print Summer 1968

Greg Card and Mary Corse

THE RECENT PAINTINGS OF Greg Card are so slight in appearance, a bare transparency of tone, that one could hardly imagine a more simply poetic yet drastically reduced set of conditions. This slightness, the apparent lack of concern with viewer involvement, is of course entirely deceptive for he is dealing with sensation close to a low threshold of stimulation. The paintings are columns of clear cylindrical acrylic plastic capped at the top and bottom, coated with even sprayed layers of transparent lacquer. They are suspended a foot away from the wall by a length of invisible nylon thread, and

print March 1968

Some New Los Angeles Artists

JAMES DE FRANCE

JAMES DE FRANCE HAS CONSISTENTLY directed himself to the projection and suppression of tangible and illusory energies. It is in the balancing of these forces that his paintings attain their merit; they assert objectness (or at least a relief-like quality) while maintaining a purely painterly quality. The recent works have seemed unusually bleak and repetitious; greyish or whitish square panels or canvases with a uniform series of regular openings cut into them, the state of the surface appearing to have been finally arrived at after much struggle even if the composition was arrived

print January 1968

West Coast Grotesque: Stephan Von Huene

AMIDST LAST APRIL’S OPENING NIGHT festivities of the Los Angeles County Museum’s “American Sculpture of the Sixties,” the one work that met with spontaneous applause and general enthusiasm was Stephan Von Huene’s Kaleidophonic Dog. Engagingly delightful it seemed: a music box of toots and gongs cycled to perform at regular intervals. The small sculptural animal atop it, on his back, gleefully (or hysterically) kicked his legs in the air, and opened and closed his clacking denture-filled jaws. A nearby entry, fully as large though silent, formally as involved, was generally overlooked or poorly

print December 1967

The Art of Bruce Nauman

A FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE work of Bruce Nauman is extremely disconcerting. Very little prepares one for the realm of remarkable concepts and surprising forms with which this young sculptor deals. Each work, like the tip of an iceberg, is the barely exposed result of a complicated and fully developed line of interpolation and interpretation. Nauman is working in an extreme corner of the area of bare visibility, for the forms are of unusual proportions, homely materials and, whether titled or not, would appear at first exposure to be a vaguely repulsive caprice.

The response to a Nauman may vary

print November 1967

Robert Hudson: Space and Comouflage

THE ARTISTIC SITUATION IN San Francisco has been described so often as cloistered, inbred, and idiosyncratic that the contributions of individuals have the tendency to be overlooked. One such case is that of Robert Hudson. While many of the prevailing cross-currents of influences, attitudes, and tastes are clearly prevalent in his sculpture, within this framework of time and place, a closer examination would reveal a vital worker with a set of conditions suggesting an important approach toward an optical sculpture.

Hudson began his career as a painter at the San Francisco Art Institute, attracted

print October 1966

Two Showings of Younger Los Angeles Artists

TWO LOS ANGELES GALLERIES, the David Stuart and the Dwan, chose the summer months to present exhibitions of younger artists whose work is but very little known even locally. At the Dwan Gallery, in a series of line drawings, John Caruthers explores various geometrical possibilities of evenly spaced torsions and tensions. Basically flat or illogically overlapped situations, they take their cue from Stella in that a bar possesses the ambiguous possibilities of being a boundary division and/or an enclosing or subdividing line. The overall shape is square and the consistent attempt is to disrupt

print Summer 1967

Larry Bell

MOST YOUNGER WEST COAST ARTISTS began their careers in the late fifties under the influence of one or another of the prevailing New York School styles. Larry Bell describes his student work as inspired by Pollock, but through much reworking the charged gesture and atomized field were finally fused with a geometric approach. In the first stage, never exhibited illusionistic renderings of cubes are found to be linked inseparably to the isometric projections he favored in the early sixties and remain at the core of his present concerns. A move of prime import caused the actual pictorial format to

print May 1967

Billy Al Bengston’s “Dentos”

BILLY AL BENGSTON’S RECENT WORK introduces three fresh conditions which alter almost completely the familiar view. These modifications are the physical manipulation of the support, the brittle aluminum surface and new color, and the tilting of the painted configurations.

An unmounted series of paintings dating from 1965 first introduce a unique variation of the surface. The grounds are a variety of veneers and synthetic board he calls “woodies.” The rippling grain pattern holds as a unified field or background, and the painted portions, whether solid or spray blended, suggest a decal applied to

print April 1967

“New York Group”

In an uneven group sampling Los Angeles viewers have their first opportunity to judge some of Dwan Gallery’s New York contingent. Richard Baringer’s contribution is a curved Stella-derived optical panel of painted aluminum. A dazzling pair of repeated stripes, red and chartreuse green, zig-zag toward a compressed center point. The vertically dividing open slot between the two arcs and the yellow ochre flat areas used to fill out the rectangular format are unfortunate if necessary compromises.

The Arakawa lithographs of room plan blueprints are typically minor homages to the Duchamp method and

print April 1967

Robert Graham

Robert Graham’s sculptures at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery are strange and individual works of Surreal fantasy. Now explicitly erotic, the tiny figures, six to eight inches high, modeled from pigmented beeswax, take part in curiously rare and memorable tableaux. Their most remarkable quality is their minuteness and the intense and demanding concentration directed to their realistic recreation. As examples, one nude is complete in detail to hair and eyelashes, and another sunbather sips a summer drink fitted out with a citrus slice and a straw. Impressive also is the wide range of materials used

print April 1967

James Jarvaise

In his new Leaf Series of painted reliefs at the Felix Landau Gallery, executed during the last three years, James Jarvaise follows through in a direction begun in his Hudson River series of oils. The show points out also how unnecessary was his departure to Spanish (Bay Area?) figures in 1963. Recovering lost ground, Matisse reappears as an influential factor, but now crowded out by a host of other masters; Arp, Calder, Gorky, and Marca-Relli.

The reliefs are sawed and epoxied plates of shaped aluminum staggered in and out of a four-inch deep space and coated with a base of white enamel. There

print April 1967

Alex Katz

Alex Katz, at the David Stuart Gallery, is a summary surface painter and easily contented. Entirely derived, he evidently owes his reputation to his talents as an “in”-group portraitist. The flat tone modeling, along with his photographic inspiration he owes to a tradition as old as Manet, and the enlarging of the heads more specifically to Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. The emphasis is on large plain areas of skin tone, briefly modeled around eyes and mouth, under the nose and chin. The handling varies from drawn fill-in to an abruptly planar construction. His merits are his ability to oppose

Fidel A. Danieli