print March 1990

David Diao

David Diao’s extended bout with abstraction constitutes one of the longer, stranger sagas in the annals of recent painting. In the 25 years since Diao arrived on the scene, his career has registered most of the decisive pressures that have shaped the medium in the crisis following American painting’s midcentury triumph. Diao followed an inaugural decade of reductive experiments that reflected the dominant Minimalist temper of the late ’60s with an extended hiatus. During this time he internalized all the proclamations that stated painting had run its historical course. Effectively sitting out

print January 1990

Ashley Bickerton

Laboring in Andy Warhol’s long shadow, Ashley Bickerton came of age in the early ’80s as part of a whole new wave of artists that made its own aggressive assault on the art market the focus of its artistic endeavor. Treating the art world as a structure that could be mastered and exploited, they “worked” its mechanisms, coaxing them to visibility at the level of content. Bickerton’s early wall pieces—fitted with handles for easy moving, covers for protection, jokes on the back to entertain the art handlers, documentation of the origin of the materials used and abused in their fabrication, and,

print January 1990

Kenneth Noland

If, at the beginning of the ’60s, Kenneth Noland seemed to be riding the crest of history, with Clement Greenberg celebrating the artist’s early efforts as the apotheosis of recent American painting, today his endeavor looks decidedly more parochial. Noland borrowed his stain technique from Helen Frankenthaler, but discarded her gestural calligraphy. As with Frankenthaler, Noland’s best paintings are animated by an unabashed estheticism. His early targets, with their simple concentric rings of paint stained directly into unprimed canvas, enabled color to breathe with a heretofore unprecedented

print December 1989

Michael Scott

Over the past near-century, abstraction has come to constitute a tradition, a virtual contemporary academy. The legacy of vanguard intention supplies a luster to the ongoing endeavor, but by and large, abstract painting proceeds quietly, shorn of its combative urgency. Though a new crop of painters is always coming up the ranks to mine this territory for its still appreciable riches, one of the surprise artistic twists of the ’80s has been the rise of a wave of painting that has roused abstraction from its respectable torpor, precisely by pressuring its status as a historical movement. Some

print November 1989

Jeff Wall

Mimicking the archaic mannerisms of traditional genre painting, Jeff Wall turns his camera on the nameless dispossessed. The large scale back-lit transparencies that result evade both the solipsistic dreariness that has come to characterize much recent “photography about photography,” and the formulaic drudgeries that frequently neutralize politically oriented efforts. If, as Wall remarked in a recent interview, he has managed to evade “the dream-world of art, to show something of the dirt and ugliness of the way we have to live,” he has done so less by documentary exposition than by a tautly

print October 1989

Philip Taaffe

Ever since Philip Taaffe dipped into the archives of modern painting in the early ’80s, the commentary around his work has been sharply divided. One camp imprecisely aligned his early abstractions with the then-current wave of appropriation art that included Sherrie Levine’s rectos of classic photographs and Mike Bidlo’s irreverent simulations of landmark modern paintings. Another faction glibly ignored the plain fact that, by any standard criteria, Taaffe’s paintings looked scandalously derivative, insisting that his references constituted little more than the usual nods to admired precursors

print Summer 1989

Annette Lemieux

Rallying cries that evoke simple, old-fashioned values are predictably seductive: inconveniently, however, expedient truths usually prove inadequate to real circumstances. Though Annette Lemieux’s romance with homegrown Americana has been hailed as a brave antidote to the claustrophobic ironies that inform much contemporary work, her misty-eyed appeals to such concepts as family, country, and self-reliance seem informed more by a home-as-fort-style nationalism than by a viable response to dehumanizing post-industrial social conditions. In Lemieux’s hands, Grandma’s musty steamer trunk proves a

print May 1989

Helen Frankenthaler

Although Helen Frankenthaler’s art-historical status is secure, it seems her fate always to be judged in the shadow of her Abstract Expressionist precursors. The designation “second generation” is for her as much a stigma as an acknowledgment. By temperament and sex as much as chronology, Frankenthaler was never a likely candidate for the full-blown deification inspired by the heroic postures of “first generation” artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Although she shares with her predecessors an allegiance to the primacy of process and gesture, the expressionist label fits her

print April 1989

WORDS AROUND WARHOL

GALLED BY ANDY WARHOL’S sycophantic courtship of the rich and powerful, Robert Hughes published a smug 1982 rebuke in the New York Review of Books that aimed to depose the “King of Pop” in the name of high culture and common sense. Disputing Warhol’s general cultural relevance, and particularly the credentials bestowed upon him by left sympathizers, Hughes’ article gave voice to a welter of widely held parochialisms and exerted a substantial measure of undeserved influence. At the same time, precisely because his intent was defamatory, Hughes cut through the pieties that frequently occlude more

print March 1989

Alan Uglow

Alan Uglow can claim neither the sanction of history, long accorded like-minded peers such as Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, nor a direct line on the zeitgeist that empowers the ’80s-style abstract simulations of Peter Halley or Sherrie Levine. Yet unencumbered by the embalmed readings that inevitably attach themselves to the star-status signature, his paintings make a refreshingly convincing case for the palpable if rarefied pleasures of his particular brand of formal painting.

On his announcements for this exhibition Uglow chose to reproduce 66/68, 1968–88, a painting consisting of a white

print February 1989

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Conditioned by the lapidary mandates of Pop art and Minimalism, American audiences may be slow to adjust entrenched and chauvinistic canons to accommodate the multivalent art of Michelangelo Pistoletto. Anticipating this reluctance, Germano Celant argues in his catalogue essay accompanying this 25-year retrospective that it is precisely Pistoletto’s stylistic “equivocation” that lends his vision its characteristic breadth.

Anxious to rescue the artist’s early achievement from Pop art’s shadow, Celant suggestively contrasts Pistoletto’s “mirror paintings” from 1962 with Andy Warhol’s soup cans

print January 1989

Mike And Doug Starn

Mike and Doug Starn subject photographic prints to all manner of process-oriented violation, and, in so doing, turn the potentially multiple image into a unique object. Instead of granting photography a conditional, ontological specificity as a direct transcription of reality, the Starns foreground the medium’s constituent material qualities, reminding us that the photograph is not a transparent window on the world. In support of this primary conceit, they mobilize an array of formal devices. Their work at the Stux Gallery showed ample wizardry. A fractured image entitled Plant #1, 1988, is

Jack Bankowsky