Barnett Newman, Treble, 1960
Oil on exposed canvas
20 x 7 inches

October 21 – December 17, 2011

Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York, NY presents an exhibition of paintings by Barnett Newman

Kate Shepherd, Drummer Olive Parent 70, 2010
Oil and enamel on wood panels
90 x 50 inches

March 24 – April 30, 2011

Known for paintings with deeply resonant colors and an understated yet assured use of line and space, Kate Shepherd presents new paintings and sculptures that convey a distinct sense of unease, ruin, and disarray largely unseen in her previous work. In And Debris, Shepherd takes the structures and rational forms that have been her hallmark and upends them, collapsing and reworking them to expose their tenuous nature and the anxiety in the everyday. And Debris opens to the public at Galerie Lelong on Thursday, March 24 from 6 to 8 pm. The artist will be present.

In her distinctive approach, Shepherd applies fine lines of white oil paint upon monochromatic layers of glossy enamel. The minimalist designs often recall familiar figures and explore literal and metaphorical aspects of space and architecture. The paintings themselves—composed of large wood panels—bear an architectural presence.

For the works featured in And Debris, Shepherd departs in many ways from her previous work, which has been primarily rational and figurative, with an overall sense of stability. In the new paintings, Shepherd introduces an irrationality in her marks while remaining extremely deliberate, with a clear awareness of space, form, and direction. Merging methodical and instinctive sensibilities, Shepherd created the designs for her paintings on a computer beforehand using architecture and animation programs, starting with straightforward forms and shifting and altering them into chaotic patterns. Her process is intuitive, but ever precise and assertive.

In Violet Grey African Rabbit Skin, a narrow configuration of lines is dangled on the vertical plane, like the shell of a figure collapsed and suspended. Shepherd created the design with a frequent collaborator, who used an animation program to trace the pattern from a 2008 painting by Shepherd and then “hang” the outline from the top—allowing it to give way to a new, flaccid form. In concentrating on a condensed, elongated central figure, Shepherd recalls the “zip paintings” of Barnett Newman. In a series of horizontal paintings alluding to Abstract Expressionists and, particularly, Franz Kline, Shepherd’s lines are less referential and instead convey activity and spontaneity. In the tumultuous “debris paintings,” Shepherd presents the insides of a painting within the painting—gutted, mangled, and spilling out into view, from a slightly obscured angle. In contrast, the “ghost paintings” feature large, vacant shapes that obliquely reference the human body and display themselves plainly to the viewer.

Also on view will be wire sculptures, whose design and presence somewhat relate to the “ghost paintings.” Open, circular, and subtle, the sculptures are a natural development in Shepherd’s enduring investigation of space and form.

In 2010, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. presented Shepherd’s most recent solo museum exhibition, Relation to and yet not (homage to Mondrian). Her work is featured in numerous museum collections, including the Phillips Collection; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of the Arts; Des Moines Art Center; and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. And Debris is Shepherd’s fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong.

Installation view.

Opens March 3, 2011

Making Histories: Changing Views of the Collection explores how a museum collection constructs and embodies histories to be reconsidered over time, offering various views into the museum’s own history and its collections right up to the present day, through monographic installations of individual works or bodies of work by key artists and designers, thematic surveys, archival research projects, special projects and recent acquisitions. The exhibition showcases the breadth of the museum’s collections, which include over 90,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, works on paper, artist’s books, applied arts and industrial and graphic design. As selections from the collections are presented on a rotating basis, returning visitors will have the opportunity to see different works over the coming months.

The climate-controlled Hall of Honor features iconic works from the collection, offering various perspectives on abstract painting, with works from the 20th-century painting is exemplified in the work of Piet Mondrian, while works by Kazimir Malevich are purely abstract. Color and autonomous form distinguish works by Jo Baer, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden and Barnett Newman. The centerpiece of this presentation is The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952–53), the renowned paper cutout by Henri Matisse, which is flanked by the intense gold and deep blue of paintings by Yves Klein.

A stunning installation of works using fluorescent light by Dan Flavin occupies the hall of the upper floor. Originally commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum, these works were first presented in this same location in 1986. Titled untitled (to Piet Mondrian through his preferred colors, red, yellow and blue) and untitled (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), these works were conceived by Flavin to be in dialogue with Mondrian, the history of modern art and the museum’s distinctive architecture.

A number of gallery spaces are devoted to individual artists and designers. Works by Carl Andre, Lothar Baumgarten, Barbara Bloom, Ger van Elk, Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning, Bruce Nauman, Allen Ruppersberg, Willem Sandberg, Wieki Somers, Fiona Tan, Charley Toorop and Marijke van Warmerdam, among others, will be on view.

The Stedelijk Museum’s collection is also distinguished by its extensive holdings of applied arts and design, from which a special selection is presented. A collection of tableware will be on show, with services, flatware and accessories. Following two recently acquired aluminum chairs by Wieki Somers, the museum has dedicated one special room to the design of metal furniture, both modern classics and contemporary pieces by, among others, Ron Arad, Xavier Lust and Gerrit Rietveld. Four consecutive galleries host a presentation of work by important young designers, including striking pieces of jewelry by Karl Fritsch and Manon van Kouswijk and experimental industrial design by Joris Laarman.

In the field of graphic design, one room is dedicated to exceptional manuscripts by former museum director Willem Sandberg—made during World War II (when, as a member of the resistance, he was in hiding) that clearly anticipates later signatures of his design work. Another gallery features a selection of extraordinary Cuban posters from the 1970s that evoke the Castro revolution.

Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Football Player—Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, 1915
Oil on canvas
26 x 17 inches

March 2 – April 30, 2011

I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pool of Academic Art. I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.
–Kazimir Malevich

It’s obvious now that the forms and colors in the paintings that Malevich began painting in 1915 are the first instances of form and color.
—Donald Judd

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition “Malevich and the American Legacy” at 980 Madison Avenue, New York.

The exhibition has been conceived in close collaboration with the heirs of Kazimir Malevich and features six rare and pivotal paintings, including Painterly Realism of a Football Player–Color Masses in the 4th Dimension (1915) that was recently acquired from the heirs of Malevich by the Art Institute of Chicago. They are brought together with works by modern and contemporary American artists including Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Alexander Calder, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, James Turrell, and Cy Twombly. Major museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and Storm King Art Center have lent works; others have been borrowed from the personal collections of Twombly, Kelly, and Ruscha.

In the ferment of the early twentieth century Russian art scene, Malevich, one of the pioneers of non-objective art, developed Suprematism as an art of pure form. He envisioned his Suprematist paintings as geometry stripped of any attachment to the mimetic representation of real objects; the elemental alphabet of a pictorial language outside the visual world. Suprematism thus conveyed what Malevich believed was the supreme reality of existence: pure feeling. His works were first shown in the West in 1927, when he traveled to Germany with over seventy works of art, which were included in the “Große Berliner Kunstausstellung” (Great Berlin Art Exhibition). Subsequently, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. included several paintings in the groundbreaking exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art” at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936. In 1939, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in New York, whose founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim – an early and passionate collector of the Russian avant-garde – was inspired by the same aesthetic ideals and spiritual quest that exemplified Malevich’s art.

These pivotal events in American cultural history, together with subsequent publications and exhibitions progressively increased Malevich’s exposure in the United States. The first U.S. retrospective of Malevich’s work in 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum provoked a flood of interest and further intensified his impact on postwar American artists. Since that time there have been few opportunities to see Malevich’s works in the United States outside of museums and to examine the ongoing effects of his enduring influence. By providing an opportunity for both, “Malevich and the American Legacy” seeks to contribute to the expanding scholarship on the influence of the Russian visionary.

It is not only formal analogy that connects Malevich and American artists but also deeper aesthetic, conceptual, and spiritual correspondences. In dialogue with his work and ideas, they searched for elemental and universal forms consistent with simplified aesthetic aims. Barnett Newman’s By Twos (1949), Ellsworth Kelly’s White Square and Black Square of 1953, a black 1955 Abstract Painting by Ad Reinhardt, and No. 3 (Plum and Black) by Mark Rothko all respond to Malevich’s ultimate proposition in Black Square (1915) while David Smith’s Cubi (1964), Richard Serra’s Malmo Roll (1964) and Donald Judd’s untitled stack (1982) expound in three dimensions on his more complex, planar Suprematist compositions. Subtly modulated paintings by Brice Marden and Robert Ryman build compositions from the most elemental of forms into unique and multifaceted embodiments of material and process. Ironic ripostes are provided by John Baldessari’s Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich) (1976) in which a white square reminiscent of Malevich’s White On White is used to mask the crucial part of a noirish movie-still, creating a lacuna that shifts the emphasis from the act itself to the responses surrounding it; and by Ed Ruscha’s bleach paintings, which transform verbal threats into cesura. From the current generation of artists in their ascendancy, Charles Ray, Mark Grotjahn, and Banks Violette’s charged abstractions testify to Suprematism’s dramatic reach into the present and allow for its future impact.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated and scholarly catalogue with essays by Yve-Alain Bois, Magdalena Dabrowski, and Aleksandra Shatskikh.

Tony Smith, Untitled, 1954
Charcoal on paper
Courtesy of the Tony Smith Estate, New York
Photograph by Cathy Carver

December 17, 2010 – April 3, 2011

“Tony Smith: Drawings” is a selection of rarely exhibited and early drawings by American artist Tony Smith (1912-1980). The work, executed within a limited time-period in the 1950’s, precedes Smith’s emergence as one of the most important sculptors of the mid-twentieth-century, following his career as an architectural designer. Some 30 drawings will be selected from the Smith Estate as well as from private collections.

Although Smith came to sculpture late in his life, the exhibited drawings show that early on he was building a conceptual base of forms inspired by the modular order and the unifying morality of the Modern architecture principle that form follows function, using the paper as a serial unit with which to build upon. Along with his interest in mathematics and friendship with the Abstract Expressionists, these sources inform the formal characteristics of the drawings: staccato linear hatching, irregular interconnecting forms, and often brilliant colors. These elements and the nonobjective modular structures of a number of the drawings in this exhibition forecast his later approach to sculpture, a truly unique path, that anticipates the systematic use of serial form by a generation of minimalist artists to come.

Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey and studied architecture at the New Bauhaus school in Chicago led by László Moholy-Nagy. After working for Frank Lloyd Wright, Smith worked as an architectural designer. In 1945 he moved to New York where he became a close friend of Barnett Newman, who introduced him to his fellow New York School painters. Among his Abstract Expressionist friends and collaborators, in the time of transition from architecture to painting and drawing and, eventually, to monumental architectonic sculpture, were Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still. Like Still, Smith was interested in the papiers dechirees of Jean Arp. He shared an interest with Pollock in the principles of organic geometric order, harmony, and structural patterns of natural forms propounded by 19th century bio-mathematician, D’Arcy Thompson.

Organized by Bernice Rose, Chief Curator of The Menil Collection’s Drawing Institute and Study Center, this group of drawings provides a unique lens through which to view the Menil’s collection of Smith’s monumental outdoor sculptures that are integral to the campus and to the collecting history of the de Menil’s. John de Menil underwrote the fabrication of Smith’s first largescale sculpture The Elevens Are Up, 1963 (fabricated 1970) one of five outdoor works permanently installed on the Menil campus. In 2001, the estate gave Wall, 1964 (fabricated 2000) in honor of Dominque de Menil.

A Letter from the Judd Foundation:

November 30, 2009

Dear Friends,

I am very pleased to announce the start of the Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné through the appointment of the Catalogue Raisonné Committee and a Catalogue Raisonné Manager, Katy Rogers. Ms. Rogers, who is currently completing the Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonné, will manage the project with the advisement of the committee.

The production of a Catalogue Raisonné is a natural extension of our mission to promote a wider understanding of Judd’s artistic legacy by developing scholarly and educational programs. The project is already supported by a newly designed Catalogue Raisonné database, which Judd Foundation has developed over two years, specifically to document artworks by Donald Judd (1928-1994).

The Committee is comprised of Catalogue Raisonné scholars, curators with experience with Judd works, and former studio assistants to Donald Judd, thus establishing continuity with the 1975 Judd Catalogue Raisonné. Founding members include William C. Agee, Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, James Bruce Dearing, Dudley Del Balso and Flavin Judd. Ms. Rogers will begin work on the project in April 2010 and will manage a team of scholars and researchers from the US and abroad, as well as others who worked closely with the artist over many years.

Judd Foundation has allocated seed funding to support the first phase of The Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné, a project that is expected to take a number of years. This new Catalogue Raisonné is the first since 1975 and builds upon the Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Objects and Wood-Blocks 1960-1974, co-edited by committee member Dudley Del Balso, Brydon Smith, and Roberta Smith, as part of an exhibition catalogue published by the National Gallery, Ottawa, in 1975. A comprehensive volume of Judd prints, 1951 – 1994, Donald Judd, Prints and Works in Editions: A Catalogue Raisonné, was published in 1993, edited by Jörg Schellmann and Mariette Josephus Jitta (Editions Schellmann and Schirmer/Mosel, 1993; 1996).

The Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné will cover works by Donald Judd in multiple volumes and digital formats. Through this project, Judd Foundation will produce an updated and comprehensive record of the artist’s oeuvre and will expand the body of critical writing on the artist available for scholarly research.

I am sure that you will share our enthusiasm as we begin our work on this great endeavor. It will be a rewarding one, and we all look forward to celebrating with you the publication of the volumes in due course.

With best wishes,

Barbara Hunt McLanahan
Executive Director

About the Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné Committee Manager:

Katy Rogers is currently project manager and co-author of the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Collages by Robert Motherwell. The volume is the culmination of a seven-year project overseen by the Dedalus Foundation, and will be published by Yale University Press. Rogers has written on Motherwell and other artists, and most recently contributed to the exhibition catalogue Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis at El Museo del Barrio, New York (October 2009 – February 2010). She received her Master’s degree in art history from Hunter College of the City University of New York, and is an alumna of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

About the Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné Committee Members:

William C. Agee is an internationally renowned art critic and historian. He is currently the Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History at Hunter College, New York. Mr. Agee has published and lectured extensively in the field of modern American art. He was the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston from 1974 through 1982, and before that was an associate curator at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He has written a number of essays on Donald Judd and organized several exhibitions of the artist’s work including Judd’s first major museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1968.

