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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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February 8 to May 8, 2013

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street at Lexington Avenue
New York City, 212-772-4991

This exchange took place well before the advent of the digital age, at a time when artists were still writing postcards, sending faxes, telegrams, and actually speaking on the phone. Open workalso makes clear the variety of ephemeral media being employed by Latin American artists, such as inexpensive chapbooks, Xeroxed papers, black and white video, documentary photographs, and diagrammatic drawings. Conceptual Art was proto-digital in that the ideas (software) for digital transmission were being disseminated before the hardware became available and the electronics became miniaturized. But herein lies an important caveat: that decade’s best work was much more complex and ambiguous than our contemporary digital reproductions and sound bites have led us believe. The fact is that many small publications and critical surveys on the subject, in one form or another, may not exist on-line, including out-of-print publications, carbon-copied essays, important letters, manifestos, symposia transcripts, audiotaped interviews, and videotaped panel discussions, events, and lectures. Just because Conceptual Art is about “ideas” does not mean that all the significant work exists in digital form, just as not everything digital even begins to approach the complexities of Conceptual Art.

Similar ground to this exhibition was covered in Global Conceptualism (1999) at the Queens Museum of Art, and Arte Conceptual Revisado (Conceptual Art Revisited), edited by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Jose Miguel Cortes (Universidad Politechnica de Valencia, 1990), which proved an invaluable resource in Spanish for artists in Europe and the Americas.  Open Work also establishes an important connection with the Centro de Arte y Comunicacion in Buenos Aires, founded in 1968 by Jorge Glusberg, in which New York conceptualists were often invited to work in Latin America. Each of these events occurred outside the mainstream of activity in northern Europe and the United States, and thus, preceded the more recent interest in researching conceptualism in various regions of Latin America as seen in this exhibition.

The exhibition title’s Open Work is taken from a term first used by Umberto Eco in 1962, in which he identifies a revisionist aesthetic based on ambiguity, participation, and information in contrast to Benedetto Croce’s insistence on intuition and expression introduced in his book, Aesthetic (1908). The curator Harper Montgomery cites Eco as a source for the exhibition given the semiologist’s interest in allowing viewers, listeners, and readers to complete the work. Sometimes participation is an explicitly political component of the artwork. A good example would be Victor Grippo’s installation Analogia IV (1972), a modest table with two settings, separated in black and white, in which the viewer may presumably share a lunch with a peasant worker. The Brazilian artist Antonio Dias’s taped grid with open spaces on the floor is more concrete. Titled Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory (1968), the grid designates a space without authority or control from the outside, obviously in reference to repressive political regimes in his country’s past.

Another Brazilian, Hélio Oiticica, presented his relaxation installation, Nests, at the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970.  We learn, however, in Jeremiah W. McCarthy’s essay in the exhibition catalog for Open Work that this work was, in fact, a last minute replacement for another film projection installation that he called an “Intentional opened visual-spectator act.” According to the essayist, Oiticica’s proposal was rejected because “the medium possessed subversive potential,” less in relation to the content of the film than in the artist’s rejection of using Olivetti’s formidable Information Machine. In addition to the actions of Cildo Meireles and Rafael Ferrer who questioned the relationship of high modernist art to late capitalism, the graphic works of Luis Camnitzer and Liliana Porter also embodied a strong opposition to the restrictive entitlements and alienating effects of the New York art scene.

The influence of North American artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner, and Donald Burgy, is present in a manner that offers a kind of necessary tension, while contributing an important advance to some of the more indigenous aspects present in the work of their South American counterparts. Here I am thinking of the time pieces and performances of David Lamelas, Eduardo Costa, Juan Downey, and Marta Minujin, all fascinating artists. In the context of this relationship between artists working in the two Americas, Open Work makes virtually everything—no matter what the work’s original intention – a series of stains by Ed Ruscha, for example – appear as a political statement. This is most likely how the artists included in this provocative and curiously intimate exhibition understood their work at the time – forty years ago– that, indeed, context is what determines content.

