November 14, 2016 to April 16, 2017

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, between Fairfax and Curson

Los Angeles, California, lacma.org

John McLaughlin: Marvelous Void at Van Doren Waxter

November 2, 2016 to January 7, 2017

23 East 73rd Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues

New York City, vandorenwaxter.com

The recent presence in New York City of the purist abstraction of artists such as Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Carmen Herrera, Joseph Albers, not to mention the artists of the Paths to the Absolute exhibition at Di Donna (Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Newman, Pollock, Rothko, Still) suggests that the zeitgeist is ripe for a full examination of the work of John McLaughlin, too. McLaughlin (1898-1976) sought, both in his paintings and writings, to provide a rationale for abstract art that eschewed the specificity of objects in the world. Indeed, he went so far as to criticize Mondrian for failing to achieve a freedom from representational sources in his work, such as “Broadway Boogie Woogie”.

“Asian painters made me wonder who I was. Western painters, on the other hand, tried to tell me who they were,” McLaughlin said. He sought a purer basis for abstraction in the Zen concept of the “marvelous void”. Using empty spaces between rectangular forms to imply absence, McLaughlin sought to draw the viewer into a meditative state in which the noise of everyday life is shut out or at least deferred. He intentionally used neutral geometric forms that had no counterparts in nature in order to give his viewers complete freedom to find their own meaning in his paintings. This objective is well captured by McLaughlin’s suggestion that his paintings are best viewed in bedrooms—silent and enigmatic, yet full of intimacy.

Nevertheless, seeing a John McLaughlin exhibition is stimulating as well as meditative. Initially, the paintings have a calming effect brought about by their strong sense of balance and harmony. Being in their presence for a while begins to reveal some unexpected tensions and visual surprises, however, that set one’s eyes and thoughts in motion. This is paradoxical, as meditation and visual stimulation are typically considered to be mutually exclusive or at the very least, incompatible.   It is McLaughlin’s ability to harness this paradox that helps to explain what makes his work so satisfying and significant.

Exposed to Japanese prints while growing up in Boston, McLaughlin spent close to three years living in Japan and traveling in China, beginning in 1935. In Japan he was surrounded with rectangular structures in the narrow hanging ribbon ties and horizontally placed images on vertical scroll paintings as well as the movable screens common to Japanese domestic design. He was especially captivated by the large open spaces, “the marvelous voids” in the paintings of Sesshū Tōyō and other 15th and 16th century Japanese artists. Some Western artists also resonated with McLaughlin, including Malevich, who eliminated the object, and Mondrian, who used rectangles as neutral forms. By using the rectangle in concert with relatively large “empty” areas, he strove to make the viewer part of the organization of the painting, free to see and contemplate without the interference of objects. Throughout his career, McLaughlin never abandoned the rectangle. As his work matured, he sought to create new combinations of structures and colors that maintained his commitment to pure abstraction in ways that were visually challenging. Because some of these works provided visual puzzles, it was not surprising that McLaughlin was included in William Seitz’s 1965 “Responsive Eye” show at MoMA.

Edward Albee picked up on the paradoxical aspect of McLaughlin when he described “a cold burning purity” in his paintings. We find it helpful to use the principle from physics of complementarity (with which McLaughlin may or may not have been familiar) to help understand this paradox. Niels Bohr conceived of this principle in 1927 using as an exemplar the finding that an electron could be seen both as a wave and a particle—but not at the same time. The existence of these two mutually exclusive entities depended on the conditions of their observation. In the same way, McLaughlin’s work can be seen as both meditative and visually energetic, but (again) not at the same time.

The well-selected and revelatory retrospective at LACMA contains 52 paintings and 9 works on paper, some of which are collages that served as McLaughlin’s maquettes and demonstrate his precise planning and placement of forms before beginning a painting. To provide opportunities for contemplation and slower viewing, LACMA commissioned the creation of 12 highly geometric McLaughlin-inspired slat-back wooden chairs by the artist Roy McMakin.

