print September 1988

Steve DiBenedetto

The Op image’s greatest potential conquest of the mind is its ability to induce a headache. The essential banality of pure optical patterning prefigured its short life within high art and relegated it primarily to psychedelic paraphernalia, such as black-light posters. Maturing generations of American youth who invested in these icons of adolescent decadence tended to lose interest in them when their black lights burned out. But Steve DiBenedetto is still a fan.

DiBenedetto works with this degraded form of imagery, creating hallucinogenic paintings out of vibrating stripes and swirling moiré

print September 1988

Aimee Rankin

In 1942, one could view Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery by turning a wheel and looking through a peephole. That same year, Duchamp rendered this “pervert’s-eye-view” by collaging a circular detail of a Paul Delvaux painting into an exhibition catalogue; the detail features a woman’s breasts reflected in a mirror. By the time he revealed his Etant Donnés, the peep show piece par excellence, Duchamp had committed yet another artistic atrocity: the privatization of visual experience in a public space. The viewer’s unshared peep into one of Aimee

print Summer 1988

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Since 1956, the West German team of Bernd and Hilla Becher has been photo documenting the edifices of the Industrial Revolution: a cement plant in Neumarkt, Bavaria; a steel plant in Steubenville, Ohio; and other regional attractions not on the typical tourist's route. Although the Becher do not transform the sites that they visit, their work, like that of their Conceptualist contemporaries Daniel Buren and Christo, is produced under strict narrative and esthetic constraints, in their case yielding a photographic language so consistent that their work to date can be read as a carefully articulated

print May 1988

Richard Wentworth

André Breton’s Surrealist “object lessons” did not go unlearned. The British sculptor Richard Wentworth, like certain other contemporary sculptors (such as Edward Allington, Antony Gormley, Eric Bainbridge, Jennifer Bolande, and Saint Clair Cemin), has learned them well. Working with found objects, altered objects, antiquated objects, or forms that look too much like familiar objects to be truly nonobjective, these sculptors create a simultaneity of appearance-linked familiarity and abstract estrangement.

The found and fabricated objects that Wentworth uses to compose his sculptures are reminiscent

Matthew A. Weinstein