Heidi Colsman-Freyberger holds a doctorate degree from Philipps-Universität, Marburg, Germany. She has worked at the Museum of Modern Art, in commercial galleries, as Robert Motherwell’s secretary-cum-curator, and as a freelancer for Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her Catalogue Raisonné projects include editing Egon Schiele (Harry N. Abrams, 1990) and compiling Barnett Newman (Yale University Press, 2004); she is currently chief researcher for another Catalogue Raisonné project, the paintings and sculpture of Jasper Johns.

James Bruce Dearing is a painter and an independent art consultant living in New York. From 1968 through 1983, Mr. Dearing was a studio assistant for Donald Judd. Over a number of years he developed a deep understanding of Judd’s working practices, and travelled with Judd on research trips and to install exhibitions around the world. He also worked at The Whitney Museum of American Art and was a partner at Bark Frameworks LLC in New York until 2005.

Dudley Del Balso serves on the Board of Judd Foundation. Ms. Del Balso worked with Judd almost continuously between 1968 and 1984 managing his office and overseeing the fabrication of his work. She co-authored the 1975 Judd Catalogue Raisonné published by the National Gallery of Canada. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the International Print Center New York and on the New York Board of the Trust for Public Land.

Flavin Judd, son of Donald Judd, is one of the founding board members of Judd Foundation and is currently the Vice-President of the board. Mr. Judd oversaw the temporary exhibition of selected Judd works at Christie’s New York in 2006, for which Judd Foundation received an award from the International Art Critics Association (AICA). Mr. Judd regularly writes and lectures on his father’s work.

Karen Schifano: Fawn, you’ve often recommended books to me that are about re-thinking architecture, utopian explorations concerned with designing new kinds of spaces for living, for example, A Pattern Language, Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, and Superstudio. Can you begin by talking about what those books mean to you, and how they might help to fuel your own quest to find out, as you ask in an earlier statement, “How can we build more room into our personal landscape? How can we craft choice and consciousness into the spaces we occupy?” What do you think about being called “‘utopian”?

Fawn Krieger: Well, first, I think every living thing is essentially utopian. And I don’t think inanimate things can have visions or beliefs — that they can exist as utopian — but things can be imprinted with beliefs and visions, and can help to carry and transmit them. I think matter is sort of like a recessive gene, or a sparkplug.

I don’t see the books of mine you mention as designing new spaces for living. I see them as analyzing the psychological and cultural infrastructures of what we’ve collectively decided to call architecture. The consciousness of these particular books — each quite different — expands my sensitivity of what it means to build and inhabit space.

This question of mine you raise asks me now how it is we move from the occupation of space to inhabiting it — the difference of living at others’ expense to the choice of living WITH others, and with otherness.

HOVER (lake 5), 2005
Composite digital drawing; ink-jet print on sintra board
51 x 3 x 41 cm

KS: So is there a way of connecting these thoughts to your upcoming project in Portland? How did you come up with the idea for this piece?

FK: For my project at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, I will be making a US National Park that functions as a stageset. National Parks are one of many stages for the enacting of national identity. They are tourist destinations, which contradict their position of an untouched wilderness to one designed, however inconspicuously, for consumption. How do we make sense of the terrible injustices that are built into our American landscape? As an artist, and a sculptor specifically, I’m asking about our material history, and about how we inhabit and relate to the presence of physical truths — bodies (of land, of self, of community).

Study for National Park, 2009
Composite digital drawing on family photograph
(Athabasca Glacier, BC-Canada, 1984)

The idea for the piece was sort of woven from a number of inspirational threads. For 5 years I’ve been working indirectly with some photos I found of a cross country trip I took with my family in 1984. They reveal intense psychologies of a family structure embedded within vast American landscapes. When I got obsessed with Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) last summer, I began to think more and more about frozen moments where multiple bodies stand within immense plateaus and clearings whose scales are so profound that they kind of alienate while containing. I wanted to create a series of tableau vivants in national parks, with actors reenacting my family photographs. But then felt it compromised the very distortions of intimacy that involve immediate and physically profound scale shifts, since the audience for the work would always see it remotely, as a video document. So my challenge became one of bringing the national park to them.

Krieger with her father
Puerco Pueblo ruins
Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
1984

Screenshot from L’avventura (1960)
Michelangelo Antonioni

KS: Wow, I’m amazed at the ambition of this project! Barnett Newman spoke of “the sublime” as a subject matter for the Abstract Expressionists, influenced in part by the vast scale of the American landscape. What’s interesting to me is how you want to undermine the sublime, and play with shifts of scale to reveal what’s underneath the network of mythologies we’ve created. It seems like another layer of awareness, an opening into a larger and more complex notion of our individual and group identities as Americans, at this particular time in our history. The slippery feeling of the word “utopia” connects into the notion we were all taught in school about our “Manifest Destiny”. Although utopia has a long history as a concept, it almost seems as if America reclaimed it and branded it as it’s own possession.

Anyway, I’m wondering how you’ll physically create those “immediate and profound scale shifts” in your set. And how the theatrical aspect of your work, the stage set, is different than “installation”. In both, I’d imagine, the audience becomes a kind of actor, and so moves and experiences a created sense of place and time.

FK: I am very much having a conversation with the history of painting, but I’m less interested in the sublime and more drawn to a conflicted, paradoxical kind of place, between the heroic and utter failure. The Hudson River School is where it’s at for me — both first and second generation, but especially first because it’s less aware of itself, represents a radical departure, and marks the beginning of what we now call American art history, but which of course, was made centuries upon centures after so much incredible art had already been produced on this land. All the morality and entitlement, the embedded psychologies of gender, class wealth, race; notions of “wild,” “tamed,” “civilized”…  I stand in front of the Oxbow at the Met a lot, and I am just amazed by the weight Cole asks us to carry. Those works were tourist commercials, real estate advertisements, and instructions for erasure and hypocrisy. But it also can’t be denied that they offered us a departure from Europe, from what was known, an entrance into the cinematic, the environmental, and the opportunity to define ourselves as artsts and audiences of a new era.

I think these inspirations are so big — gargantuan and impossibly awkward — which is why I like them. I don’t mean to enter into their bigness, but to squish the monumental into the scale of the body. So we could hold them, and pay attention to the sensations they surface through embodiment.

When I was in art school in the mid-90s and I’d hear about an artist who makes installations, I just didn’t feel any association. The word felt contrived to me, like something was applied to a space instead of transforming it. It wasn’t until after I got out of graduate school, ten years later, that I was introduced to stage-set-making as artwork. It came through a collaborative project called ROOM, with Wynne Greenwood. We made domestic spaces as stage-sets in which her band, Tracy + the Plastics, would perform. The introduction of the idea of the “set” created lots of new questions that just felt completely inspiring to me.

First, there were questions about audience and performer safety, which I loved immediately. Then there were questions about communication and collaboration through building, that I found reinforced the conceptual principals within my work. Then there were questions about spectatorship, witness, interaction, experience, participation, and movement. I started to choose the term “audience” over the art term “viewer”, and found that within the act of becoming audience are mini practices of citizenship. More and more, I am finding there is no distinction between performer and audience, so the spaces I build often dismantle conceptual and structural hierarchies that would otherwise support this. I don’t imagine anyone will have to “act” in National Park. They are already part of the construction without entering it.

ROOM, collaboration with Tracy + the Plastics (Wynne Greenwood)
The Kitchen, NYC, 2005
Installation view (detail)
Carpet, wood, foam, paint, fabric, paper, hardware, a/v equipment
Approx. 17 x 9 x 2.5 m
Photos © Paula Court, Courtesy of the Kitchen’s Archives

ROOM, collaboration with Tracy + the Plastics (Wynne Greenwood)
The Kitchen, NYC, 2005
Performance view (detail)
Carpet, wood, foam, paint, fabric, paper, hardware, a/v equipment
Approx. 17 x 9 x 2.5 m
Photos © Paula Court, Courtesy of the Kitchen’s Archives

KS: It seems like some of these same considerations (in terms of audience/performer and citizenship) play a big part in your previous project, COMPANY at Art in General in 2007-2008.

FK: Totally. Kristan Kennedy (the Visual Art Program Director at PICA) invited me to do a commission in Portland after learning of COMPANY — a shop as work-of-art that existed in Art in General’s storefront space for close to a year. I began COMPANY with many questions about the “stage” of consumption, about desire, longing, value, ownership, and the commerce of art. Also about inspiration — how and why and when we work directly through it and likewise, depart from it. But by the end of that piece, my questions had moved more into ideas about roles (sesame, poppyseed, whole wheat…); about moments when our subjecthood becomes objectified through our position as consumers, and when objects take on identities and assume power beyond their inanimate proportions, as a part of this same mechanism. I became interested in this transference between subject and object, and how it informs the different characters within socialized structures implicitly tied to consumption.

Because it was COMPANY that inspired Kristan to approach me, I first began my discussions with her in thinking about how we could take COMPANY to Portland. What would it mean to make a stage for American consumption that is nomadic? That’s when I began to look into the history of American tourism, all around the same time I was thinking about those people on the mountain in L’avventura, and my family’s cross country photos. My questions have as much to do with notions of domestic movement, as they do with concrete challenges, like shifting my process of making objects framed within a structure — as I did with COMPANY — into making a structure that functions as one humongous object.

COMPANY, 2007-8
Art in General, NYC

COMPANY: pastrami on rye (Line 2), 2008
Foam, canvas, spraypaint
21 x 21 x 9 cm

KS: You seem so clear and articulate about the kinds of questions you ask yourself. Are there ever times when you’re surprised or thrown off and things derail, the process is murky and words fail you? Any stories to tell here?

FK: Always. Most of the time I feel overwhelmed with what I don’t know, and fear and doubt I have the strength to enter straight into it — that is my work…at least, that is what my work is for me. I feel my job as an artist is half to undo, to unlearn, to unknow, and the other half is to be accountable for it. I’m not sure what I’d do without the murk, but the painful part isn’t so much the murk but choosing the murk over its alternative. Again and again. That’s really where the blow is.

Words always fail. That’s part of what makes them beautiful, part of what makes them as brittle, malleable, and curious to me as cement, or the yellow craft foam Jo-Ann Fabrics insists on not selling anymore in its NYC locations for some unexplainable reason. This is another plea, Jo-Ann!

When I was in my last year of graduate school at Bard College, in 2004, I felt a need to build out instead of up, and to suspend weight and density atop vacant spaces. I was thinking a lot about the history of American architectures, and questioning what it meant to build as a white American woman — what my hand in the construction of this country meant, what I was building on top of, and what I was building to support. It was at this time that I first rediscovered those childhood cross country photos. Prior to that body of work, I had been making some terrible and some not-so-terrible sculptures with cut logs, and images of founding fathers, as well as drawings of cut slabs of meat.

When these architectures began to surface, I couldn’t see their connection to my previous work, and they all looked like failures, literally crumbling in front of me. Then I realized, fortunately right before my thesis board(!), that the work was really a set of inadequate domestic foundations, expressing both potential and obliteration, and linking itself directly to the word “founding”. The connection helped me to make a larger link between sacrifice and violence, between expectation and failure, between establishment and transgression, and between consumption and regeneration. I realized, not just that these were foundations, but that I had found my voice, and titled the work FOUND.

The arrival of words to my voice, is the remnant of fighting for my own truths, all of which must be translated into language, whether it’s material, verbal, or written.

Bricks (from FOUND series), 2004
Bricks, concrete, wood
183 x 15 x 61 cm

KS: So let’s go from the verbal to making things and materials. I’ve heard that you once characterized your aesthetic as “Flinstone-ian”. I’m drawn to the accessible, hand-made, funky quality of your work, as it carries this seriously intellectual weight. Quite a tension there.

FK: It’s a strange sensation when someone asks you to define your aesthetic. For me, any response to that question will include transgression, and in this case, I was playing with the idea of ‘a canon’ of sculpture, sort of thinking about stone carving and pedestals, in relation to a canon of stone-age-ness.

Constantin Brancusi
Le Baiser / The Kiss, 1908
Plaster, 58cm high
Philadelphia Museum of Art / © Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Fred’s Monkeyshines
The Flintstones
October 17, 1963 (Season 4, Episode 5)

KS: Yeah, I can see that it’s strange to look at something you’ve done after the fact and try and describe it. I know that it’s the result of your process, and yet I’m still interested in how and why your sculpture looks the way it does, why you make the choices you make. Are you also thinking through your materials? Or do you choose materials and structures after you’ve researched and thought about a project? Or both? Maybe you could lead us through “how you use your hands”.

FK: I often work in series, or chapters. This is not something I try to do, it’s just the way I work. So what happens is that there’s a whole infrastructure of ideas and feelings happening at once…an obsession with The Love Boat, orange juice, furniture mail-order catalogues from the late 60s, my father’s hard leather jacket with patchwork leather buttons, oak veneer, Holly Hobby, and having a bad cold…let’s say. These incongruous associations combine with physical, visceral urges and emotional memories that are often associated with touch and necessity, like feeling a carpet edge at home, or poking my 3-year-old-finger in cellophane packages of ground beef. They are not thoughts; they are completely of the body.

My job is to get out of my own way at this point — to trust what I lean into completely, and to trust the interconnectedness of these pulls, all without question. My aesthetic, I suppose, is really a measure of moment. During this time it’s less that I intend to keep my process private than that I haven’t even identified it as process. It’s simply living. And what happens when a system of attractions begins to weave together, is that I sort of adapt an auto-psychoanalytic approach, to make sense — or meaningfulness — of those symbols that I feel sympathetic to. At this point, my job is to take ownership of my choices, by asking every conceivable question of their properties and interrelationships. I guess the relationship between my thinking and my hands is one of roles really, of becoming. It’s as though my role shifts from child to parent, in a way.

Photo © Abe & Sofie McNally

KS: And are the materials that you work with, things that sometimes look like craft supplies or stuff from your kitchen, chosen partly as a response to those “physical, visceral urges and emotional memories”? There’s a direct, almost child-like presence to these materials and the way you put things together.

FK: The materials are another obsession happening simultaneously to the orange juice and Love Boat. They aren’t a response to necessities — they are part of them. Felt and concrete are both materials that have come up a lot in this way for me. As are leather, dyed canvas (with frayed/inside out edges), and silver mylar. It feels kind of like a craving. Like a thing that, when consumed, makes you feel whole or complete, or fully satiated. For a moment…

National Park will be on view at Washington High School in Portland, Oregon, from September 3 – October 18, 2009, as part of the Portland Institue for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Arts Festival.  A recently published catalogue on Krieger’s project COMPANY can be purchased here.

Karen Schifano is a New York City-based painter

All photos © Fawn Krieger, unless otherwise noted.

Installation view

September 1-26, 2009

The Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of work by David Novros. Six paintings dating from 1965 to 1969 will be shown, some of which have not been seen in public for over forty years.

An original member of Park Place, the historic New York artist collective, Novros is well known for his large, abstract paintings on irregularly shaped, multipaneled canvases. With their sensuous and reflective surfaces created with multiple layers of sprayed-on acrylic pigment and glazed with Murano (a powdered pigment which is suspended in clear lacquer), Novros’ paintings provide the viewer with new types of perceptual and emotional experiences. He not only seeks to communicate content through monochromatic color, geometric form and complex spatial issues, but he also encourages a kinesthetic viewing experience through the surface’s response to changing light.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Novros often painted murals on his parents’ garage. Thus began the artist’s commitment to “painting as wall and on wall.” Influenced by a variety of art historical sources, including Native American pottery, Byzantine mosaics, Italian frescoes and the mural-scale paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Novros likens his work from this period to portable murals and aims to communicate the emotional power of geometric abstraction.

These breakthrough paintings from the initial stage in Novros’ career in turn influenced other artists as well, most notably Brice Marden and his panel paintings from the 70s. However, unlike other artists who utilize shaped canvases, Novros’ work emphasizes the critical meeting point of the canvas and wall, as if his paintings are extensions of the walls themselves.

David Novros was born in 1941 in Los Angeles and lives and works in New York City. Most recently, his work was included in a group exhibition entitled “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York” at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Novros was also the subject of “Contemporary Conversations: David Novros and The Menil Collection,” a one-person show that was part of a series of exhibitions that celebrate living artists whose work is in the Menil’s permanent collection.

Novros has exhibited in several prominent venues, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art in Dallas, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Bremen Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, Germany.

May 26 – June 20, 2009

Edward Shalala will exhibit documentary photographs in The Painting Center’s Project Room. Shalala makes temporary raw canvas thread paintings in NYC parks and grasslands and photographs the results. Shalala responds to the history of modern and postmodern abstraction that deals with ‘end game’ painting. The lineage begins with: Cezanne’s use of raw canvas (“in-reserve”), Barnett Newman’s painting ‘Name II,’1950, Robert Rauschenberg’s White painting series, 1951, Piero Manzoni’s clay coated works of 1958, and Lucio Fontana’s raw canvas and raw linen paintings with selected slashes of the late 1950’s and 1960’s, followed by the works of: Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Robert Irwin, Fred Sandback, Eva Hesse, Howardena Pindell, Alan Saret and Sol Lewitt.

Imi Knoebel, Untitled, 1968/72
Deutsche Bank Collection

May 23 – July 31, 2009

This year’s exhibition, conceived by Deutsche Bank, is devoted to the complex oeuvre of the Düsseldorf artist Imi Knoebel. Knoebel’s works have been continually pursued for the Deutsche Bank Collection for the last twenty-five years. The work of the former student of Joseph Beuys, with its pioneering exploration of form and color (also in the context of the young generation’s return to the abstract art of the 1960s and 70s), is today more momentous than ever. The exhibition is divided into two “acts.” The first part presents new works by the artist executed between 2005 and 2009. Under the title Ich Nicht (Not Me), they give a concise answer to Barnett Newman’s question “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?” Enduros, the second part of the show, constitutes a retrospective of Knoebel’s work from 1968 to 2005, covering the entire spectrum of the artist’s abstract formal vocabulary. Around 200 collages, drawings, photographs, and prints from the Deutsche Bank Collection provide a comprehensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre. At the same time, they pay tribute the medium of paper—the focus of the corporate collection.

The exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin is being mounted in close collaboration with the artist and in cooperation with the Neue Nationalgalerie, where Imi’s Knoebel installation Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe… is opening at the same time.

March 26 – April 25, 2009

Over the last two decades, Dutch artist Roland Schimmel (*1954) has produced a compelling oeuvre of abstract paintings to which digital animations have been added more recently (these films are “illustrated” by music of composer David Lopato). What the works have in common is the exploration of sensorial frontiers. the paintings and animations depict optical structures or fields, in which the soft contours of shimmering haloes and hard edges of black holes pop up and meet. Observing the encounter of these contrasting forms evokes physical sensations of expansion and contraction reminiscent of op art’s push and pull effects. Roland Schimmel’s art however is finer as well as harder in what it is, and obtains: acts of looking and projecting.

The backdrop of Roland Schimmel’s work is a blend of a taoistic life-view, central to which is the concept of equilibrium between the individual and their surroundings, and a deep interest in neuro-physiology, in particular the cooperation of the eye and the brain. in his paintings of twenty years ago, after-images were the dominant agents. Simple figures painted on a ground in complementary colors triggered retinal images which the viewer, as it were, projected back onto the painterly surface. Thus the work was completed by involuntary physical acts. After-images also play a key role in the selection of works from the last ten years that are on show in this exhibition. But now a doubling occurs: on the paintings, (parts of) the retinal images that are triggered by the encounter of oscillating and straight forms are painted as well. The viewer encounters a retinal fantasma. Observing these works leads to sensorial disorientation followed by cleaning of the senses. Now the viewer can surrender to what the work actually embodies: an infinite sensorial realm, an oceanic experience.

In 20th Century abstract art this ideal scenario, with a viewer becoming one with an artwork or better disappearing in it, can possibly for the first time be seen in Barnett Newman’s paintings. the predecessors of roland schimmel’s work however appear in “de-personalized mechanic” artforms, and in particular those artform.

Carl Ostendarp, Aaarrgh, 2009 (detail)

February 13 – August 23, 2009

The RISD Museum of Art presents Carl Ostendarp, “Pulled Up,” an exhibition in its Lower Farago Gallery that not only borrows its title but also its optimism from the 1977 Talking Heads song of the same name. “Pulled Up” will feature works chosen by the artist from the Museum’s collection together with new paintings of his own. Ostendarp (American, b.1961) has taught and exhibited widely, and his artwork is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other museums.

Ostendarp came to the attention of Judith Tannenbaum, the Museum’s Richard Brown Baker curator of contemporary art, when she encountered an installation at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, called All Tomorrow’s Parties. In this work—which took its name from the 1967 Velvet Underground recording with German singer Nico—Ostendarp presented Pop Art classics by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and others against bright pink walls bordered with red drips. Last year, the Elizabeth Dee Gallery (New York) presented an 18-year retrospective of Ostendarp’s work; a review in the New Yorker described the installation as “tangy conflations of Pop, minimalism, color-field, and cartoons.”

After seeing Ostendarp’s work in Frankfurt and New York, Tannenbaum invited him to produce an installation at The RISD Museum. During a visit to view the collections, he was drawn to works on paper by a range of master artists in styles as varied as Dada and Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop. In the completed installation, these works from the collection will be juxtaposed with two new paintings by the artist and hung on a two-color, drip-pattern mural designed by Ostendarp and painted by him with the assistance of several RISD graduate students. The works from the collection range from Odilon Redon, Hans Arp, and Joan Miró, to Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Roy Lichtenstien, Andy Warhol, John Wesley, and Ed Ruscha, among others.
While pulling works from the Museum’s collection, Ostendarp was keenly aware of the 1970 intervention at The RISD Museum by Andy Warhol for his historic “Raid the Icebox” exhibition. Ostendarp also has been inspired by music in much of his work and for the RISD installation, he borrowed the title from the Talking Heads because of their connection to RISD– Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz are both graduates.

Ostendarp’s work is both cheerful and sly. Typically spare and often including simple biomorphic forms or words, his compositions are flooded with flat color. Often inspired by music, Ostendarp will create multi-sensory experience for visitors by playing the Talking Heads 1977 album in the gallery, producing a total experience that invites visitors to see these older pieces in a new light.

PROGRAMMING
Carl Ostendarp Lecture
Thursday, February 26, 6:30 pm
Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center
In his lecture, Ostendarp talks about this project as well as his interest in late Modernism, including Pop Art and Minimalism.

Ward Jackson at Kay-Mar Gallery, NY, 1964
Transit & Garden 1 (left to right)

Quite simply, you have to know about Ward Jackson and his work — he was an innovative abstract painter, a maverick editor and arts administrator, and a key member of New York City’s artist community.  I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ward’s nephew, artist Julian Jackson, about his uncle’s life and work.  Our discussion that follows is published on the occasion of Ward Jackson’s first retrospective exhibition, taking place at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY, from April 27 – June 2, 2007.

Matthew Deleget: The first time I learned of Ward Jackson’s work was just a few years ago.  I was walking down the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum taking in the Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) exhibition, seeing all the usual work by all the usual suspects, when I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible lozenge-shaped painting, a small one, installed on a short wall near the elevator bank.  It was a work by Ward Jackson and it was slipped into the exhibition by one of the Guggenheim’s curators on account of the fact that Jackson had recently died, age 75.  As I poured over his painting, I wondered to myself, who is Ward Jackson?  So, Julian, maybe you can help me answer that question, who was he?

Julian Jackson: That’s really a big, if short, question. He was a painter, a writer, an editor, an archivist, an opinionated observer, a passionate viewer, and was deeply engaged, his whole life, with art. Most of all, Ward Jackson was a real New Yorker, the kind who outgrows a small town, and follows his dreams to the big city.

His early interest in art and his restless intellectual curiosity led him, via art magazines, to a precocious interest in abstraction that had to have been pretty rare in his rural hometown of Petersburg, VA, in the 1930s and 40s. While studying painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), he began a pivotal correspondence with Hilla Rebay, the curator for the Guggenheim family who had recently launched the Museum of Non-Objective Art, which, of course, later became the Guggenheim Museum. She encouraged him to send sketches, which she would review offering comment. I can imagine him eagerly waiting for the return mail! Her interest in his work, which meant so much to him, fostered both his life-long interest in the complexities of the figure/ground relationship in abstract painting and his scholarly interest in the early development of abstraction.  When he neared graduation, she offered him a job at the Guggenheim.   After a period of study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, Ward finally settled in New York and took her up on it.

He started in the mailroom where he worked with Dan Flavin (who later dedicated a light piece that curled down the ramp to him ) before the Frank Lloyd Wright building was completed, and worked through various positions until becoming the archivist in the early 70s. In that position he remained an active part of that institution until his retirement in 1996, though even then he was called upon for projects and maintained desk space in a series of ever smaller nooks of Leiderkranz Hall, the rambling building on 86th Street that housed the archives at that time. For instance, when the cafe was remodeled in the late 90s, Ward curated the photographs that still hang there as a visual history of the museum.

The last time he and I went to the Guggenheim together was in the summer of 2003. Matthew Barney’s vast project was in the rotunda then, but we had come to see the exhibition of Malevich’s brilliant early work that was installed in an upstairs gallery. Ward knew well the intricacies of the building, and led me through a bewildering series of back offices and staircases so as to avoid the Barney. Everyone knew him and he had the run of the place. Before reaching the gallery, we passed an open door, which briefly revealed the rotunda. Ward held his hand beside his face to block out the view and hurried forward to view unsullied the distant idealism of the early Malevich. As a true believer in abstraction, he felt that the Guggenheim had gradually lost its moorings, sense of mission, and drifted far from its founding ethos under Baroness Rebay. This sense of traditionalism set him apart from many of his contemporaries, but was a deep part of him and deeply informed his work. We left the Malevich via another circuitous back way heading to the basement so that Ward could empty his bulging mailbox into his own equally and always bulging shoulder bag. It was the last time that he would visit place he knew and loved so well.

He passed away early in 2004, and Lisa Dennison, who curated Singular Forms, and who had known him at the museum since the 70s, generously included that painting that you saw in the exhibition. At the opening a large group of friends and colleagues gathered there sharing wine and memories. That corner of the ramp that night felt like a crowded opening in a small gallery. I know Ward must have felt right at home.

Well, that’s a long answer to your short question, and it really only touches on one side of him. Ward was certainly passionate about his job, but most of all, thought of himself as a painter and his work will be the focus of the exhibition at Metaphor.

Ward Jackson
Composition, 1948
Oil on masonite, 24 x 18 inches

MD: That was an inspired answer.  Ward is clearly someone that continues to inspire you and inform your work – both as an artist and director of a gallery.  Maybe you can tell me about your experience coming of age as an artist.  How and when did you realize your uncle was an artist?  How did he impact your world-view and development?

JJ:  Well, art must be in the genes because I was drawn to it. I was always drawing from an early age. We had a good small museum in Richmond where I grew up and my parents often took us there after church on Sunday. Maybe that’s why I still think of art as possessing a sort of spiritual component. Anyway, my grandmother lived nearby the museum so we would sometimes swing by her house afterwards for lunch. Her dark old Victorian townhouse house was chock full of Ward’s early work from the late 40s and early 50s.  She stored it for him all over her walls. To me, my grandmother’s house felt like an extension of the museum and I loved roaming through the cluttered hallways looking for his paintings.

Among his student works were the paintings he had made while studying with Hans Hofmann, and in them, there is a free, gestural energy added to his interest in figure / ground. I loved those paintings, and to this day, keep my favorite one on a wall in my studio. Of course, I had met Ward at family holiday gatherings, but he was an adult, quiet, and didn’t have much to do with the kids. Still, I loved the idea that we had an artist in the family and felt a real kinship with him just from looking at his paintings.

As I grew older and more serious about art, the idea that art could actually be a career was made more tangible by his example. I was kind of in awe of the fact that he worked at a great museum, painted seriously, and lived in New York. In the early 70s, as I was finishing high school, Ward had a one-man show at the Virginia Museum.  It was the first opening I ever went to and it was great. He was showing the bright, reduced abstractions of his Virginia Rivers series, squares of pure color bisected by contrasting colors on active diagonals. These paintings blended tough abstraction with pop color and were very challenging. By this time I felt confident enough to talk to Ward about his paintings and, in a sense, that conversation put me on the road I’m still on as a painter and curator myself.

During that period Ward had also been regularly sending me copies of the publication that he and two partners had started called Art Now New York. It was a three-fold folio containing 8 1/2 x 11 inch reproductions of work recently exhibited in New York, accompanied by statements from the artists. In the four-year run of Art Now (which later morphed into the Gallery Guide), they published everyone from DeKooning and Jasper Johns to Brice Marden and Robert Smithson. It was a window into the art world for me as a young student and a great introduction to a bunch of interesting artists and their thought processes. I would love to see Art Now compiled into a book project because, looking back, the four years of its run (1968–72) were a moment of extraordinary ferment in American art with Pop, Color Field, Minimalist, and Earthwork artists all sharing the stage with an older generation of sculptors and painters. These folios reflect the energy in that mix. In many cases the statements that Ward solicited and edited are absolutely seminal primary statements by some of the really significant artists of that period.

