print April 1978

Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is a retrospective that never calls itself one. It brings together works from 1962 to 1978 in an installation which, as good silent partner, doesn’t detract from the art on view.

It makes clear, for example, the absence of a linear development in LeWitt’s work at least after 1965, which I find refreshing. Ideas were picked up, dropped, works made, destroyed, made again at a later date; it is impossible to draw the deterministic line, to say it all went like this.

We’re faced with ideas for art and the forms they were given, in some cases, 13

print April 1978

Kate Millett

Kate Millett’s “The Trial of Sylvia Likens” wasn’t the kind of exhibition you expect to see in Soho, Noho, P.S. 1 or in any other New York art context. You didn’t just slip into it. It was clear, inelegant and meaty, and conveyed heavy personal feelings. It twisted your head around, and that appealed to me. Of course, for anyone used to confrontations with Minimal art it would be easy to hate the show for the way it played to the many, for the footprints on the floor telling you where to go, the taped narration, the scrawl on the walls, even the coverage in the Voice. Art, thank god, has gotten

print April 1978

Gerhard Richter

I’ve never believed, as Gerhard Richter once claimed, that pictures can be made according to recipes, without personal involvement, that the making of pictures isn’t an artistic act. I’ve never thought this mission impossible ever had anything to do with how or why Richter paints. The remark is 13 years old, but it’s been quoted again on an information sheet for his recent exhibition. It comes from a “textcollage” Richter made with Sigmar Polke, another artist, in 1965 (it was later exhibited in Hannover), when they were both students at the art academy in Düsseldorf. Their ’60s tabula rasa was

print April 1978

Heidi Glück

Writing this review has been a wrestling match with works I felt at first gave me too little to go on. Heidi Glück’s paintings looked too skeletal, the signposts too scant: there were lines, geometric forms, empty blocks of space between forms—the forms your eyes sketched into the empty spaces. You read from left to right, covered ground or kept time with your eyes which were held in, and sent back and forth, by the clearly marked edges of the canvas.

Some of the longer paintings on canvas look like the last possible paintings one could make short of working directly on the wall, as if they have

print October 1976

A Conspiracy of Bachelors

HARALD SZEEMANN, THE FORMER DIRECTOR of the Kunsthalle in Bern and head of the last Documenta, has organized an exhibition called “The Bachelors’ Machines,” which is presently on tour in Europe. The title is taken from Duchamp’s designation for the bottom half of his Large Glass, in which nine cylindrical, machinelike “bachelors” work with other forms to build a closed system for the production, conveyance, and release of sexual energy (sperm) into the top part of the work, the “bride’s domain.”

Bachelors’ machines are statements on the relationship between the sexes and on the male’s aspiration

Barbara Flynn