Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication
History, practices, issues and implications
Conference and Exhibition, Portland, Oregon

Sunday, April 25, 2010
University of Oregon in Portland
White Stag Block

From the outside a Donald Judd piece is seamless, hiding all traces of it’s construction. But behind the final piece is a rich history of the artist’s intent and his method for fabrication. Join us for a groundbreaking discussion of Judd’s art, lead by contemporary art scholars and Judd’s longtime fabricator, Peter Ballantine. The day-long conference in Portland, Ore., will look at Judd as an icon of the American minimalist movement, as well as issues of authenticity and fabrication that continue to have lasting implications for artists today.

A related exhibition will be presented in the University of Oregon in Portland’s White Box visual laboratory.

Conference Speakers:
Robert Storr — Dean of the Yale School of Art and past curator at the Museum of Modern Art, art critic and painter
Peter Ballantine — Curator, lecturer, restorer and Judd’s longtime fabricator
Bruce Guenther — Curator of modern and contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum

Curators:
Jeff Jahn — Judd Conference Consulting Curator
Arcy Douglass — Judd Conference Director

Registration (includes boxed lunch):
$65 early registration by March 22; $85 after
$35 for students

To register, visit www.juddconference.com

The event is sponsored by the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts

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.

November 12 – December 25, 2009

Steven Parrino, Untitled, 1993

October 11, 2009 – January 3, 2010

The MAGASIN is starting its season with a portrait of the artist Olivier Mosset. The exhibition takes the form of a tribute, gathering works by different artists, but never showing Olivier Mossetʼs own work. The artists are of all generations, from Carl André to Stéphane Kropf including the famous group of artists 1m3 among the youngest. As a key figure of the artistic scene and part of a family with the same artistic sensitivity, Olivier Mosset keeps close links with them. He collects or swaps works with them. He has today gathered an important collection, most of which was offered to the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds. Other works are to be found at the MAMCO in Geneva, the Consortium in Dijon and in Tucson.

The exhibition aims at drawing a portrait of the artist through a series of rooms organized around different specific subjects. A first room will introduce his roots, with Chardinʼs engravings (given each year by his grandfather to his colleagues), or Gregoire Müllerʼs portrait. Another one will highlight portraits of Olivier Mosset with Steven Parrinoʼs photographs of him and acrylic paintings by Walter Steding. Another room will reveal quotations, borrowings and copies (from Hugo Pernet in particular). The following rooms will show monochrome paintings, floor-based works, and the indestructible link between Olivier Mosset and the bikers world.

Participating Artists:
Donald Alberti, Carl André, Ian Annul, Janine Antoni, Matthew Antezzo, John Armleder, Art Club 2000, Richard Artschwager, Olivier Babin, Fia Backström, Donald Baechler, Francis Baudevin, Jérôme Beauvarlet, Lisa Beck, Ford Beckman, Joseph Beuys, Alexandre Bianchini, Mike Bidlo, Dike Blair, Philippe Bodenmann, Serge Bramly, Gavin Brown, Neil Campbell, François Chessex, Robert Colescott, Collectif 1m3, Michael Corris, Mark Dagley, Jamie Dalglish, Ricardo De Olivera, Steve Di Benedetto, Alain Dister, John Dogg, George Dupin, Gretchen Faust, Helmut Federle, Sylvie Fleury, Roland Flexner, Christian Floquet, Catherine Eyde, Jonathan Genkins, Fritz Glarner, Janine Gordon, Christophe Gossweiler, Dan Graham, Amy Granat, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Bill Gruner, Wang Guangyi, Raymond Hains, Marcia Hafif, Isabel Halley / Joanna Avillez, Peter Halley, Stephane Huitmere, Nicole Hassler, Drew Heitzler, IFP, Alain Jacquet, Kyle Jenkins, Michael Jenkins, Kim Jones, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Ben Kinmont, Yves Klein, Serge Kliaving, Jeff Koons, W.J.M. Kok, Joseph Kosuth, Frank Kozik, Stéphane Kropf, Alix Lambert, L/B, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Louise Lawler/Sherrie Levine, Ange Leccia, Serge Lemoine, Lépicié dʼaprès Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Renée Levi, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Russel Maltz, Christian Marclay, Jackie McAllister, Matthew McCaslin, Allan McCollum, Mathieu Mercier, Haley Mellin, Tom Merrick, Jonathan Monk, Elena Montesinos, Valentine Mosset, Grégoire Müller, Chuck Nanney, John Nixon, Cady Noland, Eric Oppenheim, Dimitry Orlac, Elisabeth Oser, Virginia Overton, Steven Parrino, Laurie Parsons, Nicolas Pasche, Yan Pei-Ming, Luciano Perna, Hugo Pernet, Gilles Porret, Philip J. Reilly, Delphine Reist, Bettina Rheims, David Robbins, Christian Robert-Tissot, Walter Robinson, Gerwald Rockenschaub, David Row, Claude Rutault, Lisa Ruyter, Frederic Sanchez, Adrian Schiess, Peter Schuyff, Michael Scott, Donald Sheridan, Tara Sinn, Howard Smith, Keith Sonnier, Walter Steding, Frank Stella, Valentina Stieger, Rudolf Stingel, Vincent Szarek, Blair Thurman, Jean Tinguely, John Tremblay, Li Trincere, Allan Uglow, Günter Umberg, Lily van der Stokker, Jean-Thomas Vannotti, Ben Vautier, Not Vital, Joan Wallace, Wallace & Donohue, Dan Walsh, Joan Waltemath, Andy Warhol, Stephen Westfall, Larry Weiner, Peter Young, Michael Zahn.

 

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The first critical reader on the artist’s work.

With essays by Peio Aguirre, Johanna Burton, Nikolaus Hirsch, John Kelsey, Maurizio Lazzarato, Maria Lind, Sven Lütticken, Benoît Maire, Chantal Mouffe, Barbara Steiner and Marcus Verhagen.

Liam Gillick (b. 1964) is a New York and London-based artist who emerged in the 1990s in the midst of paradigmatic political and cultural change. In the past two decades, he has developed a highly influential artistic practice around a discursive model that complicates object production and raises key social questions. This reader brings together diverse theorists, critics, historians, curators and artists to address Gillick’s work and its contexts.

Questions of discourse dominate the first four contributions to the book. Peio Aguirre develops his thinking around the “poetics of social forms,” drawing dialectical relations between Gillick’s screen structures, designs, collaborations and the social imaginary of his writings, treating the artist’s praxis as a “whole,” albeit a necessarily elusive one. Sven Lütticken also attends to elusiveness – Gillick’s as well as artist-writers’ such as Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Marcel Broodthaers and Donald Judd – but stresses two conflicting impulses at play in (not) making sense: a critical strategy and an economic imperative. Marcus Verhagen focuses on Gillick’s collection of critical writing, Proxemics: Selected Writings (1988-2006), and develops key distinctions: between Gillick’s discourse and that of Nicolas Bourriaud; and between these two sometime collaborators and the art historian and critic Claire Bishop, who took up Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s notion of “antagonism” to critique Bourriaud’s notion of “relational aesthetics” alongside the art of Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija. John Kelsey combines Foucault’s use of the Ancient Greek term parrhesia — a public speaking of truth, even in the face of death — with Deleuze’s notion of “indirect discourse,” to question the political underpinnings and truth claims in Gillick’s “Volvo” fiction.

At their core of the next three essays lie the political and ideological problems of defining difference — which Gillick repeatedly nominates as a key concern – and of practicing differentiation. Barbara Steiner distinguishes corruption, corruptibility, and complicity with market forces and institutional powers. Chantal Mouffe reviews her notion of radical democracy and antagonism drawing nuanced connections and distinctions between Gillick’s praxis and the theories she has developed (also with Ernesto Laclau). Johanna Burton’s essay notes a lack of specificity with regard to Gillick’s deployment of the term “difference” and goes on to develop an instance of feminist difference rooted in enthusiasm.

Maria Lind considers kitchens. She takes up this ubiquitous feature of every modern home as a historical nexus, both of the post-World War II ideological battles over planning and speculation, and of several gender-coded modes of production. Further questioning the grounds of practice, Nikolaus Hirsch, considers the changing status of the architectural model as a thought-paradigm and as a thing for forging politics.

The last two essays tarry with the operative abstractions of temporality and historical consciousness. Maurizio Lazzarato, whose theorization of immaterial labor has been especially influential for Gillick, contributes notes on the current economic crisis. He focuses on how the logic of debt within neoliberal capitalism, where tomorrow’s earnings are consumed in today’s purchases, becomes a tool to block possibilities of thinking alternative futures. Benoît Maire’s links the free floating time found in Gillick’s fictional writings to developments in continental philosophy, using a complex notion of the screen as a device for mediating social relations in a post-historical time.

Meaning Liam Gillick is published by the partners organizing the ongoing survey exhibition: Liam Gillick: Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario.

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 19.01.08 – 24.03.08
Kunsthalle Zürich, 26.01.08 – 30.03.08
Kunstverein München, 27.09.08 –16.11.08
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 10.10.09 – 10.01.10

 

Installation view

March 19 – May 3, 2009

Kjell Varvin (born 1939) creates both drawings and paintings, but is best known for his sculptures and installations. This exhibition focuses on a large selection of sculptures made of welded steel and produced over the last fifteen years. Together with the sculptures, a number of drawings on veneer will be on show and the exhibition thereby comprises the largest presentation of Varvin’s work so far.

Kjell Varvin’s oeuvre has its roots in Minimalism and the artist himself emphasises how much artists such as Donald Judd, Brice Marden and Sol LeWitt have influenced him (Varvin also later worked as Lewitt’s assistant). However, Varvin uses a method that has more in common with improvisation and playfulness than with stringent planning and perfection. He allows random chance, spontaneous ideas and accidents to be a part of his works, which he prefers to call “proposals” rather than “statements”. This process results in drawings and sculptures that have retained elements of imperfection and therefore also their human quality.