When I began traveling to New York as an art student, Ward would let me stay in his wonderfully cluttered studio on Union Square. He would set me up with a Gallery Guide underlined with his choice of shows that he thought I should see and would usually take me through whatever was showing at the Guggenheim. He was a great source of information and inspiration.

Ward Jackson
Rite of Spring, 1952
Oil on canvas

MD: I would like to talk a bit more in-depth about Ward’s early years, in particular his time spent with Hans Hofmann.  As you know, Hofmann had a reputation for being enormously generous as a teacher and had profound impact on modern art in America.  What do you think Ward took away from his studies with Hofmann?

JJ: In order to fully answer that question, I should back up a little bit to Ward’s student years. I mentioned the correspondence with curator and painter Hilla Rebay, which sharpened his interest in figure / ground relationships of the sort found in late Kandinsky. This connection led in 1948 to an invitation by George L.K. Morris to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group in their 11th annual exhibition in New York. This opportunity, coming when Ward was just twenty, led to a lifelong, close, and collegial friendship between the two men.  Morris was himself a painter and writer.  He was the first art critic for the Partisan Review, a founding member of the AAA, and an outspoken supporter for the development of abstract art in America. Twenty-three years older than my uncle, Morris became something of a mentor to him, encouraging him in his studies and earliest professional opportunities.

Though tempered with his own restless approach to mark-making, this period of Ward’s development clearly shows the influence of his contact with these two powerful advocates for a type of homegrown abstraction employing a shallow cubist division of space and floating isolated shapes that was very much a part of the critical stance of the AAA at that time. In this period he also toyed with Surrealist automatism in a series of small-scaled works in egg tempera on panel.

This tight and cerebral approach to artmaking was given a good shake in the sunshine when he earned the chance to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown during the summer of 1952. Hofmann’s insistence on an art based in the study of nature and grounded in exhaustive experience with drawing and composition brought to Ward’s work a looser, organic energy and heightened ambiguity of space. The experience of working outside, close to the sea and the primal landscape of the seashore with its omnipresent horizon obviously touched a nerve with Ward.  It was something he returned to again and again, and it informed his work in various ways for years to come. For the rest of the 1950s, Ward turned his back on the earlier Neo-Plastic styles that preoccupied him as an undergraduate student and plunged into the orbits forming around the key gestural painters of the time, particularly Kline and DeKooning. In this way his contact with Hans Hofmann was critical because through his summer of work with him, he was pulled from the one camp, with its foot firmly planted in styles linked to the 1930s and thrust into confrontation with the dominant aesthetics of his own moment.

Ward Jackson
Red Vertical, c. 1956-57
Oil on canvas, 57 x 49 inches

MD:  As a young artist, Ward had a number of ongoing “mentor” relationships with established individuals, such as Rebay, Morris, and Hofmann, and he participated in an exhibition with the members of AAA, most of whom I assume were older and more well-known in the artist community. You did say, however, that it was Hoffman who pushed Ward into the “aesthetics of his own moment.”  I would like to know a more about this.  Who were some of the younger artists, with whom Ward developed friendships at this time, the artists of his generation?

JJ: To tell you the truth, I know less about this period of his life partly because I was barely walking at the time and partly because Ward talked about that time in his life less than others. At this point I’m very sorry that I didn’t sit down with him sometime specifically to learn more about that important juncture in his life. Like most artists, Ward was more interested in the present than the past and, by the time the two of us were starting to become close, more than twenty years had passed since he had studied with Hofmann.

What I do know is that he moved to New York in 1952, and began his life as an artist in earnest. Over the next ten years, he explored and expanded upon the gestural style of land / cityscape based abstraction that he had first dug into with Hofmann. He was part of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and, like so many other of his peers, he began his exhibiting career in New York as part of the 10th Street scene of cooperative galleries that grew up around Irving Sandler’s pioneering Tanager Gallery. The tenth street co-ops provided important alternative exhibition opportunities for the flock of younger artists who, like Ward, were drawn to New York in the post-WWII period.

Most of these artists were working in some variation of the abstract and semi-abstract styles one associates with that period. The big players of that moment like Pollock, Kline, Newman, Rothko, and DeKooning were dominating both the scene and the uptown galleries so the downtown co-ops, many of which were artist-run, played an important role in nurturing younger artists. Artists as diverse as Allan Kaprow and Philip Pearlstein, Mark di Suvero and Alice Neel, Al Held and Yayoi Kusama, and hundreds of others all benefited from the support and early exposure provided by these rough and tumble, do-it-yourself spaces.

New York in the 50s must have been a great place to be a young painter with its heated air of intense debate and discussion and Ward was there. He had his first solo exhibitions in the mid 50s at the Fleischman Gallery, just around the corner on 9th Street. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out much about that gallery. If anyone reading this could give me more information about it, I’d be grateful. I have no doubt that Ward was a keen observer of the scene, as well as participant, and made many acquaintances there that followed him through his long tenure in the art world. One friend from those years that he often mentioned was Judith Rothschild.

MD: Judith Rothschild was an abstract painter and active in the artist community.  She was also a member and later President of American Abstract Artists.  Tell me more about his relationship with her.

JJ: Well, this brings us to some of the interesting contradictions of Ward’s life. Judith Rothschild was indeed a serious artist, a good one, and was very involved as a supporter in the 10th Street scene and, as you said, the American Abstract Artists. She was also a wealthy heiress, well able to support her art life. Ward, whose salary at the Guggenheim was modest at best, and whose lifestyle was always marked by utter frugality, was, throughout his life, fascinated by and drawn to the wealthy. George L.K. Morris, his wife artist Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Judith Rothschild were longtime friends and colleagues with whom Ward spent a great deal of time through the years in mutual critique and discussion of both their own works and larger movements in the artworld.

Ward Jackson
Bridge, 1963
Oil on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: This background information, particularly about an artist’s formative years, is always so critical in terms of understanding where an artist is coming from, his/her point of view, and overall value system.  It is a great segue into the work he was making in the 1960s, the work that first brought him to the broader attention of his peers and the greater art world.  How did Ward arrive at making hard-edge geometric abstraction in the early 1960s and what territory did he specifically stake out for himself?

JJ:  Like many members of his generation, Ward was also struggling to find his own voice. The fevered energies of Abstract Expressionism were beginning to sputter by the late 50s. Rauschenberg and John’s were already, by the mid-50s, pushing back against the overheated dominance of gestural painting by infusing its tropes with ironic detachment. Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers were looking for new ways to bring imagery back into painting. Ellsworth Kelly had recently returned from Paris charged with a freshened approach to pure color abstraction and Al Held had embarked on his series of huge paintings based on simplified letter forms. Ad Reinhardt was deeply engaged in the process of clearing his work of the marking and emotionalism that colored so much work of the later 1950s, and the ground-clearing work of Barnett Newman was also becoming better understood. These streams of activity were clearly informed by a heightened criticality in pointing the way toward the developments of the 60s and the cooler sensibilities that came into play in that period.

Ward responded to this crux moment with a body of work, the black and white diamonds, that marked the arrival of his mature style and laid out certain themes and approaches that would engage him for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1959 or so, his notebook drawings show him experimenting with the diamond as a framing device for calligraphic linear abstractions. Over the next couple of years in dozens of drawings, he begins to respond more directly to the tough formal and symmetrical imperatives of the diamond format itself, gradually developing a set of tightly balanced compositions that utilize its radial stability and echo its prominent diagonals. Transit, the painting that you mentioned at the very beginning of our talk and that was included in the Singular Forms show at the Guggenheim, is a good example of his breakthrough work. The diamond-shaped, ‘square on end’ canvas is first divided by a broad central white vertical band that overlaps, or cuts through, two centrally-stacked black diamonds. At the left and right hand corners of this shaped canvas, smaller diamonds in black are separated from the core by white outlines the same thickness as the ‘spine’. The result, though starkly graphic, is a subtle and ambiguous play of overlapping planes in a relatively small and tightly compacted space.

Ward first showed these pieces in an exhibition at the Kay-Mar Gallery in 1964, in which he shared the walls with a remarkable group of artists — Dan Flavin, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt.  The hierarchic and emblematic inner geometries contained in this and the other paintings of this series set Ward’s work slightly at odds with the heightened material concerns of many of his peers in the exhibition. In a sense he was looking back to earlier, more pictoral iterations of abstraction while his fellows were busily staking out the more reductive strategies of Minimalism. Ward’s sense of scholarship and painterly lineage ran deep, and throughout his subsequent career, he honored them with his own personal, sometimes idiosyncratic approach to pictorial space and the problems posed by figure / ground relationships. He would often tell me in later years, “Mondrian only painted 13 diamonds.” Clearly he felt that the great master of Neo-Plastic painting had only scratched the surface of the possibilities contained within the prismatic confines of that difficult format.

Ward was devoted to the ideals of Mondrian, though his own work for the most part eschewed rigorous Neo-Plastic conventions. And like Mondrian, whose early works in particular showed the influence of his spiritual engagement with Theosophy, Ward’s work was to some extent colored by his own spiritual studies. Ward practiced Kriya yoga, a meditation technique focused on the transformation of physical energy to spiritual energy by visualizing its movement up the spine and outward. From the earliest black and white diamonds, Ward was interested in the primary vertical structure of the form, and its reinforced cruciform symmetry lent itself to the punchy diagrammatic nature of some of his more mandala-like paintings, especially in later diamond works from the 80s and 90s.

Ward Jackson
Virginia Rivers Series: Winona, 1972
Acrylic on canvas

MD: To continue that train of thought, how did Ward’s work change and develop into the 80s and 90s?  For instance, I’ve heard he was constantly making drawings on index cards, a couple of which I’ve seen recently in American Abstract Artist exhibitions.  How would you characterize his late work?

JJ: Beginning in the 50s, Ward established the practice of his ‘drawing books’ as he called them, small 4 x 6 inch pads that he always carried in his jacket pockets. On each page he would line off six squares or diamonds and, in these little spaces barely more than a square inch or two in size, work out in serial fashion the ideas that would later become paintings. In this way he could work whenever he wanted and wherever he was. These sketchbooks were an important part of his process and it has been fascinating for me to go through them as I have become more familiar with his linear development. I’ve been able to see how he would gnaw on an idea sometimes over a span of years, before committing it to canvas. This helps explain the fully resolved constructions of the paintings, as well as sheds some light on the sometimes-hermetic nature of his imagery.

As I described earlier, Ward’s work throughout his life swung on a pendulum from inner concerns to outward observation resolved in formal terms and back again. There was always a tension between the seen and the imagined, but as he moved into the 80s and 90s, the free play of ideas, as evidenced in the pages of the drawing books, became more personal and less programmatic. He developed various series simultaneously and within the self-imposed confines of his chosen format was able to engage a wide range of thematic material. One key theme that I have touched on are the group of mandala-like diamonds. Ward was plagued with various health problems during those years and his inherently spiritual approach to artmaking found a deepened release in these paintings, which often featured a rising central axis that, widening as it rose, emulated his positive meditations. This impulse was also at the core of his ‘ladder’ series, which actually began with a group of studies of his view of the World Trade Towers. Those iconic towers, which he could see from the window of his studio, fascinated him with their soaring verticals framing a clear center shaft of sky. At night he was interested in the rung–like arrangements of lit and unlit floors against the darkened night sky. The metaphor of ascendance was an important one in his work, the yearning to transcend the physical. The ‘ladder’ pieces sort of reconciled his key interests as they were based on his close observation and experience of the city, and yet, were also expressive of his personal brand of spirituality.

In his last works, the ‘opening space’ group, Ward returned to more strictly formal concerns exploring once again the unique particularities of space within the diamond format. These are among the most rigorous and successful of his works in this form, I think, reflective of his years of wrangling with it. On their face these final drawings, and the one painting that was their result (Homage to Mondrian, 2001 – 2003), are composed of just two broad bars of color, one an elongate rectangle hugging the lower left edge of the canvas, the other swung upward as if hinged to form a raised horizontal axis bisecting the canvas left to right slightly above center. These bars carve the space and seem to push it to the right creating tension within the diamond while dividing it into four separate and discrete areas of color, each with a different shape and volume. The result has a tough, elegant pictoral logic that pays a final debt to his brilliant precursor.

Ward Jackson
Homage to Mondrian, 2001-03
Acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: During Ward’s last twenty years, you clearly shared an increasingly close relationship with him, which was precisely the same time you came of age as an abstract painter.  You were undoubtedly well-versed in his ideas, process, and practice.  So, on a more personal note Julian, what was Ward’s influence on your own work as a emerging painter?  I think it is also worth mentioning here that you are currently the Secretary of American Abstract Artists, a position long occupied by your uncle.

JJ: Growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, VA, where all adults seemed to be either moms or insurance men, it was tremendously liberating to know that such a thing as ‘artist living in New York’ was actually a career option. I learned a great deal from him and have been inspired through the years by the toughness of his conviction and the purity of his persistence. Ward never achieved fame or great fortune, but his work as a painter and participant in the artworld was a source of intense search, discovery, and joy for him. It framed his life and filled it with meaning. What more can any artist ask?

I am also an abstract painter and inherited his interest in the lineage, development, and potential of abstraction as a mode of discourse. My own work and sensibility, though, has always had a softer focus. As a painter I’ve been more interested in atmosphere than edge. Ward never quite approved of what he considered my romantic tendencies and frequently accused me of being “too Turneresque”. He was a tough critic with a tightly-focused perspective, still, as Pollock said, having a strong point of view to push against is tonic for an artist. Gradually though, Ward accepted the seriousness of my own work as a painter, and later sponsored me for membership in the AAA. I think in the back of his mind he was always hoping to protect his legacy in the group, and sure enough, he put me right to work as his typist for the minutes. Deciphering his handwritten notes was always an interesting perceptual challenge.

Julian Jackson
Cloudlight, 2006
Oil on panel, 36 x 32 inches

MD: And finally, let’s talk for a moment about the exhibition of Ward’s work you are currently organizing.  You are mounting the first retrospective of Ward’s work at your gallery — Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY — which you founded in 2001 with your wife, artist Rene Lynch.  This must be a labor of love for you.  How are you approaching his exhibition and what would you like the audience to walk away with?

