Work by Jesus Rafael Soto

May 8 – June 19, 2010

Participating Artists:
Mario Ballocco, Julije Knifer, Marco Maggi, Francois Morellet, Olivier Mosset, Jesus Rafael Soto

After World War II, many artists turned to geometric abstraction as a springboard for experimentation, leaving behind figurative art. Some said that was the death of painting. I prefer thinking of it as a new start.

I was first introduced to geometric abstract art when instructed by Serge Lemoine at lʼEcole du Louvre and have been since then fascinated by the subject. My strong continued interest in geometric art has led me to creating this exhibition to explore what is beyond geometry. Since the Renaissance, viewing a painting has been described as looking through a window onto the world. I would like to engage a more experimental approach and to bring the viewer inside the “world” made available by these artworks.

Francois Morelletʼs serigraphs abolish the system of one point perspective. His systematic method of image making is a study of the eyeʼs perception. Only using flat solid shapes on a monochromatic background, Morelletʼs layer effect creates depth, which can be experienced from multiple angles. This play on the eye is also seen in Mario Balloccoʼs work. And through his chromatic problems, Ballocco utilizes color to reveal how it has a positive and stimulating effect over the eye, provoking a psychic action on the whole human body.

This idea of action and movement has been synthesized by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty, who described perception as ʻan immediate and physical fluid, involving the whole body and not just the eyeʼ. Physical movement becomes a means of reaching a revelation about the art works by shifting the viewerʼs sensory and perceptual point of view. With Sotoʼs installation, a piece of the actual set of the 1978 ballet Genesis, choreographed by Alicia Alonso, at the Great Theatre of Havana, this is precisely how the viewer will experience this theme by literally walking into geometry. In another way, Marco Maggiʼs study explores the threshold between the second and third dimension. These works intensifies the viewerʼs physical relationship to the art.  His objects- papers – sit directly on the floor without pedestals and share our same space.

Finally, our experimental interaction ends with Julije Knifer and Olivier Mosset. Both have explored where flatness and surfaces can lead us – a rhythmic close up of a pattern, which develops into an independent surface that we can admire.

To answer the problematic of this showʼs title, what is beyond geometry is something that is over points, angles, surfaces and solids; what we find is a window to a world, which can function as a mirror of our sensations.

All the works presented have an impact to our senses and they envelop us into a mesmerizing geometric and transcendent atmosphere.

Poul Gernes, Zielscheibenbild / Target B, 1966-68

Opening: March 25, 2010

Curated by Renate Wiehager, “Pictures about Pictures. Discourses in Painting” – is the Daimler Art Collection’s exhibition title for the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. About 130 works ranging from Classical Modernism and the post-war avant-garde via European Zero and Minimalism to international contemporary art are being presented. The exhibition is structured into thematic fields, each of which presents discursive references to historical and current positions: Bauhaus and De Stijl, Hard Edge and New Color School USA, Constructive and Concrete Tendencies, European Zero avant-garde, Minimalism and design aspects, Neo Geo and contemporary positions. The show brings together about 75 artists from roughly twenty countries, and the works cover a time span of one hundred years, from 1908 (Adolf Hölzel) to 2010 (Andreas Schmid).

As already suggested by the exhibition title – “Pictures about Pictures. Discourses in Painting” – this show is not showcasing a museum-style sequence of styles and isms. The presentation is in fact attempting to create a referential dialogue between the works and to reveal discursive links between individual formal ideas and subject matter. The intention here is to consider art history not in the sense of ‘invention’ and ‘progression’, but as an argumentative union of pictures in temporary contexts and transitional forms. Dialogue situations of this kind come about in the first place within the horizon of epochs transcribed by time and rendered visible by the exhibition – European avant-garde movements before 1939; re-adoption and reformulation of abstract tendencies in Western art after 1945; analytical deconstructions, remakes and media cross-dressing in the direction of architecture, design and Ambient Art in Contemporary Art. But discursive references can also be discerned over and above the passage of time or developments that diverge culturally and ideologically – Simone Westerwinter and Anselm Reyle make an ironic allusions to the European Zero avant-garde; Jonathan Monk translates Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” into an endless loop; Andreas Reiter Raabe and Olivier Mosset analyse the “end of painting” topos with pictorial forms of emptiness and nothingness; Eva Berendes reconfigures the material aesthetics and formal inventory of Russian Constructivism; Jens Wolf develops rhythmic-serial cover versions of Josef Albers’s “Homage” paintings; Markus Ebner and Tom Sachs ‘repeat’ pictures by their teachers Günter Fruhtrunk and Peter Halley.