Untitled (1955), included in a large room of close to a dozen asymmetrical works from the 1950s, has an overall calming effect. At first glance, it appears to be balanced and harmonious with several contiguous rectangles in soft grayish earth tones near its center and large white areas on each side. With continued looking, one’s eyes begin to jump around, noticing the two narrow black bands or the two narrow white ones jutting out from the white side sections and piercing the earthy middle sections. One may wonder why the two vertical white areas surrounding the middle bands are not the same size, or why the narrow white bands on the right and left appear to thrust themselves into the center of the painting. Surprisingly, the painting manages to maintain both its original harmonious calmness and its visual challenges—in sequence, but not simultaneously.

In the next room, there is a majestic symmetrical painting, #14 (1959) featuring two large void-like rectangles in light blue and deep black to offer a place of contemplation for the viewer. It soon becomes apparent that whichever large form one focuses upon is the one that appears to move closer to the viewer. But before long, the quiet contemplation shifts to more active problem solving as the horizontal blue rectangle at the bottom edge of the painting appears to cause the larger forms to rise.

Painting #1 (1968), which might have been a perfect choice for MoMA’s Responsive Eye show, is dominated by large and intensely red rectangles. These are inviting as voids, but are then interrupted by black and white areas. Are the three vertical black areas meant to serve as frames for the red areas or to pair up with the three white vertical bars immediately to their left, leaving the white bar on the extreme right with no companion? At some point, the white strips at the top and bottom of the painting come into view, so that the red and black forms are then seen as resting on a large white background. This combination of contemplation and visual excitement is the magical complementarily of McLaughlin.

A film just outside one entrance to the exhibition features the painter Tony Berlant and several other established Los Angeles artists discussing the contributions of John McLaughlin. From this video, it is indisputable that he was a strong influence on several generations of artists, particularly on the West Coast. In addition to Tony Berlant, the painters and sculptors who were likely to have known McLaughlin and his work include Joe Goode, Ed Moses, Sam Francis, Ed Ruscha, James Haywood, Tony Delap, Billy Al Bengston, Ron Davis, David Novros, Marcia Hafif, Edith Baumann, John McCracken, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos. A slightly later cohort inspired by McLaughlin includes Scot Heywood, Alan Wayne, David Reed, and Don Voisine, among others. Furthermore, McLaughlin is widely acknowledged to be a forerunner of the Light and Space movement of the late 1960s and 1970s because of his importance to Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, James Turrell, Mary Corse, Peter Alexander and Craig Kaufmann, who further dematerialized their art and provided slowly revealing immersive works that challenged the perceptions of their viewers.

Therefore, we were disappointed to learn that this thoughtfully curated show of major works, many of which have not been seen before, will not travel, despite its having been offered to more than thirty museums nationally. People not able to get to Los Angeles will have to be satisfied with the scholarly and beautifully illustrated catalogue with insightful and well-documented essays and chronologies edited by the co-curators, Stephanie Barron and Lauren Bergman.

Fortunately, all was not completely lost for New Yorkers. Van Doren Waxter, which represents the John McLaughlin estate, commissioned Robert C. Morgan to help organize a pocket-retrospective of six McLaughlin paintings, representing each decade of the artist’s career, along with two Japanese scrolls. Morgan, using his deep knowledge of Oriental art, has written an informative essay about the “marvelous void” both in Chan and Zen aesthetics and McLaughlin’s abstraction.

The largest in the New York exhibition, #4 (1965), captures the apparent simplicity and predominance of the void in many of McLaughlin’s late paintings. At first, its bright yellow color dominates. Almost immediately, however, the two white rectangular columns that run from top to bottom near the left and right of the painting become salient. On closer inspection, the white columns appear to be the same size as the yellow areas closest to the edges of the painting, creating a visual pair at each edge. The different perceptions of this painting fluctuate depending on one’s focal point, emphasizing either the large yellow void in the center or the two white columns near the sides.

The complexity inherent in McLaughlin’s works, evident in both these exhibitions, continually challenges perceptual and cognitive capacities. Psychologists have long recognized that unresolved problems exert a tension that keeps them alive in memory. McLaughlin’s shifting geometries visually exemplify this principle.

