Support/Surface Years
Just as Johannes Itten’s influential Bauhaus courses were once described as an “expressionist jam,” the work of the French artists affiliated with the ’70s support/surface movement could be called “conceptual jam.” This bizarre hodgepodge—part formalist reflection, part Maoist discourse—covers a wide aesthetic spectrum in the work of such affiliates as Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, and Claude Viallat. It’s an irony of art history that, with this show of sixty-four works curated by Daniel Abadie, director of the Jeu de Paume, the support/surface sloganeering can even play into the hands of cultural