print February 2020

Mel Bochner

Many of the paintings in this exhibition were emblazoned with phrases that Mel Bochner calls “exasperations” (which was also the title of the show): Among these were LOOK WHO’S TALKING and I’VE HAD IT UP TO HERE, along with the familiar Bochnerian BLAH BLAH BLAH. In the press release, Bochner invoked the “politics of language.” His chosen expressions are meant to reflect, alternately, the rage and the disingenuousness of public speech in these dire times. The artist has a gift for identifying platitudes or expostulations that, in being isolated, become transformed—ambiguous or strange. For

passages February 2019

ROBERT MORRIS

ROBERT MORRIS has said that his work is a form of “investigation.” During the 1960s and ’70s, the period of Minimal, post-Minimal, and Conceptual art, he devoted attention to processes of mind and body—to making, perceiving, and knowing. He sometimes turned to models from science and technology, although he explained that his efforts were born of a desire to disprove rather than prove: to push systems in ways that exposed their lies. In his critical writing, he examined new developments in sculpture with clinical precision. Later, drawing from his early work even as he appeared to reject it,

print December 2016

Jeffrey Weiss

THERE ARE WORKS OF ART, though rare, that stop us cold. Bruce Nauman’s installation Contrapposto Studies, i through vii, 2015–16, is one of them. On view at Sperone Westwater gallery this past fall, it was displayed in three rooms on the first and third floors. (A second version, Contrapposto Studies, I through VII, ran concurrently and remains on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, through January 8, 2017.)The work, a sequence of seven HD-video projections, is an adaptation of Walk with Contrapposto, a one-hour video Nauman made in 1968. In the early video, the artist, hands clasped behind

print March 2016

“Revisions—Zen for Film”

DEMATERIALIZATION. In an important text of 1968, Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler chose that word to describe the presumed disappearance of the aesthetic object in the context of Conceptual art. Dematerialization proved to be a useful myth: useful in that the term was convenient shorthand for the decline of the conventional art object (a painting or sculpture handmade by the artist-author); a myth in that so much advanced work of the period yielded a decidedly material proliferation of paperwork—handwritten or typed texts, contracts of ownership and certificates of authenticity, photographic

print November 2015

DUE PROCESS: RICHARD SERRA’S EARLY SPLASH/CAST WORKS

SPEAKING OF HIS EARLY PRACTICE, Richard Serra makes a succinct claim: “This is this. This is not that.”¹ His works from the mid to late 1960s were intended to express the actions of “process.” In so doing, they demonstrate the deployment of basic procedures that activate the primary qualities of media derived from construction and industrial fabrication, such as fiberglass and vulcanized rubber. Produced from molten lead, the works known as “splashings” or “castings” (or sometimes both) are chief examples of this category of work. Indeed, in their case, the role of process is deepened by the

print Summer 2015

LIGHT REPAIRS: A ROUNDTABLE ON THE RESTORATION OF MARK ROTHKO’S HARVARD MURALS

WHEN IS A PAINTING not a painting anymore?

In 1962, Mark Rothko created the Harvard Murals, a set of six monumental paintings, five of which were displayed in the penthouse dining room of the university’s Holyoke Center, a windowed perch with stunning views. Deeply and delicately hued expanses, the canvases ranged in color from searing orange-red to light pink to dark purple. But in the decade that followed, continual exposure to daylight drastically changed the works, fading them so that some areas lightened to near white while others turned a dull black. Languishing in storage for many years, the works were thought to be beyond repair. But recently, a team of conservators and scientists made a new and unprecedented attempt to restore the pictures—not with pigment or chemicals but with light: For each canvas, they devised a highly complex colored-light projection that, when shone on the work, returns it to its original coloration. What we see is what was meant to be seen, ostensibly. But what are the risks of such an approach? Does the use of light open the door to virtual reality, to smoke and mirrors, turning the paintings into something else altogether? Or does it constitute a brilliant way of making the paintings viewable again, without so much as touching a thread of canvas?

