September 21, 2013 to February 2, 2014
11 West 53rd Street, between fifth and Sixth avenues
The Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries, third floor

In 1973, Dorothea Rockburne asked herself a question: “How could drawing be of itself and not something else?” Her answer, in a way, constitutes MoMA’s presentation of her works from 1972-73, “Drawing Which Makes Itself. ” Materiality enters the process of making with a visual and conceptual concision that turns a support for drawing, such as paper, into an active and equal participant capable of making varied compositions of solid and linear geometric elements. A conflation of means and ends combined with stark and beautiful meditations on numbers and their inherent relation to form, resulted in a graphic process that is both intuitive and systematic.

Immersion in the consequences of mathematical sequence linked to a visual correlative was something that Rockburne established early in her career.  Born in Canada in 1932, she studied at Black Mountain College in the the first half of the 1950s..  Attending a class at the famed North Carolina institution that was described as mathematics for artists turned out to be hugely formative for her.  The course focused on the underlying geometries present in nature and was taught by Hamburg-born mathematician Max Dehn (1878 –1952) (Robert Creeley was a classmate.) Dehn, who taught at the college from 1945 until 1952, was the sole mathematician on the faculty where he continued his research into geometry, geometric group theory, and topology. Geometric group theory concerns the active influence of equations on geometric symmetries or fluid geometric transformations in a particular space, a theory that didn’t become a discrete area of study within mathematics until the late 1980s. Its premise should appear somewhat familiar, even if not theoretically understood, upon viewing Rockburne’s MoMA exhibition, which in turn revisits the installation of a show of the same title at the Bykert Gallery in 1973.  Various square, diamond and arced shapes are poised along one wall in dialog with each other and with the works situated  on two white low, wide pedestals raised inches from the floor. Originally, carbon from the floor based work spread around the gallery as visitors walked close to and around them, and used their hands to touch them, but the pedestals and a prohibition on touching prevents anything similar happening at MoMA.

The effect of the pedestals  — although their purpose is to prevent the spread of carbon underfoot — is to reflect the wall-based works horizontally and emphasize a perspective that is dependent on the angle and distance of viewing,  This actually enhances rather than detracts from the floor works and equalizes the space of wall and floor, echoing the equalizing of support and drawing within each work. The way in which geometry and surface generate extra visual content brings Ellsworth Kelly and Kasimir Malevich to mind., Kelly for activating of gallery wall through shapes connected to prior visual experience, Malevich for his use of black and white and his ambitions for transcendence.. Rockburne has said, “I came to realize that a piece of paper is a metaphysical object. You write on it, you draw on it, you fold it.” Quotidian gestures, in other words, that have the potential of embodying and reflecting much more.

Neighborhood, 1973, comprises a series of diagonal and vertical lines in pencil and colored pencil on the wall, with a sheet of semi-transparent paper in a central position between them. The orientation of the lines and the regular geometry of the paper suggest a relationship between the two of movement and a tracing of action.  There is a visceral identification with the artist’s construction of the piece in the evidences of performativity. There is a speed and subtleness in the turning and overlapping of line and the open center of the paper around and under which the action takes place visually and to which memory is caught up in reading the marks imaginatively. The folding in of different notions of media is referred to in Natasha Kurchanora’s interview for MoMA with the artist when directly citing Vladimir Tatlin as a point of reference. Drawing, sculpting and performance are all present, though it is drawing that is explored. Given the moment of its making it is impossible not to think of the expansion of possibilities in American art in this decade and the sense of discovery and invention, a connection to tradition not withstanding.

Different papers and material are utilized as support and device in the exhibition. Roman VI, 1977, , for example, is made using Kraft paper, Copal oil varnish, blue pencil and Mylar tape. Scalar, 1971, is made with chipboard as well as paper, with nails and crude oil. In its wall position, altthough touching –and therefore appearing to be based on — the floor, it is both sculptural and architectural.  The raw physicality of this piece, with its irregular perimeter edge of both vertical and horizontal elements, together with a surface that is subjected to a staining process (like weathering) – as if an exterior wall found inside – demands a complex associational reading. For Rockburne this is still within her definition of drawing as those associations further the idea of drawing.

