Alvin Balkind

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  print May 1968

  Arnold Rockman

  Does art need artists? The excuse most often given for calling a Duchamp “readymade,” or for that matter a Jasper Johns bronze flashlight, an object of art is that it was selected by an artist and placed on a pedestal by him. The archaeologist, on the other hand, who presumably is not an artist also “finds” things from other or earlier civilizations and places them on pedestals; and we call them “art.” What if a non-artist, non-archaeologist, were asked to “find” some everyday things from our contemporary civilization and to place them on a stand? This was the gist of the innocent question posed

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  print May 1968

  Michael Morris

  The spirit of much of Michael Morris’s current work is summed up in a 1966 painting (owned by the Vancouver Art Gallery) called The Problem of Nothing. Many of the formal elements which frequently appear in his work are present or hinted at in it; and, although it is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, yet it exposes with surprising clarity a distinct underlying philosophy.

  In this painting we see a bubble emerging from a box within a box within a box which comprises the outer dimensions of the painting itself. A three-sided border in white encloses a vertically striped horizontal rectangle painted

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  print December 1967

  Vancouver

  Last year, when the Western Association of Art Museums annual conference was held in Portland, Oregon, one delegate from Southern California looked around wearily at the paintings on the walls of a home she was visiting and muttered her unenchanted opinion of the Northwest School: “Roots, branches and twigs.” This September, when WAAM met in Vancouver, B.C., for the first time, the delegates arrived for the usual round of parties, semi-digestible luncheons and banquets and, if we guessed correctly, the anticipation of an unbearably provincial enclave: woods and paintings both full of twigs,