print March 1980

Theodora Skipitares

When Theodora Skipitares took The Mother and the Maid and The Venus Cafe to Amsterdam earlier this month, the audience loved Mother and hated The Venus Cafe. “I’m not sure why,” said Skipitares later, “but I think they expected more acting.” The audience mainly had theatre backgrounds, and seemed to accept certain conventions of the performance easily: the acid green wall of Venus, the props acting both as sets and costumes. Ingredients that an art crowd savor were taken for granted by an acting crowd. She thought perhaps that Mother was less autobiographical and that had something to do with

print January 1980

“Dance”: Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt

NO MATTER HOW THEY SUCCEED or fail in the particulars of their collaborative effort, Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt have created an emotionally eloquent event in Dance, performed in December at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, combining at a few moments in rare peaks of pure physical joy. That the dance goes with the music which goes with LeWitt’s film is arguable. You’d have to survey those who left throughout the performance for violent negative reactions. Those who stayed to give standing ovations would be harder pressed to denigrate the collaboration. Beyond choreography or scoring,

print May 1979

Neil Welliver

Since Neil Welliver holds a rather prominent position among landscape or realist painters today, it seems justified to point out a few reasons why someone may not like his work. Aside from the fact that it’s always pleasant to have a well-executed landscape around the house, what is it that attracts so many to his canvases?

Perhaps it’s the very things that I find disturbing in his imagery, his application and presentation. Basically the dislike comes down to an impatience with the paint-by-number approach of putting together an image from blobs of paint. Recognizing the historical precedents

print May 1979

Mel Kendrick

Seemingly uncomplicated, Mel Kendrick’s wire mesh and wood constructions are relatively uncluttered geometrical shapes. Each wall-mounted sculpture has a clear outline. The interest comes in when Kendrick folds the single piece of wire mesh, so that shadows and lines form on the wall behind the piece. With the addition of several wood or metal bars behind the mesh, space becomes three-dimensional. The added parts cause highlights and shadows that become more and more complex as you begin to distinguish ever subtler shapes of light and dark within each piece. Painted a bright blue overall, each

print April 1979

Cynthia Carlson

When paint gets so thick it becomes almost an object in itself the next logical step is to remove it from the confines of painting and let it become three-dimensional. Self-sustaining forms carefully scattered along painted walls comprise Cynthia Carlson’s latest show, a result of just such thinking. The squiggles and crosses and dots of paint that built up on her previous canvases have become detached, self-standing objects. They line up across the bottom of a wall in Willie’s Weep, pattern across an expanse of wall space in Ceremony, or cluster together in random arrangements.

The configurations

print April 1979

Donald Lipski

“Gathering Dust” consists of 2,000 small pieces of nervous energy, pinned to the wall and brightly lit. The nervous energy is contained in various common objects distorted and reworked by the hands of the artist in fits of ordinary nervous tension. At least that’s how Donald Lipski explains the origins of these items. For years, says Lipski, he’s been collecting these remnants of unconscious modeling and storing them in shoe boxes, keeping a record of what ordinarily would be thrown out with the trash. Almost everyone makes objects like these, in the same category as random doodles and scribbles

print April 1979

Meredith Monk

This performance revives a 1973 piece by Meredith Monk; little has been done to enhance the work since its initial conception. Given the amount of pioneering work that Monk has done since then the results were necessarily disappointing, for the richness of Quarry (her last performance at the B.A.M.) is sadly lacking in this piece. Education of the Girlchild focuses, as does Quarry, on events in the life of a single female child and her decisions and involvement in life-shattering events. The rich and cataclysmic occurrences in Quarry are presented on much simpler terms here, but the same vague

print April 1979

Suzan Pitt

“I want the audience to always know the illusions are being made by successive drawings through time—that I’m not trying to make an illusion they can ‘believe’ in,” says Suzan Pitt on the making of Asparagus. Animated film is not often reviewed in an art context, which is a shame; animation at its best is a highly personal and classical art encompassing all the elements of formal painting and sculpture with the extra added attraction of time thrown in. Pitt’s statement captures the essence of the art itself, its play with illusion and magic, creating things in the reality of real time, composed

print March 1979

Robert Mangold

In his new paintings Robert Mangold has altered the outside shape of the canvas as a whole, destroying the perfect rectangle in favor of a distorted perimeter. Each painting is composed of two canvases side by side, the line between them functioning as a formal drawn line. An “X” is penciled in from upper to lower boundaries, carefully off-center, just missing the central line at the crossing. These two ideas at once displace the recognizable shape of the canvases—Mangold plays with the ambiguity of his defined forms, purposely avoiding the expected division or shape. So far these are familiar

print March 1979

Frank Stella

Surprisingly or not, Frank Stella provided the most direct contrast to Minimal leanings. His new works are an overwhelming circus of materials. Never mind the meaning of his bizarre new direction, or the impulse behind the radical profusion of elements—Stella has left refinement so far behind as to render it forever dead. The new works cross almost every line there is, between painting and sculpture, assemblage and montage, hard-edge, color field and punk. Perhaps he just enjoys wreaking havoc with critical definitions.

Hints of his intentions have surfaced before. Works from 1976, featuring

print March 1979

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik’s newest videotape offers the possibility of a completely new trend in entertainment. Shown to a capacity crowd, the audience of devoted fans must have been prepared for anything the master had to offer, from the most outlandishly abstract patternings to full-blown conceptualizing. What they got was an amazingly enjoyable piece of work. Despite all its radical cutting and split-screen effects, They Can’t Lick Stamps in China was funny, enticing and provocative.

Paik used several theatrical premises to introduce themes and gimmicks. His collaborator (and art writer) Gregory Battcock

print March 1979

R.M. Fischer

There may be a reason why rational men parade around at parties with lampshades on their heads. If there is, R.M. Fischer is the one who knows the meaning behind this seemingly meaningless act. Fischer’s lamp objects have an eerie feeling of the same transformation reversed—lamps parading as people. Each one in his installation has a personality all its own; the pseudo-fantasy of L.A. Lamp, the demure prettiness of Dinner Lamp, the furtive hunch of Street Lamp.

But personality is only part of the problem Fischer confronts with his humanoid beacons. Served Up takes its title from a four-part

Deborah Perlberg