print May 1974

Gary Kuehn

Gary Kuehn’s show was a ten-year retrospective; he’s had perhaps less than his fair share of attention so the opportunity to readily obtain some kind of an overview of his career was timely and welcome. Over the last decade Kuehn has developed consistently toward a reliance on the modified readymade. He’s tended to use things like cardboard boxes—covered with tar that will soften and melt in the sun—in order to depict and exploit physical force within terms that reduce the evocation of gesture attendant on such a depiction. Kuehn’s progress has inclined toward elimination of the personally

print May 1974

Brice Marden, David Novros and Kes Zapkus

Brice Marden’s recent drawings are delicate, brilliant, and central to one of the most pressing problems with which serious painting is currently concerned: the problem of working with a pictorial space that doesn’t deny its function as a subdivision of real space. Marden uses drawing (line) exclusively as a subdivider of the rectangle that continually refers to the dimensions and proportions of the original format. Line, in these drawings of Marden’s, is the means for an intuitive procedure that amounts to a constant revision of the pictorial space. Linear accumulation transforms the space,

print May 1974

Ed Moses

Ed Moses is now painting diagonal stripes on laminated tissue paper in a way that equates the surface—pigment and rhoplex—with its support; the paper is about as thick as the painted skin it bears. Fragility, one of the most immediately apparent properties of such a work as Coyote, 1973–74, is as much a physical condition of the piece as it’s a feature attributed to it by color or line.

The physical fragility of these works seems important because of, not despite, their involvement with the terminology of ’60s modernism. Specifically, they refer to Morris Louis and to the recent work of Frank

print May 1974

Giulio Paolini

Giulio Paolini’s work is of various kinds: literalist drawings with the middles torn out and other permutations of the same idea; a drawing made of graph paper with a hand holding a pen superimposed on it and made out of the same kind of paper; a self-portrait the title of which named objects—a bust of Heraclitus among them—the painting was said to contain but didn’t. The common theme can only be Paolini, whose privileged subjectivity seems meant to unite the disparate elements of physical perception and associated meaning he presents. The most elaborate work in the show confirms this. It consists

print May 1974

Roberta Allen and Roman Opalka

Roberta Allen showed work of two sorts. Strips of canvas arranged on rollers, in groups, partially rolled and partially unrolled and labeled according to the length exposed. And groups of vertical lines on gridded paper—one line to a square—labeled as arrows without heads denoted as pointing up in some pictures and down in others. The theme of partial concealment also enters into some of these drawings. Allen is impressive because of the variety she gets out of this simple idea, and this variety—the large number of different kinds of work she’s able to make with it—indicates the depth of its

print April 1974

Cecile Abish, James Reineking, and Stuart Shedletsky

Painting, photography, and sculpture seem—at the moment—to be mutually informative in a special way, Painting and sculpture continue to be immersed in that concern with material documentation stimulating of the most advanced work in these disciplines for the past decade. Such concerns address themselves to a spatial and temporal distortion that is physically engendered, rather than being a function of a conceptually abstract presentation of structure. Photography is, after all, a feature of industrialism that has altered the ordinary associations of “documentation” itself, in its provision of

print April 1974

Judy Rifka, Gerald Horn and Joshua Neustein

Judy Rifka’s paintings dominated the show. I’ve left her work until last because it has some—vague but insistent—affinities with that of Gerald Horn and Joshua Neustein, to whom I shall come in a moment. Rifka’s work is done on cardboard, which provides a soft, brown field for an image made out of one or two colors.

This image is the result of a procedure that begins as a way of getting from one mark to another, across the surface of the piece, and ends with the creation of a kind of envelope made out of layers of paint. In the work illustrated here, the black shape, which was initiated by tiny

print April 1974

Duane Hansen

An example of such a contrast is readily at hand, if one compares Pearlstein’s Two Female Models with Drawing Table with an example from Duane Hansen’s recent show, Derelict Woman, 1973–74. Both works—to refer to Tillim once more—seem equally necrophilic and prophylactic. A picture, larger than human scale, made out of oil paint and canvas, and showing two figures and some of the apparatus of traditional art; painted with a fairly small brush and presenting an illusion of depth essentially through a Renaissance technology. A sculpture, exactly the same size as its subject, colored and dressed,

print April 1974

Philip Pearlstein

Philip Pearlstein continues to paint large life paintings—and, now, some landscapes too—that rely on cropping, a shallow space, and the precedence of drawing over color. Reflected light intrudes only as a last resort, to make possible a complicated transition that’s got to take place in a restricted space. In—for example—Two Female Models with Drawing Table, 1973, color plays an important role only twice. In the seated figure, reflected light is used to bracket the transition from the side of her torso that’s cast into shadow by her right arm to the visible part of her left calf, which is close

print April 1974

Richard McDermott Miller

Which isn’t the case with Richard McDermott Miller, around whose work there hangs on air of nostalgia for, mostly, the representational heroicism that lost its nerve quite early on in the development of the modern bourgeois state. His larger pieces suffer, I think, from a kind of chunkiness that suggests discomfort—on his part—with the larger than life scale. The smaller pieces—which abandon nostalgia for the heroic and substitute for it a view of classicism that comes from a later stage in the 19th century, and which is more modest and naturalistic in its emphasis—seem to me not to have this

print April 1974

Barry Flanagan

Barry Flanagan—like Shedletsky—tends to use dates for titles. And, also like Shedletsky and others, his interest nowadays seems to be in a comparably autobiographical—in his case via the exploitation of the iconographic—use of material signification. Most of the work in his show at the Modern was hung on the wall, different shapes—mostly made of canvas of various kinds—that overlap one another and are fastened at the top to a common pole. Sometimes the pieces of canvas are painted, and sometimes they’re not. The worst piece of work in the show consists of a cage with bits of canvas trapped

print April 1974

Terry Fugate-Wilcox

Terry Fugate-Wilcox makes sculpture that consists of packaging scientific—chiefly mineralogical—fact. His show was in three parts: works changed by the environment—by temperature, humidity, etc.; works in which diffusion is taking place, as in the sculpture made out of strips of aluminum and carbon bolted together, where the proximity of the two metals assures that electron migration between them is taking place—with consequences that will be clearly apparent to the naked eye in about 3,000 years; and works which are being eaten away by the atmosphere, which are referred to as “burning” pieces.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe