his long and varied career, there is an untitled piece from 1974, in which a horizontal line, with arrows on both ends, points on the left to the word “Abstract” and on the right to the word “Literal.” These two categories of conception encompass the limits of the artist’s—indeed, of anyone’s—meaningful investigation of the various ways we build up and tear down thought. But Mullican goes even further, not only exploring but also representing the means whereby our intelligence conveys images necessary to processing the world. In fact, in the show there is next to the arrow image another untitled line drawing, also from 1974, of a long-haired young man, with the caption “What is this man thinking?” In this particular case, as happens so often with this artist, the act of questioning is part of the drawing’s import, becoming as important as the answer to the query. Mullican brilliantly handles connotation and denotation, preferring to see both categories of intelligence as belonging to each other rather than as opposing poles. Working more freely than the philosopher, he imposes his radical imaginings rather lightly, as if the entire process of making sense were metaphysically ephemeral, despite his intense need to know.

It may well be that Mullican has an advantage over the more academically trained among us; by offering his ideas in two ways—as images and as words—he neatly escapes the conundrum that significance itself belongs to one kind of realism. Pictures no less than words offer insight into the way we think, and by conflating them he builds schemes that outline, in almost pure form, the way we make sense to each other. As it happens, his symbolism ranges from the obscure to the fantastically easy to read.  Mullican’s view responds to any and all suggestions, conveying to the bemused but focused viewer the need both to erect and deconstruct systems. In The Drawing Center’s single large gallery space, covered with his drawings, we encounter is a luminous aptitude for discursive thought, in which many centers of cogency simultaneously occur.  When Mullican asserts in writing that the “preoccupation with materials and processes seems to clutter up the phenomenon of what interests me,” he is making it clear to us that no individual person or thing can contain the entirety of that which engages him. Thus the artist reworks appearances as a means of describing the gestalt that both energizes and evades his hand.

In drawings other than the ones announcing his attention in readable language, Mullican can make rather a mess of things. Two drawings from 1978 are deliberately confused scribbles—offerings that refuse to classify the many, many objects that get in the way of our recognition of them.  Later drawings, those from the “World Frame” series in the 1990s, demonstrate considerable skill in the field of geometric and architectural drawing. But Mullican is not so much someone who presents the real as we know it; instead, he attempts to give voice to the hesitancies we have about making our way in the world. His schema relate to sign- and symbol-making, without which, he recognizes, we are pretty much in confusion. In this sense he adds to the world rather than reduces it. His systems never remain entirely abstract, nor do they give way to a literalism of intentions. Instead, he finds a middle ground, in which knowledge is a concomitant of representation, and the construction of categories is founded on what is available at hand. His drawings neither give way to easy dualities, nor do they deliberately overwhelm with complications. Art thus is a way of being in the world, whose classifications are never completely understood.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija is an art world provocateur whose practice takes the central problem of conceptual art and runs wild with it. Conceptual art can mean different things, but whether seen historically, as an extension of Minimal art in its radical reduction of the art object for the sake of linguistically questioning art’s nature,  or understood, more generally, as art where the material manifestation is strictly subservient to bigger ideas, the aesthetic problem of such art remains the same.  What is there, sensually speaking, to enjoy? What kind of dynamic relationship with the object is there to be savored?

The best-known pieces by Mr. Tiravanija (pronounced Tira-VAN-it), a Buenos-Aires-born and North American trained artist of Thai descent, literalize the question of savoring — he stages cook-ins. These events raise questions about food production, developing and advanced economies, supply and demand — familiar leftist fare.

Within the tradition of avant garde “happenings,” this is art at its most ephemeral, in that the physical evidence is soon gone. But it is far from the least memorable, as Mr. Tiravanija is not a bad cook. Clearly, though, this kind of gesture is art that eschews the traditional means. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to learn that Mr. Tiravanija is the subject of a large show at the Drawing Center, curated by Joao Ribas. This perennially hip institution often likes to stretch definitions of its remit, but Mr. Tiravanija’s “Demonstration Drawings” actually consist of more than 200 framed, small pencil-on-paper images, each of them depicting a scene of political protest, the most traditional show to be seen there in an age.