Participating Artists:
Absalon (IL) – Josef Albers (D) – John M Armleder (CH) – Hans Arp (F) – Jo Baer (USA) – Eva Berendes (D) – Ilya Bolotowsky (RUS) – Daniel Buren (F) – Andre Cadere (PL) – Enrico Castellani (I) – Krysten Cunningham (USA) – Dadamaino (I) – Stephane Dafflon (CH) – Ian Davenport (GB) – Gene Davis (USA) – Robyn Denny (GB) – Markus Ebner (D) – Maria Eichhorn (D) – Helmut Federle (CH) – Ulrike Flaig (D) – Adolf Fleischmann (D) – Günter Fruhtrunk (D) – Rupprecht Geiger (D) – Poul Gernes (DK) – Liam Gillick (GB) – Hermann Glöckner (D) – Mathias Goeritz (PL) – Terry Haggerty (GB) – Peter Halley (USA) – Al Held (USA) – Jan Henderikse (NL) – Nic Hess (CH) – Adolf Hölzel (A/CZ) – Donald Judd (USA) – Michael Kidner (GB) – Jim Lambie (SCO) – Alexander Liberman (UKR) – Sylvan Lionni (GB) – Richard Paul Lohse (CH) – Heinz Mack(D) – Almir da Silva Mavignier (BRA) – John McLaughlin (USA) – Christian Megert (CH) – Mathieu Mercier (F) – Gerold Miller (D) – Jonathan Monk (GB) – Jeremy Moon (GB) – Francois Morellet (F) – Sarah Morris (USA) – Olivier Mosset (CH) – John Nixon (AUS) – Kenneth Noland (USA) – Julian Opie (GB) – Phillipe Parreno (DZ) – Henk Peeters (NL) – Danica Phelps (USA) – Lothar Quinte (D) – Martial Raysse (F) – Andreas Reiter Raabe (A) – Anselm Reyle (D) – Gerwald Rockenschaub (A) – Ugo Rondinone (CH) – Tom Sachs (USA) – Pietro Sanguineti (D) – Eckhard Schene (D) – Oskar Schlemmer (D) – Andreas Schmid (D) – Oli Sihvonen (USA) – Ferdinand Spindel (D) – Katja Strunz (D) – Jean Tinguely (CH) – John Tremblay (USA) – Georges Vantongerloo (B) – Gerhard von Graevenitz (D) – Simone Westerwinter (D) – Jens Wolf (D) – Michael Zahn (USA) – Heimo Zobernig (A)

February 7 – April 11, 2010

For the 100th birthday of the philosopher Max Bense, ZKM will present an exhibition showing his international impact on the fine arts and literature, which can be compared to that of Umberto Eco and Marshall McLuhan. The exhibition, which carries forth the ZKM series “Philosophy and Art,” presents Bense as poet and author, scholar of the arts and literature, as well as exhibition curator and publicist.

Bense, who was active in Stuttgart from 1949 until his death in 1990, propagated an aesthetic of “technical existence” in Germany of the post-war era, which antedated by decades the media-theoretical turn in literature and the humanities that occurred in the 1980s. His thoughts on literature and art were part of a comprehensive philosophical picture of the world that showed a natural-science and “technical reality” of civilization and was aimed against German post-war culture’s romantic and mythologizing trends. Already back then, Bense established a concept of culture that—in the Enlightenment tradition—included the intellectual history of mathematics, physics, and engineering.

Max Bense, who was born on 7 February 1910 in Strassbourg, studied physics, mathematics, mineralogy, geology, and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Cologne, and received his PhD in 1937 with a thesis on “Quantum mechanics and existential relativity.” He first worked as a physicist for I.G. Farben in Leverkusen. After his war duties, Bense pursued an invitation from the University of Jena. But he already fled to West Germany in 1948 and was appointed first as visiting professor in 1949 and then as professor of philosophy and the philosophy of science in 1950 at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. He also taught at the HfG Ulm, the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and in Rio de Janeiro.

Bense began pursuing his literary and artistic tendencies as publicist and radio playwright during his studies. In Stuttgart, he also began to organize exhibitions, first at the Galerie Gänsheide beginning in 1957, then at the study galleries he founded at the Technischen Hochschule Stuttgart. He wrote about numerous fine artists and poets, among others, about Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Alberto Giacometti, Almir Mavignier, Henri Michaux, Mira Schendel, and Paul Wunderlich as well as Alfred Andersch, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Eugen Gomringer, Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to his exhibitions and essays, Bense also created other forums for the arts: i.e., by founding the magazine “Augenblick” (1955) and “reihe rot,” 1960, which he and Elisabeth Walther edited, which published, among others Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, and Diter Rot. At the same time, beginning with semiotics and news technology, beginning in the mid-1950s he developed an “information aesthetics” that influenced concrete and kinetic artists throughout Europe and made him one of the seminal theorists of the pioneering era of European computer art.

The exhibition with publications by Max Bense and prints, paintings, and sculptures by artists that were important to Max Bense, or were influenced by him, is supplemented with manuscripts and photos, as well as recordings of his radio plays and television appearances. They show the philosopher and his view of “art in an artificial world” (1956).

Artists in the exhibition:
Kurd Alsleben, Max Bill, Hannelore Busse, Pierre Charbonnier, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Pierre Garnier, Bruno Giorgi, Matthias Goeritz, Eugen Gomringer, Ludwig Harig, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Josef Hirsal, Oskar Holweck, Hugo Jamin, Ernst Jandl, Hiroshi Kawano, Reinhold Köhler, Harry Kramer, Kurt Kranz, Theo Lutz, Aloisio Magalhaes, Georges Mathieu, Almir Mavignier, Hansjörg Meyer, Henri Michaux, Manfred Mohr, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Günter Neusel, Heinz Pfahler, Décio Pignatari, Uli Pohl, Francis Ponge, Diter Rot, Bernhard Sandfort, Mira Schendel, Anton Stankowski, Karel Trinkewitz, Timm Ulrichs, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Oswald Wiener, Emmett Williams, Wols, Paul Wunderlich, and Dolf Zillmann

Curated by Margit Rosen, Jens Lutz, Miriam Stürner, and Peter Weibel

Daniel Göttin, Transformer 2, 2008

After 2step, minimalpop, Painted Objects, Double Exposure, A Bit O’ White, My Eyes Keep Me In Trouble, Yo, Mo’ Modernism, With Your Eyes Only, COMPOSITE VISIONS is the ninth touring group exhibition organized by CCNOA, Brussels, Belgium.