At first sight, the sculptures may resemble classical, modernist works, but since their titles and other components refer to observations of everyday objects (as, for example, fire escapes in New York, a pinball machine or a dining table), they appear on closer examination as up-to-date works with a referential diversity that reminds us first and foremost of far younger, postmodernist artists. The exhibition has a fresh and topical quality, though consisting of works by an artist who made his debut in 1964.

Throughout his career, Kjell Varvin has exhibited extensively both in Norway and abroad. In recent years, he has participated at major exhibitions such as the Sculpture Biennial at the Vigeland Museum and the Drawing Biennial at the Artists’ House in Oslo and also at joint exhibitions such as “Geometry as Image” at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York and “Go back to Start” and 0047 (all held in 2008). Varvin’s last solo exhibition in Oslo was held at The Drawing Center of Norway in 2007.

 

Installation view
Photo: Genevieve Hanson, NY 

March 5 – April 18, 2009

Curated by Peter Ballantine

When Donald Judd very reluctantly abandoned painting in 1961-62 in favor of working in three dimensions, it was because he had finally concluded that a philosophically tenable painting was not possible – philosophically in the empirical-perceptual sense of being entirely available visually, and tenable in the sense of being free of abstraction or any other kind of representation. He called these ‘illusionism’ because they are all, in the strictest sense, contrary-to-fact, and therefore anti-visual.

Judd later objected on serious grounds to the term ’sculpture’ for his work, but from 1962 until early 1964 (when he started having his work fabricated) this term was not entirely inappropriate, even on his own terms, in that these works, still noticeably handmade and hand-painted, remained, even though unintentionally, slightly expressive. As a former painter, Judd understood color and how it could be used — and, incidentally, considered all materials to be colored — but there was a lingering depictive, cosmetic, and surface-obscuring quality to applied paint.

In a 1963 floorpiece, Untitled (DSS 38), Judd covered what would otherwise have been a seventh broad area of hand-painted plywood, with a four and a half square foot piece of 1/8-inch opaque purple plexiglas; the contrast of both colors and materials is defining. This piece, the earliest in the exhibition, is Judd’s first use of plexiglas. Later works include a 1989 (by now unpainted) plywood and brown plexiglas wall-piece, Untitled (89-38 Ballantine), where the browns of the plywood and plexiglas reinforce each other.

Plexiglas, manufactured (cast) between sheets of plate glass, takes on the consistent flatness, gloss, and material thickness of glass, but is much lighter and fairly easily worked with hand tools. Transparent plexiglas—either colored or clear—has the optical clarity of glass. Opaque plexiglas, unlike a layer of paint, has, as Judd said, the same saturated color “through and through” and an independent substantiality. This quality of plexiglas being ‘a better paint,’ of being an improvement on applied paint, is only one of the paint-like ways Judd found to use colored plexiglas. His previous use of straight-out-of-the-tube oil paint found a parallel in the strong, but limited variety of standard ‘found’ plexiglas colors. Within ten years he was sometimes even using two layers of plexiglas together, a transparent yellow, for example, over an opaque red, to achieve a third color — not orange, by the way — or, more rarely, colored transparent over paint, similar to something only possible in painting through glazes.

There are other ways Judd uses transparent plexiglas that relate directly back to glass, especially stained glass, with its ability to seal, admit light, reveal and color interiors, as seen in a 1966 ’single stack,’ Untitled (DSS 89), and in a 1970 stainless steel and amber plexiglas ‘turnbuckle piece,’ Untitled (DSS 234), where the entire interior and every detail of its dynamic construction is visually accessible.

Untitled, 1979 (79-40 Bernstein), an unusual variation on a classic transparent ’stack,’ has red opaque plexiglas top and bottom, referring back to both the glass and paint properties of colored plexiglas.

Daniel Robert Hunziker, Corner, 2009
142 x 125 x 75 cm

March 13 – May 9, 2009

Andreas Grimm München presents MAXIMAL MINIMAL featuring artists Robert Dowling, Terry Haggerty, Daniel Robert Hunziker, Donald Judd, David Renggli, Stefan Sandner, Sebastian Wickeroth & Claudia Wieser.

The title of the exhibition is meant to juxtapose the term ‘Minimal Art’ with its antonym ‘Maximal’, not as a paradox or contradiction, but rather as a combination of thoughts on the nature of the works shown. It explains the relationship of the history and influences of Minimalism on contemporary art. From its beginning at the German Bauhaus to the American Minimal Art of the 60’s, the term ‘Minimal’ reflects a reduction within a formal repertoire, but can be misinterpreted as a limitation within its own artistic field. The exhibition shows that despite a formal reduction within individual works, artists achieve a maximal effect on the viewer. The drawings, sculptures and paintings included in the exhibition may suggest that, although the aesthetics of some have a more academic and interpretative meaning rather than an immediate and material approach, aesthetics and substance should not be mistaken as contrasting poles, but rather as coexisting components of Minimal Art. In this way, the exhibition provides different avenues through which the viewer may experience contemporary interpretations of Minimalism.

Among Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin, Fred Sandback or Richard Serra, Donald Judd (*1928 in Excelsior Springs/Missouri, †1994, New York, USA) is considered to be one of the pioneers and protagonists of the American Minimalism. His wall sculpture ‚Untitled (87-28 Menziken)’, 1987, shown at Andreas Grimm München points out the spacial dimension of works of Minimal Art as well as its Classicism in terms of the movement.

A cursory view on the drawings of Terry Haggerty (*1970 in London, England), which are shown for the first time here, reveals restrained clear, schematic forms and consistent coloration. A closer look shows the capillary pencil strokes that assist the artist in his drawing process. Instead of erasing them afterwards, Haggerty shows them as basic elements of his works. In doing so, he discloses the creative process and the construction of the constructed.

The objects of Daniel Robert Hunziker (*1965 in Walenstadt, Switzerland) are positioned between installation and model. Their concrete sources are found mostly in constructions in ones daily environment to which Hunziker looks with the eye of a sculptor. The piece shown in the exhibition, ‘Corner’, 2009, reveals the artist’s particular interest in the interaction between light and material surface.

Robert Dowling (*1979 in London, England) gathers simple shapes from a wide variety of sources, which he recombines to produce complex recurring geometric works. Adopting a sculptural approach to making paintings that pop back and forth between 2- and 3- dimensions, his practice echoes and subverts the methodologies and processes of minimalism.

We could take David Renggli’s (*1977 in Zurich, Switzerland) work ‘Schloss’, 2009, (german for castle and lock) as though it were in a thwarted dialog with works of Minimalism, which are already considered traditional. The smooth, polished surface of ‘Schloss’ displays, with a subtle irony, the object’s inoperability. We are able to participate in Renggli’s view on the history of art, part criticque of Minimalism, part commentary on the heroizing of the modern ‘masters’ of Minimal Art.

In Sebastian Wickeroth’s (*1977 in Issum, Germany) floor sculpture, corrosion counters the formal, geometrical and monochrome perfection. But it is not about the destruction of a sculpture, but to create decomposition as an equal mode of construction. In using simple materials like plasterboard walls, wood, styrofoam and enamel, which are turning into room filling, extensive interventions in space, we could also disclose an artistic statement.

By his decision to entitle his work ‘Guess I am doing fine (target)’, 2003, Stefan Sandner (*1968 in Vienna, Austria) sets off the traditional objectivity of Minimal Art. Through this title, the impression of coloured circles fitted into each other and placed on two triangular canvases is channeled toward the idea of a target. Accordingly, viewers’ interpretations of the work are directed away from the non-objective and abstract to the representational, while at the same time, undermining it through the use of combined shaped canvases reminiscent of Color Field and Minimal masters.

The exhibition also discusses the boundaries of Minimal Art. Does the viewer come to the decision arbitrarily if he or she views the work of Claudia Wieser (*1973 in Freilassing, Germany) as part of the tradition of Minimalism or not? Her fine line-making practice, which could be seen as at the edge of Minimalism, provokes the idea of Minimalism’s limits.

 

 

“The Rose Art Museum on the Brandeis campus houses what is widely recognized as the finest collection of modern and contemporary art in New England. With more than 6,000 objects — paintings, sculptures, works on paper and new media — the Rose collection has particular strengths in American Modernism, American Social Realism, post-War American, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Surrealism and Photorealism. Recent acquisitions include works by Nam June Paik, Anri Sala, William Kentridge, Thomas Demand and Matthew Barney. These names comprise a virtual “who’s who” of art since the 1960s. With its mission to “engage its communities in the experience of modern and contemporary art,” the Rose maintains an active exhibition program, presenting new art while embracing its foundation in historical modern art.” (excerpted from the museum’s web site)

 

In a move to correct its current operating deficit and shore up its lagging endowment, Brandeis University’s board of trustees recently voted unanimously to close the Rose Art Museum and sell off its collection of art.

A few quick thoughts come to mind:

1. Stop treating your museum collection like an ATM machine. Art is not cash.
2. Art is a critical component of a liberal arts education. Your museum is as important as your library.
3. Why not temporarily shutter the university’s athletic programs and facilities instead? Are these critically important to the university’s education mission?
4. Most of the works in your collection were donated. As an alternative, why not return them back to the artists who toiled away –- mainly in poverty – to make them.  They should benefit the most from their work’s appreciation in value.

