print February 1987

“A Distanced View”

The fall season gave rise to a range of acts of retribution. The most coherent and illuminating of the many exhibitions that aimed at redressing errors supposedly perpetuated by the recent blitz of German and Italian neoExpressionist art was “A Distanced View,” organized by Lynn Gumpert. “The hype of German and Italian neoExpressionism,” writes Gumpert in her catalogue essay, “has obscured our awareness of the current state of affairs in the other European countries and of artists working outside the dominant modes of painting and sculpture.” For this reason Gumpert focused on art employing

print February 1987

Dan Graham

Dan Graham’s first New York show in many years seemed conceived as an ironic retrospective, one that evoked a strange familiarity in most viewers. Moving through it one encountered a project seen in this or that gallery, a model and documentary photographs for the glass pavilion reconstructed at Documenta in 1982, a videotape remembered from here or from there, and many texts and images published in the late ’60s in Arts magazine. As a whole, the exhibition encompassed models, wall works related to different video projects (Present Continuous Past(s), 1974, Public Space/Two Audiences, 1976),

print December 1986

Niele Toroni

In his first one-person show in New York in more than ten years, Niele Toroni followed the same format and mode of application that have characterized this France-based painter’s practice for two decades. In each of the show’s three works, near-identical marks of a paint-soaked brush were deposited on wall or canvas at regular intervals to comprise uniform configurations of rectilinear colored dots. The title of the show (which also describes Toroni’s method of production) summed up the effect achieved: Empreintes de pinceau no. 50 répétées à intervalles réguliers de 30 centimètres (Marks of a

print December 1986

“Cinemaobject”

Film is the 20th century’s capital art form, but it is also a medium whose narrative, structural, and semiological features have been broadly exploited by contemporary artists. Sharing with television and photography the cultural impact associated with techniques of mechanical reproduction, it has become both direct reference and underlying subtext in a wide range of the last decade’s artwork. Sponsored by the Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance and Film, and cu-rated by exhibiting artists Dennis Adams and Steve Derrickson, “Cinema-object” came billed as the first exhibition to

print November 1986

RITES OF EXCHANGE

LOUISE LAWLER MADE HER REPUTATION with her “Arrangements,” begun in 1981 and ongoing. The idea behind these photographs of artworks as exhibited in private, corporate, and museum collections is to examine the networks of meaning set up through their different contexts. In this manner, Lawler takes issue with a philosophy of representation that sees meaning as resident in an object, as “proper” to it and “in place.” Underlying the series is a semantic play in which the notion of the a-rangement or dis-position of objects calls attention to our faith in an ideal order in which form and meaning

print November 1986

“Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object”

Over the past few years artists and theorists alike have addressed our complex relationship with the commodity at this particular moment in late-capitalist society. At issue is less the allure of the commodity than its altered structure, and the social adjustments entailed by that structure. The global penetration of advertising, television, and the general telecommunications industry has displaced the object as a discrete and usable artifact, replacing it with systems of shimmering signs coded to manipulated effects that are far abstracted from substantial “objectives” What we consume is the

print October 1986

“Modern Objects: A New Dawn”

Rather than sublating the artwork within social and economic concerns, “Modern Objects” isolated esthetics pure and simple—design, that is, without the designs it has upon us. Organized by R. M. Fischer (who curated its 1983 predecessor), the show included works by eight artists, and three surfboards.

What is a “modern object”? For Jeffrey Deitch, author of the accompanying essay-cum-brochure, it is a nigh-religious icon, an emblem of the boundless optimism and unquenchable aspirations that characterized the Modern period’s ideology of progress. Only now, he suggests, in an age weakened by

print Summer 1986

On the Trail of Jean Le Gac: The Case of a Painter Who Never Paints

JEAN LE GAC'S “PAINTER” is a scheme, a stratagem, a device employed to develop a discourse on art. Less an identity than an image, he first appears, in 1971, as a Sunday painter, endlessly in search of his proper vocation—a dabbler in his métier. The hero of romantic stories, he climbs cliffs, rides horses, travels to distant lands, and engages in extreme exploits patterned on adventure tales from the ’30s. His demeanor too is formulaic, for he traffics in paint pots and berets and affects 19th-century dialects. Everything about this painter seems to issue from another century, including the

print September 1985

A REFLECTION ON POST-MODERNISM

IN 1968, LONDON’S INSTITUTE of Contemporary Art organized “Cybernetic Serendipity” an exhibition intended to indicate the effects of technology on Modern life. As its title suggests, this dizzying display of technology presented a paradisiacal vision of the capacity of the machine, and to this day it remains one of the central projections of a techno logical utopia based on the notion of modernization. Underlying it was the premise of “technoscience” as a prosthetic, or aid, to universal mastery; the cybernetic revolution appeared to accomplish man’s aim of material transformation, of shaping

print Summer 1985

Sarah Charlesworth

As opposed to Sarah Charlesworth’s earlier work, which explored the thematic terrain of passion and desire, her recent subject is what we loosely describe as “nature,” Lush green and black backgrounds support photographed images, all taken from geographic or travel-and-leisure magazines, of varied plant, animal, or ethnological scenes: an owl, snakes, or a Iamb crowned with flowers as if for some village festival are examples of Charlesworth’s purposefully reduced motifs. Coexisting with these are a Gauguinesque island woman, a seated Buddha sculpture, and other images that imply a kind of

print Summer 1985

“Disinformation: The Manufacture of Consent”

Surely it belongs within the experience of all viewers of art to be so moved by a lousy review as to rush out to see the show. An exhibition so bad, goes the logic, can hardly lack interest; one is moved to discern the prick, the prong that provokes such extremes of passion. So, after reading Michael Brenson’s words in The New York Times of March 22, 1985, I scurried over to see (I quote him) “the kind of exhibition that gives political art its bad name.” What I found in "Disinformation: The Manufacture of Consent: organized by Geno Rodriguez, director of the Alternative Museum, was something

print May 1985

Silvia Kolbowski

Silvia Kolbowski’s show seemed important for pushing the artist’s focus into a broader referential frame. All of her work deals with the construction of sexuality, and, in particular, with the imposition implicit in the feminine position; her rearrangements of photographic images generally drawn from mass media magazines treat the means employed, and masculine interests served, in the process of feminine subjection. This exhibition extended the reach of those themes into the spheres of business and fashion.

My comment requires a stipulation, for the show, composed of three different modes of

Kate Linker