Editor’s Note: Robert C. Morgan, who is a regular contributor to artcritical, is the author of several significant studies in the area of global conceptual art, including Del Arte a La Idea: Ensayos sobre Arte Conceptual (Madrid: Akal, 2003); El Fin del Mundo del Arte y Otros Ensayos (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2000); and  El Artista en el Siglo XXI: La era de la Globalizacion (Buenos Aires: Eduntref, 2012).

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Sanford Wurmfeld is quite simply one of the most informed and articulate painters working with color today. It is not only a matter of what he knows and says, but of the chromatic clarity of his large-scale optical paintings. One of the most important, yet understated aspects of his unforgettable series of perennial grid-based patterns, currently on view at Hunter College Times Square Gallery, is their complex integration of primary and secondary hues and values. (Wurmfeld taught at Hunter from 1967 until his retirement in 2006, from 1978 as chair of the art department.) What Wurmfeld reveals is a sequential modulation of color that ultimately staggers the eye/brain mechanism—and let’s include the emotional charge as well. With color theories informed by such luminaries as Leo Hurvich, Josef Albers, and Dorothea Jameson, Wurmfeld has evolved his own profoundly investigative manner of working as one of our leading geometric abstract painters. His indefatigable visual articulation of color and light derives from a process of sheer focus and assiduity that inform numerous magnificently executed, large-scale paintings in this first-rate exhibition. Missing are the full-scale circular dioramas that embrace the viewer with a saturation of color on all sides. Three major installations of these have been executed and shown elsewhere, but they have yet to be seen in New York.

Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 – 2013, February 15 to April 20, 2013, Hunter College Times Square Gallery, 450 West 41st Street (between Dyer and 10th Avenue), New York City, 212-772-4000

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February 17-April 21, 2012
Curated by Joachim Pissaro, with Bibi Calderaro, Julio Grinblatt and Michelle Yun
450 West 42nd Street, between Dyer and 10th avenue

John Cage would have considered the location of this show a work of art in itself:  a thoroughly chaotic intersection with buses zooming out of the Port Authority, obstructed sidewalks, a construction site, scaffolding everywhere, and above all, the thrum of noise—or, as Cage would have called it, sound.

Trained as a composer, and notorious for composing a piece consisting of “silence” (4’ 33”), Cage, more than anyone, established sound as an artistic discipline beyond the walls of the concert hall.  “Notations” takes its name from the title of a book in which Cage compiled experimental musical scores, including some of his own but mostly those of others; it is thus a fitting title for a show that celebrates the centennial of his birth by showcasing twenty-eight international artists whose work reflects his sweeping influence.  As parsed by Joachim Pissaro’s erudite essay and the entries in the fine exhibition catalogue—written by Pissaro’s students—this legacy centers around the location of art in natural and “empty” space (as in ambient sound);  the blurring of distinctions between conventional categories of artistic practice (as in the famous “prepared” pianos);  and most importantly, the invitation of indeterminacy (as in what he called “chance operations”) into art.

“Notations” is housed in the Hunter College’s labyrinthine Times Square Gallery, vast enough to dedicate some of its spacious rooms to just one or two pieces, and conveying the feel of an honorific museum, rather than a temporary exhibition.  The first work viewed is One, a subtle, contemplative 90” film by Cage of roving spots of white light.  (The austere soundtrack, 103, is an independently composed work for orchestra.)  Made near the end of its Cage’s career, One is a symbolic as well as a literal “beginning” of this ambitious homage.

The Fluxus movement of the 1960s was a direct extension of Cage’s multi-media performances, and is represented here by Telepathic Music #5, Robert Filliou’s witty Dada-like ensemble of folding music stands that display playing cards and notes inscribed with enigmatic directions.  Contrasting with this silently orchestrated play on “play” are assemblages for the making and/or hearing of sound. Edgardo Rudnitzky’s brilliant Octopus is a retrofitted turntable with four arms that simultaneously play individual instrumental performances recorded on four separate tracks of a vinyl record.   In true Cageian fashion, its automated start and stop play generates continuous reassortments of musical fragments, redefining the concept of the “string quartet”.  In Ears with Chair, Yukio Fujimoto brings attention to ambient sound by using long tubes to amplify and deliver it, in stereo, to the listener’s ears.  Another interactive piece, Leon Ferrari’s Colgante Escultura Sonora/Hanging Sound Instrument, is a curtain of hanging metal rods which, when disturbed, emit a palpable harmonic buzz.

