print January 1976

Problems from Early Kupka

And only a cowardly consciousness and meager creative powers in an artist are deceived by this fraud and base their art on the forms of nature, afraid of losing the foundation on which the savage and the academy have based their art.
—Malevich

That he has broken an object or placed a red or yellow square in the center of his canvas will not make his work new; what will make his work new is his grasp of the creative spirit infusing this outward appearance.
—Léger

The artist should now know what, and why, things happen in his pictures.
—Malevich

FRANTISEK KUPKA HAS ALWAYS seemed a minor figure in

print November 1973

Claude Yvel and Henri Cadiou

The Museum of Modern Art’s modest exhibition “Collage and the Photo Image” seems to have been mounted as a pleasant way to pass the summer, but it forms a surprisingly effective confutation of a dead serious, reactively polemical exhibition at the New York Cultural Center, “Reality and Trompe-L’oeil,” “by French New Real Painters.” The French New Real Painters are but four in number, and of the four Claude Yvel gets the most space and makes the catalogue statement. Those paintings in the show that are not a direct ripoff of Harnett, Peto, and 19th-century American trompe-l’oeil painting in

print November 1973

“Collage and the Photo Image”

“Collage and the Photo Image” is a classic (meaning typical) Museum of Modern Art small survey show from its own collections. Most of the work in it is already familiar, and could have been predicted to be in a MOMA show with such a title. Thus it is no surprise that a show of this kind includes works by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Heartfield, Moholy-Nagy, and Christo, etc. George Grosz’s The Engineer Heartfield was a surprise only because I had never noticed its collage elements, which is to confess never having paid much attention to it. Interesting for me in this show was the category

print November 1973

Richard Francisco

Richard Francisco’s work, like that of Don Johnson to some extent, indirectly plugs into the traditions of Joseph Cornell, Lucas Samaras, and H.C. Westermann, and more directly into the work of William Wiley, which by now seems almost to mean the San Francisco tradition. This doesn’t say much about Francisco’s work except to roughly describe the sort of work he does. The primary difference between Francisco’s works and the works of those artists mentioned, with the exception of Cornell, is in its subtlety and delicacy. Francisco’s works are physically delicate, minute, and lightweight. There is

books October 1973

On Quality in Art

Jacob Rosenberg, On Quality in Art (Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1967).

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The problem is that I am, in a sense, speaking to Jacob Rosenberg, but if he is speaking to me, he doesn’t know it, or he didn’t know it until now. And of course there is a certain unfairness to this sort of dialogue, all of it in my favor; for in a sense, I choose what he says, though my choice of what I may have him say is restricted to the 232 pages of his text (plus his introduction).

1. “Artistic value” or “quality” in a work of art

print September 1973

Robert Ryman

Probably more than any other paintings, including Ad Reinhardt’s, Robert Ryman’s fulfill Reinhardt’s claim of what paintings should be by saying what they shouldn’t be. In one sense, it is easy to approach Ryman’s paintings in terms of what they are not, because so much that is conventionally present in paintings is absent from his. Perhaps this absence of many conventional elements gives a clue as to why painters, generally speaking, tend to disregard Ryman’s work, and artists who otherwise have no use for painting make his paintings an exception. In the usual sense, there is not much in a

print September 1973

Robert Whitman

Art and technology seems to have had its day. Much activity called “Experiments in Art and Technology” has produced little that could be followed up. But when experiments are really experiments, eventual practical applications (“practical” is used rather oddly here in referring to art or art-making) are not the point, but are only happy side effects. In this sense, an experiment that yields nothing useful is necessarily neither a failure nor a waste of time; at a minimum, the knowledge is gained that such experiment yields nothing useful or interesting. Nevertheless, there was a certain amount

print September 1973

Miriam Shapiro

Miriam Shapiro has, except for a few lingering traces, abandoned the illusionist, hard-edge paintings of a few years ago. Her new paintings are motley collages of snips of fabric and acrylic. Schapiro’s political activities are fairly well known so there is a temptation to read some sort of feminist connotation into her choice of materials, but whatever interpretation this choice doesn’t seem a matter of great consequence. Most of the paintings are complicated with a ground of a simple configuration covered by many quiltlike bits of fabric, whose placement seems not so much random as arbitrary.

print Summer 1973

Hans Haacke’s Gallery Visitors' Profile

Hans Haacke

DURING AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS by Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, Nancy Holt, Laurie James, Brenda Miller, and Mary Obering, October 7–24, 1972, the visitors of the John Weber Gallery were requested by me to complete a questionnaire with 20 questions. Ten of these questions inquired about their demographic background and ten questions related to the visitors’ opinions on sociopolitical issues. They were either multiple choice questions or had to be answered by writing in a figure or a word. The questionnaires were provided, with pencils, in two file trays on either end of a long table in the

print Summer 1973

Barry Le Va

Barry Le Va’s work 12 to 3: Ends Touch-ends Cut (Zig-zag end over end), seems an interesting case of chaos and coherence, as if a metaphor for putting a construct on the world. The work is materially uncountable inch/half-inch sections cut from a 1 1/4” wooden dowel, all over the rough uneven floor of the new Bykert downtown gallery. It looks like a late ’60s scatter piece. However, the work is obviously the product of a system, and the fact of a system can be inferred from the work. But, grasping what system is determining the placement of dowel sections on the floor is extremely difficult.

print Summer 1973

Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti’s show at Weber consisted of 42 sets of 120 stamped and canceled envelopes, mounted and framed under glass, and filling the large front room of the gallery. Within a 43rd frame, by the elevator doors, the same size as the other 42, was the announcement:

Untitled—Victoria Boogie-Woogie 1972 5040 Envelopes 35280 Stamps All permutations of seven Italian stamps The letters were mailed by the artist from different cities to himself in Turin

What interests me in Boetti’s work is not so much that it represents “all permutations” of the relative positions of seven stamps in a horizontal

print Summer 1973

John Salt

Looking at John Salt’s paintings at O.K. Harris feels a bit like being a character in Godard’s Weekend. The symptom of feeling like a character in a movie is particularly appropriate to Weekend since the characters in that movie also feel like characters in a movie. The common denominator in the two cases is the presence of persistent automobile wreckage. Probably connotations of the degenerate built-in obsolescence of the capitalist system are the meaning metaphors implicit in Salt as well as in Godard. The case was so overstated in Weekend that however nightmarish the endless flow of wreckage,

Bruce Boice