Since its last theoretical stance as a sublime yet powerful art form, creating a new -ism and ironically also stating the end not only of painting but possibly also of visual art in general, and of its intellectual process, the idea of the ‘reductive’ itself has made an impressive return. Traces of the idea of the ‘reductive’ and similar approaches to art-making can be found in many artistic oeuvres which have come into the limelight since the overpowering postmodern related statements by artists and critics in the late 80’s, and the aesthetics of the ‘reductive’, nonobjective and concrete are now a subject of reflection in contemporary art practices, re-emerging from an imposed quasi non-existence.

In this state of relative non-recognition within the discourse and debate around art and culture in general, the subject of the ‘reductive’ as a possible antithesis to the overpowering reintroduction of representational painting and at the same time to the emergence of the focus on new media, technology and photography, has regained considerable strength over the last decade within an international frame of cultural production and commerce, as well as through the firmly held lone positions of artists like Mosset, Charlton, Armleder, Morellet, Palermo and others throughout the 80’s and 90’s.

Having seemingly recovered from the harsh critical overtones after almost being eliminated from contemporary discourse, in which a retroactive and purely commercial tone took over, the ideas and strategies of the ‘reductive’ and ‘essential’ have slowly found their way back into artistic language and practice. Yet, due to the visual superimpositions of present times, artists have started to shy away from the rigid limitations of -isms related to the ‘non-objective’ or ‘reductive’ and have embedded existing ideas, confluence of styles and approaches into the contemporary world, the here and now, mingling with popular culture as well as branching out of the studio practice inherent in painting as we know it and as the majority still likes to understand it.

Crossovers with other forms of art, like pop art, installation, and new media, play a major role in this new understanding of art-making in the realm of the ‘reductive’ and in its breaking out of its claimed territory with excursions into new planes of understanding, confronting the remarkable stakes which are on offer within the perimeter of ‘reductive’ art production today.

COMPOSITE VISIONS is triggered by the multitude of influences entering the thinking, thought process and practices of an array of like-minded contemporary artists from around the globe working within the fascinating and resilient discourse surrounding the historical, formal and contemporary explorations within the field of the ‘reductive’ in general and ‘reductive’ painting in particular.

Organized by the Brussels-based CCNOA COMPOSITE VISIONS comprises the work of 16 international artists and aims to give a modest inside overview of the possibilities within this broad approach. This type of exhibition is never able to display the entire palette of diversity; CCNOA’s objective is simply to document some of the thinking around this subject.

Participating Artists:
Kjell Bjorgeengen, Julian Dashper, Delphine Deguislage, Edith Dekyndt, Daniel Gottin, Clemens Hollerer, Camila Oliveira-Fairclough, Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi, Michael Skoda, Tilman, Alan Uglow, Jan van der Ploeg, Dan Walsh, Lars Wolter, Carrie Yamaoka, Beat Zoderer

Francois Morellet, Sphere – trames, 1962
Collection Maximilian & Agathe Weishaupt, Munich

November 22, 2009 – January 31, 2010

Zdenek Sykora & Bridget Riley
Richard Paul Lohse & Manfred Mohr

October 3, 2009 – January 10, 2010

Heinz Teufel, the famous gallery owner and collector, died in 2007. He was a great patron of Concrete Art in Germany. From opening his first gallery in 1966 in Koblenz up to his 1998 activities in Berlin he consequently pursued a stringent gallery profile – independent of the fluctuating fashions of the art world. Including works by over 40 internationally renowned artists, the collection of Concrete Art he put together within this period was given to the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. This assortment of art, including 200 paintings, numerous sculptures, and an extensive stock of prints, gives an exemplary pan-European overview of Concrete Art since the Second World War. The inclusion of Eastern European as well as Italian and French manifestations of the abstractionist movement is an outstanding feature of the collection and rarely to be found in museums.

Participating Artists:
Josef Albers, Olle Baertling, Hermann Bartels, Horst Bartnig, Hubert Berke, Max Bill, Andreas Brandt, Antonio Calderara, Ad Dekkers, Jo Delahaut, Piero Dorazio, Rita Ernst, Eberhard Fiebig, Mark Francis, Christoph Freimann, Günter Fruhtrunk, Raimund Girke, Hans-Jorg Glattfelder, Camille Graeser, Heijo Hangen, Siebe Hansma, Auguste Herbin, Uwe Kubiak, Jan Kubicek, Walter Linck, Richard Paul Lohse, Manfred Luther, Max Hermann Mahlmann, Karel Malich, Jan Meyer-Rogge, Manfred Mohr, Francois Morellet, Wilhelm Müller, Aurelie Nemours, Mario Nigro, Gudrun Piper, Bridget Riley, Jan Schoonhoven, Anton Stankowski, Zdenek Sykora, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Herman de Vries, & Beat Zoderer.

Installation view

September 12, 2009 – February 28, 2010

‘Drawing Sculpture’ is presenting a selection from the Daimler Art Collection’s wide-ranging holdings of works on paper for the first time, complemented by sculptures, videos and picture objects. About 60 works by 28 artists are being shown, dating from about 1960 to the present day. In each case the presentation will stage dialogues between classical Minimalist positions from the 1960s and international contemporary art.

The exhibition is not addressing drawing as a tool for sketches and preliminary stages leading to actual works of art, but presenting it above all as an independent and potentially creative medium. Drawing’s conceptual possibilities resulted from developments in the course of the 20th century, especially in connection with the move away from figurative to abstract art. Here the changed perception of the work of art not as a completed unit but that of art as a process has an important part to play.

