Robert Pincus-Wittent

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  print January 1970

  Ken Showell

  In 1963, a loose alignment of very young painters—at once as interdependent as they were at odds with one another—coalesced in, of all places, the Kansas City Art Institute. Andrew Morgan, the director, had invited Ronnie Landfield there and then Michael Steiner, both of whom had been comrades at the High School of Art and Design (the old “Industrial Art”) here in New York. Dan Christensen was a Senior at Kansas at the time and they gravitated to the old hand. Peter Young and then Ken Showell joined the group. But the Kansas City amalgamation was short-lived and its members split, some for a

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  print January 1970

  Steven Urry

  Biomorphism and automatism were conventions developed during the sway of Surrealism. Insofar as the vacuum elicited by the demise of Pop art appears to have been filled by multi-media events and similar Surrealizing derivatives, one can see that Steven Urry is using these conventions to advantage. Certainly, biomorphism and automatism appear at this moment to be enjoying a refreshed prestige—almost as if it had entered a third phase of Pop art (if one considered Rauschenberg and Johns as the parental unit and Warhol, Lichtenstein, Segal and Rosenquist as the second generation).

  Still, it seems

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  print January 1970

  Gary Kuehn

  This segue is invidious; but insofar as both Urry and Gary Kuehn are sculptors committed to examining the contrast between hard and soft with the same piece, the lead-in is apposite. Kuehn, punching thirty but hardly unknown, is associated with the- Rutgers group from which Keith Sonnier and Robert Morris have emerged. Attracted by the problem of soft-to-hard in sculpture over several years, the earlier work indicated that Kuehn had been trapped by certain a priori conclusions. This scale of malleability had been undermined by the application of a literary idea from the outside. But, even if

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  print January 1970

  Frank Lincoln Viner, Craig Kauffman, DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Bruce Beasley, Robert Bassler, The Gianakos brothers and Eva Hesse

  Maxims: It is not what you do but how you do it. It is not what you do it with but what you do with it. Armed with these, I expected little from A Plastic Presence, an overview of the uses of plastic as a contemporary medium. The pretentious name of the exhibition did not help, nor did the sponsorship from private industry (although the Philip Morris Company has saved up indulgences with its support of the fine broad international exhibition “When Attitude Becomes Form”). My trepidations were perhaps unfounded. Tracy Atkinson, Director of the Milwaukee Art Center, made a judicious and in places