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The Broad is a commanding addition to Los Angeles’ downtown cultural artery along Grand Avenue, situated beside the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall, and across from the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA). The Broad, nearly 10 years in the making, opened its doors to the public last month, presenting Edith and Eli’s massive collection of blue-chip artworks free of charge. Preceding the construction of their name-sake, the Broads had established historical ties to every major Los Angeles museum, including LA MOCA, the Hammer, and more recently the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) — a sizable gallery built on-site at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA) in 2008. The permanent collection exhibited at Grand Avenue will be familiar to Angelenos from earlier presentations at LACMA’s Renzo Piano-designed BCAM wing.

In terms of the building itself, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro refer to the Broad’s unique design as a “veil-and-vault” structure, consisting of a fiber-reinforced concrete façade, or veil, that allows for controlled, natural light to permeate the gallery spaces surrounding the “vault” — a state of the art climate-controlled storage unit at the building’s core.

For the inaugural exhibition, Joanne Heyler, a 20-year Broad Foundation veteran and director of the nascent museum, has selected more than 250 works by some 60 artists in what she refers to as “a sweeping, chronological journey.” This presentation is indeed a journey, one that communicates the history of the international art market of the past 30 years, reified by these artists’ positions within such an axiomatically authoritative institution as the Broad. Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation further reinforces this point.

Ed Ruscha’s companion pieces, Old Tech Chem Building (2003) and Blue Collar Tech Chem (1992), open an exhibition of recently acquired works on the museum’s first floor. The works depict the 11-year transformation of a fictional “Tech Chem” facility into a space newly named “Fat Boy.” The 1992 work depicts a grey night sky, which in 2003 bleeds red. The phrase “Fat Boy” recalls the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 — nicknamed “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” respectively. These paintings serve as an intense opening to the show: while the present is foreboding, the future perhaps radioactive, Ruscha instructs us not to be nostalgic for the past. Tech Chem limns our present experience as a product of our dark origins.

Following Ruscha’s powerful introduction, I was disappointed that the curators failed to draw any relationship between Mark Grotjahn’s poignant formal studies and the more explicitly political works on display. Grotjahn’s 2007 Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) consists of a series of rotating mathematical grids — vertical lines become horizontal and vantage points slant and skew. The artist’s black geometric shapes flutter to life along the length of the series, creating optical impressions that change as the viewer moves in the space. The wall text reads that these shifting vantage points provide “room for many perceptions of and points of entry into the work.” It is precisely this awareness of the capacity of artworks to read multiply, for meaning to bend and shift, which could have successfully brought historically disparate works in dialogue with one another.

The museum’s main gallery upstairs opens with Jeff Koons’ monumental Tulips (1995-2004), surrounded on all sides by Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1990), a nine-panel installation in which the words “Run Dog Run” are stenciled in repetition using black enamel on aluminum. Wool breaks apart the words themselves, the R and U placed above the N, the D and O placed above the G. With the dismemberment of these three-letter words, Wool highlights their semiotic function, encouraging the viewer to understand them as formal signifiers divorced from their meaning within the phrase.

This relationship between signifiers and concepts was explored by American artist Jasper Johns 30 years prior with his masterpiece, Watchman. This 1964 assemblage highlights the artist’s radical refusal of any single identification: how exactly is his composition ordered? Which paints are laid down first? Which are stripped away? Do his colors prefigure their descriptions? Johns’ Watchman mirrors the scale of the human form — reinforced by the cast of a human leg in the upper register — and, as such, demands to be understood as contingent upon the viewer’s own physicality, identity and experience.

Glenn Ligon also works at this intersection of language and identity, as evidenced by his series Runaways from 1993. For these works, Ligon asked friends to draft descriptions of him as though they were reporting a missing person to the police, and was shocked to find that they recalled the 19^th-century runaway-slave ads he had researched for the series. The descriptions vary widely from piece to piece — different features are highlighted, others glossed over. While the exhibition privileges formal and historical relationships over conceptual ones, it would have been inspiring to examine Wool, Johns and Ligon’s work side-by-side, as a means of highlighting the discursive production of meaning in all three. Instead, Ligon’s installation is predictably flattened, reduced to what the curators call “the parallel senses of insider and outsider in us all.”