Or maybe not. For what is soon learned about this project is that Mr. Tiravanija’s hand has not touched a single image on view. Instead, these drawings have been commissioned from an array of unnamed Thai art school graduates. Mr. Tiravanija selects photographs of demonstrations from the International Herald Tribune, sends them to his cadre of draftsmen who are left to render them in a literal, illustrational style.

The drawings are presented in densely hung blocks that fill the Drawing Center’s fulsome, open-plan loft space. There is a deliberate avoidance of scheme or pattern in the arrangement — neither are specific draftsmen grouped together nor types of protest, which range across the gamut of sanctioned or spontaneous demonstration from anarchist agitations at global summits, traditional trade union marches, Labor Day parades, environmental protests, and from orderly, organized demonstrations of vast crowds to surging, near-riotous frenzied mobs, to lone gunmen, clenched-fisted and keffiyeh-clad.

As one scans this extensive body of collective effort, however, one inevitably tries to make sense both of the project and its results. First, there is a limited range of drawing styles, which tends to be competent enough but generally stilted, illustrative, and a bit nerdish. Some artists have a freer hand than others, and use hatching more expressively. All feel as if they have attempted fidelity to the photographic source, although the latter are not at hand for comparison. One wonders whether the difference in treatment is purely a matter of the individual draftsman’s hand or whether different speeds of movement in the scenes depicted — orderly placid drudging through dreary East European streets versus violent clashes with riot-geared police in some steamy tropical town — account for these differences.

This observation in turn start one thinking about a lexicon of gestures — in terms of body language, accoutrements of protest, rituals and improvisations — that would be less likely to occur simply from looking at a similar spread of photographs. This alone vindicates the decision to have the images drawn, as regardless of aesthetic quality, this has the effect of slowing down the viewer to notice such details, doing so as much thanks to the awkwardnesses of rendering as its fluency. As David Rieff observes in his catalog essay, it adds to the pathos of these drawings that many of the executants will have participated in the protests they are limning (a significant proportion of the photographs relate to Thai events.)

Leaving the viewer to construct his or her own index, so to speak, relates this project to a line of typological, indexical kinds of conceptual art, like Hilla and Bernd Becker’s photographs of industrial buildings or Gerhard Richter’s blow-ups of encyclopedia portraits of illustrious writers and scientists. With Mr. Tiravanija’s drawings, one is as likely to come away with a sense of the ubiquity of protest as of its distinctions, and this is a result of the deadpan dreariness of this, overall, uninspired spread. For, while there are individual sparks of draftsmanly flare, the combined effect of these dutifully executed images is enervating.

That in turn, however, is an available meaning to be construed from this whole enterprise. A sense of exploitation is palpable in a work where the sum is exponentially greater than the individual parts, and where the originating and organizing agent, Mr. Tiravanija, reaps infinitely greater reward — of attention, thought, and obviously financial, too — than the individual scrawlers. The somewhat pitiful, feeble, folkloristic nature of the cottage industry draftsmanship and the bland sameness rather than quirky individuality this produces, turns the indexing of protest into a model of the very globalization against which many of the protesters were reacting.

A version of this review first appeared in the New York Sun as “The Conceptual Provocateur” on Thursday, September 18, 2008

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RICHARD POUSETTE-DART: DRAWING – FORM IS A VERB
Knoedler & Company until March 8
19 East 70th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212 794 0550

Alan Saret was an important figure in the post-minimal art movement of the late 1960s who subsequently dropped out of the art scene. He is best known for mesh sculptures in chicken wire and similar materials that create dense yet airy, amorphous forms, and are often suspended.

Mr. Saret has been coaxed back into view in recent years: James Cohan Gallery, for example, staged a show of privately held early works in 2004. Now the Drawing Center has organized a show of 31 drawings, dating from between 1967 and 2002, and a pair of sculptures.