JJ: Running Metaphor is itself a labor of love, but this show is special for me. I’m seeing it as the culmination of my long and fascinating relationship with Ward. We’ll be exhibiting a small group of key pieces from each decade of his active working life from the late 40s until he stopped working due to health problems in 2003. Southerners like Ward and myself are made keenly aware of heritage and ancestry and, with this exhibition, I’m paying homage both to my uncle and to a member of the family of artists. I’m very pleased to be able to present a small selection of his life’s work, to frame a sense of the scope of that life, to honor it, and to bring it back into the light. Obviously, I’m very close to the subject of this show, which makes it impossible to be as objective and critical about the work as I might normally be when presenting an exhibition, but I do think the work speaks for itself. I’ll be very interested to learn how a contemporary audience sees and responds to his work.

Those of us involved in the artworld and artmaking to whatever degree are always most alert to the smoke of today’s fire, burning in the moment. Retrospectives are a chance to step out of time and take a longer view. Artists are made up of many things and context is one of them. Each artists’ contribution helps define and frame his or her moment. With hindsight we can see who was in the middle of the frame and who was out at the edges, but in a very real sense, the edges themselves play a constant and critical role in the definition of the center. I would like the audience to walk away from this show with a heightened appreciation of the flow of time that we’re all a part of, a renewed appreciation of the interesting contributions of my uncle, Ward Jackson, and a greater appreciation of the many fires that burn with heat at the edges.

Julian Jackson is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY.

Matthew Deleget is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of MINUS SPACE.

Links
> American Abstract Artists
> Hans Hofmann Estate
> Judith Rothschild Foundation

Robert Yasuda, Coco-Palm (2006)

Robert Yasuda’s work stands well in a corner. His current exhibition includes three narrow corner paintings (“Half Full,” “Simple Truth,” and “Bonjour”) that work like studs or posts, rising vertically with a strenuous elegance, adding a sense of rigor to his otherwise atmospheric abstractions. Yasuda has favored the corner for some time, and his work, even in group shows, always seems to shine from that unlikely spot. Formally, they recall Barnett Newman’s fieldless and tightly packed “zips,” such as “The Wild” from 1950, but the thrust of the work is entirely different. A more recent connection could be drawn to the corner light sculptures of Dan Flavin, since Yasuda’s paintings, which are iridescent, cast a reflected glow of colored light onto the surrounding walls.

The artist’s paintings of the past five years are defined by their radical luminosity and eccentrically shaped supports. The fourteen paintings included here continue along that line, but the color is much more radiant, reflective, and silvery than before. Yasuda uses interference paints that shift in color depending upon the positions of the viewer and source of light. The plank-like length of the corner piece,“Artesian,” shifts in temperature from warm to cool depending upon where you stand—a simple tilt of the head can cause a sharp color change.

Not only do Yasuda’s paintings physically interact with the viewer, but, like true chameleons, they’re capable of multiple color states. Most of the new paintings have an extreme pearlescence that’s reminiscent of the polished surface on the interior of an abalone shell. At times pink is dominant, which gives way to periwinkle, and so on. Only “Pluto,” with its denser color, and “Elusive Metaphor,” with its effaced gesture, both from 2005, seem like holdovers from the artist’s previous series. Although technically impossible, it almost seems as if Yasuda is attempting to extend his color into the invisible poles of infrared and ultraviolet. In any case, his extreme antipodal push has yielded some intense and uncommon color combinations—the rare iridescence of butterflies and exotic fish comes to mind. Other minimal painters like David Novros, David Simpson, and more recently, John Millei, have worked with iridescent and/or interference paints but none has ever approached this specialized medium with quite the same airy delicacy.

Yasuda works on wooden panels that he has shaped by hand. The shapes are subtle, a slight cleft here, a softly rounded contour there. It’s worth noting that Yasuda, who was born in Hawaii, has some experience shaping surfboards. One can imagine him approaching a panel in the same manner he once approached a surfboard blank, with an eye towards shaping an edge to discretely personalize the wood. The artist also adds a layer of nearly sheer fabric that softens the panel’s surface and suspends the color/paint to such an atmospheric effect. Yasuda’s considerable hands-on craftsmanship is essential to his works’ poetic aura. Their manufacture makes them special from the start.

Yasuda’s painting is forceful, but gentle; confrontational, but oddly non-threatening. It strikes me as very non-New York (perhaps non-Western too) in that regard, where every personal encounter is typically marked by a kind of casual abrasiveness. Yasuda’s paintings seem to dwell on the ephemeral aspects of nature—deeply and profoundly, but not heroically. A painting such as “Beach Day” offers all the aqueous escape of the mistiest Olitski but without the weighty ego brio. In that sense, Yasuda’s painting comes as a welcome and necessary relief. He offers us an immediate and cultivated experience of nature, elemental meditations on water, light, and air (Monet minus the weeds). And in terms of available nature, they are far less mannered than, say, the city parks of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, but just as critical as a necessary relief from the relentless onslaughts of urban life. A Yasuda painting welcomes the viewer into an endlessly shifting space of total opalescence—something akin to customized twilight.

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.

View of Gowanus Canal from MINUS SPACE project space

Michael Zahn: I’m looking at your new Knife Paintings, and they’re quite unlike anything you’ve done previously.  The intersecting black diagonals are visually pretty swift.  The drawing has a striking, highly stylized movement to it, and this palette has a gruff quality that feels like a quick crack in the chops.  These two yellow and orange color planes are fairly terse and down to earth.  There’s an optical weight and corresponding opacity to them suggestive of the dirt from which the pigments are made, and somehow I feel there’s the hint of a threat there, too.

Michael Brennan:  My work is becoming more direct as I mature. The execution is immediate. I paint in the premier-coup or ‘first-strike’ mode. I’ve been deliberate with form and color. I also wanted to avoid any antiseptic associations with tape and geometry. If they’re somewhat more workmanlike, it’s probably as a result of my move to Gowanus. That’s not so unusual, I think. If an artist is paying attention, their work will change in predictably unexpected ways whenever they relocate. When I lived on the Bowery, my proximity to Chinatown was a kind of inspiration. All of those ideograms and red signage (Harmony Palace, Sino Carpet, even Lighting By Gregory) had a real influence on my approach to painting. I began reconsidering everything after moving to Brooklyn a year ago, since I did want to account for this unique environment somehow.

Michael Brennan
Bishop, Knife Painting #2, 2006
Oil, wax and alkyd on canvas
48 x 76 inches

Kentile Floors sign with F/G subway line
in background, Gowanus, Brooklyn

MZ: There’s a very definite quality to this part of south Brooklyn. It’s unlike other parts of the borough, or even the rest of the City. The window in Matt and Rossana’s space affords a view of some of it. There are the overbuilt and largely crumbling structures you describe in your ‘New Roman Times’ essay – the massive brick walls, the elevated trains and the expressway to the southwest, but there are also the tire shops and taxi garages along Fourth Avenue, the scrap metal dealers and the beer distributors on Third Avenue, the drawbridges, the loading docks, the water towers, and the chimneys, the decrepit coffee joints, the insular social clubs and the old wiseguy haunts like Monte’s and Two Toms, there’s the sweep of the sky, the ‘Il Furioso’ sunsets, and the proximity to New York harbor…I wouldn’t say it’s exactly picturesque, but it’s all very cinematic. I know film has been a constant point of reference for you. The neighborhood around the Canal is still a part of what I call ‘the dirty New York’ that’s seen in ’70s movies like The French Connection and The Seven-Ups, cinema which has a palpably brusque, existential violence to it. I see a bit of this in your Knife Paintings. I mean, that infamous Lincoln Continental loaded with all the dope was delivered to a pier not far from here.

Smith & 9th Street Station on F/G subway line 
with Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in
background, Gowanus, Brooklyn

Subway tressel, Gowanus, Brooklyn
Photo by Michael Brennan

MB: I never tire of those two films, that silvery cityscape, or that era in general. The excitement of those films is a kind of fuel – all that visual velocity, the harsh cuts, the wheel-well views of a car chase. The cold reality of revealing the city just as it is, run-down, dirty, dangerous and dumb, is strangely liberating. There are fences all around this neighborhood that embody similar qualities. It begins as a normal cyclone fence in front of an empty, litter-strewn lot. Then there’s an addition that went up in ’77, when things got really bad, that doubles the height. But that wasn’t enough, so the top gets crowned with rusty coils of concertina wire. And you’re left with this menacing metal mesh of triangles and razors protecting nothing more than a patch of gravel, some empty plastic bags, and a derelict truck or two. This is not something to tune out. This is something to learn from. I walk by this stuff everyday; it had to enter my work somehow. Maybe we should debate the virtues of Lincoln versus Cadillac instead, like a couple of gavone in a social club?

Michael Brennan
New Roman, Knife Painting #1, 2006
Oil, wax and alkyd on canvas
48 x 76 inches

Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, The French Connection (1971)

MZ: Well, what’s there to say?  General Motors revamped the Cadillac’s image with some new sheet metal and a Led Zeppelin soundtrack.  Ford continues to build bigger and more monstrous vehicles, like the Lincoln Navigator. These things relate to questions of style and taste, and to issues of novelty and obsolescence.  But they also represent a staggering failure of imagination.  Detroit was once the symbol of a powerful and creative industry, but today it’s probably even more fucked than it was in the ‘70s…We should mention we’re romanticizing the decrepitude that’s ubiquitous in certain parts of our environment, whether it’s observed on the street corner, encountered in the movie house, or tossed away as yesterday’s news.  These subjective, aestheticized responses to detritus coalesce in a very modern viewpoint that’s first embodied in Baudelaire’s description of Manet’s painting, even as it pictured the emergence of a stylish class obsessed with novel distractions and amusing entertainments. This is asking a lot, but I rarely encounter contemporary painting with a fraction of the pictorial power and confrontational pose that something like Olympia possesses.  Can painting still shake things up in that way?  It’s curious that this period we’ve been discussing, the 70s, sees both the decline of American manufacturing and the moment where postminimalist abstract painting derived from the New York School experienced a major breakdown. Your paintings reflect this situation, and attempt to recover certain values from that  time.  Do you buy the current idea that abstraction is simply one style among many, and that its communicative power is diminished?

Still from The Seven-Ups (1973)

Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863)

MB:  I never thought of abstraction as a style. To me it was always another breed of painting that offered an incomparable visual experience – that’s why, as an artist, I always found it so attractive. There have certainly been confrontational abstract paintings.  Barnett Newman’s The Third comes to mind. I’m not sure Olympia makes for a fair comparison, but I do often think of how different things are now, especially compared to the 70’s.  I like the new Cadillacs with their faceted front ends, but I never think of them as real Cadillacs.  Once I was behind this giant, white Escalade that had the Cadillac seal stuck on its back gate. GM had puffed up the size of this SUV, but the seal remained the same scale as it had been on a ’73 Eldorado.  It was a stock plate designed for what had been a regular-sized car. This Escalade looked ridiculous, like a fat man wearing a teensy hat.  Anyway, there’s an image that represents the decline of American manufacturing in a nutshell.  I also watched Bullitt the other night and I noticed that, with the exception of a few Volkswagens here and there, every car in every scene, whether Peter Yates was shooting in the city or on the interstate, was American-made – and that’s what seems totally ‘foreign’ now.

Still from Bullitt (1968)

Ford Motor Company Highland Park Plant
circa 1920, near Detroit, Michigan

MZ:  There were, at that point, a lot of Americans around that used to make a lot of actual things.  That’s an idea that seems totally ‘foreign’ now as well. The real blue-collar ethos that was a fundamental part of the ‘70s is today just about dead.  If anything, its energy was absorbed into different subcultures like punk, no wave, and hip-hop, where it was manifested as an aggressively performative D.I.Y attitude.  Those three subcultures are also products of the ’70s, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone now with half a brain who’d claim contemporary pop music is still challenging. That’s not to say, of course, that it isn’t entertaining…But I’ve sometimes heard it said, and it makes sense given what we’ve been discussing, is that this was what really happened to abstract painting:  Around 1977, at least in New York City, it turned into music.

2007 Cadillac Escalade

Led Zeppelin

MB: The fact that live music had all but disappeared from the City until punk came around is unimaginable, and yet two mainstays of that scene, CBGB and Continental Divide, just got priced out of their leases– perhaps that’s for the best?  But I see the whole Minus Space project as very much part of the D.I.Y. ethos.  That’s how all these scenes begin.  I’ve heard stories about Franz Kline delivering his own paintings to his dealer Charles Egan with the work stacked in the backseat of a convertible. As far as a blue-collar ethos goes, it seems like you and I originally hit it off right away because we both actually made things, and that was very unusual, and kind of suspect, among our first New York crowd of people that we hung out with in the late’ 80s. You were always muttering ‘go home and make something’ at those parties on Elizabeth Street.

Barnett Newman, The Third (1962)

Michael Zahn working in studio

MZ:  That’s when I was working in construction in New Jersey and in the City, and was up to my eyeballs in plaster and paint in these steel-cage death-match situations every day.  The job sites were like bastard progeny of the Full Metal Jacket boot camp scenes bred with the frantic assembly-line parody from that I Love Lucy episode with all the cakes on the conveyor belt.  But that was where I really did discover how to make things in an intensely technical, speedy, and highly polished way.  I still use that knowledge today whenever I walk into the studio.  My paintings are like paeans to that sort of hardcore craft.

Ramones (1976)

Michael Brennan
Skeleton Star, Knife Painting #3, 2006
Oil, wax and alkyd on canvas
48 x 76 inches

MB:  Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral is, in part, a love letter to Newark’s vanished manufacturing base. Roth goes on at great length about exactly how much expertise goes into making a pair of ladies’ leather gloves.  It’s riveting.  His main character, Swede, is constantly at odds with people who have never made anything in their lives, especially radical intellectual types. But Roth also knocks abstract painting as something like a catalog of dissatisfactions, which to me sounds more like a description of some of his novels.

F/G subway line with watertower
in background, Gowanus, Brooklyn

MZ:  Swede is like an archetype of the guy who just wants to be left alone to do his work, but circumstances always intervene.  I think that’s probably the dilemma a lot of abstract painters face.  The dissatisfaction that occasionally arises might come from constantly having to defend the practice from what you stated earlier are unfair or misplaced comparisons.  But Olivier Mosset once described this predicament in a typically straightforward way – painters solve painter’s problems, and not stockbroker’s problems or bicycle racer’s problems.  That’s about as punk or as blue-collar as it gets, in my book.  It’s unapologetic in its defiance, and upfront in its refusal to compromise, but at the same time it doesn’t idealize its situation.  It seems to me that the very best abstract painting knows what it is, and knows what it’s capable of accomplishing.  It takes a certain kind of pride in that knowledge, which is as varied and complex as the personalities of its makers, and each painting in itself is a record of that radical self-awareness.