Others translate Cage’s exploration of sound and silence into visual studies of negative and positive space;  for example, Fred Sandback’s familiar yarn sculpture (Untitled), and Waltercio Caldas’s O transparente (da serie Veneza)/The Transparent (from the Veneza Series), a disorienting exploration of the outlines of everyday forms.  Some works channel Cage via Raushenberg (Liz Deschenes’ Tilt/Swing, reflective photograms of darkness); Warhol (Kaz Oshioro’s Orange Speaker Cabinets and Gray Scale Boxes, an auditory twist on Warhol’s Brillo Boxes); or both (Ushio Shinohara’s Coca Cola Plans, replications of the eponymous Rauschenberg combine).

There are ample videos, including Christian Marclay’s Indian Point Road, visually minimal but with a lush backdrop of natural sound; Felipe Dulzaides’ humorous, inventive short films; and filmed interviews of Cage by Frank Scheffer (From Zero:  Four Films on John Cage).  Embodying Cage’s notion of “instantaneous ecstasy” is Daniel Wurtzel’s marvelous Pas des Deux. In this videotaped performance, a ring of fans propel two lengths of diaphanous, colorful fabric into mid-air.  Minute variations in flow cause the material to twirl and billow, coming together and apart in an exquisitely (un)choreographed dance—an allusion, perhaps, to Cage’s long artistic and personal relationship to the dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham.

Seemingly intended to fill out the margins of Cage’s reach is more conceptual work, such as the blank full-page ad taken out in Artforum magazine by Nicolas Guagnini and Gareth James, but its connection to Cage is less compelling.  Similarly, in contrast to Cage’s anarchist allegiance—resolutely couched in the aesthetic—one imagines that an sociopolitical comment is being made by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s amalgam of “prepared” piano and ticker tape, indexes (v. 1), in which software transforms a live feed of international financial information into notes played on a grand piano, but it remains unspecified.

One theme that emerges from “Notations” is the transformation of daily practice—to which Cage was devoted, and related to his deep immersion in Zen Buddhism—into art itself.  A perpetual work-in-progress, William Anastasi’s Sink is a flat steel slab that is “watered” every day, allowing the complex patina to evolve in its unpredictable way. (One of the edition of four belonged to John Cage’s own collection.)  In Window Project, Reiner List creates a light box grid of serial daily photographs of the same Eighth Avenue view from his studio.  And in her moving installation, O trabalho dos dias/Day’s Work, Rivane Neuenschwander covers the walls and floor of a room with sheets of adhesive film, each one stuck with the debris collected from her home in one day;  en masse, this has the strangely elegant effect of travertine marble.  The tension evident in these and other works results from the contrast between their strict rhythmic order and the chance events they document—illustrating just how hard it is to resist our natural resistance to disorder.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was given to astronomers who determined that there is no such thing as a vacuum:  even in supposedly “empty” space, forces acting to expand the universe.  Famous for finding art in “empty” space, John Cage was ahead of his time, and remains vital still.

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on view Friday, April 3, 6-10pm at Hunter College, 450 West 41st Street (between 9th & 10th avenues) as part of the Hunter Open Studios, also on view Saturday, 2-6pm, with “cash and carry” silent auction on Friday evening.

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September 21, 2008–January 5, 2009
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
between Fifth and Sixth avenues
212 718 9400

September 2 to December 6, 2008
Hunter College: The Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street and Lexington Avenue,  SW corner
212 772 4991

September 25 to November 15, 2008
Hunter College: Times Square Gallery
450 West 41st Street
between 9th and 10th avenues

Nightfall can inspire fascination with the starry sky, optimistic hopes for fulfilled sexual desire, or at least anticipation of  sleep. But it can also cause anxiety if you are lonely, which is why van Gogh described The Night Café (1988), at MoMA, as showing a place where “dark forces lurked and suppressed human passions could suddenly explode.” As Joachim Pissarro, the curator of the  MoMA show and co-curator (with Mara Hoberman and Julia Moreno) of the two-part Hunter show explains, the forty-some Hunter artists in effect answer the question: How would van Gogh respond to night were he to have available our sensibility and artistic media?