Conservator CAROL MANCUSI-UNGARO, who worked on the project; curators HARRY COOPER and JEFFREY WEISS; art historian YVE-ALAIN BOIS; Artforum editor MICHELLE KUO; and artists LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON, DAVID REED, KEN OKIISHI, and R. H. QUAYTMAN peer into the void.

CAROL MANCUSI-UNGARO: Rothko’s Harvard Murals were installed in 1964, but after suffering differential damage, they were put in storage in 1979. They were included in a few exhibitions, two at Harvard and one traveling exhibition, but basically they hadn’t been seen or studied for decades.

The murals are one of only three commissions that Rothko made. Scholars studied the Seagram paintings, and they studied the Rothko Chapel, but they largely skipped the Harvard Murals because hardly anyone had seen them. Most only knew the story about their fading and being removed from view. The works

passages September 03, 2014

On Kawara (1933–2014)

TO SPEAK OF THE WORK OF On Kawara is, in certain respects, to speak of the life—and now, of the death. The artist’s passing deepens an absence that some might say was already there, for he spent the last half century strategically avoiding the public eye. The nature of his art is fairly well known, although it is generally seen in small, refined doses, and its visibility comes and goes: But for an ongoing installation of paintings at Dia:Beacon, the work is shown sporadically in galleries and museums and otherwise can be hard to find.

Kawara was a young star of the postwar Tokyo avant-garde, but

previews May 2014

“Mel Bochner: Strong Language”

A good deal of attention has been paid in the past decade to the work of Mel Bochner, with exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and London’s Whitechapel Gallery, among other venues. Yet in New York, Bochner’s home for close to fifty years, the artist has, bizarrely, never received a museum survey. This welcome exhibition, though not the full-scale retrospective Bochner so richly deserves, will include more than seventy works—paintings, drawings, and prints from 1966 to the present—in which Bochner

print February 2014

ETERNAL RETURN: ROBERT MORRIS’S RECENT WORK

FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, Robert Morris has been producing new work that is, in unexpected ways, explicitly derived from old work. So far, the new objects are fifteen in number. They have been produced by a craftsman, Josh Finn, from a variety of hardwoods: walnut, maple, oak, cherry, mahogany, ash, alder, birch, poplar, and European beech. The techniques of fabrication are often those of cabinetry. Each work was made to stand alone, but Morris thinks of the entire group as a “family” of related objects. Four of them are variants—almost exact replicas—of works in plywood or fir previously

passages November 2013

Walter De Maria

MYTHS THRIVE on an absence of information. It would be unfair to say that Walter De Maria was given to self-mythologizing, but he was an elusive, at times even evasive, figure. He has certainly been the least visible public personality among his contemporaries. Does this partly account for the peculiar fact that,despite its obvious significance—and its inclusion in such landmark exhibitions as “Primary Structures” at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1966 and “When Attitudes Become Form” at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969—his art can almost be described as obscure? Given that certain works by De

print October 2013

CLOSE UP: THE ABSENT OBJECT

IN “WHY SCULPTURE IS BORING” (1846), Charles Baudelaire seeks to diagnose the modern condition of the sculptural object. His chief claim, however, concerns the elementary nature of the object across historical time. In contrast to painting, Baudelaire writes, sculpture in the round is plagued by certain crucial “disadvantages.” A painting is “despotic”: In its flat frontality, it demands to be seen from one position alone. Conversely, a work of sculpture, which we are apt to view from many perspectives, cannot control the way in which it is beheld. Despite its identity as an autonomous object

print March 2013

THINGS NOT NECESSARILY MEANT TO BE VIEWED AS ART

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to speak of the “status of the object” in art? The phrase has generally been deployed in discussions around the unfixed material identity of the aesthetic object in the postmodern era. When used this way, it is meant to signal, among other things, the end of medium specificity, which has given way in artistic practice to a mobile, variable, or indeterminate relation between the terms of a work and its material means. At stake is the work’s very constitution: It is no longer understood necessarily to take only one form—indeed, it may not require concrete form of any kind.