Rockburne has said that her work contains sexuality, which of course in its surface and process sensuality, it certainly does. Often times intellectual rigor and sensual presence are easily separated, and in American culture sexuality is not so much connected to sensuality, as Rockburne herself has observed. It is striking that mathematic and geometric form is here always made as a very present surface, tangible and exposed to touch.  Thought is therefore anything but disembodied, even if this idea might seem alien to Rockburne’s searching formal and conceptual endeavor.

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June 28 to August 17, 2013
36 Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal
New York City, 212-995-1774
(Summer hours: Tues – Sat, 11 AM – 6:30 PM, or by appointment)

An art object has no clearly defined purpose beyond the recognition of itself as art. The un-nameable complexity of what art is can be reinforced by its material proximity to objects that are industrial, entertaining, or fragmented beyond recognition–all of which are qualities that art can hold as well. The seven artists included in Conspicuous Unusable at Miguel Abreu Gallery make work that highlights this definition of art in relation to utility and refuse-like materials. The show’s title draws on a line from Heidegger in which he states that objects that are no longer used for their assigned role (for example, a broken clock) do not “vanish simply” but instead, take a “farewell in the conspicuousness of the unusable.” This philosophical framework opens up a space for reverent (but thankfully not overly high-minded) contemplation of visual art’s relationship to its other: the purposeful object. The exhibition explores these questions with a tense and interesting collection of works that evoke the intellectual spirit of classic Minimalism but with a more quiet mindfulness of the limitations of the grand gesture.

Dorothea Rockburne’s contribution is Study for Scalar (1970), a wall piece series that skirts the line between painting and installation in which six sheets of crude oil-stained paper, nailed to equally stained chipboards are arranged in three perfectly aligned pairs on a wall. The opulent, aged residue of the oil on the surface of both paper and board, a rugged evidence of action taken, is thrown into a strange relief by the cleanly economic use of nails to adhere paper to board and board to wall. The seriality of Rockburne’s work seems more like a musical variation than a ratio for linear time; there is no limit to the affinities one can keep discovering between paper, board, oil, and wall placement. Another use of layers to evoke transformation is proposed in Olof Inger’s Do You Remember? (2013), a diaphanous wall hanging made from a delicate design of pale yellow, rectangle-cut plastic trash bags. In their new incarnation as art, the plastic sheets suggest an almost-too-polite academic study of what happens when industrial materials are formally repurposed with an eye for harmonious design.

Several works in the show have the more distinct appearance of discarded industrial fragments from the streets of the Lower East Side. Jean-Luc Moulène’s Chrome (1999), a small, steel cage-like sculpture and Cameron Rowland’s U66 (2013), a thin strip of lacquered steel, are modestly understated. These are objects that do not seem to need people, and there is an almost unnerving resistance to visual excess and flamboyance. The two crushed soda cans caught between the marble slabs of Gabriel Kuri’s Two nudes two points (2013) are the most explicit evidence of the messiness of human life.

A palpable sense of elegy is most apparent in the work that literally points to what is missing from the room. In Untergerät (2013), Rey Akdogan discretely activates each of her fellow-exhibitors’ art objects with her removal of the gallery’s white floor tiles to reveal concrete underneath, leaving a thin framed tile edge on two sides of the room’s surface and along the inside of the front door. This is an intervention along similar lines to the artist’s 2012 exhibition at Miguel Abreu, night curtain, in which Akdogan kept the gallery open into the nighttime hours, turning the darkened room, lit by ambient neon light outside, into a three-dimensional magic lantern theater with an overhead fan and a slide carousel. There is something intriguingly old fashioned about both of these minimalist defacements that hide a loving respect for the formalities and barriers of a white cube gallery space. Likewise, much of the work in Conspicuous Unusable is infused with a similar, traditional restraint, an absorbed knowledge of the historical precedent for such art.

