print September 1988

SIGNS OF THE CROSS

The scriptures can be understood as narratives about created objects that enable the major created object, namely God, to describe the interior structure of all making. . . .
—Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

IN 1984, AT THE CLOISTERS, New York, the young artist Christian Eckart came across a catalogue on the Santa Croce Crucifix, a late-13th-century cross, attributed to Cimabue, which had been damaged in the Arno floods of 1966. After about of restoration, the cross had toured the world, inviting reverence at the various stations on its road, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eckart

print Summer 1988

Rodney Graham

From the early ’80s to this show of his latest works, Rodney Graham, an artist from Vancouver, Canada, has developed within Ian Wilson’s genre of “nonvisual abstraction.” In 1984, Wilson, an early member of Art & Language, described Conceptual art as an extension of poetry, literature, and philosophy: one that “takes the principles of visual abstraction, founded in the visual arts, and applies them to language.” Wilson places linguistic Conceptual art in a hierarchy above other so-called physically bounded art forms: “True conceptual art moves beyond visual and physical execution of ideas no

print May 1988

John Hilliard

John Hilliard’s images are evocative, sometimes enigmatic, and frequently suggestive, in the sense of the gamut of meanings that may be culled from their sexual root, ranging from the sensual and erotic to the overtly sexist. During the ’70s, the subject of his investigations was the structural analysis of photography by means of images, a project he shared with many others. In his work, Hilliard exploits the language of photography, self-consciously manipulating and distending its technical and structural characteristics to extend and complicate the metaphoric narratives that he relates.

Hilliard’s

print April 1988

VANISHING ACT: PHILIPPE THOMAS

IN A STORY BY Jorge Luis Borges, a man dreams a son. He invents the soma and persona of a son, and then, in his dreams, releases his progeny to lead the semblance of an autonomous existence. Soon, however, he perceives a flaw in the veneer of his almost perfect simulacrum—he realizes that the son will soon discover the ephemerality of his own status. The man decides to inform the boy of this tenuousness himself, but in the process, as in the turning of a wheel, he discovers that he too is the creature of circumstances like the son’s—that he too is a figment of somebody else’s imagination.¹ Such

print April 1988

On Kaware

This show featured five works from On Kawara’s “Today” series: JULY 16, 1969, JULY 20, 1969, JULY 21, 1969, FEB. 27, 1987, and MAY 1, 1987. Each work in the series consists of the month, day, and year of a single date, and was made entirely on the date depicted. Letters and numbers are in white acrylic on black acrylic grounds, and are painted with the deadpan impassivity of a sign painter. Although done by hand, it is as if they were manufactured mechanically, made by following the directions in an instruction manual. For example, according to the press release: “Each painting takes eight to

print March 1988

Markus Raetz

With a few bits of twig and some slightly bent sheets of zinc, Markus Raetz constructs an art pared down to a skeletal structure, a structure that is a metaphor for the poetic structure of art. His work is about art yet is neither proselytizing nor didactic, never falling into the reductive analysis of the type of deconstructive art currently in vogue. Raetz reflects the workings of art by presenting metaphoric equivalences that are layered and complex in meaning.

Raetz’s metaphors are not literary but visual and perceptual. He rejects the linear, rational, instructive pleasures of the text for

Claudia Hart