print January 1973

Alan Sonfist

Alan Sonfist’s Landscape in comparison with all this, makes him look like a “naturalist.” The small section of actual forest he has trans ported to the gallery floor is presented as if it were a piece of evidence in the Museum of Natural History. There are a variety of reference frames and scales of observation through which we may view it. First we see it in terms of his experience of it. An excerpt from his diary outlines his discovery of the site and details his reactions on various lev els while it describes the discrete units he encounters there with charming fulsomeness. Next we have a

print January 1973

Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis confronts nature and the man-made. He makes this confrontation literal, incorporating both objects and performances. He confronts the kind of paradoxical fusion of real and manufactured that Magritte was particularly masterful at depicting. Kounellis’ Papagallo of 1969, the earliest work in the show, consists of a vertically oriented iron rectangle. The work outlines his esthetic position perfectly. It is an abstract “object”—gray, hard, and Minimal—to which the artist has bound a “natural” phenomenon—a richly colorful, cawing, bit of life. Each impinges on the other’s reality.

print December 1972

Willem De Kooning

Willem De Kooning’s paintings of 1970–72 on view at the Sidney Janis Gallery continue the series of figures in landscapes that he initiated in 1963 when he moved from Manhattan to The Springs on Long Island. The particular importance of this exhibition is the debut of de Kooning as a sculptor. It is in the light of this new development that we must reevaluate his recent paintings. The American master at merging figure and background into holistic unities has suddenly, at the age of 68, presented his familiar figures to us as solid, clearly-defined entities. The ambiance or setting so vital to

print December 1972

Jack Youngerman

Shaping has been the central issue of Jack Youngerman’s painting for most of his career. But it is only in this year’s Pace Gallery exhibition that he has made this concern manifest in a literal way. The works look like giant cutouts shaped by monstrous scissors. Of the eight large, highly-stylized shaped canvases comprising the show, three are bipartite and only one is symmetrical. The shapes are, as always, organic in nature—abstractions on a theme of flowers or leaves. Half of the works are hot—sunshine with lemon yellow or two close-hued golden oranges—while the other half use contrasts of

print December 1972

Edward Clark

Edward Clark is concerned with surface to about the same extent that Youngerman is not. In his most recent work the surfaces are thickly encrusted, asserting the physicality of their medium with obdurate aggressiveness yet emitting light and seeming to contain atmosphere. The three constants in Clark’s painting are horizontal striping, an active surface, and an obsession with the ellipse as his personal hieratic image.

Clark’s exhibition covered three years and as many distinct solutions to his basic problem of maintaining a valid relationship between the ellipse and the canvas edge. His earliest,

print December 1972

Yvonne Jacquette, Sylvia Mangold, Susan Shatter, John Moore

The four artists at Fischbach are concerned with very humanistic notions, and they are making straight, serious, and ungimmicked approaches to their various subjects. Yvonne Jacquette’s painting approach is probably the most abstract of the four. Her upwardly angled views into the underbellies of movie marquees and the blue sky beyond have a compositional stringency that is reminiscent of a classic Mondrian painting. The marquee whether unlighted or partially lit at dusk, reads as a large flat squarish form filling the upper left. It is balanced by incident at the right and bottom of the field

print December 1972

Caspar Henselmann

Caspar Henselmann is attempting the “superman” approach. In an effort to free himself from the stifling treadmill he was on of producing kinetic sculptures to decorate lobbies out of glass, steel, oil, and air pressure bubbles, he has spent the past few years exploring a variety of new sculptural modes. The results, a very great many (too many) of them at least, were brought together for his Mercer Street Coop exhibition. Through the jungle of confusing styles he presented, a certain and interesting sensibility was discernible. He has a bent toward the flowing, the naturally inundated, the

print December 1972

Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke is clearly involved with the sensualist approach to sculpture. In her first one-woman exhibition after years of crafts-world obscurity as a ceramist, she shows remarkable assurance and facility. Her sensibility and her material seem to have fused perfectly and immediately into one strongly expressive whole. Wall sculptures of fleshy pink latex sheets hang on pushpins, bunched in groups of overlapping, snap-fastened flaps. They are so lusciously tactile that it is all but impossible to resist the urge to run their soft, spongy petals through your fingers. The five works range in

print December 1972

Jean Linder

The signs of struggle so conspicuously absent in Wilke’s relaxed work are discernible in the tougher polyethylene sculptures of Jean Linder. In spite of the unfortunate plastics industry odor which permeated her Mercer Street exhibition space, in spite of too much plastic sculpture in the ’60s, and the whole industrial SoHo ambiance in which her work is situated, she managed to state her sculptural ideas with force and clarity. No innovator, but a solid former (vacuum-former) of materials she turns transparent vinyl into soft and fairly firm configurations of varying density, texture, and

print December 1972

Tal Streeter

Tal Streeter, like Kenneth Snelson, is a recent convert to the gentle tensility and grace of bamboo for his sculptural material, and to the refinement of Japanese construction techniques. But unlike Snelson who explores the complex dynamics of tension and compression in deceptively simple bamboo sculptures, Streeter’s kites are frankly nonassertive. They are only secondarily involved with formal considerations.

The art of kite-making traditionally receives great respect in the Orient, but has only recently begun to be appreciated in the West. Streeter’s kites are made of barely opaque rice paper

print December 1972

Furniture

The Castelli Furniture show could be thought of as something Dr. Szeemann might have squeezed into Documenta 5 or as an exhibition exhibition (as in exhibition baseball game, i.e., one that doesn’t count, which altogether seems an odd notion). However, while the disjunction offers two possibilities, the possibilities are not necessarily so restricted. Generally the “Furniture” show doesn’t look much different from other group shows except that we are told the work on exhibit is furniture. In several cases, it is necessary to inquire what kind of furniture is intended. Di Suvero’s twisted metal

print May 1972

Douglas Huebler

As I intend my work to say, this is the way I feel the world is—that it can be refreshed; that it is open to re-negotiation; that it can be original again—by releasing us from some of the models of reality that have been pressed upon us that may no longer be relevant.

—Douglas Huebler

HUEBLER’S EVOLUTION TO A COGENT and seminal position within the Conceptual art movement was made in large, sure steps that exactly paralleled reductivist developments during the ’60s. He was a painter until 1962 when he began pushing his geometrical paintings out from the wall into reliefs. These were followed by

April Kingsley