The artist who perhaps most thoroughly embodies the dialectic between use value and material fact is Charlotte Posenenske (1930-1985), a German minimalist sculptor and staunch conceptualist who abandoned art-making for the field of sociology in 1968. Her work in the show, Series D Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes) (1967/2009), are modular, fabricated steel structures (resembling ventilation pipes) that can be installed in an infinite variety of ways. In their current incarnation they climb up the wall of the gallery, hugging the ceiling in a slightly organic manner. Posenenske’s removal of authorial intention places even greater emphasis on the theatrical effect of installation. The Square Tubes have a life of their own, whether installed in front of a bus stop, in a collector’s home, or as part of a gallery exhibition. In line with Akdogan and Rockburne, here is a work that benefits immensely from its unclear limits. It returns the sovereignty of strangeness back to the material object at hand, which is all that any artwork can hope to achieve.

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Black Mountain College and Its Legacy at Loretta Howard Gallery

September 15 to October 29, 2011
525-531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 695-0164

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy, co-curated by Robert Mattison and Loretta Howard, reflects the impressive roster of artists that made the institution outside of Asheville, North Carolina legendary. As expected, the exhibition features work by many of the College’s bold-faced names—Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Hazel Larsen, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jack Tworkov—most of whom served as teachers at the school.  However, the show excels for including lesser-known artists like Leo Amino, Jorge Fick, Joe Fiore, and Richard Lippold. The exhibition often juxtaposes works at Black Mountain with something representative and later. Adjacent photographs of the artists facilitate the narrative.

For nearly two decades Black Mountain College (1933-1956) puttered and spurted along offering an improvised curriculum and a revolving door to artists, poets, composers, scientists, and anyone else who wanted to participate in its program known for placing individual creative discovery at the top of an alternative agenda. The founders hoped to intertwine living and learning, believing, as quoted by Martin Duberman in his 1972 study on the College, that “as much real education took place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.” The college was notorious for it’s spontaneous discussions in its dining hall overlooking Lake Eden.

Anni Albers wrote in an early issue of the Black Mountain College Bulletin, “Most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being.” This statement captures the essence of Black Mountain College making it fitting that an exquisite tapestry by the artist is one of the first works visitors encounter.

Josef Albers features prominently in the exhibition. Despite my personal aversion to his stringent methodologies there can be no doubting his influence upon the young itinerants who stumbled into his classroom. Both his 1937 monochrome, Composure and his Homage to the Square (1960) hanging opposite are fine examples of his strict color code, but boring in their overtly calculated way.

Most impressive of the exhibition’s early against mid-career comparisons is Kenneth Noland’s small painting V.V. (1949), and Soft Touch (1963). One can feel the presence of Albers’ teachings in the colorful quadrilateral symmetry of the earlier work. Noland’s short geometric gesture stretches out in the later work to become one of his celebrated V-shaped Chevrons.  In another comparison, an early photograph by Kenneth Snelson of dewdrops suspended on a spider web from 1948, offers a remarkable insight into the artist’s use of line and tension that can be found in sculptural works in the years that followed.

Certain pairings are more referential: Pat Passlof’s early example borrows gesture from de Kooning, with whom she traveled to Black Mountain to study in 1948, while the later piece builds up color from Milton Resnick, who she married in 1961. Passlof tells the story that after Albers tore up Elaine de Kooning’s homework in front of class, Passlof promptly gathered her things and left his classroom never to return. Elaine is represented by a fabulous enamel on paper titled Black Mountain Number 6 (1948).

The exhibition could have benefited from stricter curatorial selection, most notably in the case of Franz Kline from whom there are six works from various periods, but no masterpieces. Robert Motherwell also fares poorly, although there is an interesting photograph and preliminary sketch from 1951 proof that Motherwell was working on the Millburn Mural commission at the time. The exhibition hits a home run, however, with its timely selection of works by de Kooning that includes a preliminary drawing for the painting Asheville.