MB: It’s not enough to just think about paintings, or the problems of paintings, their critical context, or whatever else. I tell younger artists this all the time. At a certain point, one has to make the painting and see what the issues are. Abstract painting, like life, is an art of never-ending adjustment.

Michael Zahn is a Brooklyn-based artist.  This interview was published on the occasion of Michael Brennan’s exhibition “Knife Paintings” at MINUS SPACE project space, December 2006.

The seven paintings included here are defined by an unruffled looseness that generally signals true artistic, as opposed to stylistic, maturity. The geometry is more convulsive and irregular. The grids are more ramshackle, and the gestures have become more intractable. These are all welcome developments in Ellis’ typically irreverent approach.

That said, there are problems raised by the paintings in this particular show, and they sometimes leave the viewer uncertain of the artist’s position.  Some might be indicative of an artist reevaluating a project at mid-point. Many paradoxically contribute to both the best and worst aspects of the painter’s work.

More distressing, however, is that the paintings’ surfaces seemingly betray an alarming attitude of indifference. This isn’t necessarily a negative attribute, but the looser handling of paint suggests a reordering of priorities, some shift in painterly values. The question now raised is whether in fact Ellis’ new paintings are gloriously dissolute or woefully dissipated? I’m not certain that can be judged from surface alone. Within the practice of painting, even an apparently simple choice, such as selecting a medium, can often inadvertently reveal something as subtle to perceive as disinterest.

Ellis seems to be relying on the use of thinner, transparent glazes more frequently.  Much of his 90’s work struck me as being nearly impermeable. Those surfaces seemed to have more body, more implied mass. They read more thickly and the color seems to carry more weight somehow. The new painting actually harkens back to Ellis’ early work from the late 80’s, which is defined by watery dispersions of ink that often dissolved rigidly constructed prismatic forms. In one sense, he’s come full circle as a color glazier. Some of these new paintings, particularly those in the back gallery, are nearly as dissolute as the 80’s work in their fluid surfaces and bleeding runs of color. I’m skeptical, however, that it’s still a decision based on necessity in the current work. There’s a disturbing tension at play here that tugs between boldness and expediency.

In terms of outright success, color is the key this time around. An all-enveloping sunny glow permeates the entire gallery, and its twin spaces radiate in yellow-to-orange light and heat. This color energy is palpable in the paintings themselves and quickly penetrates the viewer. Ellis’ totalizing use of color here, more than any other single element, suggests a regathering of force and a reinvigoration of form.

Two large paintings located near the entrance to the gallery stand out in particular. The first, Untitled (SEVL-05-8) from 2005, marks a distinct turn in the artist’s work away from the more tightly structured grids and contained geometry that have remained Ellis’ perennially favored tropes. In this painting the geometric forms seem to visibly skirt away. They are not locked down, or well behaved in any Euclidean sense. Their implied velocity, catty wumpus construction, and imperfect execution are clearly courting disorder rather than any kind of intrinsic idealism. This slipperiness in approach to form reads as an immediate contemporary concern.  Untitled (SEVL-05-8) strikes me as a rare and major transitional piece.  Here one can feel Ellis tossing his personal playbook aside, and reconsidering the game anew, one unlikely move at a time. A new drama unfolds here through the intense recombination of manhandled geometry.

Another noteworthy painting, Untitled (SEVL-06-4) from 2006, is similar, but here the internal elements are more infernal.  It’s an overheated, supercharged tour-de-force. The familiar vocabulary of stripes, grids, and geometric blocks takes a backseat to some seething color fission. In terms of color temperature, this painting is thunderously approaching china syndrome levels of heat and volatility.  Structures aside, in terms of absolute molten materiality, this painting reminded me of Jackson Pollock’s last great Blue Poles.

Another thing that Ellis has proven particularly adept at, and this has been noted elsewhere, is that he always successfully individuates each painting. Paintings such as Untitled (SEVL-05-5) and Untitled SEVL-05-7, like true siblings, are characterized by their extreme personality differences.  I once heard the artist speak highly of Barnett Newman, who, using a remarkably restricted language, managed to proffer some new philosophical proposition almost every time he painted. I suspect that Ellis too wants something more from his painting than just a pretty picture. Unlike most painters, he resists settling for just that. The kind of beauty that he typically employs is by nature uneasy, and is typically both brutal and elegant simultaneously. In his insatiability, he reminds me of the independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, who himself was another kind of irascible (remember that old Fugazi song?). Years ago, while filming Faces, Cassavetes declared:

We have to move beyond the current obsession with technique and camera angles. It’s a waste of time, How you shoot a film is a diversion. I think anybody can shoot a film. Look at the most commercial things in the world—television  commercials. They’re magnificently photographed.  What are we wasting our time doing that for? It has nothing to do with life. Now we’re making that a value. Pretty photography is part of our culture.

What both painter and filmmaker are after is another kind of aesthetic experience, something more meaningful, beyond the gloss that has an immediate and ruthless human value. This attitude could explain the artist’s reckless handling of paint. How important is it anyway to sweat over the polite surface of a painting? This goes well beyond nagging questions about the morality of beauty in painting. Our President doesn’t read newspapers, but most artists do. Maybe an internalized sense of violence is now necessary for any work of art to be relevant? Incidentally, Cassavetes once praised the painting of Delacroix for “his emotional violence.”

Unfortunately, most abstract painters—almost by rule—are defined by their own lack of temerity. Geometric painters seem to suffer from this malady the worst. Ellis intuitively understands this and is consciously confrontational. He has done so in great contrast to his peers, and is known for willingly and repeatedly throwing himself into an aesthetic breech and so has opened up more new and exciting territory within the realm of abstraction than any other painter of his generation. It’s the ambition of his work that has put him there. I’m not convinced that this brinkmanship always makes for exciting results, but to his credit, Ellis’ painting has never been considered academic, or more precisely, Alexandrian. Ellis understands the role of risk in painting because he understands what’s really at stake with painting.

To be an artist is to remain restless. Ellis has approached painting with both courage and desire, and the result has been work that remains risky, vivid—necessarily intense—or in a single word, alive. Society expects painters to gamble with their lives, while artists expect painters to gamble with their work. 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.

Although the artists are generations apart (Smith died in 1980 at age 68 and Kapoor is now 50) and one show is historical while the other is contemporary, both artists share a deep and common interest in phenomenological experience, metaphysics, negative presence, stark materiality, and a timeless formal classicism. Both, at times, couple a strong sense of foreboding with some light and underhanded wit. Unlike most minimal sculptors, Smith and Kapoor practice engagement rather than indifference. For better or for worse, both sculptors’ works always feel fabricated and traffic in mysticism.

The Smith show at Marks included three large and important early sculptures, as well as a medium sized painting which hung above the reception area. Smith’s exceptional “Black Box” was the centerpiece and one of Smith’s first works cast in steel — most of the artist’s sculptures remained in painted plywood mock-up form until recently. “Black Box”, along with “Die” which was not included, was to Smith something like what “Onement” was to Barnett Newman — minimal but revelatory watershed events that redirected the course of modern art. It has been widely commented that “Black Box”, which was initially inspired by an office filing cabinet, looks more than a little like a tombstone — or “monument” in mortuary parlance.

Also, included were “The Elevens Are Up” and “Wall”. The title of the former is an indicator of Smith’s black barstool humor. The term “Elevens” refers to two tendons in the neck that are frequently visible in haggard old alcoholics. It also describes the parallel relationship of the twin black masses in Smith’s sculpture. Those same two modules were placed end-on-end to create “Wall”. All of the works in this exhibition, including the untitled painting from ’62-63, were masterpieces of physical displacement and positive/negative exchange.

When the sophisticates in Woody Allen’s Manhattan were talking about the wonders of “negative capability” they probably had Smith or some other laughingstock stereotype of minimalism in mind. Long pigeonholed as a marginal figure in postwar sculpture, Smith’s stature has advanced from being a bridge figure between Ab-Ex and Minimalism to something more of a seminal figure-larger in some respects than either movement. At some point in recent history, Tony Smith surpassed David Smith as the 20th century sculptor of greatest relevance. Smith’s striking octahedral lunar lander “Moondog”, which was installed at Paula Cooper some years ago, was one of the more celebrated sculptural events of the 90′s. One might attribute renewed interest in both Tony Smith and Ronald Bladen to some wake effect surrounding the spectacular success of Richard Serra, the Dauphin of Chelsea. In any case, Smith is clearly the early master of the black object in his own right. Smith, who suffered from tuberculosis as a child and was sequestered in a sanitized backyard shanty with nothing more than a iron stove for company once remarked “If one spends a long time in a room with only one object, that object becomes a little god.” The weight of this experience is contained in everything Smith ever made.

The Kapoor show next door was equally engaging, and although whiter, it was in no way lighter. About half dozen chrome finished stainless steel sculptures peppered the floor space. These pieces, with titles like “Implant” and “Pregnant Square”, were lightly satirical and somewhat reminiscent of Charles Long’s sculptural spoofs from about a decade ago. The more phenomenological pieces remained the real crowd-pleasers, albeit contemplative ones. Pieces like “Vortex”, with its ear canal like void, and “Whiteout”, with its depthless parabolic inflections, were both objects of endless visual and haptic delight. Kapoor’s grandly metallic mirrored “Carousel”, the show’s most ambitious piece, looked like an old-school space-station and would probably be at home in the Rose Planetarium as much as MoMA or some other turnstile museum. No one could argue against the economy of these pieces. Like Mark Rothko or Robert Irwin before him, Kapoor consistently achieves the most maximum effect possible through the most minimal of means

Kapoor first gained attention in the 80′s for making dense, discrete forms that were supersaturated with brightly hued powdered pigments. The forms seemed to be symbolic and their color verged on a purity that seemed uncharacteristic of the era. Kapoor’s popularity seemed to grow as he pieces became more interactive. His ruminations on the Void have become destination events. Their sheer theatricality is often a target, and many have likened the works to the kind of impossible props, such as the infamous floating water spigot, one associates with a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.

I, for one, am willing to take Kapoor’s spiritual aspirations at face value. I find both Smith and Kapoor’s spiritual vacuity-emptiness with a capital E-endlessly more appealing than the general vacuousness one might associate with the Chelsea experience. Kapoor’s art is concerned with “issues that lie below the material, with the fact that materials are there to make something else possible…the non-physical things, the intellectual things, the possibilities that are available through the material.” What could be more difficult or praiseworthy than trying to arrive at the immaterial by way of the material? This is the paradox that lies within both Tony Smith and Anish Kapoor.

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.

The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in February 2004 in conjunction with Hartmut Böhm’s spotlight exhibition.

Matthew Deleget: I would like to begin our interview – your first published in English – with a brief discussion of the art climate in Germany directly following World War II. You were born in Kassel, Germany, in 1938, and came of age during the war and post-war period. The war clearly caused a massive disruption with prior concrete art movements developed by the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands, and Constructivism in Russia. Where and how did concrete art and artists regroup and reemerge during the late 1940s and 1950s in Germany?

Hartmut Böhm: The first years after the war were struck with shortages, the strains of daily life, and the reconstruction of destroyed structures.

Documenta I in Kassel in 1955 was certainly the reentry into the international art dialogue; it took place in the makeshift Fridericianum, which was badly damaged in the war. The Art Academy (Kunstakademie) in Kassel was newly re-founded in 1948 with a partial adoption of the teaching methods of the Bauhaus, which were expressed in the new term “work academy.“

The High School for Form (Hochschule für Gestaltung), founded in Ulm in 1953, oriented itself even more clearly after the Bauhaus. It had the requirement of comprehensive, intellectual discussion with the outside world; the initiators were Otl Aicher and Inge Scholl, in memory of their siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed by the Nazis. Max Bill became their first principal and planned the school building.

Anton Stankowski returned back to Stuttgart from Switzerland and resumed his work in art and graphic design, which he began in Stuttgart in the 1930s. Max Hermann Mahlmann returned from the war and found his constructive pictorial language in Hamburg in the 1950s. Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, who lived during the war in Holland, went to the High School for Form (Hochschule für Gestaltung) in Ulm. Josef Albers stayed in the United States, but came to Ulm as a guest lecturer between 1953 and 1955. Otto Ritschl worked in Wiesbaden.

The younger generation first formed at the end of the 1950s in Rheinland. Düsseldorf and Cologne became important places for art. I am thinking about Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günter Uecker, and the broader circle of European “Zero” artists. The actual concrete artists, however, lived, worked, and taught at various places and remained widely isolated, until little by little newly-founded galleries came into being – for instance, Galerie “Der Spiegel“ in Cologne; Galerie Teufel in Koblenz (later Cologne); Galerie Hoffmann in Frankfurt (later Friedberg); and others.

MD: Two of the artists you cite as major influences in your artistic development are Max Bill (Swiss, 1908-1994) and Richard Paul Lohse (Swiss, 1902-1988). In the United States, there is very little information about these seminal artists in the form of exhibitions, monographs, essays, dialogue, etc. Please discuss the legacy of these two artists on concrete art in Germany and, more specifically, their impact on the development of your work and thinking.

HB: The “Zurich Concretes“ had the privilege of continuing to develop the constructivist tradition of the pioneering generation in neutral Switzerland. Max Bill grew up as a student of the Bauhaus. He impressed and influenced me with his far-reaching theoretical and curatorial work, as well as his wonderful graphic, painterly, and sculptural work. Still today, I know how directly his “Skulptur 22“ overwhelmed me at the 1959 Documenta.

His writing, “The Mathematical Way of Thinking in Art” (Die mathematische Denkweise in der Kunst) from 1949 gave concrete art a theoretical foundation. During the war (1944), he showed the first exhibition on the theme in the Kunsthalle Basel under the title “Concrete Art.“ In 1960 he put together a second concrete art exhibition that also included North and South American positions (Alexander Liberman, Ad Reinhard, Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith, Mary Vieira, Luiz Saciloto, Hermelindo Fiaminghi and others).

Richard Paul Lohse influenced me with the rigid consequences of his modular and serial orders, which he developed beginning in the early 1940s. I have visited him multiple times in Zurich since the 1960s and he has become something of a “fatherly friend.“ He has been interested and engaged in the work of younger artists his entire life; he has intensely followed my work and analyzed it with rigorous exactitude. I am especially thankful to him for insight into the conclusive consequences that hold a work together structurally.

It is difficult to comprehend, why so little attention has been given to these two influential artists in the United States. Max Bill had a large exhibition at least in 1974 at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which was shown afterwards at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the San Francisco Museum of Art. To my knowledge, Lohse was introduced by Donald Judd at 101 Spring Street in 1988 and with a few paintings in a solo exhibition in Marfa.