One further aspect addressed by ‘Drawing Sculpture’ shows drawing’s potential for working in three-dimensions. Again and again it is sculptors who exploit drawing’s ability to explore an exciting relationship between line, surface and three-dimensional presence, and who have paid attention to the creative function of line in outline and internal structure, in other words to disegno. Drawing in the present perception of art, also includes work that has been produced not by classical drawing but as a working process, and that suggests the essential character of drawing as the origin of order and structure, and its quality as a sensual and tactile expressive form.

The concept of dialogue between works from different periods and styles will be drawn into focus once more, and taken outside the exhibition gallery by a special exhibition called ‘Auke, Giorgio, Ignaz & Oskar’. The Dutch sculptor Auke de Vries has chosen works from the collections at Daimler, the Gemäldegalerie and the Bode Museum in Berlin and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. These will strike up a conversation, as originals or large-format photographs, with de Vries’s sculptures, which are both abstract and richly allusive in their motifs. The artistic dialogues can be seen at Daimler Contemporary and at Bode Museum in Berlin.

Participating Artists:
Leonor Antunes (P), Eva Berendes (D), Hartmut Böhm (D), Monika Brandmeier (D), Christo (BG), Dadamaino (I), Katja Davar (D), Gia Edzgveradze (GE), Ulrike Flaig (D), Adolf Fleischmann (D), Marcia Hafif (USA), Rita Hensen (D), Georg Herold (D), Oskar Holweck (D), Claude Horstmann (D), Markus Huemer (A), Robert Longo (USA), François Morellet (F), Rupert Norfolk (GB), Silke Radenhausen (D), Eva-Maria Reiner (D), Jan Scharrelmann (D), Oskar Schlemmer (D), Lasse Schmidt Hansen (DK), Jan J. Schoonhoven (NL), Auke de Vries (NL), Andy Warhol (USA), Georg Winter (D)

 

Francois Morellet, Relache no. 2, 1992
Acrylic and oil on canvas, lacquered aluminium,
neon tubes and canvas strips
332 x 270 x 26 cm

May 17 – September 27, 2009

Mueum Ritter opens a major solo exhibition of work by François Morellet and pay tribute to one of the foremost artists in France today. Until September 27, 2009, the entire building will present a broad cross-section of his wide-ranging œuvre. Apart from geometrical paintings, the exhibition will also fea-ture works with lattices and adhesive tape, as well as light installations using coloured neon tubes. The choice of works was made in close consultation with the artist and grants the viewer a very personal look at over 60 years of work by one of the wittiest of artist provocateurs.

The title of the exhibition “Squaring of the Square” is taken from one of the artist’s works in neon. “What is this title about? Nothing, of course,” says Francois Morellet, “apart from my twin obsession with squares and absurdities… It seems to me that humour, irony, derision and frivolity are the necessary seasoning to makes squares, systems and all the rest of it digestible.” This outlook has enabled the artist time and again to astonish the viewer by the simplest of means and to create highly effective and wittily ironic works from geometrical forms.

With 50 works from all major periods of his career, the exhibition provides an excellent overview of Morellet’s extensive output. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue (96 pages) in three languages, published by Verlag Das Wunderhorn, price € 21.80.

VIEWLIST is MINUS SPACE’s new online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Our second viewlist exhibition is conceived by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner. Michelle is a Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1997, she co-founded, along with her artist and partner Brad Killam, The Suburban, an artist project space in Oak Park, Illinois. She is also a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Her work is represented by Rocket Gallery, London; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

 

There are many things in the air and all of them are for free
Conceived by Michelle Grabner

“So I think what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.” — Bruce Sterling, February 2009

Fiscal exigencies have bestowed artists with promising new freedoms. No longer charged with the aim to develop tamped spoils for the voracious speculative collector, many artists are once again examining the formal dimensions of three-dimensional space.

In photography this can be seen in the renewed and enthusiastic interest in abstraction. The exploration of the darkroom’s technical limitations and its structural truths are once again concretizing photography.

The superabundance of ceramics and cast-metal objects weighing on gallery pedestals of the recent years has given way to boundlessness. Untying gravity and provoking physical space is being ushered back into the formalist’s syntax as traditional measures of object value have broken down.

Unlike the contemporary accretion work that engages in synthetic concepts of space, the works included here actively invent spatial relations, experiment with organizing structures and choreographing movement. Accumulation and collection practices — many of which were aptly featured in the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” exhibition — are acts of imitation, a superfluous and redundant practice mirroring web navigation and digital information gathering: web 2.0 assemblage.

“There are many things in the air and all of them are for free” is the title of a loopy wire sculpture by Diango Hernández that is currenty on display at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach. I have adapted this title for my purposes as it locates value while poetically summoning the progressive fact that three-dimensional space is new again.

Look up.

 

 

 

March 19 – May 8, 2009

On 19 March 2009, an exhibition of works by the French artist François Morellet will open at the A arte Studio Invernizzi gallery. The exhibition, which will take place in the gallery’s enlarged and renovated premises, will centre around a group of important works reflecting the artist’s most recent output and designed in relation to the exhibition space.

In order to stress the close relationship of the works with their setting, Morellet will also create a site-specific intervention in the large new exhibition room on the mezzanine floor: the spatial dimension and physical and perceptive involvement of the spectator as part of the surroundings, of which he or she experiences a special and specific moment, are crucial aspects of his poetic practice. 

The forms and balances of Morellet’s interventions always involve a variety of elements, such as the graphic sign, sculpture, painting and installation, and are founded on rational and cognitive systems that are the basis for their coming into being and construction.

The rationality of their development is grafted onto the emotivity of the particular moment when they are observed: the works are formed in space as a means for capturing the energy that pervades the surroundings, never failing to open themselves up to emotivity that is entirely free and varies with the endless coming into being of time.