 

Recent News Articles

Brandeis to sell school’s art collection, by Geoff Edgers and Peter Schworm
The Boston Globe, January 26, 2009

Brandeis to Sell All of Its Art
Inside Higher Ed, January 27, 2009

Outcry Over a Plan to Sell Museum’s Holdings, by Randy Kennedy and Carol Vogel
New York Times, January 27, 2009

Museum backers seek halt to selloff, Say art should stay at Brandeis, by Geoff Edgers
The Boston Globe, January 28, 2009

Hawk this gem? Unconscionable, by Sebastian Smee
The Boston Globe, January 28, 2009

Brandeis may keep art, says president, Reaffirms need to close museum, by Geoff Edgers
The Boston Globe, January 29, 2009

The Rape of the Rose, by David Bonetti
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 29, 2009

Brandeis on the Brink, by Judith H. Dobrzynski
The Daily Beast, January 30, 2009

In the Closing of Brandeis Museum, a Stark Statement of Priorities, by Roberta Smith
The New York Times, February 1, 2009

Museum director assails Brandeis’ plans
The Boston Globe, February 2, 2009

Is the University’s Museum Just a Rose to Be Plucked?, by Daniel Grant
Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2009

Audio Interview with Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz, by Tracy Jan
The Boston Globe, February 4, 2009 

Museum Rescue Sought, by Carol Vogel and Randy Kennedy
The New York Times, February 5, 2009

Letter: Brandeis president apologizes for handling of museum issue, by Geoff Edgers
The Boston Globe, February 5, 2009 

 

A Letter from the College Art Association (published on January 29, 2009)

The College Art Association (CAA) was shocked and dismayed to learn of the decision by BrandeisUniversity to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its entire art collection for operating revenue.

CAA supports the Codes of Ethics of the American Association of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors, which clearly state that works of art in museum collections are held as a public trust and that any proceeds of sales must only support the acquisition of new works. However, perceiving an entire art collection as a disposable financial asset and then dismantling that collection wholesale to cover other university expenses is deeply troubling for all college and university collections.

The closing of the museum at Brandeis will be devastating to the academic community, not only affecting our colleagues at the museum and students and faculty in the Department of Fine Arts, which offers programs in both studio art and art history, but also depriving the entire arts-loving public in New England and around the world. The teaching of art and art history in higher education is untenable without the direct study of physical works of art, and it appears the Brandeis Board of Trustees has disregarded the kind of scholarship and creativity that have been the hallmark of CAA members for nearly one hundred years.

According to news reports, neither Brandeis University nor the Rose Art Museum is on the brink of economic collapse, nor are they unable to maintain the collections. Given that no clear explanation has been offered on the school’s financial exigencies, the closure of the Rose Art Museumand the sale of its collection appear to be in violation of professional museum standards and of academic transparency and due process; the decision also demonstrates a lack of academic responsibility and fiduciary foresight. We appeal to the Trustees of Brandeis to revisit and reverse their decision.

Paul B. Jaskot
Executive Director, College Art Association
Professor of Art History
Department of the History of Art and Architecture
DePaul University

Linda Downs
President, College Art Association

 

New Facebook Group
Save the Rose Art Museum

 

MINUS SPACE welcomes your input! Comment below.

 

Allied Works Architecture
Maryhill Overlook, 1999
Photo by Sally Schoolmaster 

“Brad Cloepfil is the principal of Allied Works Architecture in Portland, Oregon. Allied Works is a nationally recognized architecture firm that has recently completed projects like the extension to the Seattle Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis and is currently finishing the Museum of Art & Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York. PORT recently sat down with him to ask about the impact artists have had on his work.

 

PORT: How did your early experience with art feedback into your own creative process as an architect?

 

Brad Cloepfil: When I was younger, I tended to be influenced by the raw experience of the work itself. At first, I wasn’t even aware of who created a work, whether it was Richard Serra or Robert Irwin, it was the experience of the work itself that was important. The experience makes you ask yourself about the spatial quality of that type of work and about the ideas that those artists are exploring. It just resonates with you. I wasn’t seeing anything comparable in buildings. It just seems like those guys understood more about the intentions of the 19th and 20th century architecture than the architects did. They had clarity of thought and a practice that was built on the exploration of material that became very important to me. The singular act of focus to create a work of art was really impressive. I saw Richard Serra’s Circuit at MoMA and it is just four pieces of steel propped up in the corners of the room. The physical presence and the mass of the steel and its ability to radiate space into the small gallery was for me a very architectural experience that I could relate to much easier than the so-called “architecture” that was being produced at that time. The experience is about the material and the way that the material is made. It was also easier to learn from the artists because their work is so pure. By that I mean, the work that I was interested in was focused on the exploration of only one or two ideas…?”

 

PORT is dedicated to catalyzing critical discussion and disseminating information about art as lensed through Portland, Oregon.

 

 

October 12 — November 12, 2008

Jacobson Howard Gallery presents an exhibition featuring garden scale sculptures, models, and drawings by Ronald Bladen. Ronald Bladen (1918-1988) is considered one of the founders of Minimalism, but he was also a self-proclaimed romantic. His interest in monumental scale and simple form was less a product of conceptual reductionism, but rather, of an interest in the drama which such forms can inspire. He was interested in the “presence” of a work of art. The solidity and simplicity of his work was intended to reinforce its stature, to stabilize and ground itself as the viewer shifts position. 

Having evolved out of Abstract Expressionism, Bladen continued throughout his career to seek a kind of transcendent or sublime response from his work. He continued to relate it – in contrast or in likeness – to natural phenomena, a point which put him at odds even with those artists whom he influenced, including Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Al Held. Bladen’s work was included in several seminal exhibitions in the 1960’s, including “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in 1966, and “Scale as Content” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1967. He was most recently the subject of a major retrospective at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 1999.

 

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As a concrete-abstract painter during the 1950s and 60s, Olle Baetling (1911-1981) developed a personal pictorial universe, while also occupying a firm position among the “Salon des Realites Nouvelles” and Galerie Denise Rene in Paris. His work was highly influential to American Op artists and Minimalists like Donald Judd.

 

September 20 — November 10, 2008

Kate Shepherd has said of her work that “all art making is a project.” Glenn Horowitz Bookseller presents an exhibition of new work in which Shepherd demonstrates her commitment to the idea of art as an ongoing search for solutions. Stack Shack is an exhibition of paintings, wall drawings and prints, as well as less traditional art objects such as blocks and puzzles. The work calls to mind a variety of ordinary, utilitarian objects including tools, children’s playthings and commercial products while also making visual reference to such touchstones of Modernism as Brancusi’s Endless Column, Donald Judd’s Stack sculptures, and Sol Lewitt’s rules-based wall drawings. What unifies all this is Shepherd’s search for ever more fully resolved solutions to a few basic artistic problems and the attitude of open experimentation that characterizes her process, whether she is making a new painting or something that more nearly resembles a toy. 

For Shepherd art is not about individual pictures on a wall, it is a way of approaching experience and so this exhibition has been conceived in part as a way to bring the viewer more fully into the process. Several works in the show are composed of brightly colored wooden forms placed with no set arrangement—visitors to the gallery are encouraged to move them around, to stack up or pull down, to create a new order or scatter an existing one. A skeptic might say this is nothing more than playing with blocks but it nonetheless provides a point of entry that shows the method by which Shepherd works. Taking only the basic elements of art—line, color and shape—and leaving them as whole and undiluted as possible she places them together, explores the many different ways they can be made to interact, and looks at the results of these combinations. The interest of the work arises from the complexity of the interactions she creates and the way that one interaction varies from the next. A sense both of endless possibility and of benign order quickly arises, and this sense is all the more satisfying for having emerged from a rigorously pared down beginning point. It is an aesthetic payoff possible only because the work conveys such ease. Unexpected color combinations find a natural balance. Lines achieve striking clarity rather than perfection. Shepherd possesses the sort of mastery wherein difficult effects appear effortless. That the exhibition is interactive, a kind of invitation to participate in this effortless flow, makes Shepherd’s approach to art all the more attractive.

 

Olle Baertling, Rabibk Paris, 1956
Oil on canvas, 37.4 x 76.75 inches

October 10, 2008 — May 2009

The Chinati Foundation presents a special exhibition by Swedish painter Olle Baertling (1911-1981). Baertling’s work is widely recognized in Scandinavia — in 2007-08 a major retrospective of his work was co-organized by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm — but in the U.S. it is largely unknown, even though Baertling exhibited widely here in the 1960s and ’70s. (Donald Judd reviewed Baertling’s exhibition at Columbia University in 1964 and later collected his prints.) Chinati’s exhibition will include 30 paintings and one sculpture spanning Baertling’s career from the early 1950s to 1980 and will be the first solo exhibition of his work in the U.S. in almost 40 years.

Baertling began mapping out the rudiments of the pictorial system that would preoccupy him throughout the rest of his life in the early ’50s, when, traveling from Stockholm to Paris and absorbing the new abstract art slowly gaining a foothold there, he renounced his previous representational work and committed himself to abstraction. In the years 1953-54, he discovered what would become the essential components of his work: rich fields of single, unmodulated color, outlined in black and formed into triangles which neither originate nor end within the space of the painting itself. For almost thirty years, these simple-seeming devices generated a rich field of possibilities for Baertling as he experimented with different configurations of line, shape, and color. Later in his career, Baertling began making sculpture in addition to his painting and also created designs for buildings and clothes. The Chinati Foundation’s exhibition will include works from all three decades of Baertling’s mature activity.

 

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1971
Anodized aluminum, Collection Walker Art Center, 
Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation, 1971

May 15, 2008 — July 12, 2009 

Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd were contemporaries of thought rather than form. Each took sculpture off its pedestal—literally and figuratively—and expanded the conventions of what constitutes a work of art, influencing scores of artists to do the same. Grouping Beuys, Flavin, and Judd in a new exhibition from the Walker’s collection provides “a snapshot of a vital moment in postwar cultural production,” says assistant curator Yasmil Raymond, and allows viewers to trace the influence of their ideas in contemporary art. “With this exhibition, visitors will see three different ‘statements’ that reflect distinct positions towards art-making and the ways in which these artists addressed the autonomy of art, its nature, and its social power. These are concerns that this generation of artists set in motion and continue to have relevance for artists today.”