MD: You were a student of Arnold Bode, artist and founder of Documenta (started in 1955), at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Kassel, Germany, from 1958-1962. You made your first geometric relief sculptures as a student during this time period. What impact did Bode’s teaching have on your artistic development? What influence did the early Documenta exhibitions have on you?

HB: Arnold Bode was a charismatic man, inspired teacher, and brilliant exhibition designer. He himself painted abstract expressionist, but in his classes, very different positions gathered. I was the only one who worked systematically constructive, but I was in close contact with similar loners, from Fritz Winter’s class Kunibert Fritz and Horst Schwitzki; from the sculpture class Werner Krieglstein and Klaus Müller-Domnick; and, not to be forgotten, from the graphics class with Helmut Schmidt-Rhen, Heinz Nickel who lectured on printmaking at the time.

As my teacher, Bode had therefore no direct influence on the development of my work, but his generosity gave me the room to find my own way. I made my first systematic white reliefs and began to work in series. The theme of “progression“ became decisive.

Documenta II in 1959 was the deciding event of the year; we were literally in Friderizianum and Orangerie daily, where we helped with construction. One couldn’t see the art any closer. I remember how Bode instructed us to carry paintings by Franz Kline or Mark Rothko to specific walls.

After the opening we worked on security and daily tours (by the way, all of Bode’s people were ordered to wear gray pants and white shirts – he hated the uniforms of the usual security personnel).

MD: In 1964, you participated in the landmark exhibition “Nouvelle Tendance” at the Musee de Arts Decoratifs in Paris, which signaled the emergence of Op and Kinetic Art. The exhibition also included artists such as Bridget Riley and Carlos Cruz-Diez, among others. What was your relationship to the “Nouvelle Tendance” movement? Did you welcome the labels “optical” and “kinetic” for your work?

HB: In 1961 I wrote my student thesis “About Constructivism“ (Über den Konstruktvismus), in which I analyzed the historical line from Malevich, Van Doesburg, Moholy-Nagy, and Bill through Gerstner via their manifestos and paintings. Karl Gerstner introduced the most avanced form of concrete art for me at that time through his variable picture-systems. I visited him in Basel and showed him a graphic series, which originated from a photographic overlaying of identical positive and negative patterns. He, in turn, showed them to Matko Mestrovic from Zagreb, who was the inspiration and theoretical head of the 1961 “Nove Tendencije“ exhibition there.

I owe my participation in the important “Nouvelle Tendance“ exhibition to the interest and esteem of Karl Gerstner and Matko Mestrovic. Gerhard von Graevenitz was active as a type of artistic commissioner for the German participation in the large Paris exhibition. He visited me and searched out the 12-part graphic series, which I just spoke about.

For me, similar to Lily Greenham, Andres Christen, or Francois Morellet and a systematization of the work process, it was about investigation, comprehension, and perception as active learning. It wasn’t about optical sensations, which it was in the foreground for other artists of the “Nouvelle Tendance“ (even for Cruz Diez or Bridget Riley) and how it was a dominant theme in the Op Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965.

I didn’t see my kinetic objects of the 1960s as dogmatically kinetic, but rather nearly parallel to what I began in 1966 with my group of “Square Relief“ (Quadratreliefs) works. On the basis of systematic, structured fields, they changed visually through alternation of the viewer’s standpoint and direction of the lighting, thereby making a theme of the relativity of perception.

MD: Minimalism emerged as a leading tendency in the United States during this same time. Many traveling exhibitions of Minimalism toured throughout Europe during the late 1960s. What was your perception of American Minimalism? How did it differ from the art being made in Germany at that time?

HB: I can’t remember exactly when and where I saw a Minimal Art exhibition for the first time, but we were well informed in Germany about its theoretical basis and aesthetic arrival through the art periodicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

When I think about it, it was inconceivable to me, the force, intensity, and publicity with which this (last?) pure American movement, in my opinion, came about. The various parameters of Minimal Art, such as the grid, addition, seriality, progression, principal comprehension, neutral technical implementation, and use of industrial materials, had existed beforehand. New and excited for me were the radicality, the dimensions, the spatial reference, and the theoretical founding.

In Documenta 4 in 1968, I saw and admired, among the American artists, the spatial-grasping sculptures of Robert Morris, Kenneth Noland’s large oblong formats with horizontal crossbands, the works of Jo Baer, as well as the absolute reductions of Ellsworth Kelly, the huge formats of Al Held, and systems of Sol Lewitt, which have stayed in my memory.

Among the European artists, the still, small formats of Antonio Calderara; the formal, reduced reliefs of Jan Schoonhoven and Ad Dekkers; and the paintings of Günter Fruhtrunk had great meaning.

MD: In 1974, you made your first “Progressions toward Infinity” works, a concept which you continue to expand upon today. How did you arrive at this series?

HB: With the exception of the kinetic objects of the 1960s, I have been occupied exclusively with the theme of progression: understanding progression as regular, at the same time as a running movement from element to element, and respectively as opposing positions of beginning elements. They were therefore formal closed systems in their basic existance (that then became relative through lighting and standpoint).

I looked for a possibility of finding a progression with the same methodical rigor, in which the last step of the progression lies outside the visible and only is existant in the imagination: a progression from the visible to the conceivable. I found the solution in the simple geometric axiom that parallels end in infinity. Expressed reversely, they don’t end in the finite. The visible parameters of the progression correspond therefore very rationally with the only thinkable last step of the progression, the infinite dimension.

MD: Artists have long been interested in the idea of the infinite, the unknowable, the sublime. I am specifically thinking here about Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of individuals looking at the vastness of the sea, or Piet Mondrian’s “Pier and Ocean” series, in which he reduces all elements of nature into plus and minus shapes (+, -). What does the idea of “infinity” mean to you? And how do you reconcile it within the finite, physical materials you use, such as steel?

HB: My titles reference my concept of the infinite, for example “Progression toward Infinity with 30°“ (Progression gegen Unendlich mit 30°) or “Progression toward Infinity with 75°, 60°, 45°, 30°, 15°“ (Progression gegen Unendlich mit 75°, 60°, 45°, 30°, 15°). They describe the regular advances toward the infinite as a geometric occurence, though also as something that separates the visible from the invisible. I know about the high philosophical, metaphysical concept of the infinite from artists in the Christian Middle Ages, Caspar David Friedrich, Kasimir Malevich, through Barnett Newman or Roman Opalka.

I would like the concept of infinity in my work to be removed from utopia. The fascination for me lies in the simultaneous logical combining of the visible and invisible elements and their derived principal separation from that same logic. Manfred Schneckenburger hit upon the fact, in a sloppy catalogue text formulation, in which he determined that my “Progressions toward Infinity“ are not “metaphysical codes,“ but rather “pictorial strategies.“

MD: In the catalogue of your 1990 retrospective at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany, you consciously chose to organize the more than 130 images of your work according to four reoccurring qualities in your work, rather than chronologically. The qualities are System (serial structures); Perception (transparency and visual ambiguity); Gestalt (partition and outline); and Concept (linear principle and progression toward the infinite). Do you still find these four qualities present in your work? Have any new qualities emerged since 1990?

HB: The four qualities you cite from my Ludwigshafen catalog that structure the catalog into four corresponding sections have remained, in effect, the cornerstones of my work. However, they also indicate the extension of my interests over time: system as a basis for the first phase of work, perception as a core concept of the 1960s and early 1970s, form as the main characterisitc of the chipboard works from the 1980s, and concept as the main idea of the “Progressions toward Infininity“ (Progressionen gegen Unendlich) and the “Comparisons“ (Gegenüberstellungen) of steel profiles from the 1990s until today (there are naturally also fore- and background concepts).

A new quality has arrived. Since around 1990 (although I realized it earlier in a few works, for example, my 1984-85 installation at Schloss Buchberg), I am looking to take apart a given space. That doesn’t mean for me to derive a work from a room’s spatial condition, but rather, to bring a previously worked out project into agreement, so to speak, and check it in another opportunity and in another situation.

An example is my “Floor Work for Odense“ (Bodenarbeit für Odense), which was made for a classical museum (I knew the measurements of the room), after which I exhibited it in an industrial hall in Oberhausen and then in the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund, a former administration building. Each time, it yielded “superimpositions“ of the same work (specifically the material structural elements, the I-beams) on top of various floor surfaces (color and material of the floor) and, naturally, in entirely different spatial environments. Or, I proceed to take with me a specific number of same-sized I-beams to an exhibition, in order to decide there, which sculpture I will realize out of an arsenal of previously established possibilities in accordance with the situation.

MD: Over the past 40 years, you have produced work in a broad variety of media, including sculpture, reliefs, installations, paintings, drawings, wall drawings, lithographs, etc. How do you begin a new work? Do you start by experimenting with the materials, or do you begin with an idea and then find the most appropriate materials to express it?

HB: Ideally I always begin with a concept sketch, at most they are linear structural correlations. Is the first sketch made and “approved“ by me? I investigate the qualities of serial forms. For example, can I express that, what I express with 4 lines, also express with 5, 6, 7…or 3, 2, 1 lines? What happens when I alter specific parameters? Etc.

In principle it is the same occurence, whether I work on paper, with chipboard or with steel profiles. The expressive power of the respective materials naturallyinterests me.

At a specific point in time, plexiglas became too elegant for me (it became too dominant in the consumer world) and I searched for a rarer material that was unused aesthetically. I found chipboard, which, in the world of goods, lead a hidden existance as the back wall of closets or covered by veneer. I didn’t stick on any more elements, but rather sawed out the lines with a circular saw. Eventually I discovered the use for industrial, internationally standardized steel profiles, which made it possible for me to get around the given empty space of a wall or floor as a component of the work.

MD: In most of your work, the visible objects – such as steel beams, pieces of Plexiglas, colored pencil lines – are as important as the empty spaces you leave between them. When I look at your work, I often find myself connecting lines, shapes, and forms in my mind. Discuss for a minute your use of emptiness in your work.

HB: I called my 1990 exhibition at the Museum für Konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt “the room around the lines“ (Der Raum um die Linie). In action, the inner- and outerspaces are just as important as the structural elements. Dieter Bogner called it “intervals“ in an analogy to the twelve-tone music of Josef Matthias Hauer. Naturally the eye of the viewer should look for and find connections and references over the empty locations – not only comprehend my principals of construction, but rather move freely in the work.

MD: There is a current perception among concrete artists in the United States that concrete art as a whole is better understood and valued culturally in Europe than here. Do you agree with this perception?

HB: Yes.

MD: Lastly, you have been making concrete art for more than 45 years. I often read, however, that concrete art has reached a dead-end. What are your thoughts about this perception? Is concrete art still valid in 2004?

HB: I don’t believe that what we, for a lack of a new comprehensive concept call “concrete art,” is at an end. I believe much more that the concept, as Van Doesburg had formulated and Max Bill had presented it, has in between become obsolete. The historical lines of concrete art and minimal art fused together long ago. American and European lines of development are for both American and European artists available and still yield new room to move.

There are artists, and there will be further artists, that will systematically investigate, exactly and consciously work on a lucid art that reveals its methods. The MINUS SPACE artists are the best example of that. However, would they describe themselves as “concrete artists?”

I considered and assessed MINUS SPACE’s terms “reductive + concept-based” as a working concept, which are modest on the one hand, but, on the other hand, are inclusive of artists of very different strategies and media, thereby opening up a new discourse.

The preceding interview was translated from the German by Matthew Deleget. Hartmut Böhm’s original responses are published below.

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1.
Die ersten Jahre nach dem Krieg waren geprägt durch Mangel, die Anstrenungen des täglichen Lebens und den Wiederaufbau der zerstörten Strukturen.

Sicherlich war die documenta 1 in Kassel 1955 der Anschluß an die internationale Kunstdiskussion; sie fand im notdürftig hergerichteten, im Krieg stark beschädigten Fridericianum statt.

Die Kunstakademie in Kassel war 1948 wieder neu gegründet wordenmit teilweiser.

Übernahme von Lehrmethoden des Bauhaus, das drückte sich auch in der neuen Bezeichnung „Werkakademie“ aus. Noch deutlicher am Bauhaus orientierte sich die 1953 gegründete „Hochschule für Gestaltung“ in Ulm. Sie hatte den Anspruch umfassender intellektueller Auseinandersetzung mit der Umwelt; Initiatoren waren Otl Aicher und Inge Scholl im Gedenken an ihre von den Nazis hingerichteten Geschwister Hans und Sophie Scholl. Max Bill wurde ihr erster Rektor und plante das Schulgebäude.

Anton Stankowski kehrte aus der Schweiz zurück nach Stuttgart und setzte sein in den 30er Jahren begonnenes Werk in Kunst und Graphikdesign in Stuttgart fort. Max- Hermann Mahlmann kam aus dem Krieg und fand in den 50er Jahren zu seiner konstruktiven Bildsprache in Hamburg, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, der während des Krieges in Holland lebte, ging als Lehrer an die Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Josef Albers blieb in den USA, kam aber zwischen 1953 und 1955 als Gastdozert nach Ulm, Otto Ritschl arbeitete in Wiesbaden.

Die jüngere Generation formierte sich erst Ende der 50er Jahre im Rheinland, Düsseldorf und Köln werden zu den wichtigen Kunstplätzen, ich denke an Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günter Uecker und den weiteren Kreis der europäischen „Zero“-Künstler.

Die eigentlichen konkreten Künstler aber lebten, arbeiteten und lehrten an verschiedenen Orten und blieben weitgehend isoliert, bis nach und nach durch Galeriegründungen Fokusierungen entstanden, etwa durch die Galerie „Der Spiegel“, Köln, die Galerie Teufel, Koblenz, später Köln, die Galerie Hoffmann, Frankfurt, später Friedberg und andere.

2.
Die „Züricher Konkreten“ hatten das Privileg, in der neutralen Schweiz die konstruktive Tradition der Pioniergeneration weiterzuentwickeln. Max Bill war ja als Schüler am Bauhaus gewesen. Er hat mich mit seiner weitreichenden theoretischen und kuratorischen Arbeit neben seinem großartigen grafischen, malerischen und bildhauerischen Werk sehr beeindruckt und beeinflußt. Ich weiß noch heute, wie unmittelbar seine Skulptur „22“ mich bei der documenta 1959 überwältigt hat.

