July 21–to September 2, 2019
675 West 252nd Street at Bingham Road
The Bronx, wavehill.org

Large, semi-translucent, gesturally painted blue shapes optically sway in space in Riad Miah’s immersive site-specific installation, at Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space. “Waves of Light—Entwined Through the Tendrils of Time,” a project space exhibition curated by Eileen Jeng Lynch, explores monthly changes in light through painting in space, a complex retinal and emotional task. Painting on transparent Dura-Lar panels on both sides with oil and acrylic, he mixes large gestural strokes and his signature menagerie of dispersed drips. The shapes are strategically suspended from the ceiling across the perimeter of skylights, enabling a translucent glow throughout the space. A palette exploring a rich spectrum of blues selected for each hanging piece come from careful observation of the sky’s color at a given time each month, as viewed from Wave Hill. The shapes echo the verticality of the windows in the Sun Porch and century old wisteria intricately intertwined on the building outside. Amongst the hanging pieces, four, seaweed-like plastic structures cascade downward from the center of each skylight creating a juxtaposition of manmade and natural twists and turns.

In a departure from his more familiar painting work, but one that does nothing to compromise the essence of his painterly magic, Miah elegantly coaxes gestural painting into another realm. Playing with light, color and paint, the work reflects changing conditions in the space and surrounding environment. At any given time of day or season, the viewer can observe at least one shape that is reflective of the current particularity of hue outsides, creating an intense, metaphysical spirit of place. Miraculously, Miah is able to fuse awareness of space with an acute sense of the two dimensionality of his painting surface, handling this by suspending the paintings in such a way as to generate an illusion of floating. The technique of traditional painting was also modified to sustain the gestural nature of the brushstrokes. The artist uses various media and careful but swift application of acrylic paint to suspend his gestures in space while the gestural strokes are cut out and pasted back on the surface creating an uneven edge. The resulting mirage-like floatation effect further teases out a sensation of time, as each gesture appears frozen in its moment.

While Riad’s debt to David Reed with his autonomous gestural swirls is striking, his project has a deeper affinity with James Turrell’s Skylight and Skyspace series. Miah strives to achieve the unobtainable effect of the sky’s depth. But unlike Turrell, Miah interprets the experience of the sky more literally by exploring the color blue and pushing it to the farthest extents to which pigment can take the eye. To Miah the examination of color is an important element of the work as he breaks down the blue spectrum. The work invites observation, positioning viewers to appreciate subtleties from the artist’s perspective. The ways in which the artist treats his surfaces, accentuates painterly qualities. The confined space in this exhibition forces the observer to interact with each hanging shape’s intimate brushstrokes and glimpse the artist’s obsessive intentionality. While Miah deploys oil paint with his signature technique of paint dispersion on one side of the Dura-Lar, the gestural strokes in acrylic are a new medium for the artist and are used to generate the energetic visual field.

Miah’s poignant manipulation of place and space create a perfect and serene moment of meditation within Wave Hill’s idyllic setting. As a botanical garden and art space, Wave Hill offers a tranquil escape from its urban surroundings. Miah’s work expertly encapsulates this ideal by drawing on more than a decade of visitation to this space. Surprisingly he eschews botanical specifics, focusing instead on the overlooked, ever-unfolding tapestry of the sky. His choices of blue address the intangible nature of the sky while balancing the delicate physicality of his materials.

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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.

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