print April 1973

Jan Dibbets: The Photograph and the Photographed

JAN DIBBETS, until 1967, was a painter of essentially Minimalist serial paintings concerned with the illusion of perspective as it operates on simple geometric shapes, and he sees his subsequent work in terms of a progression from these early paintings. Clearly there is a connection between these paintings and the “Perspective Corrections” that followed, but reference to his later work as stemming from his having been a painter seems a retrospective view shaped, perhaps in part, by an orneriness and a desire to separate himself from a Conceptual label. In 1967, Dibbets began transferring what

print April 1973

Dorothea Rockburne

Dorothea Rockburne’s new work really is new work. Her work over the last year has undergone such a consistent and complete change that the only continuity maintained with earlier work is the continued use of paper as a physical material forming the work rather than simply receiving the forms of the work. The most significant difference in her new work Drawing Which Makes Itself at Bykert is the replacement of set theory as a structuring principle imposed on the work from without with a logic which structures the work entirely from within it, and as such, the structure of the work and the work

print April 1973

Larry Bell

Larry Bell showed two works at Pace similar to those shown last year in which his now characteristic vacuum-plated glass panes stand vertically at right angles on the floor. As has often been described, Bell’s vacuum-plating process results in a pane of glass which is transparent on the left side, for example, and is a mirror on the right side; between those two extremes is a confusing middle ground in which the transparent almost imperceptibly becomes mirror so that the center portion of the glass is both at once. To move from the mirrored portion of the glass, in which one sees a bright clear

print April 1973

Robert Mangold

Since the mid-’60s, Robert Mangold’s art has been unusually consistent, without the degree of repetition that so much consistency generally implies. Like his paintings, each shift in his progress has been subtle and complex. The early sprayed Masonite panels of the “Area” paintings can be thought of as examples of hard Minimalist facts in which lines were the consequent of the physical limits of surfaces. Or, they can be thought of as logical sets in which the whole for each painting was given and known even when only a fragment of the whole was actually present as the work: Given the existence

print April 1973

Robert Zakanych

Robert Zakanych’s paintings at Cunningham Ward are about normal size in current terms, meaning large but not that large, and they look something like unfinished wallpaper. The canvases are divided into large regular grids which don’t fit the paintings evenly but are, in a sense, cropped, and within or overlaid on the grids are regularly repeated patterns such as cloverleafs, circles, and uniform stacked wavy bands. In all four of the paintings the center portions are finished, at least comparatively, in that the patterns have been completely filled in, covering the white canvas; the areas moving

print April 1973

William Scott

It is difficult to look at William Scott’s large show of paintings at Martha Jackson and not think at all of Robert Motherwell, which seems to mean, if only implicitly, thinking of Matisse and Miró as well. There is no problem distinguishing Scott’s paintings from theirs, but the particular way representational shapes and still-life situations are reduced to simple abstract forms, and in many paintings, the way the paint is handled, the kind of line and brushwork around a line is so close to those painters that comparison and the sense of a certain degree of derivation seems to me unavoidable.

print April 1973

Laurace James

Laurace James continues to work with wood, ropes, pulleys, rocks, and in her show at A.I.R., bricks as well. In a sense, two of the three works in her show are one work by being isolated sections of a “separated diptych.” Both of the works of the diptych are essentially the same: One brick and a bundle of three bricks are suspended at the opposite ends of a rope which is itself suspended by a hinged set of vertical planks against the wall and a complex of pulleys. The bricks attain a suspended balance in just about any position but the most extreme ones, in which case the bundle of three bricks

print March 1973

Joseph Kosuth: 2 Shows

JOSEPH KOSUTH SHOWED EARLY works from 1965–67 at Castelli downtown and his recent Ninth Investigation-Proposition 1 at the uptown Castelli gallery late last year. The early work under the general title Protoinvestigations all deals with language, but could be broken down into work dealing explicitly with the relation of language to the physical world, and work dealing primarily with language and only by extension with the physical world. This latter group of works had the form of the well-known white on black photographic blow-ups of dictionary definitions, in this case of the words “red,”

books March 1973

Art & Language

Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell, Joseph Kosuth, Art & Language (Cologne, Germany: Du Mont, 1972).

Quadruplicity drinks procrastination.

—Bertrand Russell

Despite the rather thrasonical aspects of the “air-conditioning” situation, it might be said to siphon off as a protasis for an inverted Eurekaism.

—Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin

It is appropriate that to speak of Art & Language is to immediately get entangled in a word confusion: Art & Language is the name of a group of artists whose main activity is the publication of a journal titled Art-Language; the

print March 1973

Eva Hesse

Once in the grip of the story of Eva Hesse, and just about everyone who knows her name knows her story, it is difficult to separate her art from her life story, and even more so by the evidence for their inseparability presented in the diaries she left and in Robert Pincus-Witten’s writings which make convincing use of the diaries. The point is not that it is necessary to separate Hesse’s art from her biography nor to argue against the case which has been made for inseparability, but rather that the interest I find in her art is in the art and not from the perspective of her biography. Eva

print March 1973

Fred Sandback

In his show at Weber, Fred Sandback continues to mark off corners of the gallery’s rooms by spanning them with elastic cord or by spanning them with hypothetical planes defined by elastic cords. Sandback has six pieces in this show, three of which amount to pairs of horizontal, parallel, colored elastic cords attached at each end to adjacent walls of a corner, and in two cases, the cords are parallel horizontally. The third case is a bit more interesting as the two cords are parallel diagonally. That is, the light blue cord about three feet closer to the corner intersection is also a few inches

print March 1973

Natalie Bieser

Natalie Bieser’s work consists of tiny beads strung in clusters on threads which are suspended between two slight wooden strips fixed to the wall. In some of the works, the wooden strips are positioned vertically and parallel so that the two or three strands of thread simply hang loosely between them with the major clusters of beads gathering at the lowest point on the curve of the thread. In other works, the wooden strips are at right angles or crossed or simply in different positions forming different configurations and sometimes causing a gentle twist in the sequence of the strands of thread.

Bruce Boice