Seine Schrift von 1949 „Die mathematische Denkweise in der Kunst“ gab der konkreten Kunst ein theoretisches Fundament. Noch im Krieg (1944) zeigte er in der Kunsthalle Basel unter dem Titel „Konkrete Kunst“ die erste Ausstellung zum Thema; 1960 stellte er im Helmhaus Zürich eine zweite Ausstellung „konkrete kunst“ zusammen, die auch nordamerikanische und südamerikanische Positionen mit einbezog (Alexander Liberman, Ad Reinhard, Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith, Mary Vieira, Luiz Saciloto, Hermelindo Fiaminghi und andere.

Richard Paul Lohse beeindruckte mich in der rigiden Konsequenz, mit der er seit den frühen 40er Jahren seine modularen und seriellen Ordnungen entwickelte. Ich habe ihn seit den 60er Jahren mehrfach in Zürich besucht und er ist so etwas wie ein „väterlicher Freund“ geworden. Er hat sich zeitlebens für die Arbeit der jüngeren Künstler interessiert und engagiert; meine Arbeit hat er intensiv verfolgt und mit strenger Genauigkeit analysiert. Ihm verdanke ich insbesondere die Einsicht in die schlüssige Konsequenz, die ein Werk strukturell zusammenhält.

Es ist schwer nachzuvollziehen, warum diese beiden einflußreichen Künstler in den USA so wenig beachtet wurden, Max Bill hatte immerhin 1974 eine große Ausstellung in der Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, die danach im LACMA und im San Francisco Museum of Art gezeigt wurde. Lohse wurde meines Wissens erst 1988 von Don Judd in 101 Spring Street und in Marfa mit einigen Bildern in einer Einzelausstellung vorgestellt.

3.
Arnold Bode war ein charismatischer Mann, inspirierender Lehrer und genialer Ausstellungsgestalter. Er selbst malte abstrakt expressiv, in seiner Klasse sammelten sich aber sehr unterschiedliche Positionen; ich war der einzige, der systematisch konstruktiv arbeitete, stand aber in engem Kontakt mit ähnlichen „Einzelgängern“ aus der Klasse von Fritz Winter mit Kunibert Fritz und Horst Schwitzki, aus der Bildhauerklasse mit Werner Krieglstein und Klaus Müller-Domnick oder aus der Graphikklasse mit Helmut Schmidt-Rhen und nicht zu vergessen mit Heinz Nickel, damals Lehrbeauftragter für Druckgraphik.Bode hatte als mein Lehrer also keinen direkten Einfluß auf die Entwicklung meiner Arbeit, aber seine Großzügigkeit gab mir den Raum, meinen Weg zu finden.

Ich machte meine ersten systematischen weißen Reliefs, begann in Serien zu arbeiten, das Thema „Progression“ wurde bestimmend.

Die documenta 2 1959 war für uns Bode-Schüler das bestimmende Ereignis des Jahres; wir waren buchstäblich täglich im Friderizianum bzw. in der Orangerie, wo wir beim Aufbau halfen, näher konnte man an Kunst nicht sein. Ich erinnere mich, wie Bode uns dirigierte, Bilder von Franz Kline oder Mark Rothko zu den von ihm bestimmten Wänden zu tragen.

Nach der Eröffnung waren wir als Aufsicht und für Führungen tätig (übrigens alle in von Bode verordneten grauen Hosen und weißen Hemden – er haßte die Uniformen des üblichen Aufsichtspersonals).

4.
Ich hatte 1961 meine theoretische Examensarbeit „Über den Konstruktvismus“ geschrieben, in der ich die historische Linie von Malewitsch, Van Doesburg, Moholy-Nagy, Bill bis zu Gerstner anhand ihrer Manifeste und Bilder analysierte. Karl Gerstner stellte mit seinen variablen Bild-Systemen für mich damals die avancierteste Form der konkreten Kunst dar. Ich besuchte ihn in Basel und zeigte ihm eine grafische Serie, die aus der fotografischen Überlagerung von Positiv und Negativ identischer Vorlagen entstanden war, die er wiederum Matko Mestrovic aus Zagreb zeigte, der dort Inspirator und theoretischer Kopf der seit 1961 veranstalteten „Nove Tendencije“-Ausstellungen war.

Dem Interesse und der Wertschätzung von Karl Gerstner und Matko Mestrovic verdanke ich meine Teilnahme an wichtigen „Nouvelle Tendance“Ausstellungen.

Gerhard von Graevenitz war als eine Art künstlerischer Kommisar für die deutschen Beteiligten an der großen Pariser Ausstellung tätig, er besuchte mich und suchte die 12-teilige graphische Serie aus, von der ich gerade sprach.

Mir ging es, ähnlich wie bei Lily Greenham, Andreas Christen oder Francois Morellet um die Systematisierung des Werkprozesses, um Recherche, um Nachvollziehbarkeit, um Wahrnehmung als aktive Aneignung; mir ging es nicht um optische Sensationen, wie sie bei einigen anderen Künstlern der NT im Vordergrund standen (wie eben Cruz Diez oder Bridget Riley) und wie sie 1965 in der Op Art Austellung im MOMA zum beherrschenden Thema wurden.

Mit meinen kinetischen Objekten der 60er Jahre habe ich mich auch nicht als dogmatischen Kinetiker gesehen, sondern nahezu parallel dazu ab 1966 mit der Werkgruppe meiner „Quadratreliefs“ begonnen, die sich auf der Grundlage systematischer Strukturfelder durch den Wechsel des Betrachterstandorts und der Lichtrichtung visuell veränderten und damit die Relativität der Wahrnehmung thematisierten.

5.
Ich kann mich nicht genau erinnern, wann und wo ich zum erstenmal eine Minimal Art Ausstellung sah, aber über die Kunstzeitschriften der späten 60er und frühen 70er Jahre waren wir in Deutschland gut über die theoretischen Grundlagen und die ästhetische Erscheinung informiert.

Unbegreiflich war mir, mit welcher Wucht, Intensität und Publizität diese (letzte?) rein amerikanische Bewegung absolute Meinungshohheit erhielt, wenn ich daran denke, daß verschiedene Parameter der Minimal Art wie Raster, Addition, Serialität, Progression, prinzipielle Nachvollziehbarkeit, neutrale technische Ausführung, Verwendung von Industriematerialien durchaus vorher vorhanden waren.

Neu und aufregend war für mich die Radikalität, die Dimensionen, der Raumbezug, die theoretische Fundierung.

Gesehen und bewundert habe ich 1968 auf der documenta 4 bei den amerikanischen Künstlern die raumgreifenden Skulpturen von Robert Morris, Kenneth Nolands große Querformate mit horizontalen Querbändern, die Arbeiten von Jo Baer, ebenfalls im Gedächtnis geblieben sind die absoluten Reduktionen von Ellsworth Kelly, die riesigen Formate von Al Held, die Systematik Sol Lewitts.

Bei den europäischen Künstlern hatten für mich die stillen, kleinen Formate von Antonio Calderara, die formal reduzierten Reliefs von Jan Schoonhoven und Ad Dekkers und die Bilder Günter Fruhtrunks große Bedeutung.

6.
Mit Ausnahme der kinetischen Objekte der 60er Jahre hatte ich mich ausschließlich mit dem Thema Progression beschäftigt, Progression verstanden als regelmäßige, in gleichen Schritten verlaufende Bewegung von Element zu Element, die zur gleichen bzw. entgegengesetzten Position des Anfangselements führten, also in ihrer Grundgegebenheit formal geschlossene Systeme waren (die dann über Licht-und Standortwechsel relativiert wurden).

Ich suchte nach einer Möglichkeit, bei gleicher methodischer Stringenz eine Progression zu finden, bei der der letzte Progressionsschritt außerhalb des Sichtbaren liegt und nur in der Vorstellung existent ist: eine Progression vom Sichtbaren ins Denkbare. Ich fand die Lösung in dem einfachen geometrischen Axiom, daß sich Parallelen im Unendlichen schneiden, umgekehrt ausgedrückt, daß sie sich nicht im Endlichen schneiden, es korrespondieren also ganz rational die sichtbaren Parameter der Progression mit der nur denkbaren letzten Stufe der Progression, der Dimension Unendlich.

7.
Meine Titel geben den Hinweis auf meinen Begriff des Unendlichen, z.B. Progression gegen Unendlich mit 30° oder Progression gegen Unendlich mit 75°, 60°, 45°, 30°, 15°.

Sie bezeichnen das regelmäßige Vorrücken gegen Unendlich als einen geometrischen Vorgang, allerdings auch einen, der das Sichtbare vom Unsichtbaren trennt. Ich weiß um den hoch philosophischen, metaphysischen Begriff des Unendlichen der Künstler im christlichen Mittelalter, bei Caspar David Friedrich, bei Kasimir Malewitsch bis Barnett Newman oder Roman Opalka. Ich möchte den Begriff des Unendlichen in meiner Arbeit aus der Utopie herauslösen, die Faszination für mich liegt in der gleichzeitigen logischen Verknüpfung der sichtbaren und nicht sichtbaren Elemente und ihrer aus der gleichen Logik stammenden prinzipiellen Trennung. Manfred Schneckenburger trifft in einer saloppen Formulierung in einem Katalogtext den Sachverhalt, indem er feststellt, daß meine Progessionen gegen Unendlich keine „metaphysischen Codes“ sondern „bildnerische Strategien“ sind.

8.
Die vier Qualitäten, die Du aus meinem Ludwigshafener Katalog zitierst und die den Katalog in vier entsprechende Abschnitte gliedern, sind in der Tat die Eckpfeiler meiner Arbeit geblieben. Aber sie bezeichnen eben auch die Verlagerung des Interesses im zeitlichen Ablauf: System als Grundbegriff der ersten Werkphase, Wahrnehmung als Kernbegriff der 60er und frühen 70er Jahre, Gestalt als Hauptmerkmal der Spanplattenarbeiten der 80er Jahre und Konzept als Hauptbegriff der Progressionen gegen Unendlich und der Gegenüberstellungen aus Stahlprofilen der 90er Jahre bis heute (natürlich gibt es auch Vor-und Rückgriffe). Eine neue Qualität ist hinzugekommen:

Seit etwa 1990 (wenn auch schon in einigen Arbeiten früher realisiert, z.B. meine Installation in Schloß Buchberg 1984/85) suche ich die Auseinandersetzung mit dem gegebenen Raum. Das heißt für mich nicht, eine Arbeit aus einer räumlichen Gegebenheit abzuleiten, sondern ein vorher erarbeitetes Projekt sozusagen in Übereinstimmung mit der Gegebenheit zu bringen und sie dann bei anderer Gelegenheit in einer anderen Situation zu überprüfen. Ein Beispiel ist meine „Bodenarbeit für Odense“, die für ein klassizistisches Museum gemacht wurde (ich kannte die Maße des Raums), danach stellte ich sie in einer Industriehalle in Oberhausen aus und danach im Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund, einem ehemaligen Verwaltungsgebäude. Es ergeben sich also „Überblendungen“ der jeweils gleichen Arbeit (genauer: ihrer materiellen Strukturelemente, der I-beams) mit der jeweils anderen Untergrundfläche (Farbe und Material des Bodens) und natürlich eine jeweils andere räumliche Gesamt–Atmosphäre. Oder ich gehe so vor, daß ich eine bestimmte Anzahl gleich großer I-beams zu einer Ausstellung mitnehme, um dort zu entscheiden, welche Skulptur ich aus dem Arsenal der vorher festgelegten Möglichkeiten ich im Einklang mit der Situation realisiere.

9.
Eigentlich beginne ich immer mit einer Ideenskizze, meistens sind es lineare Struktur-Zusammenhänge. Ist die erste Skizze gemacht und von mir „genehmigt“, untersuche ich die Eigenschaften zur Serienbildung, z.B. kann ich das, was ich mit 4 Linien ausdrücke, auch mit 5, 6, 7… oder 3, 2, 1 Linie ausdrücken? Was geschieht, wenn ich bestimmte Parameter verändere? usw.

Es ist im Prinzip der gleiche Vorgang, ob ich auf Papier, mit Spanplatten oder mit Stahlprofilen arbeite. Natürlich interessiert mich die Ausdruckkraft des jeweiligen Materials.

Plexiglas wurde mir ab einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt zu elegant (es wurde zu dominant in der Konsumwelt) und ich suchte nach einem raueren Material, das ästhetisch unverbraucht war und fand die Spanplatte,die in der Warenwelt ein eher verstecktes Dasein als Rückwände von Schränken bzw. bedeckt von Furnieren führte. Ich klebte keine Elemente mehr auf, sondern sägte die Linien mit der Kreissäge aus, schließlich entdeckte ich für mich die Verwendung von industriellen, international standardisierten Stahlprofilen, die es mir ermöglichten, mit dem gegebenen Leerraum der Wand oder des Bodens als Bestandteil der Arbeit umzugehen.

10.
Ich habe 1990 meine Ausstellung im Museum für Konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt.

„Der Raum um die Linie“ genannt. In der Tat ist der Binnen-und Außenraum gnauso wichtig wie die strukturierenden Elemente. Dieter Bogner hat das in Analogie zur Zwölftonmusik von Josef Matthias Hauer „Intervalle“ genannt. Natürlich soll das Auge des Betrachters über die Leerstellen hinweg Verbindungen, Bezüge suchen und finden- auch solche, die nicht nur mein Konstruktionsprinzip nachvollziehen, sondern sich frei in der Arbeit bewegen.

11.
Yes.

12.
Ich glaube nicht, daß das, was wir in Ermangelung eines neuen, umfassenden Begriffs konkrete Kunst nennen, am Ende ist, vielmehr glaube ich, daß der Begriff, so wie ihn Van Doesburg formuliert und Max Bill präzisiert hat, inzwischen obsolet geworden ist.

Längst sind die historischen Linien von Konkreter Kunst und Minimal Art zusammengewachsen, amerikanische und europäische Entwicklungslinien sind sowohl für amerikanische wie europäische Künstler verfügbar und ergeben neue Spielräume. Es gibt Künstler und es wird weiterhin Künstler geben, die systematisch recherchierend, genau und bewußt an einer klaren Kunst arbeiten, die ihre Mittel offenlegt. Die Minus Space Künstler sind das beste Beispiel dafür – aber würden sie sich deshalb als konkrete Künstler bezeichnen?

Ich betrachte und schätze den Terminus von Minus Space „reductive + concept based art“ als einen Arbeitsbegriff, der einerseits bescheidener ist, andererseits aber Künstler ganz unterschiedlicher Strategien und Medien einschließt und damit einen neuen Diskurs eröffnet.