Mysteriously, the late activist-artist David Wojnarowicz shares one of the final galleries with art star Julian Schnabel, an odd juxtaposition that the wall text fails to engage with or defend. The Wojnarowicz works are striking and impassioned, in particular The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of The U.S.A., from 1986. Here, a crucified figure is undergirded by layers of painted-over newsprint with the phrases “10 years,” “life and death,” “in the womb” and “foul” left bare. Veins extend from the voodoo figure and wrap around images of mosquitos, cowboys, blood red steak and a hand literally covered in a blood. This is a work about AIDS, homophobia, fear of infection and government inaction resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands.

Like other works in the exhibition, Wojnarowicz’ pulsing political message is tamped down by Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation that resists social-historical examination. The Broad falls victim to a universalizing narrative that presupposes that the meaning attached to these artworks is fixed, conveyed to a disembodied spectator that approaches the work in isolation, divorced from her own social experience. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “veil-and-vault” concept then serves as a poignant lens through which to understand The Broad’s political stakes. It’s all right there in the architecture — the museum’s surface appears porous, penetrable and malleable. However, this veil is merely a symbol of access that instead serves to reinforce the institutionally fixed, guarded and rich marrow within.

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June 7 to September 27, 2015
5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at South Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, 323 857 6000

California is a great place to incubate, lending itself to a slower pace where its more contemplative residents may think and create amid beautiful landscape and sunshine, Noah Purifoy spent the last 15 years of his life creating sculptures and installations in the desert around Joshua Tree, California. His body of work, namely assemblage of locally found objects, offers a unique Mojave Desert experience that is now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The title of the show, “Junk Dada,” serves as an insight to Purifoy’s work as it finds aesthetic, contextual relatives to artists who were known for turning menial objects/readymades into profound statements, while simultaneously referring to the homophonous “junk data.” His assemblage The Last Supper II (1989), for instance, consists of old, rusted silverware and sardine cans arranged neatly in a frame. The title and earth tone composition transforms the pieces of refuse into something meaningful, or possibly holy. Like a still life, each component of once-used material is a unit of data that tells us something about being in a certain place and time, but also transcends its fractured nature to become something new and unified. Purifoy doesn’t simply repurpose objects; one can sense the history of the silverware and sardine cans the way old photographs and antiques are haunted. Because of this, there is something morbidly nostalgic, yet beautiful in using dead things to create. The meticulous arrangement of photos, pigments, a skull, and various objects in The Summer of 1965 (1996), for example, holds the tension of a mysterious spell, every object a vital component to its potency.

Walking through the exhibition, it is easy to imagine the home of many of the works: Joshua Tree is a vast and strange landscape where the eerie silence overwhelms. It takes someone with a strong intellect to thrive in such solitude and Purifoy’s work is a reflection of such an experience. There is a toughness in his creations, but there is also at times a lighthearted sense of humor. His piece Ode to Frank Gehry (1999) is as hokey as it is architectural. Perhaps it speaks to the complete and bittersweet nature of existence — that what constitutes its tragedy is also what makes it comic. It also says something about the power of imagination: Don Quixote’s windmills in the desert come to mind looking at this piece.

Purifoy created his own atlas of fetishes and imagery. Whether a given piece is a politically charged collage, a wooden sculpture, or a textile assemblage, they all point to something central in his work: his sense of humanity. The viewer feels the love of material and handiwork in Rags and Old Iron I & II (1989), through the decisive arrangement of beads and textiles, which compel us with a mystical simplicity. In three mixed-media paintings hung together — Picket Fence, Four Horsemen, and Crucifixion (all 1993) — black and gray cubes float together over a white, textured ground and form coarse, charming symbols. They hold the mystery of an ambiguous tarot card reading yet one senses that they are but honest renderings made form observation.

In an age of single-use materials and computer-fabricated objects, Noah Purifoy’s work holds relevance in that the spirit cannot be stripped from art — that making things with one’s own hands and cherishing the materials and process of creation will always be magical.

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