Created from 1963 onwards, Morellet’s neon works are a means for inscribing his forms – now consisting of vital light – more forcefully in the occurrence of events. The artist’s approach to life – allowing him to create a vibrant and dialogical relationship with it – involves participation in the events of the world and their coming into being, which takes the form of specific and always unique fragments.

Works representative of Morellet’s output from the 1950s to the 1980s will be on display in the gallery’s other spaces.

François Morellet exhibited at the A arte Studio Invernizzi gallery in 1994 (with Dadamaino and Günther Uecker), and has also had shows here with specific interventions in 1997, 2000 and 2005.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a bilingual catalogue will be published with reproductions of the works, an introductory essay by Luca Massimo Barbero, a poem by Carlo Invernizzi and up-to-date biographical and bibliographical notes.

 

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.

 

Painting by Mark Dagley

November 8 — December 22, 2007

Nyehaus presents INDICA.  Acknowledged as the first experimental art space in London, John Dunbar’s Indica gallery, in existence from November ‘65 – November ‘67, was born into a far more uncynical time. Open for barely two full years, Indica (from ‘Indications’ – somewhere to go) set the controls for the heart of experimental art in Britain. During its short life, Indica encouraged collaboration and ‘free flow’ rather than competition. With groundbreaking shows by Takis, Mark Boyle, Julio Le Parc, Liliane Lijn, Jesus Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Yoko Ono, Indica was very much ‘of the moment’. A teenage Marc Bolan ran errands, Paul McCartney helped knock in nails. Polanski and Antonioni, Burroughs and Ginsberg hung out. International Times got started in the basement. John met Yoko there.

So Indica re-appears at Nyehaus, exhibiting one piece of work by each of the artists shown in the original gallery alongside a selection of responses by London’s and New York’s most adventurous and imaginative young art stars. Nyehaus becomes Indica. Temporarily. A chance to relive, revise and read up almost forty years to the day. The story begins Thursday, November 8th. Don’t miss it this time around.  Features work by The Action, Baschet Brothers, Boyle Family, Lourdes Castro, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Mark Dagley, Michael English, Juan Fontanive, Jaime Gili, The Graham Bond Organisation, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, Michael Horovitz, Janfamily, Nina Jan Beier, Marie Jan Lund, Chosil Kil, Aishleen Lester, Liliane Lijn, Francois Morellet, Yoko Ono, Takis, and Peter Whitehead.

 

 

Francisco Sobrino, Espace Indéfini, 1968 
Plexiglas sculpture, 76 x 31 x 24 inches

October 27 — November 24, 2007

Sicardi Gallery presents the works of three of the founding members of the art group Centre de recherche d’art visuel (CRAV): Francisco Sobrino, Horacio Garcia Rossi, and Hugo Demarco.   CRAV, later known as GRAV (Groupe de recherche d’art visuel) which also included Julio Le Parc, Vera and Francois Molnar, Francois Morellet, and Yvaral among others, was founded in Paris July 1960 when several artist’s gathered to discuss their collective research and came up with the manifesto to liberate from the work of art the ego of the creators. They strove to create a new visual situation based on the field of peripheral vision instability, limiting the artwork to a strictly visual condition and regarding it as something provisional. The participation of the viewer was integral to the works. The group disbanded in 1968.  Garcia Rossi and Demarco were both born in Argentina and immigrated to Paris in the late 50’s. Sobrino, born in Spain, spent much of his youth in Argentina before relocating to Paris.

 

Alexander Liberman, Omega IX, 1961

March 8 — April 28, 2007 

In addition to being the Year of the Pig, it also appears to be the year of Op Art.  Another great survey exhibition including Yaacov Agam, Josef Albers, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Hannes Beckmann, Fletcher Benton, Karl Benjamin, Francis Celentano, Tony Conrad, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Benjamin Cunningham, Gene Davis, Jose de Rivera, Julio Le Parc, Leroy Lamis, Alexander Liberman, François Morellet, Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Bridget Riley, Julian Stanczak, Frank Stella, Luis Tomasello, and Victor Vasarely.

Last June I met my friend Margaret Crane for lunch at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We sat outside on a sunny Sunday afternoon, chatting and eating salad. It wasn’t too hot, the air was breathable—a perfect ladies’ date. Then we headed into the museum’s jewel-in-the-crown exhibition, Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s. The show was huge, astonishing, including nearly 200 works by 130+ artists from Europe, North America, and South America. Jesús Rafael Soto’s bright overlays of geometric lines made our eyes blur; Bridget Riley’s wavy stripes made us slightly dizzy. Lucio Fontana’s canvas was sliced, with two gaping wounds down the middle just begging to be poked, but we knew better. We saw paintings in irregular shapes by Manuel Espinosa, Juan Melé, and Rhod Rothfuss; we saw plastic, neon, dangerously sharp metal edges; we saw Mira Schendel’s sheets of rice paper hanging from a nylon cord, all fluttery like parrot tulips. Margaret and I marveled at François Morellet’s diamond-shaped metal grids that squished up and expanded. We stood in front of a three-dimensional painting that shifted almost imperceptibly. “Margaret, am I crazy or did you see that thing move, too?” We delighted in Gianni Colombo’s rows of throbbing styrofoam rectangles. With so many kinetic pieces, the stationary art felt dull, static—like it just sat there taking up space. A number of artists worked with corners, none of them as eerily as when Joseph Beuys stuffed the corners of his studio with animal fat, but we did enjoy Fred Sandback’s single blue elastic cord that created a square of (empty?) space in a white corner and Enrico Castellani’s “Red Corner Surface,” which looked like giant red buttocks. We saw paintings that curved away from the wall, paintings with things hanging from them; we saw mobiles, first-edition concrete poetry books, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photos of weird water towers, and Carl Andre’s shiny floor tiles that we could actually walk on without a guard hauling us away.