 

“The Portland Center for Visual Arts (PCVA) was based on a very simple premise: artists talking to artists. The PCVA was founded in 1971 by three artists Jay Backstrand, Mel Katz, and Michele Russo. The exhibition space was located on the third floor of 117 NW Fifth Ave. Katz wanted to give something to the community as well as bring to Portland some of the things that he missed from New York. Usually, the PCVA sent a letter to an artist explaining that they wanted to have a exhibition of the artist’s work in the Northwest and could they follow up with a phone call the following week. This was a strategy that proved to be tremendously successful and they were soon able to attract some of the best artists in the country to come to Portland and have a show. The PVCA was unique in every sense of the word. The artists liked working with the PCVA because although there was a limited budget for each of the shows, there was never any limit to an artist’s ideas. After the first few New York artists had a good experience working in Portland, the PCVA had an excellent reputation and the original artists often recommended other artists who might be willing to come out here…“

 

May 3 — September 30, 2008

 

Mel Bochner, Theorem of Pythagoras, 1997
Wood engraving on handmade paper, 22 x 17-1/2 inches

April 19 — June 22, 2008

Our era is driven by the possibilities inherent in reducing countless observations to one mathematical formula and of generating seemingly random phenomena from a set of precise rules. The geometry of the universe has been summarized in E=mc 2, the Book of Life has been translated into the four-letter code of DNA, and machines computing with two digits have discerned patterns in the world of science and in everyday life. Yet despite its central position in the modern intellectual landscape, mathematics has often mystified the non-specialist because its secrets are written in a foreign language of mathematical symbols.

The intent of To Infinity and Beyond is to describe the ideas that drive mathematics—numbers, geometry, pattern, and so on—and to demonstrate how artists have expressed these topics. The exhibition will include an international selection of art inspired by mathematics, and the exhibition scripting will illuminate the sources of the work as found in symbols, formulas and graphs. Approximating a pictorial visualization of abstract concepts, To Infinity and Beyond will reveal the profound impact that these diagrams and patterns have had on the artists who create today’s visual environment, and demonstrate that mathematics—because of its abstractness—is the international language of exact thought.

Artists include: Richard Anuskiewicz, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Squeak Carnwath, Roz Chast, Rupert Deese, Grace DeGennaro, Pedro De Movellan, Agnes Denes, M.C. Escher, Alfred Jensen, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Micha Lexier, Sol Lewitt, Anthony McCall, Manfred Mohr, Sharon Molloy, Francois Morellet, Olivia Parker, Rosamond Purcell, Rick Purdy, James Sanborn, Tom Shannon, Stephen Sollins, Bernar Venet, Julian Voss-Andreae, Ouattara Watts, Melvin Way, Rebecca Welz, Kevin Wixted and Richard Yarde.

 

 

May 3-4, 2008

The Chinati Foundation is pleased to announce a symposium dedicated to the writings of the late artist and museum founder Donald Judd. The symposium will offer a diverse range of presentations and subjects. Among the topics to be considered will be the relationship of Judd’s writings to his art; his use of language and syntax; Judd’s political views; how Judd produced and edited his essays; and Judd’s art criticism and its relevance today. Chinati’s symposium will focus on the critical essays and reviews of Donald Judd, one of the most significant artists of the last fifty years and the founder of the Chinati Foundation. Judd was a prolific writer from the late 1950s to the end of his life in 1994. He produced important pieces on art, architecture and their cultural and political contexts. Some of these are well known, others not. Judd was well-informed and outspoken, and from its very first publication his writing showed a distinctive style: it was direct, unusually hard-hitting, and yet marked by moments of subtle irony and humor.

 

 

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As a concrete-abstract painter during the 1950s and 60s, Olle Bærtling (1911-1981) developed a personal pictorial universe, while also occupying a firm position among the “Salon des Realités Nouvelles” and Galerie Denise René in Paris. His work was highly influential to American Op artists and Minimalists like Donald Judd.  Introduction by Ustvedt Nilsson, John Peter Øystein. Text by David Birnbaum, Daniel Raskin.  Price $40.

 

Nic Hess, König Gerrit [King Gerrit], 2007 (detail)

September 21, 2007 — January 27, 2008

The Daimler Art Collection presents the exhibition Minimalism and Applied I at Daimler Contemporary, Haus Huth, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. The exhibition explores the relationship that exists between minimalist formal language and applied art. As the subtitle of the exhibition suggests these ‘transfers’ can be useful for imagination, association and play. Our exhibition at the same time represents the beginning of a new thematic focus to be continued in the next future.

Approaching the theme from the perspective of the collection’s history, the exhibition aims at encouraging a dialogue between the developments in the areas as an open dialogue. We have abstained from providing a pure comparative presentation of art and design and have opted to place the main focus on artists of our collection who have been active in both areas. These range from names such as Josef Albers and Arakawa/Gins to contemporary position like Andrea Zittel, Heimo Zobernig and Leonor Antunes. The works by these 25 artists are complemented pars pro toto by designs from Renzo Piano, the architect of Potsdamer Platz, as well as by design products from Gerrit Rietveld, Herbert Krenchel, Charles Eames and Konstantin Grcic. As one can derive from these names the aspects of applied art are represented in the fields of architecture, graphic design, logos and branding, as well as furniture design. 

Participating artists include Josef Albers (D), Ruby Anemic (D), Leonor Antunes (P), Arakawa/Gins (J/USA), Eva Berendes (D), Max Bill (CH), Martin Boyce (GB), Krysten Cunningham (USA), Stéphane Dafflon (F), Karl Duschek (D), Maria Eichhorn (D), Ossi Fink (I), Konstantin Grcic (D), Nic Hess (CH), Donald Judd (USA), Kazuo Katase (J), Imi Knoebel (D), Herbert Krenchel (DK), Sylvan Lionni (USA), Alexander Liberman (USA), Richard Merkle (D), Isamu Noguchi (J), Danica Phelps (USA), Renzo Piano (I), Gerrit Rietveld (NL), Meg Shirayama (GB), Anton Stankowski (D), Franz Erhard Walther (D), Franz West (A), Georg Winter (D), Lars Wolter (D), Andrea Zittel (USA), Heimo Zobernig (A).

In his series of lectures, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe asks tough questions.  Why abstract art?  What is abstract art good for?  These questions, the topic of his six lectures, are familiar.  It seems to me that they are asked, and in a sense answered, every time an artist makes an abstract work.  They are the questions that artists ask as we wrestle with the history of abstraction and as we work to move abstraction forward.  And for artists making abstract work now, Pictures of Nothing is necessary reading.

The 2006 publication of these lectures, given as the National Gallery of Art’s Mellon Lectures in 2003, offers the many of us who could not attend the talks access to his clear, concise, deeply informed and often funny examination of the art of the last fifty years.  The discussion of abstraction begins, after a very brief summary of the early 20th Century, with the 1950s – the Cold War and Abstract Expressionism.  While it progresses to 2003 in a fairly linear chronology, Varnedoe also moves sideways, describing the significance of multiple and seemingly contradictory things happening at once. 

James Turrell, A Frontal Passage, 1994
Light, 12′ 10″ x 22′ 6″ x 34′

Pop Art and Minimalism emerging from the same moment.  Frank Stella making paintings that are equal parts Pollock and Johns.  Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman make quiet, subtle works that appear similar but are worlds apart.  Although Varnedoe is forced, in the interest of time, to omit many artists and works that could have been included, he’s not working in art historical generalities.  He’s looking at specific ideas, moments and relationships.  With regard to this he says, “Epochs do not have essences, history does not work by all-governing unities, and works of art in their quirkiness tend to resist generalities.” 

Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959
Enamel on canvas, 7′ 6 3/4″ x 11′ 3/4″

As he leads us through de Kooning, Johns, Judd, Kelly, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Hesse, De Maria, Turrell, Halley, Richter, Marden and Serra (and many others), Varnedoe keeps an emphasis on experience and our responses to the very particular details of a piece.  Small differences, he says, make all the difference.  Whether it’s how we experience the work directly or how the work relates to our experiences in the world, he ties the art to our personal encounters.  Through this he builds his argument that abstraction isn’t grounded in something universal.  Rather it’s based on responses that are our own.  Subjective.  Individual. 

It’s this, a culture that coheres because it values independence, that abstraction offers us.  In Varnedoe’s words, “This is why abstract art, and modern art in general, being based on subjective experience and open-ended interpretation, is not universal or the culmination of anything in history but the contingent phenomena of a modern, secular, liberal society.” 

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968
Brass, 22″ x 48 1/4″ x 36″

Varnedoe concludes with a reference to the faith that abstract art requires.  As he describes it, “Not a faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith.  A faith in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing…”  His faith, his unwavering belief in abstract art is present in every word of these lectures and it’s what makes his insights and arguments so extraordinary.

A modern, secular, liberal society.  That’s something to have faith in.

 

Lynne Harlow is a New York City-based artist.  She will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space in December 2007.

Kirk Varnedoe. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock. Foreword by Earl A. Powell III, preface by Adam Gopnik. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2006.

 

Donald Judd purchased 101 Spring Street in 1968, which served as both his studio and residence for many years.  It is considered to be the birthplace of installation art.  All works on view at 101 Spring Street were installed by Judd.  Public tours of the space are available every Friday at 11am.  Fee $30 ($15 for artists).

 

 

January 26— February 24, 2007

introduction
It seems somehow appropriate to me that Daniel Göttin’s recent wall works — those in which lines of tape placed on a wall are used to make a large, dense web of intersecting lines — are called Networks.  Over a two-month period Daniel and I talked about his art via electronic messages relayed back and forth across a complex network of thousands of miles of cable between Basel, Switzerland and Northern California.  He could write to me in the evening, and I would receive his message moments later in the morning, a kind of time travel.  My job was easier than Daniel’s—we wrote to each other in my native English, rather than his native German, and I got to ask all of the questions, then sit back and wait for his reply.

