print April 1974

Jean Le Gac

In his show of captioned photographs, Jean Le Gac is concerned with “watching himself act” through word and image reconstructions of living memory. His narrative sequences accrete the personal in experience. They rely on evocative photographs, second-person address, and his artisthood to appeal.

His language is dense, fraught with constructions as faulty in English as they must have been in French. It is easy to denigrate his expositions as a species of French literary pedantry; perhaps it is more productive to view them (since they are in a gallery and conjoined with photographs) as pictorial

print April 1974

Eric Staller

Eric Staller’s show of slide projections in the back room at O.K. Harris raises the question dogging Realist painting of the urban environment: why not photography?

In one work. Staller chooses to photograph the angle where building meets sidewalk throughout Manhattan, projecting his images onto right-angled screens along the floor. The slide program is a kind of diary of a pedestrian’s sidelong glances, in which a painterly eye distills textural and coloristic pleasure from this urban junction.

Staller’s slides projected onto canvaslike white screens quote a Realist methodology borrowed from

print April 1974

Michael Economos

In his Realist paintings of crushed cans lying in long grass, Michael Economos reanimates the can as an image with a nod to Andy Warhol’s 1962 torn and damaged Campbell’s cans. But whereas Warhol’s garbage is raw, and his cans ripped by human agency, Economos’ have been turned over to nature, and their rusted surfaces reveal the passage of time.

One painting sets up the show in a loosely cartographic way: a long aerial view of a Budweiser can lying at the end of a mud promontory which juts into a shallow stream with a grassy bank. In a corner of the work, a folded brown form appears which is

print April 1974

Dalia Ramanauskas

Dalia Ramanauskas’ drawings of torn and opened cardboard cartons are Realist renderings of garbage as well. Unlike Economos’ cans, which are sited in nature, Ramanauskas draws boxes upon a white ground. She renders details with a meticulousness that makes her boxes perhaps more compelling than their actual presences. There is a stillness and an absoluteness about her objects, an outgrowth of placeless pose and consuming detail that makes them, like the still-life elements in Northern Renaissance painting, repositories of meaning.

Ramanauskas’ boxes are mostly relics of private correspondence,

print April 1974

Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle builds forms, he doesn’t pare them away. He works within a limited range of ideas about what a sculpture predicated upon familiar forms and usages can do, trading away the sculptor’s chance to make revelations in favor of clever handling.

Three of the small mock-ups in the show work the twin concepts of lifting and holding, the idea of anchor. Swept planes of sheet metal (like the blades of da Vinci’s helicopter) strain to raise each sculpture from the ground to which it is pegged by an angled chunk of colored wood.

Doyle is fond of a craftsmanly annihilation of the two-dimensional;

print April 1974

Jene Highstein

Jene Highstein’s installation consists of two huge horizontal pipes, one about six feet off the ground, and the other just over eight feet. Highstein’s module is the gallery itself. The horizontal pipes address the vertical columns that support the ceiling and bifurcate the gallery; the piece acts to square the space. As information, the pipes make the gallery a metaphor—a quasi-industrial adjunct to a greater whole—like a boiler room or steam conduit. There is an irony in this: steel pipes, which perform a service function in our lives, work here to master a given space.

Between the expectation

Alan Moore