print May 1975

Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti's work leaves me puzzled. Is he deliberately mocking the notion of art as a solution to a problem? Is his use of a series taken through various permutations an indictment of the repetition of art production, varying the terms without changing the theme? Or, is he questioning judgments of quality, of one answer being more valid than another? His drawings are all on graph paper—as if to emphasize their grounding in mathematical truth. One group involves the filling in of a set number of consecutive squares, the set number of times, each pattern being different. Seven sevens, nine

print May 1975

Laurace James

Similar questions arise with Laurace James's sculpture. Her constructions are made of wood, some surfaces painted, others left raw. Each is accompanied by a set of instructions explaining how the viewer can manipulate the piece. Moving the hinged joints, reattaching hooks to eyes, arriving at an alternative conclusion. The implication: that one result is no better than the other. But also that making a sculpture is simply arranging the material according to certain rules of structuring. For James has not really eliminated the choice of the artist. She sets the framework, limiting the scope of

print April 1975

Richard van Buren

AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY Graduate Center recently a mini-retrospective of Richard van Buren’s work. At the Paula Cooper Gallery, new pieces. Questions about development. How does one evaluate an artist’s work? In terms of newness relative to the overall art scene? Or in terms of a personal evolution? Or both?

Van Buren’s freestanding fiberglass pieces made in 1974 seemed the strongest to me. A work like Rack. Literally a skeletal structure. Two green resin backbones rising parallel from the rear to the middle where they bend downward apart to the front. Each standing on eight pairs of spindly

print April 1975

Joseph Kosuth and Keith Sonnier

Certainly the presentation of Joseph Kosuth’s Tenth Investigation, Proposition 4 is no surprise. The format itself provides a link to Kosuth’s previous investigations. A neat row of eight table-desks and chairs, each desk with a notebook of four Xeroxed texts rigidly fastened to it and facing two blueprinted maps which diagram the structural relationship of one text to another. The gallery as classroom, the viewer assigned to homework to reinforce the lesson. A summary of the course is contained in a printed notice on the wall. Each of the desks with accompanying texts and maps represents a “

print April 1975

Joe Moss

Ostensibly the way sound creates an environment is the premise of Joe Moss’s work. A floor covered with sawdust. Four large (12-foot diameter) sound reflectors hanging one opposite another along the four sides of the defined space. Another set of smaller (6 1/2-foot diameter) reflectors placed in a line across the gallery like two sets of parentheses. Various ramps allow one to change one’s height in relation to the reflectors. And clickers are provided as a suitable noise source. Before entering this environment, one can read about what to expect. Sounds that shift in location or change their

print April 1975

Doktori

Doktori. I remember his show last year of latex paintings. A glut of rubberized pigment, the work simply a dramatization of its medium. His new pieces are less ostentatious in their physicality. More subtle in their transition from painting to sculpture. And more involved with a search for personal expression. A number of the works are elongated verticals, slit in the middle, the opening asserting their three-dimensional presence. The surfaces are mottled, drips and strokes of latex, traces of coppery metallic powders, vestiges of wood grain from the original base. One thinks of a canvas pried

print April 1975

Louise Kramer

Another indication of the predilection for stylized idiosyncrasy. Louise Kramer. A show of work spanning the years 1972–74. In the middle of the gallery, four huge boulderlike bubbles of latex. A play between the weightlessness of the air-filled interior and the lumbering heaviness implied by the surface mass. The incongruity of a ball too big to throw counterpointed by the actual elasticity of the latex which bounces back to one’s touch. But where does this go beyond the funniness of these clumsy objects? They seem somehow empty of content, just there, nothing more.

On the wall, a series of

print April 1975

Emily Fuller

Emily Fuller. Less demonstratively arbitrary. Her work, like Doktori’s, painting materialized into objecthood. Strips of clear plastic sewn together as a bag, a chain of pocketed envelopes. Each sleeve containing substances of color—paint and metal powders, cut glass tinsel, sand, flour. Murray Bay Water Back. The bags hanging, draped in a row across a rod suspended from the ceiling. The soft pastels of the separate pigments accumulating into a rainbow of color. Traces of the powder cling to the sides and tinge the transparency of the plastic as it filters the light from a nearby window. The

print April 1975

Frank Kowing

Another instance of the current emphasis on physicality can be seen in Frank Kowing’s paintings. Here the stress is not on the objecthood of painting per se, but on the materiality of its construction. Combining an Abstract Expressionist way of working with collage techniques, Kowing remains close to his sources—Rauschenberg and Johns, Motherwell and maybe de Kooning. Jockey, for example, is literally a window. A green frame stenciled with the black letters jockey. Inside, on top, a wrapping of plastic occasionally painted on, sometimes folded back to expose the surface behind. Underneath this

print April 1975

Brower Hatcher

Just a note on Brower Hatcher’s sculpture. Illusionism transposed into three-dimensionality. Streaking Wheel. Three steel rings hovering one above the other, supported by dancing squiggles of metal which draw the space in between. Wide Limit. More Caro-esque in the additive relatedness and balancing of its parts. Yet again the slender curlicues of metal adding frenzied excitement to their more solid base. It’s as if Hatcher felt the formalist tradition needed a more dynamic element. What he ends up with is decoration.

—Susan Heinemann

print March 1975

Mary Miss

Wondering where to begin. Wanted to start my review of Mary Miss’s new piece with waking up. Sun sparkling my windows. A desire to be outside, out of the city. But what does that have to do with the work? Well, it’s part of the experience I brought to the work, feeding into my experience of the piece. Traveling on the train. Fashionable ladies posed at the stations, set for Fifth Avenue. My journey a pilgrimage, implicit in gallery visits, explicit here. Getting off at Greenwich. Past a parade of silent mansions. Finally the site. Striding across an open playing field. Manicured golf course to

print March 1975

Doris Ulmann

In contrast, it is the people who become the icons in Doris Ulmann’s platinum prints and gravures. Her main subjects are poor Southerners. She presents the time-worn faces of Appalachian craftsmen and women, the simple dignity of the blacks of the Gullah region of South Carolina. Reading Gene Thornton’s review in the Sunday Times I thought again about the soft-focus pictorialism of these images. Does it matter that these photos were taken in the late ’20s and early ’30s, at a time when the modernist impulse was toward a sharp-focus on straight reality? True, a few of Ulmann’s shots look