As we sent questions and answers back and forth, and also exchanged pleasantries and observations, our conversation began by meandering from point to point, gradually establishing different nodes of reference.  Over time an order was recognized, and the conversation was eventually shaped and contained within the boundaries of the interview format.  In doing this we responded to a situation and found a form within it.  Similarly, I recall how in our discussion Daniel described his process when making site-specific works, and it occurs to me that his work is also a conversation, but one that takes place with materials and spaces that involve time, various distant locations, perhaps negotiations with bureaucracies, and a flexible and open language.

Just as how in our interview Daniel speaks with extreme clarity and thoughtfulness, his art also possesses these qualities.  But this clarity is not the result of a fixed or repetitive position or strategy.  Instead, his art is iterative, responding to changing conditions and environments.  Different aspects of his work, both the works made on the wall and the objects made for the wall, are inter-related and work off of and reflect on each other.  There is a wholeness to what Daniel refers to as an entity—his body of work.

—Chris Ashley, February 2006

 

The following conversation between Daniel Göttin and Chris Ashley was conducted via email in English between December 2005 and February 2006.  For further information about Chris Ashley, please visit www.chrisashley.net.

 

Chris Ashley: Daniel, your work can be roughly divided into two groups: site specific work and colored or painted objects for walls.  The site specific works for interior walls are typically made with paint and tape, and you make works for exterior walls, too.  You also make painted objects for the wall out of aluminium or MDF, and sometimes free-standing objects.  Can you talk about the difference between these two kinds of art?

 

Daniel Göttin: The difference between these two kinds of art is a difference of location and condition.  The starting-point for a site specific work is the space with its specific qualities where the work will be installed.  I use the given information (for example, plans, photos, sketches) to create a work that co-exists with the space.  It is a collaboration between the given, already existing part of the site and the new part I add to the site.  The idea is to combine the already existing with the new into an entity in time and space.  The work only exists in and simultaneously with the space, and both become active parts of the art work having equal rights.  It is not possible to move one of them to another place—its existence is unique.  The works made of aluminium, MDF and other materials are works I produce either in the studio or I let them (or parts of them) be produced in a factory.  In many cases it is again collaboration, this time with the factory worker.  This changes the conditions.  I don’t need a site but the studio to make the work, and the number and sizes of the works are limited.  The works made in the studio don’t depend on a specific site, but on the conditions of technical possibilities of production.  They are movable, and they can be shown in different places.  Since I am switching between the two kinds of art mentioned, they are still parts of a broader entity.

 

CA: How would you define this broader entity, which I assume is your overall concern (or concerns) as an artist under which all your work falls?

 

DG: The broader entity is the view of the world in general.  Art is one aspect besides many others.  It is about art and life.  It is not so much about art itself as one entity and life as another entity, seen besides each other.  It is, rather, a permanent mutual influence.  Art can be a way of living, and life can be artistic.  Art is not necessarily only painting (like most people think), or sculpture, or something else in the field of art.  To me it can be anything I see or define as art.  It is a free field without boundaries.  It is about the conciousness of how someone perceives something: the world; the far; the near; the broad; the detail.

Usually art happens in the context of a gallery, a museum, or in places pre-defined for art.  In these places the work shown is defined as art because of the context.  It can also be challenging making art in a place which is not defined for art.  Then art plays on the same level as anything else; it connects with life.

 

CA: Besides showing in Europe you have also shown quite a bit in Japan and Australia.  How have those opportunities come about?

 

DG: These opportunities came about through the universal language of art as I understand it.  Also, as a two-way system communicating between two equal parts, the existing and the new, the known and the unknown, the seen and the not seen.

 

CA: Do you find that working in different locations—different cities and counries—greatly affects the work that you produce there?  Of course, you find various materials in different places, so there is that affect, but I wonder if there are other influences that are specific to the  location in which you’re working, for example, language, light, geography, pace of life, etc.  How do these affect a work that you produce on-site?

 

DG: Installing and producing in different locations certainly has an affect on my work.  Sometimes I consciously include aspects of the local situation into my work, and sometimes I only realize the influence later.  Thinking and working is about connecting and relating to the site where a work is made or installed.  Being aware of the location or the site is part of the concept.

For example, in Australia the light is so incredibly intense that it changes the color range of some of my works.  In Marfa, the presence of Donald Judd’s work and some of his artist friends’ work is so strong, and so sensitively, precisely and carefully installed in the context of the natural environment and everyday life, that it sharpens the perception and the conciousness of how to work with material, proportion and space.  In Japan, the visual and architectural language had some effect on a concept for a tape work I executed there.  The work turned out to be a European-Japanese combination.  My artist residency in New York last year was different again.  On the one hand, there was living and working on the edge of Soho and Chinatown, between East and West, in this fast, big business, art metropolis.  On the other hand, the experience of all the waste, and all the low budget projects, made me work in a more improvised way, with leftover cardboard, for example, and even taking up photography.

Since one location is remote and quiet, and the other is busy, fast and loud, different locations have different effects on my work.  A beautiful landscape, a vast night sky, the incredible ocean, friendly people, interesting discussions, great art, cultural offerings, a good restaurant, a nice bar, a fun time— everything is part of the experience.  All of these specific qualities in different conditions and in each location is a challenge for new work.  I adapt my concepts and myself to the new situation.  My cultural background connects with the background of the new location.  This is what makes a site specific art work possible.

 

CA: In an interview around the time of your Chinati residency you said, “I use normal materials.  They’re not expensive.”  You also said, “I don’t do things that anyone else couldn’t do; but I DO them.”  If these words were taken out of context it might make your work sound somewhat ordinary or simplistic, which it isn’t.  An important distinction between doing and not doing something creative or meaningful is actually “doing” it—taking action  How did you arrive at using the materials you use, and how do you go about making a site specific work?  You have referred to making “interventions“, and I would assume that time—or, perhaps, the time given to make a work— is a factor in how a work comes about.

 

DG: The Chinati residency was a good opportunity to use everyday material, since there was no other (art) material to get at that time in remote Marfa.  I made a site-specific work from material I could find in town, again working with the given conditions.  I got white cardboard boxes (with no printing on them) from the post office down the road, and some clear adhesive tape from a small supermarket called Wynn’s at that time.  Since the Southern Pacific Railroad impressively divided the small town in front of my studio every day, it made sense to me to include rocks from beside the railroad tracks for the work.  All these materials were within a mile’s distance—I just brought them back for a temporary artwork.  Normal, everyday material means material that is only valid in its usual context.  And doing means to materialize an idea, to make it exist in the real world.  An artist residency gives me the chance to spend some time in a foreign place.  It is interesting and challenging to visit a new place and find out what I can do without having a plan.  Everything is new: the people I meet; the location; the way of living and the way of making art.  I use the time I spend in a new place for creating a work that is related to the whole situation and its conditions.  This is the source, a point-zero combined with my previous experience.  The conditions can have a strong influence on the work, as well as on life.  This leads to a way of working that enables me to make art work in any situation.  I would like to make art works of any size, of any material, in any place.  Conditions can be, for example, time, location, space, materials, language, impressions, and money.

 

CA: What are the criteria by which you can determine that a temporary, site-specific work produced under these conditions (newness, foreignness, time limits) is successful?  Can you give an example of a wall work that you thought was particularly successful, and explain why it was successful?

 

DG: One temporary work I made in 1994 in Switzerland was an allover tape work in a big factory, at that time used as a cultural center with guest studios.  It was a beautiful space, but the view had been blocked by many movable walls, and a lot of things were lying around for a long time.  I decided to take out all the walls to empty the space and to clean the floor.  Then I mounted horizontal bands of black adhesive tape onto three outer walls, and also horizontal bands of clear tape around three sides of the freestanding inner coloumns.  The whole space only changed a bit, but it was the first time visitors could see the space itself in a new way, only slightly changed.  

Another work I made was in 1998 at the newly opened Kunsthaus Baselland.  It was the very first exhibition there, and I had the chance to use the whole basement space to make one big installation.  The idea was to introduce the space itself to the visitors.  I made a concept for all the walls and the floor using black adhesive tape in different widths, clear tape, and green artificial carpet.  

A third exhibiton I made in 2001 was at the Haus für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst in Zürich (now called Haus Konstruktiv, in a new place).  This place is the heart of the first, second and contemporary generation of Schweizer Konstruktivismus and Konkrete Kunst—Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Verena Loewensberg, Fritz Glarner, Camille Graeser, Hansjörg Glattfelder, Beat Zoderer, and others.  I decided to paint the walls of four spaces in four different colours, and put an allover network of black adhesive tape entirely across each of the walls.  The first space was painted green, and I placed a Le Corbusier sofa from the office of the museum onto a blue artificial carpet.  A small radio stood in the corner playing a daily program.  The second space was painted yellow and was left empty.  The third space was painted orange with the model of the new museum standing on a blue carpet as well.  The last space was painted pink, and visitors had the possibility to see images of the renovation of the new museum on a computer, which was also standing on a blue carpet.

These three examples are installation works dealing with a real situation, time factors, and artistic and non-artistic conditions.  If I can say each was successful, it was maybe because of the treatment of the whole situation, and an unusual use of usual industrial materials in a subtle way.

 

CA: There are of course precedents for site-specific wall works.  Probably the two most important contemporary figures noted for their wall installations beginning in around 1968 are Blinky Palermo and Sol Lewitt; each is noted for his handling of space and his process for working, and the resulting work cannot easily be called painting, sculpture, architecture, or even decoration.  In 1979 an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago called “Wall Painting” included Robert Ryman, Marcia Hafif, Lucio Pozzi, Richard Jackson, and Robert Yasuda; this exhibition seems apart from your approach since it primarily focused on moving  painting from the canvas to the wall.  Currently, David Tremlett makes large wall drawings using imagery and color inspired by his travels.  Jan van der Ploeg, your contemporary, makes wall paintings that have a conceptual basis and which, I think, seem to flirt with a Pop-influenced, neo-Modernist decoration.  Even earlier are the examples of Schwitters and El Lissitzky’s “Prounen Raum.”  And of course, there is also the long history of frescos and murals.  How do you see your work in this history?  What are some of the concerns that you share with these artists, and what do you see as unique to your work?

