print November 1988

Vernon Fisher

Parallel Lines, Vernon Fisher’s site-specific installation on the second and third levels of the Hirshhorn Museum, comprised eight 12-by-13-foot, latex-and-oilstick wall drawings. Unlike many installations which would be more accurately termed in situ than site-specific, Fisher’s installation was carefully linked to its site. The Hirshhorn is a disc-shaped structure supported on four large piers; its only windows line circular hallway galleries that face an inner court. The drawings’ location in these narrow circular spaces exploited the museum’s shape, forcing the viewer to see them both

print October 1988

Steve Poleskie

Steve Poleskie is an aerial performer who uses a Pitts Special aerobatics biplane to draw in smoke. He creates large three-dimensional forms, several thousand feet in each direction. Poleskie is fond of quoting from Italian aviator Fedele Azari‘s 1919 manifesto calling for a “futurist aerial theatre.” Azari believed the artistic form created through flight was infinitely superior to dance because of its “grandiose background, its super dynamism,” and because it was free and available to a large number of spectators. However, Azari was writing during the heady days of early Modernism, an age in

print September 1988

Harris Rubin

Unlike his earlier work, Harris Rubin’s new welded steel sculptures feature representational elements and imply narrative structure. They symbolize a world dangerously out of control, gripped by conflicting ideologies and militarism. End of the Line, 1987, has an armature similar to that of a classroom globe (perhaps a plea to learn from history?) which supports a gas-powered kitchen stove and a locomotive. The locomotive, pulling a nuclear cooling tower on a flat-bed car into the stove’s oven, alludes to past and future horrors: the ovens of Nazi Germany and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

print April 1988

“Transcendence: Washington, D.C.”

The Washington Color School was formulated by Clement Greenberg around the work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Furthermore, because many of his ideas about “post painterly abstraction” were also articulated through their work, most of the critical dialogue about the school became focused on post-Cubist space, color staining, and formalist structure. As a consequence, work by other Washington abstractionists like Leon Berkowitz, Howard Mehring, and Thomas Downing was similarly characterized, often overlooking other salient features of their art.

Though small (only 10 works, from 1960 to ’87),

Howard Risatti