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 March 1974

“Public Dialogue with Joseph Beuys”

Joseph Beuys’ “Public Dialogue,” at the New School on January 11th, was much more interesting for what it revealed about the New York art community than it was as an event that shed light on the work and epistemological limits of Beuys’ career and persona. In this respect, it must be counted as a great success, for Beuys’ achievement is predicated on forcing an act of didactic reflexiveness to occur.

The evening promised to be exhilarating from the start. On arrival at the New School, one found that many more people had turned up than the auditorium could possibly accommodate. Since the event

print March 1974

Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis’ work interests me more and more. An article that will compare her Knots—especially the metallic-looking ones that were recently exhibited in Houston—with her work in video certainly should be forthcoming. Such a comparison could, I think, locate Benglis’ concern with narrative, and come to grips with the nature of her concern with narrative as a concept that’s vitally altered by mediation—representation—of any specific sort.

Benglis has told me that she has always thought of herself as an artist concerned with pictorial issues, rather than a sculptor. Her present show confirms

print March 1974

David Rabinowitch

David Rabinowitch’s sculpture is primarily of interest for the way in which it concentrates attention within the work while seeming to be related to a sculptural enterprise that seeks to do the opposite. Rabinowitch is a Canadian, and developed his attitude to sculpture in a milieu as responsive to English art as to American. Perhaps because of this, perhaps for some other reason, his ambition is of a sort that’s opposed to the kind of literal reassertion of the ground plane that occurs in the work of Carl Andre, with whose sculpture his seems at first—to an eye that’s been educated by recent

print March 1974

Anne Truitt

Anne Truitt’s show confirms one thing—if none other—about her work: she’s consistent. In fact, in ten years her sculpture seems to have changed virtually not at all. A Washington artist, born in Baltimore in 1921, Truitt depends on color in a way that links her with Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. In connection with this, Roberta Smith reminded me that Clement Greenberg called Truitt the first Minimalist. That, given her dependence on color as a property which qualifies and reduces the material emphasis of her work, doesn’t seem to me a useful way of characterizing what she does. Except for

print March 1974

Andrew Tavarelli

Andrew Tavarelli’s paintings get better, I find, the more one looks at them. They are helped in this by being a bit rough in execution, which reduces their tendency to be seductive, as so much painting that relies on ’60s chromaticism is. Like the sculpture of Anne Truitt, some of Tavarelli’s paintings appear to have something to do with the Constructivism-qualified-by-Matisse esthetic of Ellsworth Kelly. Also with the idiosyncratic use of the stretcher’s edge developed in the mid-’60s work of Jo Baer. But I am most interested in an aspect of Tavarelli’s work that doesn’t refer to either of

print March 1974

Art & Language

The Art & Language show centers around a “message” which ends: “. . . we have replaced Angst with the grammar of going-on (concatenation).” This is a revealing sentence, I think, which needn’t be taken literally—whether or not that’s the intention behind it. Rather, it can be read as an assertion which encapsulates an ambition. It serves to demonstrate the Art & Language group’s general tendency to identify itself, by assertion, with what is true of advanced thought in general—that the nominal subject of existentialist speculation, the (psycho-historical) dilemma of the individual, has been

print March 1974

Elias Friedensohn

Elias Friedensohn’s oil paintings connect with the work of others who seem—to me—to be involved with the “innocent modernism” of Puvis de Chavannes. In particular, they remind me of the work of Bruno Civitico, whose paintings are also technically adept, historically evocative, and philosophically—esthetically—marginal.

Friedensohn’s color and composition, besides bringing to mind Puvis’ last gasp of Mediterranean classicism in the industrial age, also appear to be about the kind of deep space that occurs in the paintings of Tiepolo. In nearly all of Friedensohn’s pictures figures float in the

print February 1974

Howard Buchwald

Howard Buchwald is also concerned with painting as a thing in the world, as, in his own words, an object to be looked at. His new paintings—all made very recently—are small in contrast to the piece he exhibited in the Whitney Annual a couple of years ago, but are similarly involved with an achieved equilibrium between “opticality” and objectness. I find the new paintings much more successful than the larger, earlier work, which involved a large orange field surrounded by squares of varying size. My take on that was that not enough seemed to happen in the middle of the painting that could respond

print February 1974

Frank Stella

Frank Stella continues to make paintings that involve a literal equivalent for modernism’s shallow pictorial space. As with his other work of the last couple of years, the new paintings employ a variety of materials, in particular masonite, cardboard, felt, and wood.

To begin with the support, I find it intriguing that during the period in which he’s been making his work in this way, Stella has consistently inserted three layers of corrugated cardboard between the stretcher bars and the surface. The sort of alternation between hard and soft that occurs across the front of these pieces is built

print February 1974

Ad Dekkers

Ad Dekkers’ work—in common with Buchwald’s and Stella’s—sets out to make pictorial space literal. And that’s as far as any similarity between his work and that of the other two goes. Dekkers is Dutch, and, according to the catalogue of his show, has from the first (1960) endeavored to literalize the space of painting as that is represented—exclusively—by the work of Mondrian. Furthermore, Dekkers is interested in Mondrian sans Mondrian’s color.

The catalogue relates Dekkers’ work—which is either white or, in the case of the drawings, translucent—to a painting Mondrian made in 1918, Losangique

print February 1974

Robert Moskoswitz

This continuum is an underlying premise in Robert Moskoswitz’ work as it is in Dekkers’, although in a different way. Moskowitz begins his paintings by drawing a perspectival space that’s then either (1) rendered vague by the use of close-valued, atmospheric color, the whole space of the painting then being reactivated by little dabs of thick paint that sit on the surface, or (2) is virtually obliterated by—predominantly—black paint, on top of which he then paints a small image. An example of the latter type is White Hat, 1973. These paintings seem to be about flatness as a property that can

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe