Kate Linker

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  print Summer 1984

  John Feker

  Most messages hit us in the time of the street, the compact, instantaneous, assaultive visual moment offered by car travel or the pedestrian’s rapid scan. To this is opposed the time of the book, or of the artwork as conventionally phrased, each of which presumes a distended, contemplative circuit, capacious in its trajectory. Television and video occupy the former zone; despite their interior locale they have an immediacy, a narrow “frequency” of message alien to the protracted wavelength of the latter. Over the last few years John Fekner’s work has occupied this temporal range, as he has

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  print Summer 1984

  Margia Kramer

  Margia Kramer also traffics in well-trodden terrain, but the strength of presentation, or the information compiled, lends moving power to her work. Progress (Memory) is a three-monitor video installation dealing with the distribution and control of information through advanced technology. Each monitor occupies a separate space, or sphere of activity, determined by the parameters of an oblong hooked rug. One screen is “driven” by an individual peddling a stationary bicycle; a second, featuring computerized music, is activated by a viewer seated on a piano bench; in the third space—a somewhat

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  print May 1984

  Raymond Hood

  For decades the skyscraper has been a keystone in architectural practice, at once defining the scope of its ambition and determining the urban skyline. Architects have measured their aspirations against the yardstick of its forms, finding in them an image of contemporary city life. Among these individuals Raymond M. Hood occupies a central position, for it was Hood who, in 1922, won the competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower, rising from obscurity to the position of the ’20s’ most celebrated skyscraper designer. Over the next decade he was to introduce four buildings that altered mid-Manhattan’s

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  print May 1984

  Terry Fox

  This recent exhibition by Europe-based performance and sound artist Terry Fox consisted of two parts, a suite of 21 drawings/constructions and an installation. Both seemed concerned with the issue of language, as if exploring its trajectory through social, political, and artistic spheres, and tracing the transmutations thereby incurred. The former works, entitled “Catch Phrases,” are mixed media objects in each of which three layers of phrases are superposed. The first layer, penciled over a 3-by-5-foot paper sheet, transcribes the emanations of newspapers and radio broadcasts; faint checkerboard

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  print May 1984

  “Design Since 1945”

  The pivotal year in the development of contemporary design is 1945. The beginning of the postwar period, it also marks the broad-scale confrontation by designers with the question of mass production. In its wake we’ve witnessed a steady, if variegated, flow of consumer objects, altered by different developments in technology, in life-style, and in human engineering. “Design Since 1945” is the first comprehensive American survey of this field; organized by Kathryn Hiesinger and installed by George Nelson, it encompasses some 425 objects by 280 designers in a chronicle of lighting, furniture,

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  print April 1984

  FROM IMITATION, TO THE COPY, TO JUST EFFECT: ON READING JEAN BAUDRILARD

  THE 20TH CENTURY HAS OBSERVED a striking reduction in the notion of the imagination. What was once the shaping power of thought, the purveyor of meaning, has become a kind of cybernetic machine, its overloaded circuits programmed to spew out scintillating visual forms. “Sheer” images, “pure” surfaces emanate from the image mechanism, only to slither in the glamor of the void that constitutes consumer society, their external enchantments compensating for the loss of substantive matter. These seductive, inherently spectacular forms are not, as before, glosses of meaning; they do not hint at inner

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  print April 1984

  Alex Katz

  To one who’s never been a fan of Alex Katz’s work, this survey of some sixty small paintings, spanning thirty years, came as the proverbial pleasure, hinting at unexpected delights and at an unknown talent for the moving nuance. These oil sketches—mainly small preparatory studies for finished paintings—indicate the “private” side under Katz’s noted “public” image; they have an intimacy, an immediacy, and indeed a variety lacking in his large-scale billboard-style works.

  This documentation of the personal aspect of Katz’s endeavor began with work from the early ’50s and continued through the

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  print April 1984

  Charles Clough

  Increasingly, the use of hybrid media by contemporary artists must be read as a critical gesture, implying comment on the epistemological limitations or inadequacies of specific means to our time. This appears to be the case in Charles Clough’s works, which are mediumistic mongrels, amalgams of photographs and paint. Each of his recent small images consists of an art reproduction or photograph that has been swathed with brilliant strokes of swirled and scumbled paint. The colors and textures of enamel play contrapuntally with the underlying images so as to shift or mimic the focus in a harmonic

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  print March 1984

  “Post-Graffiti”

  A seductive neologism, this show’s title soon palled, deluding the viewer. Whatever it might have meant of a rupture in stance or sensibility was negated, for “Post-Graffiti,” to judge from the catalogue blurb, denoted a simple shift from subway to canvas, from impermanence to permanence, from the milieu of the street to that of the museum or gallery. It signaled, then, a change in material ground, serving to legally and artistically legitimize what was once “outsider” art. Not that the emergence of graffiti in this spatial and cultural situation is unprecedented, as Keith Haring’s and Jean-Michel

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  print March 1984

  Keith Haring

  Strangely, the “old masters” in “Post-Graffiti” presented mostly tepid work, as if desiring more focused spotlights, unmindful of that great group show that is the subway. Downtown, Keith Haring one-upped current fashion by staging a two-gallery, two-level show, his computer-age circuits overflowing ground floor and basement, their digital jag moving from this gallery to the space behind the former Blimpie’s up the street. Haring’s familiar gang—the radiant children and angels, the lunatic TV-lookers and extraterrestrial forms—were in full force. In the Houston Street environment they populated

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  print February 1984

  “Still Life: Hollywood Photographs”

  The lures of Hollywood movies, with their amalgam of stars, events, and luxuriant details, were seemingly insufficient to insure audience appeal. With the aim of cementing seduction, Hollywood studios in the postwar years churned out an endless stream of promotional stills, employing publicity departments and independent agencies to disseminate the images at large. These stills were used for posters, newspaper clips, and magazine reproduction; they displayed professional as well as supposedly intimate moments. Some show rehearsed and overheightened moments taken from feature films, while others

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  print February 1984

  Richard Serra

  On the occasion of the Richard Serra retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, the Ministry of Culture installed a large Serra sculpture in the Jardin des Tuileries. Originally intended for the museum’s Forum, this vast double-arced work is 120 feet long by 12 feet high; in its current, temporary location it conforms to the category of sculpture that Robert Irwin has described as “site-adjusted” rather than “site-specific.” Clara-Clara, 1982–83, is placed at the Place de la Concorde entrance to the site so as to repeat and articulate the axial coordinates of its confines. Positioned between two