 

DG: The concern that I share with many of these artists is the fact that the wall is not only a wall to which the work is applied; it is an active part and support of the work at the same time.  Many wall works stay in line with being a painting on the wall not linked to the site.  The wall remains the background for the painting with its motiv coming from somewhere else.  Architectural-spatial specialties and details are more hidden or covered rather than consciously included.  I see the unique part of my work in the presence of the existing wall including details (doors, switches, plugs, tubes, and other irritations) and the motiv at the same time.  It is what I would call concrete.  The way of reading the work is reading one thing.  The existing wall makes the work visible, the work makes the existing wall visible, and seeing both simultaneously makes the artwork visible.  One of the concepts I am using since 2000 is a myriad of adhesive tape lines I attach directly to a wall or floor, one line after the other.  It’s the idea of doing something the same or similar, step by step, again and again.  The making itself can be monotonous, repetitive, meditative, interesting, boring, like an everyday job.  It’s again doing instead of not doing, and after a while one sees something appearing while the labour itself disappears.  The work becomes independent and self-evident, normal as a table, a door, a real thing.  The difference between high and low is gone.

 

CA: The image made with tape in these wall works isn’t planned ahead, but you make it on-site in response to the wall as you encounter it.

 

DG: The recent wall works (Networks, since 2000) made with adhesive tape are based on a flexible concept.  There are a few things I plan ahead concerning the site.  The image is roughly planned as a starting-point.  With the execution of the work I get additional information from the site, which sometimes requires a change or an adaption.  I start working somewhere by mounting the tape directly to the wall.  Then a door, a window, a pipeline, a staircase and so forth blocks the flow of the work, and it forces me to respond.  This influence can change the rhythm and direction of the work.  Therefore the work links with the site directly.  This work will be different from the last one or the next one.  The continuity is in the similarity and in the difference of both the works and the sites.

 

CA: Some of your wall works cover a complete wall from side to side and floor to ceiling, and others are framed on the wall, separate from the edges.  My initial feeling about this is that a covered wall becomes an enveloping environment, whereas one that does not extend to the edges of a wall is framed somewhat like a picture on a wall.  How do you see these differences?

 

DG: Yes, it’s different.  The allover work uses the whole size and architecture of a wall or a space.  A framed work is usually built in relation to the proportions of the site, too, but the focus and the visual reading is different.  The framed work focuses the view inside the frame, where the wall is part of the work, and outside the frame is the support.  The allover work spreads in all directions; there is no focus, and the wall is a part of the work and the support at the same time.  In some installations I combine both systems—convergent and divergent views.

 

CA: Do you use a wall as you find it, or do you prepare the wall?  Do you change the color or surface texture?

 

DG: The quality of a wall or floor is part of the conditions I mentioned above.  I try to accept a space as it is at first sight.  The quality of a wall is a given; there is no reason to change it.  A dirty wall with spots, holes or scratches is site-specific; I like to include these tracks.  I make the experience so that the mounted (especially black) adhesive tape freshens up the wall as a whole spatial situation; visitors many times think that the wall has been pre-painted.  It is not the idea of a pure art work I make; it’s more a kind of collaboration between the existing and the new.  Ilya Kabakov talks about the total installation, which in my mind is a special case, since the work denies the existing space many times (dark spaces), as do some of James Turrell’s installation works, in a similar way.  It takes the viewer away from the real space he is in.  That is what I try not to do.

 

CA: One of the difficult things I would think your wall works force you to confront is the delicate balance between art and decoration, especially when a wall work is in a more public space as opposed to a space that is recognizable as a context for art.  I’m reminded of this by the Christine Mehring paper “Decoration and Abstraction in Blinky Palermo’s Wall Paintings” (Grey Room 18, Winter 2004).  What are your thoughts about art versus decoration?  Do you care about this?  Are there things that you do in the work to steer the viewer towards one way of seeing or the other?

 

DG: My concern is to build a concrete visual identification for a site, created by an art work linked to the site to evoke a situation in reality that can make sense there.  The aspects of the site influence the concept I develop.  I am interested in a work that makes the site visible through the art work, and the site makes the art work visible at the same time.  It is about the consciousness of perceiving something.  It is a communication, a give and take between equal parts creating a new, balanced entity.  It is a two-way system, different from a one-way system or a non-linked idea projected onto a so-called neutral ground, which I would understand as decoration.

 

CA: You seem to use images in the wall works and the objects that have aspects in common.  You have recently used what you call a “diamond” shape in both the wall works and the objects; it’s a four-sided shape, and sometimes it looks like a square in perspective.  Also, the objects that you have made that look like skewed crosses seem like details from the wall works where two taped lines cross at an angle.  Is this a relevant observation?  Is this a common practice for you?

 

DG: Yes, some details of a work can develop into an independent new work sometimes.  Since I like to work with basic and simple geometric forms the field is limited.  The limitation enables me to use a language with similar forms, patterns or grids in different ways.  Many times it is playing and reflecting between the same, the similar, and the different, making distinctions visible.  I usually work simultaneously on different projects.  The public works or commissioned works have specific demands.  Other works I make without a specific connection to a site, but connected between different types of my works.  It is working in a two-way system, which is reflected in work made in new ways or from a new point of view.  A prolific communication takes place between my various works.  It shows several aspects, and results in my art work as an allover entity.

 

CA: You don’t call the objects you make paintings, right? When you make these objects do you have more options than the industrial materials you use for the wall installations?  In particular, I wonder if you have more choices in terms of color, support, and surface than you do for the wall works.

 

DG: Since my background is closer to three dimensional work — sculpture and architecture — than painting, I would rather call the works objects, though some of them are very close to painting, or even are paintings.  Many of the works are built or constructed; they have a third dimension, and they have color or colored parts.  Some works are based on the distinction between the color of the support and the applied color, which is related to the example mentioned above about the wall and the applied tape for an installation.  I don’t work with a specific color system, though I use color very often.  I usually apply color flat on the surface.  The use of material, and the way a work is constructed, shaped and joined together is very interesting, and color is a factor I use very spontaneously.  Of course, there are many choices in using color for objects and paintings, and prefabricated, standardized industrial material is very limited in color and in size.  Working within these limitations and materials is challenging; it is connected to the everyday working world.  The ordinary materials and the way of making a work of art connects it to everyday working processes and techniques.

 

CA: Do you ever combine an object with a wall work?

 

DG: Sometimes I combine them.  In some cases working on a concept leads towards a combination.  Some exhibitions or sites ask for a combination of two and three dimensional work.  The tape is flat and rather two dimensional, and many objects are three dimensional.  An object mounted on the wall calls for a focused, detailed view, and an allover tape work calls for a distant and broad view.  It’s again a two-way system that simultaneously shows distinctions between an object with its own quality in any place, and the tape that only exists on a specific site.  Both are equal parts to be perceived together with the wall or site.  Using many different entities simultaneously can be an aim in the future.  I could imagine combining different or even contary movements in art (and life)—a combination of, for example, Schwitters and Judd, is not really a contradiction to me.  Of course there would be many other interesting possibilities.

 

CA: I am interested in the viewer’s experience of your work.  The wall works make an environment around the viewer, and so there is an element of time and movement in looking.  The objects are more static, more like icons that have a one-to-one physical relationship with the viewer, which is a way of looking that is not so much about movement or time, and more about stillness.  Considering the images in both the wall works and the objects, they can be split very roughly into two groups: imaes that appear to be solid objects, and those that are linear objects.  Viewing each of these is a very different experience.  To put it very simply, as a kind of concrete example, a “Diamond” work on aluminum from 2004 is like a landscape, whereas one of the shaped crosses made of MDF from 2002 is a kind of figure.  Images in the wall works can also prompt these associations, which are part of how the viewer might begin to physically and metaphorically respond to your work.  What kind of visual, physical, and metaphorical responses are you hoping to invoke with your work?

 

DG: My focus is not so much on the responses my work can invoke.  I understand the response as a result of what I do.  I would like to create a free field of associations that can lead to the viewer’s own conclusions.  Something is there without an explanation.  The art work doesn’t need a reason to be—it simply exists, like anything else in the world.  It is a realized possibility besides many other possibilities.  The art work is not a solution for something else; it is something to reflect on, and it is an independent companion.  The viewer experiences the art work immediately in real time and space.  I do not intend to make art that creates secrets or longings.  My concerns are existence, position, orientation, material, construction, proportion, distinction, repetition, contemplation, and stillness.  I like the idea of an artwork that makes sense without a reason.  

The viewer’s response begins with an exhibition.  That’s the moment when the artist’s work is finished and valid.  There is no way back, and no change possible.  The responsibility and the risk for the work is on the artist’s side.  The viewer’s response is the part coming from the outside.  As mentioned before, all elements seem to be based on a two-way system.  It’s a dualism.

The use of the terms ‘landscape’ and ‘figure’ are not very important to me.  I try not to serve this kind of looking at art.  To me it is a pre-determined way of thinking that is unimportant for my work, since my work is spatially oriented and not representational.  The terms “reductive” and “abstract” I understand in a similar way, as a derivation from something else that has been either more or bigger.  I prefer the terms ‘object’ and ‘concrete,’ which I think are the closest to what my work is.

