print September 1988

Peter Nadin

Over the last several years, Peter Nadin has gradually developed a large repertoire of diverse imagery and techniques. His new paintings pack all of it and then some into every canvas, including crude still-life drawings, simple houses, lollipop trees, a schematic self-portrait, a snapshot of a longtime friend, a drawing of a human skull, land- and skyscapes, hand-and footprints, and short poems. Loaded, chromatic brushstrokes and solid blocks of color punctuate this imagistic mélange. Each pictorial element stems from a specific technical procedure, first arrived at through trial and error.

print May 1988

Allan McCollum

Individual Works, 1988, Allan McCollum’s recent installation of rhetorical objects at John Weber Gallery (running concurrently with the artist’s exhibition of other works at Annina Nosei Gallery and Julian Pretto Gallery), consisted of more than 10,000 plaster/Hydrocal castings displayed on a broad, velvet-lined pedestal, like a gigantic banquet table, that spanned the length of the gallery. This large structure aggressively theatricalized its surroundings as would a quintessentially Minimalist sculpture à la Michael Fried, but the real drama here lay in the suspect individuality of the castings

print April 1988

Ken Lum

For at least the past six years Ken Lum has concerned himself with a meditation on closure. His installations have consistently featured arrangements of modular sofas that look for all the world like the work of a paranoid interior decorator who’s decided to “circle the wagons”—that is, the seating is arranged in a perfect square, permitting no point of access. More recently Lum has been making signs out of nonsense words (wordlike letter combinations that belong to no language). In these, the graphic stylization cries out for a response that the absent “text” frustrates.

With its brusque collision

print March 1988

John Baldessari

Over the last 15 years or so, John Baldessari’s contribution to the development of post-Modernism has become increasingly evident. That Baldessari considers his art making and his teaching to be a unified practice points up his modest pragmatism: art and ideas are to be used rather than fetishized. In a manner deceptively whimsical and open-ended, he has staked out the present modes of critical inquiry (photo deconstruction, investigation of mass media, appropriation, and allegory) with uncanny rigor.

Out of an early affinity to John Cage’s esthetic, Baldessari works from direct, literal perceptions

John Miller