Dorothea Rockbourne was one of the few students at Black Mountain with prior  training, as she had attended her native Montreal’s Ecole des beaux-arts. She arrived in search of a more diverse education and latched on to the only mathematics professor there, Max Dehn, whose basic lessons in geometry and topology had a lasting influence on her career. Her Gradient and Field (1977) –reconstructed for this exhibition-is a sophisticated installation of vellum sheets placed at prescribed levels above and below a vectored horizontal line in such a way as to amplify the divergent fields.

There are some sore omissions and unnecessary inclusions in this exhibition.  It’s hard to justify the absence of Jerry Van de Wiele, for instance, especially when Helen Frankenthaler, who was at Black Mountain for just a week visiting Clement Greenberg and hardly a part of the community, is represented.  Enticed by a letter from his friend the painter Jorge Fick (represented in the show by a selection of late works), Van de Wiele enrolled as a student in September 1954. When classes were suspended during the winter of 1955 he returned to The Art Institute in Chicago where he convinced two friends, Richard Bogart and John Chamberlain (the latter represented by later sculptures) to follow him back in the spring.

There are, however, amazing moments in this show that allow you to look across rooms and down hallways to draw associations, such as when Jack Tworkov’s hefty gestural painting Day Break (1953) is seen through the undulating stainless steel beams and cords of Snelson’s large Easter Monday (1977). Tworkov is also represented by two ink studies for House of the Sun, an important series of paintings the artist began at Black Mountain during the summer of 1952.

Upstairs hang three abstract paintings by Emerson Woelffer, invited to Black Mountain in 1949 at the request of Buckminster Fuller (represented by a large sculpture and two posthumous prints). A group of five collages by Ray Johnson hang next. Johnson was on campus from mid to late 1940s and studied with the likes of Albers, Bolotowski, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Lippold, Motherwell, and Charles Olson. His collages, all done later, incorporate and at the same time upend the learning of these historic teachers.

While the College did offer classes in language, anthropology, and science, the arts remained the focus of the curriculum. An impressive selection of rare books by the Black Mountain Poets is assembled in a large vitrine on the second floor on loan from the collection of James Jaffe. The show provides first edition printings of Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, Charles Olson, M.C. Richards, and Jonathan Williams to name a few. Among the various publications sits the prospectus for the 1951 Summer Institute, which includes a terrific image of one of Black Mountain’s most remarkable dancers, Katherine Litz.

Photography was officially added to the curriculum in the fall of 1949. Hazel Larsen Archer was something of the resident photographer. Her images of a spiky-haired John Cage, a contemplative Willem de Kooning, and Merce Cunningham dancing in an open field (reprints of a few are included in the exhibition) are some of the most historic images of the school. She is credited, among other things, with giving Rauschenberg enough instruction with the camera to let him do with the instrument as he pleased. Archer, along with students in her class, decided to produce the magazine 5 Photographers, showcased here.  Aaron Siskind, a photographer particularly admired among the Abstract Expressionists, arrived in 1951 as faculty. Works from his North Carolina Series (1951) are on view, accompanied by works by Arthur Siegel and Harry Callahan.

A highlight of the exhibition comes with the projection of footage of three early dances by Merce Cunningham:: Septet (1953), Antic Meet (1958) and Story (1963). It is captivating watching Cunningham dance his own choreography and while the footage has been available to Merce Cunningham Dance Company, enabling the company to recreate these historic pieces in detail, this is the first time the footage has been publicly shown. Septet was created during the summer of 1953, the year of the company’s official debut, and is one of the very few dances Cunningham set to music.

Story (1963) features sets and costumes by Rauschenberg, assembled using anything the artist could find outside the door of the theater. This work speaks to the great collaborations that took place at the College, including Cage’s Theater Piece #1 (1952). Created over lunch and performed later the same day, the piece features Cage, Charles Olson, and M.C. Richard reading from ladders while Rauschenberg plays records and Cunningham dances.