These drawings, which comprise a majority of his graphic output, belong to a series the artist calls his “gang drawings,” so named because the marks are generated by a fistful of colored pencils wielded as a single drawing implement. The clusters of marks then ensue can bear an obvious formal relationship to his sculptures, but are not to be construed as preparatory for the sculptures, or even necessarily sculptural.

Working this way can give rise to an instructive tension between individual, signifying marks and generalized texture. There is, however, considerable variety on this score from one drawing to the next. “The Great Hair Lock Ensoulment” (1968) presents a sharp, crisp formation of lines in echelon that will bring to mind the postwar School of Paris painter Hans Hartung. “Ensoulment of the Kings of Eart of All Ages” (1970) on the other hand, while also presenting a concentrated mass of line at the center of a large (two by three foot) sheet, opts for various softer kinds of line, some mushy and impressionistic, others spindly and tenderly feeble.

The defining formal characteristic of Mr. Saret’s aesthetic, then, is a dualism of looseness and definition. This equally relates to his wire sculptures that have literal presence but at the same time defy their own physicality to generate trancendent, suggestive meanings.  Mr. Saret’s outlook reflects the influences of his formative years. As a counter-cultural artist of the 1960s he was attracted to process art and found, industrial materials as part of anti-aesthetic stance that relegated the hand of the artist. Increasingly, he was also attracted to mysticism, much affected by a period spent in India in the 1970s. This perhaps accounts for the liberating mix of the literal and the transcendental in his drawings.

The use of clusters, in this context, manages at once to deny the expressive agency of the hand and to generate suggestive chance effects. The result is a curious fusion of severity and opulence. These drawings have a rigor and clarity that recalls the process art of the 1970s, yet formally harks back to the lyrical innocence of abstract expressionism, as does their mystical inclinations. The feathery strokes and singing colors of “Prana Spectrum Trace” (1989) might bring Joan Mitchell to some people’s minds. The general sense of disembodied gesture that animates many of these at once lyrical and awkward drawings relates directly to Jackson Pollock with little acknowledgement of minimalist denial.

An exhibition of late drawings by first generation Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart at Knoedler includes works made at the same time as many of Mr. Saret’s, and despite generational differences between these two artists the drawings seem to touch on a similar duality of absence and presence. Physical gesture means the artist’s hand is present yet transcended: there is no question that the arcs or circles are handmade, but an unforced, lyrical all-overness creates a cosmic, suprapersonal sense of order and well-being.

“Light Gathers to the Question of No” (1979) is a page filled with quickly scribbled circles — those towards the edge begin to dissipate while a cluster in the middle are more heavily outlined to suggest a circle of circles. These forms can equally be read as receding in space or projecting forward. In several works, a loosely drawn, off-centered circular form provides a focal point causing other kinds of marks to shimmer or vibrate, pulling the eye into an enveloping, consuming field.

These late drawings look remarkably like much younger, contemporary abstract painters. Where “Sphere Credo” (1991) has a matter-of-fact robustness that brings Terry Winters to mind, the graceful deliberations of “The Sadness of a Circle” (1989) with its deconstructed arcs and loops is a dead-ringer for Brice Marden.

Pousette-Dart was possessed of a gorgeous touch, drawing with animated restraint. There is unfussed variety of line within a single piece, such as “Imprison Circle” (1980s), where smaller, thinner marks serve to convey spatial depth. “Sphere Credo” layers circles within a loose diagonal grid with asymmetrical additions of color, in this case green dabs of acrylic. The pencil pentimenti generates depth while the circles drawn with spirited gusto in black ink pop off the page.

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Joe Fyfe, Andrea Scott, and Roberta Smith joined David Cohen to review Gilbert and George at Lehmann Maupin and at Sonnabend, Jesper Jest at Perry Rubenstein, Richard Tuttle at the Drawing Centre and Sarah McEneaney at Gallery Schlesinger.

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