Lucio Fontana
“Spatial Concept-Waiting (59 T 104)” (1959)
Oil on canvas with incisions

With a big show like this, it’s impossible to take it all in. After a while the mind shuts down and visceral reactions take over, greeting the work with grunts and chuckles, or sometimes just the word “cool.” This shift can be intense, as the boundary between viewer and artwork falls away—you enter into a sense of intimacy with the artist, the intimacy of a sort of psychic licking rather than studied analysis. This happened to me at the Eva Hesse retrospective at SFMOMA in 2002, where her work profoundly moved me; but surrounded by so much cleverness and glitz, her pieces in Beyond Geometry felt stripped of resonance. Eleanor Antin’s “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture” is comprised of four long horizontal columns of photos of Antin’s naked body—front, back, and side views—taken over time as Antin loses weight. In the context of all this formalism, it emerged more as an exercise in seriality than a comment on women and body image. Standing before it, Margaret said, “Cool.”

The show’s press release touts the political influences on the work included. Under the subheading, “1945-1979: A Turbulent Time,” mention is made of the Cold War, Vietnam, civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, and “an activist youth culture.” In comparison, the exhibition catalogue (MIT Press, 2004) focuses more on the theoretical than on the political implications of this transitional period between high modernism and postmodernism, when the United States overthrew the shackles of European dominance and became a world-class art power. Though many of the artists in the show practiced a fervent regionalism, curator Lynn Zelevansky argues in her introductory catalogue essay that these works’ “radically simplified form and systematic strategies” comprise a global movement. “The international artists represented in exhibitions and publications around 1970 may have already been aware of one another’s work to varying degrees, but it is more significant that they shared sources and ideas to which they had been exposed locally. As a result, the conceptual basis of their art, often independently conceived, was nonetheless related.”

 

Bridget Riley
“Polarity” (1963)
Emulsion on canvas

Throughout her catalogue essay, Zelevansky argues with artist after artist. Discussing the American minimalists’ disdain for European art, Zelevansky notes that the minimalist embrace of the literal in art was actually a tenet of European concrete art, formulated way back in 1930 by Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. In response to the minimalists’ disdain for what they saw as Mondrian’s “geometric abstraction,” Zelevansky points out that Mondrian, in fact, created his work intuitively. In response to Swiss artist Max Bill’s assumption that “seeing is detached and rational, a straightforward biological mechanism that functions the same way in all people,” Zelevansky counters with, “As James Elkins makes clear, true seeing is actually ‘irrational, inconsistent, and undependable.’” One comes away from the Beyond Geometry catalogue swimming with information, one’s head stuffed with a vision of insular groups infighting and denouncing each other over rigorous issues such as “ideal” versus “presence.” Zelevansky’s typology of beliefs and oppositions is exhausting—minimalist, concrete, neoconcrete, Grupo Ruptura, conceptual, kinetic, and on and on—a big sense of no forest, all trees. What I longed for in the catalogue was a clearer and more in-depth exploration of what the exhibition’s press release describes as the “common intellectual and artistic concerns” that form the basis for “this unprecedented coming together.” How does this work emerge from its “turbulent time” other than with a vague sense that because of the threat of nuclear holocaust we’d better get rational?

At the beginning of Zelevansky’s essay is a photo of Hélio Oiticica’s Nucleus 6, which is made up of a group of monochrome pinkish paintings suspended at various heights, some of them at right angles to the others, creating a sort of enclosure. In the midst of them stands a guy in jeans and a short-sleeved black shirt, his arms down and slightly out from his body. We see him only from the shoulders down; the top half of his body is occluded by two horizontal paintings. Another long vertical painting wedged at a right angle between these two horizontal paintings appears to slice into and bisect his body in two, separating the left side of his chest from the right. The absolute stillness and stiffness of his stance reinforces this effect. There is a thin gap between two of the paintings, revealing a strip of the guy’s face—the hint of an eye and the corner of a mouth. He’s peering back at the viewer, but his expression is unreadable, ambiguous, as if he were rehearsing for a part in a Robbe-Grillet film. He doesn’t look like he has moved beyond geometry. He looks like geometry has trapped him.

Jesús Rafael Soto
“Almost Immaterial Vibration” (1963-64)
Wood, wire, and paint

In high school when I was a pulsing blob of emotion and intensity, László Moholy-Nagy’s 1947 Vision in Motion was my bible. Documenting the aesthetics of Chicago’s neo-Bauhaus Institute of Design, which Moholy-Nagy founded, the book is liberally illustrated with student and faculty experiments in form, as well as contemporary avant-garde art. I marveled at the streamlined angularity of art and industrial objects, at curvaceous biomorphic shapes that hinted at a titillating eroticism. Beyond Geometry’s catalogue credits Moholy-Nagy several times with being a precursor to some of the artists in the show, so I turned to Vision in Motion again, curious as to how it could speak so deeply to a Vietnam-era working-class teen in Indiana. What I found was an astute, frighteningly timely analysis of the dehumanizing effects of modern technology and global capitalism. In the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Moholy-Nagy proposes a marriage of art and science in order to secure the heart and morality of the industrial world. Moholy-Nagy cites the US Declaration of Independence as an example of a utopian principle whose realization is limited by “the unconscious dependence upon the previous structure.” New forms of art can eradicate oppressive unconscious structures. “The fundamental concept and concern of the abstract painter does not seem to be involved in the details of ‘social reality.’ Consequently, abstract art is often interpreted by the social revolutionaries as the art of the escapists. But the artist’s duty is not to be always in opposition. He may concentrate his forces on the central problem of visually constituting a better world, yet to be born. . . . In a deeper sense, the interpretation of space-time with light and color is a truly revolutionary act.” “Abstract” art, by reprogramming the subconscious of the masses, will bring about nothing less than a new social order.