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy is an impressive show and a remarkable undertaking considering the many facets of this historic school.  Continuing a streak of themed shows at Loretta Howard that include last year’s Artists at Max’s Kansas City, 1965-1974, the exhibition strives to make connections within the period, although sometimes lacking the tight editing necessary to make such associations more visible. The mystic Ruth Asawa is represented with a single work: an untitled looped wire sculpture from early 1950s hanging overhead. It would have been insightful to see one of Asawa’s later drawings as well in this context.  The exhibition, spread out over two floors, makes for a great treasure hunt, but it’s difficult to experience the true impact of the show in its totality. The catalogue is a bit of a disappointment with some annoying historical errors. Pat Passlof’s name is misspelled. for example, and she followed de Kooning to Black Mountain with the intent of studying with him not Mark Tobey, as recounted here. Chamberlain was never on faculty and was not  present during the summer of 1955.  Bios are included only for the most prominent artists, and poets are left out completely. Even Charles Olson, whose reputation at Black Mountain outstripped his 6’8” frame, isn’t featured. These problems need not detract from the abundance of historic materials, however, that make this a show not to be missed.

RELATED EVENTS / PROGRAMS:

A Black Mountain Poetry Reading
featuring Francine du Plessix Gray, John Yau, Vincent Katz, Maureen Howard and others. Wednesday October 19, 6-8PM

An afternoon with independent curator Jason Andrew, as he discusses his recent exhibition and publication: JACK TWORKOV: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952. Mr. Andrew will discuss Tworkov, his arrival at Black Moutain College and his relationship with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Fielding Dawson, Jorge Fick, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, during one of the most historic summers in the history of the Black Mountain College. Saturday, October 22, 4:00PM

JASON ANDREW is the manager, curator and archivist for the Estate of Jack Tworkov whose recent projects include the publication Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952. A prominent figure in the Bushwick art scene, his independent collaborative projects with artists and dancers and others are presented through the Norte Maar company. He is also the co-owner of Storefront, a gallery in Bushwick featuring young talent and revisiting the work of established artists. He can be followed on twitter: jandrewARTS

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It would appear that the timing of Dorothea Rockburne’s exhibition of exquisite astronomical drawings could not have been more fortuitous.   Within a couple weeks after the opening at its New York venue, an on-line Associated Press article confirmed that the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva – also known as “the world’s largest atom smasher” – had established a new record in the number of high-energy collisions among proton beams. LHC scientists, known as particle physicists, were thrilled to discover that their costly investment was getting closer to a microcosmic simulation of the mystery behind the Big Bang that presumably instigated the beginning of the universe 14 billion years ago.

While there is little doubt that such physical and astronomical concepts are of interest to Rockburne, as they have been for her entire career, such statistics are unlikely to alter or defer her own process of envisioning the universe in the terms that she understands.  In an interview with the curator of the exhibition, Ann H. Murray, Rockburne explains that in 1990 she was …”beginning to question the Big Bang theory from this viewpoint: if the universe was created from an initial speck of infinite density (a singularity), where had that matter come from and what caused matter and energy to explode and inflate?  Had this happened previously, creating other universes?  Thinking about this made me want to roam around the universe through painting and thought.”

Rockburne has always been interested in etiology, that is, the causes behind phenomenon.  In art, this is a territory often unexplored by scientists.  What are the causes of the universe?  Are they, in fact, related to the creative process that one may discover in painting?  The works on paper in this exhibition are filled with evidence that, in their own way, is equal to the record number of high-energy collisions among proton beams. One only has to study the intricacy and intensity of the series, titled Universes (1994-99), made with raw pigment, acrylic medium and charcoal on watercolor paper, to see the evidence of Rockburne’s internalized and highly informed vision.  Each of the six paintings offers a different point of view.  Some reveal darkened premonitions with cracking interstices in space, while others elicit light and speed – whirling cycles in which helix patterns appear and where glittering elliptical shapes suggest a passage within the evolution between energy and matter.

