November 23, 2013 to January 11, 2014
2712 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA, 310-559-0100

There is an overwhelming and unnerving self-consciousness inherent in the acts of making and doing. Some rare individuals are able to divorce themselves from the implications of their actions, but for the vast majority of people, every move they make is done with the consideration of how this action will be perceived. This is why most people make decisions at a low-risk level. Of course, it is natural to desire acceptance, to desire approval. But artists, like athletes and performers, also seek admiration. As athletes want to be stronger and faster than the competition or actors want to be more beautiful and captivating than their peers, artists want to be the most illuminating and intellectual of their group.

The work of Alan Shields (1944-2005) never seems to make excuses for itself. It stands firm, indifferent to worship or criticism. It is self-aware and self-critical, but not self-conscious. It is not humble and it is not modest, despite its relatable aesthetics. It is not preoccupied with convincing those who come across it of its worth or value. This work does not feel insular; unlike many other objects, these project a sense of necessity—a need to be made, a need to be seen, a need to be lived with and cared for.

A mini-survey of Shields’ work from the 1960s to the 1980s is now on view at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles. The vibrant colors, surprising material and compositional decisions, and evocative texts and titles throughout are reflective of the counter-culture of the era that shaped his art, but at the same time appear as fresh and confidently articulated as the work one might encounter in an emerging artist’s studio today. Many artists coming out of MFA graduate programs, particularly painters and sculptors, are caught in a distressful position, wanting to be “playful” and “experimental,” but also feeling anxious about the cursory nature of this activity, combined with an immense pressure to frame their work in a conceptual or theoretical manner. This anxiety often leads to aseptic carbon copies of things they saw in some seminar. For this generation of young artists struggling to balance work and play, it would likely behoove them to take a deeper look at Shields’ oeuvre, and the intellectual fun he has proven that can be had as an artist.

The earliest pieces in the show are three framed concrete poems, or “untitled typed drawings,” as Shields referred to them. Each of these typed drawings (all 1968) indirectly describe one specific thing (an airplane, bubble gum, cigarettes) through terse, staccato phrasing, within the confined form of a rectangle. The real poetry of these text pieces derives from the almost autistic tranquility of their making, which goes on to inform much of what constitutes the rest of the exhibition, consisting of works from the following three decades.

Two mobile-like objects anchor each room. The first, Dance Bag (1985), comprised of acrylic, canvas, glass beads, and thread on aluminum tubing, is fastened above a circular mirror that is approximately the same size as the circular bottom of the hanging sculpture. The second, In Bed the Sty is Teacups (1976-77), a limp chain link composition of acrylic-soaked canvas, is suspended from taut triangulated bead-covered wire, with more beads loosely strung to and beneath it, vaguely mimicking a thin shadow. Both of these breezy constructions dangle in stillness, implying a potential movement on their part; in doing so, they goad the viewer to move about them. This is the common wish of all three-dimensional objects, but as its title suggests, the possibility of a dance between object and viewer is open—a jointly sly and benevolent move on Shields’ part.

Other wall works include radiant unprimed and unstretched canvases, each eliciting movement like the sculptural works they surround, and together, they create varied allegorical manifestations of being. The aptly titled Finger Lickin’ (1974-76), is splattered with rainbow colors, the dashing marks reminiscent of a rambunctious finger painting. This initial painted layer is smothered with a cast net of thread, rope, string, and beads, creating a momentary pause, until the web causes the eye to wander further. Next to it is Subway Series (1984), a lax grid consisting of orbs with peripheral orbs, which bring to mind the growth within a Petri dish or the early films of Stan Brakhage. David Omar Rosaria (1982), the most saturated of the wall works, is a concise kaleidoscopic sequence. It flows like a liquid sand painting with belting adhered to its surface to create a simple and humorous design—a boxy portrait of a perplexingly endearing robot.

In this age, where media and technology have become so narrowly defined by the Internet, and marketing and advertising have devolved into the equivalent of commercial speed dating, it is easy to forget what these things mean. Is a wheel still technology? Can a poem be a form of advertising? Shields’ work reminds us of the limits and prospects of language and objects in society. Any apparatus has potential, any image has meaning. With this knowledge, it becomes our duty to engage and react.

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November 7 to December 21, 2012
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City, 212.445.0444

Critics sometimes like to imagine they are entering the picture space of paintings under view. In a justly famous extended passage in The Salon of 1767, for instance, Denis Diderot describes wandering within some landscape scenes by Claude-Joseph Vernet. And in his critique of Clement Greenberg’s formalism, Leo Steinberg asserted: “In an age of space travel a pictorial semblance of open void is just as inviting to imaginary penetration as the pictorial semblance of a receding landscape was formerly to a man on foot.” Normally, of course when viewing a work of art, you stand some  distance in front of that object. But if paintings are used to construct a maze, then you can walk surrounded on all sides by art.  Galerie Lelong Chelsea’s exhibition Hélio Oiticica: Penetrables earlier this year allowed viewers to go through a maze at the far end of the gallery which was composed from panels of solid colors—green, blue, yellow, and orange. At the end, you were rewarded with a cup of orange juice. Oiticica intended that Penetrables be a movable penetrable fresco. Shields’ Maze creates a very different effect.

The Greenberg Van Doren Gallery has a relatively large unobstructed display room. And so, filling a large part of it with Maze (1981-82), filled with decorative circles, triangles and rectangles composed of areas of pure color, and some intricate geometric patterns changed completely the way that you experienced that space. Twisting and turning, walking on narrow pathways between paintings hung on frail-looking wood frames using webs of cotton belting, you finally emerged on the far side from the entrance.  The pathway is narrow enough that you need to turn sideways. When you enter, you don’t know exactly where the path will lead. Were someone to enter from the other side, you then would have to back out. At some points, you can see outside, but often when you are within Maze you find yourself immersed in a forest of paintings.

Taught to sew by his mother and sisters, Shields (1944- 2005), became famous in the early 1970s for employing the motifs of 1960s color field paintings in colorful decorative hangings.  He compared Maze to a stage set: “you’ve got walls, corridors, intersections, changes of direction, all directed by a type of architecture within architecture.” The opening for this show featured a performance choreographed by Stephen Petronio “Into The Maze,” set to a piece of music composed by Tom Laurie, which was inspired by a short melody written by Shields. But even without attending, a gallery visitor could understand the power of Maze (1981-82) to inspire these performers. Entering a maze is an essentially regressive experience. Abandoning your normally purposeful walk, you surrender yourself to following the spatial order created by the artist. Color field paintings become walls of a maze – what an unlikely, but aesthetically satisfying fate for an art form that aspired to dematerialize the work of art.

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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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