Mon Levinson’s smart moire boxes contribute still more artifacts to the stockpile of Antiques-For-The-Future. Levinson has distinguished himself for some time now by his knowing graphic design cum art-object. Being neither outrageously good nor outrageously bad, but just right, Levinson continues to sell his gifts short. He postpones his Actuality to a quarter century hence when “In People with Responsive Eyes” will undertake the building of a collection of optical art of the Sixties. Any crucial issue that Levinson is more than capable of attacking now will by that time be smoothed over by his already apparent period charm.
Charles Frazier presents a hodgepodge of derivative sculpture, here a bit of Arp, there a touch of Johns. The Arpy-Plus works are good-looking polished bronzes. One is a kind of lobster claw, the snapper of which results from a neatly segmented incision. The other piece is a Johnsian map of the United States ably constructed out of wood. The center forms a booth in which a railroad lantern sits playing King-of-the-Mountain. It pretends, however, that Rauschenberg had never set a Hymnal into a paisley shawl, or that Dali, for that matter, had never cut nightstands out of the back of his wetnurse. It is paltry and engaging.
The most pretentious figure, by far, is Jan Evans who is a neat canvas-stretcher and an equally neat white painter. These “brightly original” grounds are then “unusually” subdivided by raised bands of polished steel and an occasional paint stripe. There is also a quaint joined double-canvas on each of which a real draftsman-like line reiterates the canvas’s shape. Miss Evans is really only a lymphatic in a whole generation of soft-boiled contemporary purists. The larger manifestation itself is interesting as all vanguard manifestations must ultimately be, but considered in terms of individuals producing individual objects, her gambits are turgid and deadening except possibly as theoretical propositions. But it is the work that gives weight to the proposition, not the other way round.
Dan Flavin, although working in familiar Constructivist relationships gives one a moment’s pause. His low-flying, fluorescent constructions, with their lurid gaseous halations of light dimly reflected in the waxed floor, their feeling for eccentric corner spaces, their fanatical sulkiness, give one the impression that perhaps Flavin is really concerned with something new. Certainly in the present company he is the only one dealing with fresh experiences.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