In The Twins: Castor & Pollux (2002), made with Lascaux Aquacryl and copper on gessoed linen, the constellation of these bifurcated figures appears, not in the literal sense of diagrammatic form, but as antipodal formations, each with their own distinct light and magnetic fields.  In Piero’s Sky (1991-92), a drawing, the equipoise of elliptical shapes begets a balance between tension andharmony that recalls, for this writer, the penetrating moment captured by Piero della Francesca in the Clark Institute’s Madonna and Child.

Rockburne’s works on paper herald metaphorical value without losing their sense of physical time and space.  Relative to her vision of the universe, this would seem to coincide with a presentation of recent infrared photographs shown in Munich this past January by Professor Dimitar Sasselov from Harvard. These staggering images made it clear that the universe is an interconnected assembly of electrical circuits and that energy and matter are, indeed, infinite in their connectivity.  What is truly exhilarating about Rockburne’s astronomy drawings is their elasticity and their ability to incite both stasis and kinesis.  Given these conditions, they allow us to travel through an uncharted space. In these modest works, ideas and emotions have no separation. They are inextricably bound to whatever universe exists within or outside of us. They constitute a meditation on the sources of desire that unlock our momentum towards discovery.

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on view at the National Academy’s 184th Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Art (until June 10). The exhibition of 191 artists from across the nation includes an array of the great and the good that crosses boundaries of trad and trendy, making the NA an academy in the best sense of the word, uniting artists of quality. Exhibitors in this year’s instalment of the biennial event include Gregory Amenoff, Stephen Antonakos, William Bailey,  Robert Berlind, Will Barnet, Charles Cajori, Sue Coe, Susanna Coffey, Janet Fish, Jane Freilicher, Mark Greenwold, RIchard Haas, Yvonne Jacquette, Wolf Kahn,  William King, Albert Kresch, Ellen Lanyon, Whitfield Lovell, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Raoul Middleman, Ruth Miller, John Moore, George Nick, Thomas Nozkowski, Pat Passlof, Philip Pearlstein, Paul Resika, Faith Ringgold, Harriet Shorr, Joan SnyderSusan Jane Walp, Betty Woodman. Rockburne is the honoree of the Academy’s annual fundraising gala on May 5 alongside philanthropist Robert Levinson. 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, 212 369 4880

This was an artcritical PIC in April 2009

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11 West 53rd Street
between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City

Curator Starr Figura uncovers the relationship of geometry to two-dimensional abstraction from 1912 to today without imposing a narrative arc. The attention rests first on individual works of art, however the exhibition is teeming with a myriad of connections between disciplines, formal imagery, and the relationship between spiritual content and conceptual design. Many of the artists represented are equally recognized as teachers (most notably Josef Albers), authors of manifestos, and members of schools or collectives, and an intense doctrinaire commitment to the geometric-based practice runs through many of “Geo/Metric.”Modestly inhabiting the Museum of Modern Art’s newest gallery space on the second floor, “Geo/Metric,” is the kind of user-friendly, yet classically rigorous exhibition that can be taken for granted in the age of curatorial spectacles.  This is unfortunate, since exhibits like “Geo/Metric,” and the recently closed “Multiplex: New Directions in Art Since 1970,” are crucial in bringing MoMA’s naturally inclined historicism into a mutually beneficial relationship with its growing collection of contemporary art.

In the “Suprematist Manifesto” (1915), created the same year as “Black Square,” Kazimir Malevich describes geometric forms as symbols of both a primeval mysticism, and a highly rigorous, intellectual parlay between the artist’s subjectivity and the impassive art object.  For each succeeding generation, this interplay of geometric form and content is located at different points. Malevich and Kandinsky, arguably the first practitioners and theorists of a non-objective art of geometric forms and symbols, are presented alongside lesser-exhibited compatriots, Frantisek Kupka, Vasilii Kamenskii, and Lyubov Popova.

