Although there is no perceptible link between the work of these three artists, each of them was formed in a climate more ostensibly attuned to conceptual concerns than is today’s, and their work shows it. Both Bruce Nauman and John Duff came to the forefront of their generation with the surge of so-called materials-and process-oriented artists, Nauman as a neo-Dadaist high-jinkser, Duff as a sculptor of nonrepresentational forms. Robert Mangold, somewhat the oldest of the three and a bona fide reductivist, stands apart from them in the “no-hands” look of all his paintings; whereas Nauman and Duff often appear to incorporate surface and incident into the subject of their work, Mangold (like Ellsworth Kelly before him) deliberately neutralizes both.
One of the two pieces Nauman showed here—a graphite, pastel and collage drawing on paper, in which the words are spelled forwards and in mirror image—harks back to comparable wordplay drawings and related neon pieces of the late ’60s. The other, Musical Chair, 1983, a sculpture of two I-beams hung from the ceiling in an X with a steel chair suspended at their perimeter, relates to other recent Nauman pieces, which as a suite address themselves, elliptically of course, to the abuse of the Third World.
By contrast, I find Mangold’s most recent paintings among his best and most fully realized. Going through the large survey show of his paintings (and the smaller selection of works on paper) last season at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam reinforced my impressions that in the future he may best be remembered as a colorist in an age of black, white, and gray monochromaticness. His colors succeed best in establishing undifferentiated yet sensitive surfaces for his drawing only in certain tonal ranges: the yellow/gold/brown group, and the grays. Elsewhere figure and ground seem unhappily out of balance to me. The Dutch show also underscored the relatively narrow scope of Mangold’s formal invention: since fixing on the graphite-overpainted-canvas format he has varied little. Introducing thin aluminum bars as extensions of the linear drawings within the cruciform shapes of his latest paintings is a big step for Mangold. With it, he concedes plasticity to illusion. In the paintings included in this show, the aluminum functions as one quarter of the cruciform paintings. As a physical line it demarcates the logical width of the other three arms, each section being a multiple or fraction of the others. Neoplastic rationale aside, the color, especially the pink of one of the large paintings and the orange and green of the other, add vigor to Mangold’s palette. Even more so than is the case with the minimalist sculptors, such minimalist painters as Mangoldand Robert Ryman have yet to be scrutinized in a rhetoric-free light. What was claimed for what they were doing is now seen as so much at odds with what they did (and continue to do) as to suggest that revisionist historians will have a heyday with their part of the ’60s. Mangold’s connection to hard-edge abstraction has yet to be made clear, and a real consideration of his color is also awaited.
Duff’s cast-fiberglass wall reliefs are reprises of the work that has brought him most attention over the last dozen-odd years, and I am glad. Neither of two intervening bodies of work, the metal-rod drawings of eccentric volumes and the recent cast-bronze forms, seemed completely, irrevocably from Duff. In their unsatisfactoriness the former emphasized the importance of real enclosure in Duff’s work, the latter how valuable the translucency (however obscured) of the fiberglass had become. Both factors come into play again here. Coloration is integral to Duff’s form, the various pigmentations having been mixed into the fiberglass before casting. And the higher and brighter the color, the more artificial it is, the better. Two organizing principles are at work in these wall reliefs: a quasi-biomorphic, quasi-anthropological air suffuses the curved ones, and a planar, geometric one is inherent in the more rectangular set. These latter, the “wedges,” seemed far and away the stronger of the two to me, particularly Reciprocating Wedge and Cantilevered Wedge. While curved pieces here are overwhelmed by their naturalist connotations, the angular ones, with their fusion of process and concept, exploit their appearance as industrial talismans.
—Richard Armstrong
