print May 2003

“Matthew Barney: The CREMASTER Cycle”

Other ambitious young artists might have been content to go to the studio, tack up a poster of Harry Houdini, a postcard of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and the famous image of Richard Serra flinging molten lead like Vulcan in his forge, and sublimate. But not Matthew Barney. For better and worse, Barney had to make a multimedia spectacle of himself, his youthful ambitions, infatuations, and oedipal urges, with various heroes, past and present, in attendance.

As is well known by now, Barney had to write and direct the five increasingly long, complex, and hermetic films of the CREMASTER cycle,

print April 1985

ENDLESS MEANING AT THE HIRSHHORN

THE HIRSHHORN MUSEUM’S EXHIBITION “Content: A Contemporary Focus, 1974–1984" was perhaps America’s most ambitious entry into the big international-survey sweepstakes which has raged for the past five years. This Washington, D.C. exhibition also turned out to be one that continually expanded and contracted in my head, with every plus met by an equal minus. Sometimes it has seemed daring and innovative, at other times confused, familiar, and just plain mousy—not to be taken too seriously; at still other times it has also seemed dangerously stupid and regressive. Basically it failed, falling

print May 1976

Stephen Rosenthal

The occasion of respected dealers showing work derived from that of their better artists takes one’s breath away. Recently, at Castelli, Alan Charlton’s gray panels linked Robert Morris and Ellsworth Kelly. Now, at the John Weber Gallery, Stephen Rosenthal seems to take Robert Ryman’s dead-pan use of materials to its most absurd and obvious extreme. (Rosenthal and Ryman were featured on the same page of the first issue of Newsletter of the John Weber Gallery, a recent gallery publication, the equivalent of about a dozen press releases, written in the benignly self-satisfied tone of a nonprofit

print May 1976

Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner seems to be trying to prolong his status as precocious young master and to advance rapidly to the position of an old established one at the same time; his recent show took the form of a mini-retrospective, but nonetheless left one, once more, in a state of anticipation. The exhibition consisted of a large selection of previously unshown drawings from the last three years; they ranged from small fast sketches to finished works and, in total, retraced Bochner’s development since 1973. Over the past few years, Bochner has advanced from the stringent conceptuality of his earlier work,

print May 1976

Gary Stephan

Gary Stephan’s third one-man show, which included drawings, sculpture and paintings, was somewhat disappointing. Stephan’s painting has changed, and the four paintings exhibited here, although respectable enough, indicate that it is still in transition. Stephan has abandoned some of his cerebral elegance and is moving toward “real painting.” After working with one or two shapes painted on otherwise bare, shaped canvases, Stephan has returned to the square format and is covering the entire surface again, almost, it seems, as an investigation of the various methods of putting paint on the canvas.

print May 1976

Robert Swain

Robert Swain’s painting is involved, purely and exclusively, with color, with the variety and interaction of color, and with the alternation between color as opaque pigmented surface and as illusionistic light. Swain’s format is relentlessly consistent; for some time now he has divided his canvases into 12-inch squares, each painted flat and precisely with one color. The paintings in this exhibition are either seven or nine squares (i.e. feet) on a side. That’s either 49 or 81 different colors per painting, since no color seems to repeat on a single canvas.

There’s a poker-faced intellectuality

print April 1976

Drawing Now (and Then)

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS innumerable museums and art galleries across the country have been swept by an epidemic of drawing and “works on paper” exhibitions, a phenomenon which began to receive in-depth attention from New York museums in 1973. In that year, the now-defunct New York Cultural Center’s “3-D into 2-D,” an exhibition of drawings by 28 contemporary artists loosely described as sculptors, was followed a few months later by the Whitney’s “American Drawings: 1963–1973,” which presented, in overloaded Annual style, two to three drawings by 87 American artists. The current popularity of

print February 1976

Joel Shapiro

The five sculptures in Joel Shapiro’s previous exhibition often functioned as tiny points upon which pivoted enormous volumes of empty space. His recent show contained 18 sculptures. This immediately suggests a change: space is now drawn more closely toward, and into, his sculpture than before. The new pieces encompass interior space in many different ways; it is implied, partially glimpsed or openly displayed. They seem larger in size, and some of them really are, but mainly the scale is clearer, which makes them appear bigger. The piece in his previous exhibition most involved with interior

print January 1976

Richard Tuttle

The architecture of the Whitney Museum and the art of Richard Tuttle make strange bedfellows. This essential fact remains, regardless of what else (good and mostly bad) has been said about his exhibition there. Ten years of Tuttle’s work, presented as “a major examination” (not a retrospective, but major nonetheless), were seen in a series of three installations designed, it was stated, to expose much work, yet allow each piece the large quantity of space it required. There were about 25 pieces on view at a time. About ten of these formed the core of the exhibition and were visible, although in

print January 1976

Carl Andre

Carl Andre’s new work comes out of the cardinal series (the beginnings of which were exhibited at the John Weber gallery in 1972) and out of pieces which appropriate, rather completely, the entire space of a room (as did work shown here early in Andre’s career, and work shown since then in LA, at the old Dwan Gallery and Ace Gallery, an in Europe). The new pieces are called Triodes, a word that Andre derived from the combination of the Greek words tri and hodos (meaning “three” and “path” or “way” respectively). The Triodes are like the Cardinals in tat they project from the base of a wall out

print January 1976

Jared Bark

In five evenings at the Idea Warehouse, Jared Bark alternated a performance piece from last year, Lights: On/Off, with a new piece titled The Neutron Readings. This was appropriate, since the two are closely related and the first provides a gauge to the growth, the improvement and the problems of the second. All of Bark’s work, including his photo-booth pieces and his paintings made by firing a BB gun at sheets of glass, involve a number of similar elements: performance, often humorous, if not downright vaudevillian; the misuse of a technique and consequently an amateurish or crude kind of

print January 1976

Frances Barth

Frances Barth’s paintings from her last exhibition inflated a rather personal geometry beyond a credible scale: various shapes, usually two separate triangles, occupied a large field of color, tending to look like objects in space. The shapes, the paint handling and particularly Barth’s somber slightly discordant colors were all emotionally convincing, but a little out of hand. Underneath their obvious seriousness was an edge of indulgence, something that kept the paintings disconnected and imprecise. In the six new paintings here, Barth has a new kind of control, and in two paintings in

Roberta Smith