Van Gogh might enjoy the way that Vija Celmins, Jennifer Coates, Lauren Orchowski, and Pat Stein show the night sky, in their contemporary versions of The Starry Night (1889). And he could be fascinated with how such works as Gregory Crewdson’sUntitled (penitent girl) (2001-2002), which shows a young woman in her underwear facing someone (her mother perhaps)  in a suburban driveway, and Kohei Yoshiyuki’s 1970s photographs showing men watching nighttime sexual activity in Japan’s parks, all extend the social commentary of The Potato Eaters (1885). The worker in The Sower (1888) deserves comparison with the man in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1994-1999), who is kicking a can through the streets at night and in the gay nightclub in Love is all Around (2007), a video by Marc Swanson and Neil Gust. If Laurent Grasso’s Infinite Light (2006/2008) mounted on the college’s pedestrian bridges, which repeats the words “night for day” can be associated with the Enlightenment,  so too can Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon (1889). And Stan Douglas’s Every Building in 100 West Hastings (2001),  a long narrow image of a street in Vancouver,  is a photographic version of Terrace of a Café at Night (Place du Forum) (1888).

But none of these van Goghs show a person asleep,  like Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963), the film of his lover John Giorno, and no image seems ominous enough to match the title of Claude Lévéque’s neon La nuit pendant que vous dormez je détruis le monde (2007). Van Gogh did not depict ecological disaster, like Susan Crile in her Charred Earth (1994), an image of the oil wells set on fire by the retreating Iraqis. Nor in his nighttime images does he show such extreme light and darkness as in Grasso’s L’éclipse (2006), a video montage of a solar eclipse and sunset. In some ways, then, the ways  that night is experienced and represented in visual art have changed dramatically. Vera Lutter uses a camera obscura to create photographic negatives, 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, II: April 17, 2006 (2006) while Thomas Ruff deploys a night-vision enhancer to give an uncannily menacing feeling to the apartment building photographed in Nacht 2 I (1992). And yet, we can recognize real continuities between van Gogh’s world and ours, for his Wood Gatherers in the Snow(1884) presents a setting not entirely unlike that of Barney Kulok’s digital transparencyStillman Avenue, Queens, NY (2004).

Almost inevitably, the representation nighttime invokes political metaphors, as Kant’s seminal essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) recognizes. To become enlightened, to move into the well-lit world of reason, he explains, “all that is needed is freedom . . freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” After you walk into David Claerbout’s installation, when your eyes adjust to the nearly complete darkness, the photograph inNightscape Lightbox (second) (2002-2003) becomes visible. But how do we understand this metaphorical association between reason and light? In his Kantian reading of the origins of modernism, Clement Greenberg associated avant-garde art with  our capacity to become self-critically enlightened. Nowadays our post-historical art historians are more likely to appeal to the authority of Hegel and his successor, Marx.

But for Hegel, so Pissarro observes, night is disturbing because we see only the black sky, while by contrast for Kant, in looking at the stars we also find within ourselves an awareness  of the sublime moral law, which, Pissarro continues,  anticipates the way that night can liberate “pent-up drives . . . . from voyeurism to exhibitionism to the endless peripatetic cruising through bars and clubs of all kinds” that we see exhibited in these pictures. For Hegel, then, the absence of light at night marks absence, the absence of light meaning that the world has become invisible to our sight, but for Kant it is possible to respond to night in a more excited and positive way. In  drawing attention to the manifold continuities between van Gogh’s art world and ours, by identifying the ways that we need to think politically about the meaning of representations of night, these exhibitions offer very challenging speculation on our situation, suggesting that Kant has more to offer art writers right now than do Hegel and Marx. Making that journey at nighttime through central Manhattan from MoMA to the Hunter galleries, which are within easy walking distance, inevitably inspires many reflections about the subject of this extraordinary three-part exhibition.

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