Learning at the table of the Russian Constructivists, Helio Oiticia’s five luminous gouache on board works, radiate a fresh Neo-Constructivism. Created when Oiticia was in his early 20s, and a member of Rio de Janeiro’s concrete art collective, Grupo Frente, the “Metaesquemas” (1957) series are simple, cut-out geometric forms in red, white and black, composed within the limits of a grid or rectangle form on a neutral ground. The total effect captures the timing of a free jazz drumbeat, a minimalist re-interpretation of the rhythmic linoleum prints of Lyubov Popova and the paper collages Hans Arp.

Mary Heilmann’s “Davis Sliding Square” (1978), provides relief from the black and white reductive optical build-up of Bridget Riley and Francois Morellet. The painting is synthetic polymer paint on paper, a Malevich on acid description of a blue square and rectangle against a yellow backdrop. Similar to Blinky Palermo’s bright green triangle on white paper (from the screenprint series “4 Prototypes,” 1970) the geometric forms have a presence that is both organic and chemical.  Classical geometry, in the hands of Heilmann and Palermo, are indeterminate substances, peeled and placed like stickers on a flat plane. In this company Ellsworth Kelly’s  “Line Form Color” (1951), a series of ink and gouache building block color forms radiates a graphically controlled precision.

The fluid concept of “radical art,” how it was defined in its own era and is understood today, also permeates the rooms of “Geo/Metric.”  A case in point is Jo Baer’s two 1965 gouache on paper compositions—thin, deftly painted frames that illuminate the paper’s white center. Baer’s work can be overlooked in a room of the decade’s flashier offerings, but it offers some of the first investigations into the conceptual perimeters of painting and painted abstraction.  Like many artists who realize a mature vision early in their chosen art practice, Baer came to art-making from a multidisciplinary background of science and philosophy, which she brought to bear on her own development as a painter.  Her frame compositions connect the hand-made line to the impersonal and industrial forms of Minimalism. Like Agnes Martin’s grids, the form realized is at once contemporary and primitive, derived from repetitive processes that reveal a wide species of spaces.

The geometric graphic’s counterpart, the ghostly space of the paper, is investigated through radical printing practices by Dorothea Rockburne. Her “Locus” print series (1972) is comprised of paper sheets bearing lines and ridges preserved from the process of folding prior to being run through an etching press.  The slight three-dimensionality of the paper (which hangs unframed at MoMA) is geometry come to life off the page. The “Locus” prints have the sublime singularity of a child’s crumpled napkin, lending themselves to the illusion of self-created works of art.  Inseparable from the invisible mechanics of the formal process, there is an important metaphysical dimension to the work.  Describing her experience working with paper in the 1970s, Rockburne alludes to the spiritual properties underlining a highly analytic practice.  “Paper began to assume terrific importance to me. I locked myself in my studio and just stared at sheets of paper. I thought that the paper would tell me something – something that I needed to know. Finally, I felt as though I became the paper.”

“Geo/Metric” brings the conversation up to date with only passing reference to the sweeping effects of digital media on geometric abstraction, a direction that, admittedly, could be better explored in a smaller survey of artists.  Instead the exhibition satisfyingly closes its narrative with an artist, Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968), whose drawings seem to embody in equal parts the early lessons of the Russian and Brazilian Constructivists, the hard edges of Minimalism, and the flash bulb presence of Op and Pop Art. The pencil on paper “Butterfly” series are tightly realized compositions of radiating color bands meeting at horizontal perspective planes.  The awkward precision of Grotjahn’s forms and the impossibility of the spaces they describe project the jubilant urgency of a hand-painted carnival sign. After being run through the pressure chamber of Conceptual Art, geometric forms for many artists working today are not indicative of a strict allegiance to any kind of school of non-objective thought or practice. From the storied history laid out in the rooms of “Geo/Metric” it seems that geometry in art has indeed reached its highest accomplishment: the freedom of eternal fresh starts.

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Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

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