I don’t work towards a specific aim.  I am working permanently on different projects, and they all begin anywhere in the middle of nowhere; they are not yet defined.  I understand my part of the work in developing a concept and realizing the work, and the other part of the work would be the viewer’s view, experience and response.  I understand art as a provision for life, like food and sleep.  Art speaks to the senses; it offers a wide range of contemplation the viewer can reflect on, and it can enhance his or her consciousness of things in life.  

Since visual art is basically a individual enterprise it mainly shows a single point of view towards the world.  My work is one position realized.  It is up to the viewer to get an impression of the work.  I don’t think that art necessarily has to be understood by explanation.  It is one of the free fields which is allowed to be left open.  People can take the visual experience of an art work without possessing it.  Art should not only be shown in a context of art, it should also happen in everyday places.  This is one reason why I like to work in a flexible way .  There is a difference between art lovers going to the galleries and museums, and art going to meet people.  It is a universal language for everyone.  My work is based on simple elements like a line, a field, a geometric form existing in the world already.  I use them by putting them into a new spatial context.  

It is my intension to make artwork in a concrete sense.  To me concrete means a work existing on its own, like any other thing in the world.

 

CA: Something that allows art to remain an open field, as you call it, is that it doesn’t necessarily have a practical function — it’s not useful or utilitarian in the sense that we think of when those words are applied to everyday objects.  As I understand it, the classic defintion of Konkrete Kunst, beginning with Van Doesburg and continuing through Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, doesn’t concern itself with abstraction, and certainly possesses no symbolic meaning, but is more or less concerned with an idea expressed visually through geometry.  Is that where you begin?

 

DG: Partly yes, but for me that’s only half the story.  Art history sometimes pretends that a particular art movement is a complete entity.  Using the term “concrete” doesn’t necessarily coincide with the ideologic background of Konkrete Kunst, which was also based on ideas about society and politics.  My concern is about an entity that can also include contradictions—a yes and a no, and even a maybe.  My starting point is a synthesis of different views or positions at the same time, which to me is a spatial view.  It can be obvious or subtle, symmetric or asymmetric or both together, with or without contradiction.  It can be rule and deviation together.  Some of the earlier works I made were collages related to Kurt Schwitters’ work (Merz), any found material roughly glued onto a piece of cardboard— physical, direct, improvised, accidental, colourful, even Dadaistic.  Later, I became interested in Minimal Art, where the artwork is often precisely planned, and perfectly and clearly constructed with a defined use of materials and attention to details.  Both movements are important to me, and sometimes I see my work carrying parts of both, corresponding inbetween those two art historical position.

 

CA: Regarding the function of art, which relates to content and meaning, as I see it art objects do have functions, whether it is for description or depiction, or for contemplation, beauty, or pleasure, or a demonstration or articulation of a critical or philosophical ideal or model, and so on.  Typically, this is a visual experience, though not exclusively.  Any of these functions are part of what make an art work “a work existing on its own.” Is this part of what you mean by a concrete work, or are you more specifically referring to physical and contextual characteristics?

 

DG: The art work as “a work existing on its own” emphasizes mainly its own physical existence.  The functions you mention above are rather functions or directions for the visual experience and the use of the viewer, not necessarily functions of the art works.  Of course, the way a work is built and installed in a context can evoke different visual experiences.  The work is there because there is first a floor or a wall, a spatial situation that provides a position.  The physical work doesn’t exist in a non-space, it needs surroundings to exist.  Maybe thoughts, dreams, or an idea can exist in a non-physical space, but doesn’t it still appear in a spatial situation?

I like a work that exists on its own together with its spatial position.  This doesn’t say anything about the content of the work itself, because the whole situation is the content.  Since everybody lives in a spatial situation, the viewer can experience this freely.  Visual (and physical) perception is existential and important in everybody’s life.  My concern in art is about visual experience and perception in general: a focused view combined with a broad view; a view from above combined with a view from below or from behind; a view from the inside and from the outside; and a view from all different positions.  I try to bring them together again equally.

The initial intention of Minimalism, as outlined by a young Donald Judd in his early essays, was not only to take art off the walls, but also to completely alter the viewer’s perception of it. Minimalism began as a type of body art, in the sense that you’re forced into a physical experience that disrupts if not eclipses the aesthetic one. Then the aesthetic experience is further muddled (or undermined) by the Minimalist insistence on using industrial or craft materials-the stuff of Canal Street.

McKendree Key’s Half Spaces: 207 Franklin Street #1 installation at her apartment in Greenpoint snugly fits all the requirements of canonical Minimalism, but does so with a casual effortlessness that lacks the self-consciousness of specifically intentioned “revivalism” and has as much to do with the utopian living situations of Andrea Zittel or a deconstructed Ikea catalogue as it does Judd’s material austerity. Key has sliced all four rooms of her smallish one-bedroom apartment in half horizontally with tautly stretched panels of spandex, resulting in a space that forces you to pick your poison of physical discomfort: either hunch around awkwardly or remain erect with your head poking into the spandex, resulting in a lot of staticky hair. Either way, being inside Half Spaces makes you feel sort of silly.

The piece is a diversion from Key’s other work, although partitioning spaces with spandex seems to be the direction she’s heading in-she’ll install a similar piece in the Islip Art Museum in August. Key’s previous work consists largely of performative installations where she would release mass quantities of plastic balls into natural settings, like a rooftop or pond. What happened next was mostly out of her control, as the natural elements had their way with the man-made ones. Clearly, the commonality of introducing artificiality into normalcy remains.

What’s changed with Half Spaces is that, instead of letting nature affect the viewer’s invariably altered perception of landscape, she controls the relation of body to environment. Although Key’s apartment is tidy, her sculptures, books, a guitar, and furniture leave the space under the spandex horizon looking somewhat cluttered, the sensation exacerbated by the claustrophobically low ceiling. An important aspect of the Half Spaces experience is to poke your head through one of the peepholes Key has fashioned, each of which affords just enough space for the normal-sized neck. The area above the horizon line is something of a revelation-comparatively, the upper five feet of the apartment are barren and spacious. The gears start to turn: “Well, a loft could easily go here.” “Some shelves would work up there.” “Maybe the spandex could actually support objects and be used as a storage space!” Probably not, actually. It’s extremely flexible, and would likely stretch right to the ground if very much weight were applied. But by dividing the room in half with the material, Key raises that pervasive issue of living space that all New Yorkers negotiate, and shows how much of it often remains unused.

A typical New York City story: artists move into a mostly abandoned and somewhat scary neighborhood for its large spaces and within five years are priced out of the area they initially sparked interest in (see SoHo, Chelsea, Dumbo, Williamsburg, Long Island City, and soon, the Navy Yard). It’s the nature of the beast in a property-starved city, and Half Spaces also touches on the economic reality of being an artist in New York-use space creatively and economically or leave the city. Speaking of economics, the gesture of using uncut, store-bought fabric to create a controlled atmosphere of heightened sensations both good and bad, is a quintessentially Minimalist one. Spandex, material of biker shorts and ice skater costumes, material of confinement, in a setting of sublimity-Half Spaces is too sublime to be ironic. Ultimately, the choice of spandex as the material of division is more utilitarian than theoretical-the fabric is easily pulled and stretched around corners and into tight spots, allowing for a thoroughly totalitarian half space. But Half Spaces also represents a witty update of Minimalist ideals, using a fabric of contemporary life to elucidate that the answers in the race for space might be just above our noses.

 

Nick Stillman is an artist and and Editor of NYFA Current, a publication of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in March 2004 in conjunction with Richard Bottwin’s spotlight exhibition.

 

Rossana Martinez: I would like to start our interview at the beginning of your career. You came of age as an artist during the early 1970s in and around New York City. What kind of work were you making at that time? Were there any specific artists, exhibitions, or events that had a profound impact on your early process and thinking?

 

Richard Bottwin: My work has always been about geometry and architecture. In 1968, during my senior year in high school, I happened upon Donald Judd’s first retrospective at the Whitney Museum. It spoke to me immediately and I still have vivid memories of it. Tony Smith’s work also caught my eye, although I was partial to the more horizontal, landscape oriented pieces. In 1971, I saw a large installation by Smith, entitled “Eighty-One More” at the Museum of Modern Art. It filled a gallery on the ground floor off of 53rd Street where the bookstore most recently resided. A very large platform in the shape of a triangle, incised with a diagonal grid, it had four-foot high tetrahedrons scattered on the grid. I was mesmerized. It was a plywood mockup and it was destroyed after the exhibition. That work informed a lot of what I did back then.

My undergraduate instructors at Lehman College (formerly Hunter College’s Bronx campus) were almost all involved with geometric abstraction, although it was mostly of the European — Max Bill and Neo-Plastic — variety. They seemed to be more concerned with making “sublime objects” rather than room filling, monumental, industrial constructions. As they were all showing in New York galleries, I had access to their output and it certainly affected me.

More importantly, though, I have been a rabid fan of architecture since I was a small child. I was building little flat roofed modern houses out of scraps of wood when I was six and, by the time I was eleven, I was well acquainted with the work of Wright, Mies, and Le Corbusier by way of library books. My family knew to call a modern building to my attention when we were speeding by one in our car. In the late 50s, my parents, low on cash, would take us on cheap Sunday afternoon outings to Idlewild Airport (later renamed Kennedy). There was a garden of fantastic pavilions being built there to serve the new jet traffic. I was in heaven every time we made that loop around the terminals. It was a very strong need to devour and reprocess architectural issues that fired me up. I was fortunate that when I came into adulthood in the early 70s, the predominant vocabulary of the art world was in sync with my predilection.

 

RM: For two decades, you’ve focused your attention on sculpture. Most recently though, you’ve been producing wall-mounted sculptural reliefs, which I find particularly unique about your body of work. The format is clearly challenging and wrought with contradictions. How did you decide to start making reliefs? What are the specific set of challenges that come with making them (versus free-standing sculpture)?