Vanguard art such as that in the Beyond Geometry exhibition has spurred us to appreciate increased viewer participation in the creation of the artistic experience. This work, committed to explorations of duration and seriality, an embrace of mathematics, suggests that (all?) meaning should reside in the object rather than the artist pointing to meaning outside the object. These are laudable aims, as are the erasure of the authority of the artist as creator, the prizing of process over product, and the urge to eradicate artistic categories. In the big picture, we can vaguely see artists all over the world working towards a leveling, possibly democratic, way of making art. But where is Moholy-Nagy’s revolutionary fervor? In the catalogue’s final essay, “Reality Rush: Shifts of Form, 1965-1968,” Inés Katzenstein makes explicit connections between Vietnam-era activism and developments in the art of Daniel Buren (French), David Lamelas (Argentinian), Hélio Oiticica (Brazilian), and America’s own Robert Smithson. Katzenstein provides a lively, enlightening analysis of the heroic efforts of these artists to break free of the confines of the gallery and take their formal experiments to the streets.

How this work engages its “turbulent time” feels especially pertinent to our current political climate, as 9/11 and the war in Iraq have propelled many writers and artists into a crisis of aesthetics. How can art address the enormity of such terror and chaos? Should it? Does formal experimentalism still make sense? Gay writers and artists experienced a similar crisis in the ’80s and ’90s in response to AIDS. I’ve been struck by the lack of irony in gay experimental narrative as compared to its straight counterparts—the McSweeney’s crowd, for example—and I’ve wondered if gay writers’ confrontations with AIDS aren’t, in part, responsible for that. Is irony possible in the face of mass crisis? Beyond Geometry may not have provided answers to my personal aesthetic soul-searching, but it did amuse Margaret and me. Perhaps laughter and delight are enough for two serious ladies on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

 

Dodie Bellamy’s latest books are Pink Stream (Suspect Thoughts Press) and the re-release of The Letters of Mina Harker (University of Wisconsin Press). She lives in San Francisco. This article was originally published in NYFA Quarterly, the arts and culture magazine of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in December 2004 in conjunction with Linda Francis’ spotlight exhibition.

 

Matthew Deleget: I would like to begin our interview with a brief discussion of your background. You were born and raised in New York City (The Bronx). What was you first contact with the arts? Was visual art something that was understood and supported?

 

Linda Francis: At the time, one could get a decent education in public schools because there was still a social contract between government and the individual. Arts programs were not much in evidence though, but I do remember that my inattention very often landed me in the art room.

 

MD: You came of age during the mid sixties. What made you decide to study at Hunter College? Was your focus always on art?

 

LF: I didn’t go directly into college from high school. I really had no idea of what to do with my life. Finally, when I did go, I intended to major in the sciences, specifically biology and chemistry. I went to Hunter simply because it was a good school and free. I was able to work a couple of days a week to get by. One depressing New York City winter evening, I passed an art supply store on my way home. It was all lit up and somehow I thought to try to make a painting. Really it was like being hit by lightning. It seemed as though I had been looking hard at things all my life and didn’t know it. I transferred to the art department, which was run by Gene Goossen. A relatively small group of artists were teaching. I was so fortunate to have been there then — it was a wonderful time for the faculty. They were developing their ideas and beginning to exhibit them. The excitement was palpable. During that time Tony Smith had his first big show of sculpture in Bryant Park and MOMA mounted an exhibition called The Art of The Real curated by Goossens.

 

MD: You did your MA at Hunter where you studied with Tony Smith, among others. How did he teach? What were his major concerns in the classroom? How did he impact your development (or not)? What did you leave with?

 

LF: The program was small and intense. The same people taught undergraduate and graduate classes. I continued on to the graduate school because of Tony. My memories were generally of a one-to-one dialogue when he came around to my studio. We talked and talked, mostly about science. We always discussed the latest issue of Scientific American since we both regularly read it. Smith was kicking around mapping ideas like the ‘four color’ problem. For him there was no better way to engage the issue of flatness in painting. He had worked with Buckminster Fuller and was very involved with his ideas. We read D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, which proved to be the book that probably had the most lasting influence on my thinking. At the time, I was painting sort of sci-fi looking things with color arrayed as that seen through a prism. Tony used to tease me saying that I didn’t want to paint, I wanted to make magic.

A few of us would often go out to Donohues bar after school hours and continue our discussions into the night. At some point Tony would open his beloved dog-eared copy of Ulysses and read aloud. After I graduated, I remember dropping in to visit him at Hunter one night. I tried to enter the room with the least possible disturbance as class was underway, but he spotted me. Tony turned around and fixed me with his profound stare, said something to the effect that he was glad to see me, and commenced reading Ulysses to the class for the rest of the hour.

 

MD: Who else at Hunter left an impression on you – faculty, etc.?

