print February 1975

Dotty Attie

Dotty Attie also makes narrative series of images, both with and without text. But instead of photographs, her images are meticulously executed drawings based mainly on details chosen from paintings by Ingres, the Mannerists, and other masters. But she selects like a photographer. I mean she treats several centuries of paintings as a field of available images from which she is free to abstract tiny passages.

Most of the paintings she has ransacked depict moments of history or myth from which the painter sought to extract a moral for the edification of his contemporaries. They were deliberately

print February 1975

Stefan Eins

Austrian emigré Stefan Eins rented a storefront in SoHo, a few blocks below the main gallery scene, and sits in it to demonstrate his artworks. There are four of them: a pulley attached to the ceiling; a crowbar leaning against the wall; a wooden block with a pin in it with which Eins plays records on an old phonograph; and a bottle of water and a pump he uses to force air into the jar until enough pressure builds up to condense the humid air into a kind of fog.

Eins offers the two tools and two toys at prices that must be close to the cost of materials. Oldenburg’s 1961 Store, sponsored by a

print February 1975

Arthur Koepcke

As a formal determinant in object-making, this participatory function is partly rooted in what Dali called “Objects of Symbolic Function,” Surrealist works like Giacometti’s Suspended Ball of 1930–31 which incorporate particular elements designed to be moved. The cheerful presumption thateveryone is an artist underlies the populist expansion of the mail art movement, and this idea is implicit in the proto-Conceptual work of George Brecht and Arthur Koepcke, Danish artist and Fluxus promoter of the ’60s.

Continue . . . is a box multiple ($75 from the gallery) containing 129 ideas—strategies,

print February 1975

Newton Harrison

In the handouts accompanying his show, Newton Harrison proclaims that he is after “an art, social in operation, based on tangible harvests, that works efficiently both as system and as metaphor.” The harvest he speaks of is seafood, cultured at his as yet unconstructed estuarial marine plantation in Southern California. I admire farmer Harrison’s politics. He is committed to collectivity, and he has what look like sound proposals to ameliorate the world’s food crisis. Nevertheless I am constrained to deal with the works in his show, and they reveal a commitment to a pictorial format that is not

print January 1975

Frank Gillette

In his early work, Frank Gillette set out pyramidal banks of monitors playing didactic videotapes that were intended to bespeak natural orders and systems. Since I’ve always suspected that massed monitors reiterate the hierarchies of Minimal sculpture at the expense of the images presented, I could see Gillette’s early work only as pseudoscientific bombast that wished it was sculpture.

Gillette hasn’t junked the sculptural format in his new installation, but he no longer insists on it. He has set out four front-facing monitors, three lined up in front and one some ten feet behind. Although the

print January 1975

Carl Toth

I was immediately attracted to Carl Toth’s tiny collages made from 2 1/4” by 2 1/4” contact prints because the sprawling polygonal shapes of his works resemble Gordon Matta-Clark’s photo-documentation of Splitting (1974). Toth references this evidentiary mode of reconstructing a site in several scenes made from what look like shots taken inside holes in the ground. But he incorporates this mode into the broader genre of landscape photography and 19th-century panorama—landscape, cityscape, and group photos.

Both uses the discontinuities that arise in piecing photos together, discontinuities

print January 1975

Italo Scanga

On two facing walls of the gallery, Italo Scanga hangs handsomely framed reproductions of kitschy religious paintings spattered with red paint. Before these, he places glass urns containing spices or grains, and occasionally leans farming implements, a rake or a hoe, against the wall. At the rear of the gallery, he hangs large bunches of dried herbs. Scanga constructs a kind of ritual space which resembles a series of ambulatory chapels in a cathedral, each with its own devotional image. One has to kneel to examine the paintings closely, since they are hung so low to the ground, and from there

print January 1975

Richard Nonas

There is some way in which the effort to reduce and control the elements in an artwork becomes an effort to control the spectator’s reaction to it. This effort, particularly in sculpture, can in turn become an attempt to seize and marshal the spectator’s sensibilities. Cowboy Minimalist Richard Nonas rented the O.K. Harris space before that gallery moved in, and installed his piece Boundary Man. He laid 11 strips of rectangular steel end to end in two lines that span two rooms diagonally. Walking around a work, apprehending its position in space and realizing yourself in relation to it, is a

print January 1975

Peter Hutchinson

In his Alphabet Series (also published as a book by his gallery), Peter Hutchinson tries to be funny and by and large he succeeds. Handwritten jokes and stories caption lush color photographs, and both hang beneath large letters upholstered in different materials. Like many comic writers before him, Hutchinson uses the alphabet as a containing device, a format for his storytelling.

Alphabet Series is a kind of ambient autobiography. It includes anecdotes about art-making and the art world, about the artist’s travels, and many funny stories about plants and animals (perhaps in ironic reference to

print January 1975

Robin Van Arsdale

suppose it comes down to my preference for art that happens to be funny while doing something else. Like Synthetic Cubism. Sometimes the joke isn’t much of one, or it’s abstruse, but it’s effortless. Robin Van Arsdale’s series of waggish snipes at the formal conventions that govern art on the wall are witty in almost that way. He twists a few of the obvious issues of modern painting into quips by reiterating them in degenerate idioms.

He alludes to Kenneth Noland’s colored stripes and thin grids by hanging a small aluminum frame with glass and paper on the wall and drawing a grid through it with

print January 1975

Rachel Bas-Cohain

Rachel Bas-Cohain also moves from jokes about modernist composition into a hard tackle on the same problems. Bas-Cohain builds two models of the Cubist grid. One is small and made from refrigeration pipes, and the other is large, spanning the width of the gallery ceiling, and made from thin cold water pipes. Thepun (as Bas-Cohain unfortunately points out in an accompanying text) is about the grid as the compositional basis—the plumbing—of much modernist painting. The first grid she builds is covered with ice crystals, and the other with droplets of water that fall on people as they enter the

print December 1974

New Voices

ART-WORLD CENTRISM IS UNDENIABLY breaking down. Even as New York has emerged in the last couple of decades as an international art-making center, so museums, galleries, and now art periodicals in outlying communities have become increasingly conscious of their own potential to contribute to the enrichment of contemporary art. All of the publications included in this survey of art magazines outside New York have arisen since 1970.

This growing publishing action is, after all, only natural. It is clearly impractical for the national art magazines to speak directly to art outside their geographical

Alan Moore