 

RB: I blame it all on gravity. I’ve made pedestal sculpture in the past, but I have come to despise the notion of that white column supporting a small work. The conventions that sculptors commonly use to keep their work from falling over, i.e., vertical poles (sculpture-on-a-stick), slabs and platforms (sculpture-on-a-pancake), disinterest me. By placing a small piece on the wall, gravity simply isn’t an issue. The mysteries created by the visual contradictions I construct remain intact.

With the larger, freestanding works, it often is my goal to make it look as is they could not possibly be standing on their own. Engineering this without hidden concrete anchors (cheating) can be a challenge. I try to devise structural systems that appear to be straightforward, but actually support in surprising ways. The reward is to seem to defy gravity when I have, in fact, just used it cleverly.

 

RM: In addition to your reliefs, you have also realized many large(r)-scale public art projects over the past few years. I am thinking about your installation at Bird Park in Philadelphia (next to Gallery Joe), and more recently, your bench-like sculptures at the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. All were architectural or structural in nature and made from raw wooden timbers bolted together. When did you start thinking about your work outside of the gallery space? Can you talk about the interactive/participatory nature of your public pieces? What public projects are you currently developing?

 

RB: As stated before, my work is primarily about architecture and this informs my vocabulary. I have always planned large-scaled outdoor pieces and built my first one on the campus of Pennsylvania State University at Clarion in 1983. There was another pavilion-like piece in Fairmont Park in Philadelphia in 1987. When my work becomes architectural in scale (in other words, when it gets as large or larger than a person), I like it to function architecturally.

I have no desire to confront someone with a big abstract thing. I’d much rather that the viewer approaches my work thinking that it is a nice place to sit and get some shelter. Then, after it’s too late, they realize that the seat is much too high and deep, and they must pull their feet up and themselves into the thing, then I’ve got them! They will then see the world around them through my vertiginous geometry, and hopefully, try to make some sense of it all.

The next public project? I alternate the larger, quasi-functional works with the smaller indoor pieces that serve as research and development. When an opportunity for an outdoor piece comes along, I’ll be on the job.

 

RM: Your work possesses an aggressively conceptual quality that you describe in your statement as “paradoxical” and “disorienting.” A number of your relief works, for instance, such as “Square & Angle #10″ and “Square & Angle #14″, appear to be sitting on a sort of white “shelf”, which is in fact part of the work. Describe how you create visual paradox in your work.

 

RB: It all comes from a physical problem. When I was three, I was treated for an unusually “lazy eye”. One eye being dominant, I never really developed full-fledged stereoscopic vision. Oh, my eyes might converge an image subliminally now and then for my brain to use, but mostly I get by with “relative depth perception” (collecting visual clues and making some sense of them). It works well enough except in low light situations where I might occasionally get mild vertigo and stumble a little (if you see me weaving around in a dark bar, it’s my eyes, not the drink).

Anyway, I have always amused myself by looking at things and alternating my perception of them by “flattening them out” and then seeing them in “3-D” again. To recreate this sensation in my sculpture, I distort the perspective in the forms in my work. This distortion interacts with the actual convergence that is occurring for the viewer and that interaction can create those paradoxes. I don’t see the shelves in the “Square & Angle” pieces as particularly paradoxical though. I simply wanted to have a square emerging from the wall at an angle.

A fellow artist and good friend of mine, Kevin Finklea, had used small white shelves in his work, so I suppose that this possibility was floating around somewhere in the back of my mind. I thought that I could support the square and create a comment about its angle to the wall by restating a variant of that information in the shelf. The shelf is also one of those architectural details I like to play with.

 

RM: Craftsmanship is not a word that is commonly talked about anymore. You take great care in how your works are constructed and finished. This is especially evident after visiting your studio. Your precision and deliberateness are some of your work’s most memorable qualities, at least in my mind. Please talk a bit about your craft.

 

RB: Being a neat and careful craftsman does not come naturally or easily to me. I also studied art in a liberal arts institution, not a professional art school, during the iconoclastic late sixties and early seventies. There was no emphasis on learning process and materials. You could learn to weld if you liked (I didn’t), but traditional modeling, casting, mold making and carving techniques never sullied my education.

Learning how to fabricate my sculpture has been a constant challenge to me, and I am still figuring out how to do it as well as I’d like it to be done. I was impressed early on that my ideas would not be credible if they were not realized in an appropriate way. I just do what is necessary to communicate the idea. The trick, of course, is to make the materials (especially when there are several in a single piece) look inevitable. At times I have veered too close to the decorative and have had to slap myself back to reality. I do find the process of making things by hand very important to the development of my sculpture. The physical act of manipulating materials and building things seems to stimulate the production of new ideas.

 

RM: I have a specific interest in your use of materials. In particular, how did you begin applying paint to your sculptures?

 

RB: I’ve always thought of the paint as a tactile material on the surface that just happens to be a specific color. At first, I used flat grey Rustoleum enamel because it was thick and smooth, and with the inevitable warm and cool shadows that would be cast in the pieces, it was every color and no color at the same time. When I started to use real color, it was in a very intuitive, painterly way. I used oils and an alkyd medium because of the alkyd’s even waxy gloss. I also liked the ease with which it could be used to apply glazes that modulate everything and bring the sculpted forms and paint into focus.

In the late 80s and early 90s, I was making very complex, almost “Rococo” wall sculptures that were painted and gold leafed. Going “overboard” in this way allowed me to collect enough information to really know what I was doing when I became reductive again. Later, I used oil paint and alkyd medium because of its versatility. The oil colors allowed me to vary the opacity and transparency in areas of solid color. That sort of manipulation is one way to make a single color interesting.

Now, I use acrylics because they are easier to handle and less toxic. Golden Paints has developed mediums and paint consistencies that are nearly equivalent to oils for my purposes.

 

RM: Although your works generally appear very straightforward, even factual, at first glance, upon closer inspection, they are in fact highly intricate structures consisting of shifting angles (rarely 45 or 90 degrees cuts); layers of sandwiched, exposed plywood and (sometimes) exotic veneers; polished, high value colors (always slightly off the primaries and secondaries); etc. They are activated to the point of being kinetic. What kind of effect are you seeking when you combine these various elements? How do you know when you’ve got it right? What kind of experience are you creating for the viewer?

 

RB: You’ve just asked and answered your own question. It is my goal to present something that looks easily understandable at first glance with perhaps just a few mysteries. When you walk around the pieces to figure them out, they change radically and present more questions. As mentioned earlier, I love to play with perspective and, if I get it right, the works might seem to twist and move as you look at them.

The experience? Well, hopefully not nausea. Best results: surprise and a moment of reflection about what we perceive. Oh yes, and humor. Laughter is essential to my existence and I feel compelled to share that.

Distorting geometry and pushing primary colors in weird ways also reflects my desire to subvert some of the dogmas that have grown up with geometric abstraction. The vocabulary I use has been around for almost a century. I am madly in love with the work of Tatlin, Lissitsky, Malevich, Rodchenko and the de Stijl artists, but I really don’t need to reinvent what they have already accomplished. A few of my purist college mentors from the 60s and 70s might be appalled with my heresies. Using what is left to us, but also rebelling and messing around with it, well, that’s what the next generation does.

Oh yes, for some reason I cannot explain, I am just very partial to 60° angles.

 

RM: You’ve had your studio in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood for over 10 years now. I am interested to hear your thoughts about the expanding Brooklyn art scene. How has it has evolved during your time in DUMBO? And what has been the place of reductive work in it?

 

RB: DUMBO has been a convenient, scenic, and once upon a time, cheap place to have a studio. The DUMBO Arts Center and its director, Joy Glidden, have been a terrific resource and stepping stone for many artists, including myself, so I’m glad that I’ve been there and that its been there for us. I really don’t see any specific relationship between the neighborhood and the content of my work. The great value has been the proximity of the many artists in the area and the productive professional connections that can occur with this kind of density. I imagine that a number of the artists on the MINUS SPACE web site have had this connection.

 

RM: You’ve also lived and worked in Philadelphia for a long stretch of time. Historically, both Philadelphia and New York have been hotbeds for artists making reductive art. How has the reception to your work been in Philadelphia? And how has it differed from New York?

 

RB: I’ve had some success in Philadelphia, and perhaps, greater opportunities exhibiting with commercial galleries there than in New York. I don’t know how I can quantify it with regard to reductive art. Perhaps with having lived and worked there for a while, some opportunities became available. Philadelphia, being smaller than New York, allowed some connections to be made a little more easily. My current gallery affiliation in Philadelphia (Pentimenti Gallery) came about from the dealer, Christine Pfister, seeing my slides at the DUMBO Arts Center in Brooklyn.

With regard to the notion of minimalism having a home in Philadelphia, it occurred to me that perhaps related to that is the fact that Philadelphia is really a city of architects. With Louis Kahn having having worked there and a great number of major firms starting out there (even if they have moved up and on..), it really has been the home and starting point of many influential builders. A short list is: Venturi & Rauch, Mitchell Giurgola, Kohn, Pederson, Fox, Davis, Brody and more… The PSFS building, one of the first international style steel and glass towers built in this country was built there in 1929. There is a perfectly circular wall mounted water fountain in the building that is said to be designed by a youthful apprentice, Louis Kahn.

 

RM: Finally, I would like to ask you about your thoughts concerning the general perception, appreciation, and support for abstract, geometric art in this country. What are your thoughts on this?

 

RB: It seems that art viewers in this country need a story that’s readily accessible or a moral that’s easy to digest. A non-objective, reductive, abstract narrative that’s not purely decorative still seems to be a hard sell, even though the genre has been around for over half a century. Of course, there are a handful of artists who have achieved fame, if not fortune doing this. I thoroughly enjoy their work, but sometimes the overbearing scale and arrogance of a lot of this sculpture leaves me uneasy. In a country that values things by how many millions of dollars they cost or how far they’d reach if laid end to end, it seems that making reductive art really, really big might gain it a wider audience.

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.