print March 1971

Edward Dugmore

Edward Dugmore has been painting in what is recognizably an Abstract Expressionist mode for about fifteen years. His current show is distinguished by highly personal draftsmanship that carries his work beyond nostalgia. Dugmore’s line is scratchy, drippy and sure. With brush or crayon, he limns in rounded, crotchy female forms. Buttocks, breasts and hips butt against each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The drawing is vigorous. Sometimes aloft, sometimes sagging, it gives the gross forms a feeling of inflated weightlessness. When line dominates, as in two or three larger can-vases of 1970 that

print March 1971

Nancy Graves

It becomes clear from Nancy Graves’ current show at Reese Palley that the camels were a way-station for her. They enabled the artist to move away from the art going on around her and into unique visual territory where she can now work with tremendous facility, control of materials and imagination to create art of extreme originality. So it’s good to see the camels go, bones and all. They were too close to the meticulous model-making of the Museum of Natural History to declare themselves apart from that craft—even though in declaring them her art took courage and strength of conviction.

In her

print March 1971

Keith Hollingworth

Keith Hollingworth’s sculpture at Paula Cooper is more circumscribed in this respect than Graves’ is. It depends more on the power of a specific image than on the open-ended evocation of Graves’ work. It counts on incongruity for its impact: the unexpected introduction of real objects from nature (pine cones, feathers) set in cleanly constructed wooden boxes and frames. His pieces seem to exist in the imagination, much as Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel did, rather than in three-dimensional space. The artist emphasizes this quality of immateriality by painting his wood and metal frames white or some

print March 1971

G. E. Moore

G. E. Moore has a lot of ideas, but hasn’t had the opportunity to work enough of them through in physical actuality to get a sure grip on his materials. There are sensations he would like his sculpture to convey: of force so precariously’ balanced that a palpable feeling of physical threat or potential danger is created. But he has been stymied by difficulties in the execution of his proposed pieces in a real space, and these problems interfere with the impact of his work.

Walking into the first room at O.K. Harris, the viewer is confronted by a long strip of black rubber stretching from ceiling

print March 1971

Ken Price

Ken Price’s humor gets its ceramic mileage from a perverse play on precious bric-a-brac collected by maiden aunts everywhere. His current show at the David Whitney Gallery is of small objects that look like Tiffany-colored turds. They are small piles of clay set on grandiose, impeccably crafted wooden bases that could be Formica but aren’t. Their color, as delicate as a butterfly’s wing, is most reminiscent of the sheen on putrescent flesh. They are in exquisite bad taste.

—Kasha Linville

print February 1971

Resurrection

The current show of black artists’ work at the Studio Museum in Harlem is so diverse that it is impossible to discuss in terms of visual cohesion. The show, which fills both galleries in the Museum, includes every kind of imagery—works patterned on African themes and techniques, familiar experiments in various styles of 20th-century American and European art and explicit propaganda. Few works stand alone as products of strongly developed artistic sensibilities.

What the exhibition does reveal are some of the many ways black artists are struggling to define their identities both as artists and as

print February 1971

Lee Lozano

A group of eleven paintings by Lee Lozano in the small, main-floor gallery of the Whitney Museum is disturbing. Called “wave series paintings,” they emit a feeling of compulsive, systematic control, short-circuited somehow so the resulting works are curiously idiosyncratic. All but the last four paintings in the group appear as meticulously brushed curves painted in murky oils. The complex mind-dance about electromagnetic wave theory that accompanies them via a group of explanatory drawings does not mitigate their oppressive decorativeness, nor does the amount of physical ordeal involved in

print February 1971

Mell Daniel

Mell Daniel’s small drawings in watercolor, grease crayon and inks are the work of an older artist whose first period of intense artistic activity occurred during the second and third decades of the century. His first one-man show of drawings was sponsored by the Arensbergs and held in De Zayas’ gallery in New York City. Although the recent drawings have a certain somber attractiveness, their interest is primarily historical. This is an artist whose vision developed when American artists were making their first experiments in abstraction. These drawings are still firmly grounded in an older way

print February 1971

John Altoon

Pen, ink and airbrush drawings from the “Cowboys and Indians” series by the late John Altoon, an artist with a considerable underground reputation as a draftsman among artists on the West Coast, are epic, erotic fantasies about Indians, cowboys and colonial ladies whose wit and beautiful calligraphy make them exceptionally entertaining. The imagery swings from inventive whimsy to violence—all paradoxically dried out by his fast-moving pen. There’s no violence in the sex, only in the surrounding events. Gentle, bizarre pleasures take place amidst murder and destruction. In a few drawings, the

print January 1971

Mary Heilmann and Joan Snyder

A handsome new space called the Paley and Lowe Gallery has opened downtown on Wooster Street. Its owners plan to sponsor group shows in the gallery space and give access to the artists’ work in their studios as well. The premise—that group shows can induce enough interest in individual artists to encourage further investigation of their works in their studios—is a questionable one, Its fault lies in the selective process involved in group shows, where work is chosen that will look “nice” in the gallery, instead of for its toughness or representativeness. Unfortunately, it’s impossible not to

print January 1971

Sharon Brandt

Sharon Brandt’s canvases at O.K. Harris are demanding and complex works as well. For Brandt, in contrast to Joan Synder, less is more.These are sparse paintings in terms These are sparse paintings in terms terms of impact, because their surface has been mobilized so effectively with minimal means. The artist works with the premise of an exquisite, almost colorless texture created by using a polyester resin to stain the canvas. She then strives to toughen the atmospheric image by the incorporation of a few lines, placed as compositional organizers on or under the translucent resin.

Line and surface

print January 1971

Gary Hudson

For Gary Hudson, more is not more but visual obfuscation. There is so much going on in his canvases, it ’s hard to see what is really happening. The major visual problem in these paintings is the relationship , or lack of it, between large floating rectangular shapes and the heavily textured areas that surround them. The discontinuity between texture and forms is exacerbated rather than alleviated by sprayed halos around the forms that disengage them even further from their surroundings, allowing them to float freely out in front of the canvas surface.

These are truly schizophrenic paintings.