print February 1978

Lauren Rothstein, Tom Holste, and Gloria Kisch

Nontraditional materials and unorthodox uses of materials have characterized much recent California art. This involvement with substances and processes, both natural and synthetic, has resulted in a tremendously wide formal range of artwork. All this “materialist abstraction” does exhibit at least one consistent characteristic: it invariably obscures the established distinction between painting and sculpture more completely than does painted sculpture or shaped canvases. Three Southern California artists, all of whom are in their 30s, have rendered the traditional dichotomy moot. Lauren Rothstein,

print September 1977

Richard Foreman’s “Book of Levers”

RICHARD FOREMAN’S LATEST PRODUCTION, Book of Splendors (II) Book of Levers: Action at a Distance is inarguably a theatrical production. Foreman labels his Ontological-Hysteric activities “theater.” Why, then, has he produced them mainly in the socioeconomic context of visual art, to the point of staging a miscellaneous piece at the Whitney Museum, reading at the Franklin Furnace Archive of Artists’ Books, and getting reviewed in art magazines? Foreman’s support, like that of many other avant-garde dramatists, musicians, dancers, writers, filmmakers and photographers, has come mostly from the

print September 1977

Patrick Ireland

Patrick Ireland’s drawings result from a coordination of distinct (but not disparate) impulses. The systematic, even systemic, ordering of elements is a prominent factor in his art, but not as prominent as in that of his American contemporaries—“preconceptualists” such as Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, and Dorothea Rockburne, the thrust of whose work has been the explication of information as image. These artists’ recent tendency to stress the magic aspect of their art (paradoxically but deliberately enhancing the impact of the information) has long been a characteristic of Ireland’s work.

The drawings

print Summer 1977

Stuart Sherman

Stuart Sherman’s “Spectacles” exemplify a kind of performance art whose roots are not only in visual art and traditional theater, but also in music, popular entertainment, and games both of skill and of make-believe. This genre depends heavily on the performer’s almost continuous use of various readymade and unelaborate, but provocative, props. They are usually manipulated by a single performer. The artistic sources for this “device theater” include the highly structured and introspective drama of Richard Foreman, the formalized “structurist” theater related to Foreman which Michael Kirby has

print Summer 1977

Michael Goldberg

Michael Goldberg’s long career has been marked by several changes in format and style. During the ’50s (when he was one of the leading lights of the Abstract-Expressionist “second generation”) his style vacillated between the expansive, theatrical, emphatically painterly drips and slashes of action painting and the evidences, tenuous or overt, of figuration. In the 1960s Goldberg modified his abstract vocabulary into graceful, erratic, still grandly scaled networks of lines and forms rendered against delicately hued fields.

By the first years of this decade Goldberg had subsumed formal detail

Peter Frank