 

LF: Ray Parker, who had the sharpest eye for composition and detail in a painting. Lyman Kipp, an utter iconoclast. Bob Morris whose work could be understood by the assignments he gave in class. Ron Gorchov, Vinnie Longo, Ursula Meyer. I was never in Doug Ohlson’s class, but we became friends. I remember watching him hang his first show at Fischbach one night with Jane Kaufman and Tony looking on. I also have a memory of Twyla Tharp trying out a very beginning work performed for a small group of us at Hunter. It featured her husband, painter Bob Huot, a decidedly non-dancer. I took every class Leo Steinberg gave. Each lecture was an object of pure beauty.

 

MD: Who were some of the artists that you admired during this time. Were there any specific exhibitions or events that left an impact on your thinking and process?

 

LF: At the time there were allot of ‘happenings’.The idea of ‘performance’ was being developed along with improvisational dance. It was as though painting had relinquished some of its theater and became more a secret, alchemical process. There was a very amazing evening at the Armory with (I think) Kaprow, Rauschenberg, Morris, and Rainer.

I was very interested in Cage’s ideas too and remember making a poster for a concert by him in Town Hall. I was reading Causality and Chance in Modern Physics by David Bohm and Louis DeBroglie. To me it was metaphysics.

I loved contemporary music and did some performance myself in Town Hall and later at the University of New Hampshire with composer Gregory Reeve. To his Red Gongs scored for orchestra and two percussion sections, I made an immense blacklight painting on mylar with a brush wired for sound. Thinking about music led me to make some boxes that radiated light and some that radiated smoke.

It was as if all absolutes gave way to the experimental. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty perversely fueled the perception that anything was possible. It was also a time when a strong humanistic sense prevailed. I remember being part of the March on Washington for Civil Rights and some time later part of the Art Workers’ Coalition, an artists’ movement in support of peace and democratic ideals.

Some of the artists whose work I looked at with interest then were Matta, Lee Bontecou, Larry Poons, Jasper Johns, and Arakawa.

 

MD: After graduating from Hunter, you lived in Tribeca (downtown Manhattan) during the 1970s and 1980s. Tell me about the artists you hung around with and the places you frequented. Where did you go to see challenging work?

 

LF: It was a real community. Tribeca wasn’t “Tribeca”. Mostly everyone knew each other. Everyone went to each other’s studios, always visited, stopped in the street to talk, went to have a beer. There were many empty spaces, in Soho as well, and people used them to mount ad hoc shows, have events. The Tribeca milieu sort of resisted commerce. There were very few galleries in Soho then and none further downtown. Holly Solomon and Paula Cooper were first in Soho, I think. Bob Kushner and Tommy Schmidt were friends who were showing with Holly. Food restaurant was going strong. I remember seeing a performance by Joseph Beuys at Rene Block’s space. John Weber, Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend opened at some point. Mel Bochner was doing wall paintings then. I remember he was the first artist I asked to come over to my studio to formally look at work.

Walker’s was a basic burger bar which often took work in exchange for a tab. The Delphi known affectionately as “the Greek’s” was the one place where everyone met when a real dinner was needed. Brad Davis and Daisy Youngblood lived in my building. The door to my loft said “American Ballbearing Co.” Across the street was Suzie Harris and Gene Highstein, Keith Sonnier. Within a radius of a few blocks were David Reed, Judy Rifka, Richard Nonas, Susan Rothenberg, Ronnie Bladen, and many, many terrific artists. I saw Jon and Joanne Hendricks. There were Fluxus things going on. 105 Hudson Street was an office building with rooms that people started to use for exhibitions. I remember seeing a Louise Bourgeois sculpture there. She was relatively unknown then. Some time later The Dia Foundation bought the building and converted it for use by their artists. Hal Bromm opened a gallery in his loft on Beech Street, which he later moved to Chambers Street. The collectors Milton Brutten and Helen Herrick were often there. Hal did some terrific shows and put together many artists. It was there that I first met critics Tiffany Bell, Carrie Rickey and poet David Shapiro. Creative Time began a series of summer installations called Art on the Beach on the landfill, which extended the west side into the Hudson River.

 

MD: Between 1976 and 1980, you had 5 solo exhibitions and participated in several group shows at Hal Bromm Gallery. What issues concerned you at the time, arts-related or not?

 

LF: Hal’s gallery was a big part of the art scene in Tribeca. It was really an extension of the neighborhood and reflected its character. He showed many European artists too and did really nice group shows with all of us. All were involved with the abstract. My first show at Hal’s in 1976 was works on paper. One wall of 60 x 45 inch drawings, geometric structures using crayon on vellum, and on the opposite wall, brush drawings, which I did to relieve my wrist between crayon drawings.

At the time I found mechanical ideas like Sol Lewitt’s art by proxy drawing interesting, but the pronouncement that ’painting was dead’ for the millionth time bored me. The work I liked had an eye for ‘phenomena’ as opposed to the programmatic exclusivities of the Minimalists. Transparency of process was important to me, as I guess it was with them, but, for me, it was only about understanding. I was particularly wary of the ’signature’ styles that were everywhere in evidence in Minimal art. It seemed to me that there was a great deal of work, which was defeated by its own program. I thought this work had the style of meaning, but very little intrinsic meaning. I was not opposed to style as a subject, but the Warhol direction was not for me.

I admired Bob Grosvenor’s work. He seemed to me to be one of a very few who was capable of engaging his materials in a totally poetic, but rigorous way. We met when I showed in Paris in 1978 at Gislain Mollet-Vieville et J. P. Najar at the same time that he was showing at Eric Fabre. During that time we also met Yve Alain Bois who was editing the critical magazine Macula with Jean Clay.

I was in Paris in 1977 too as the guest of Jean Paul Najar. I met many of the young French artists, but especially remember painter Christian Bonnefoi who took me over to Gallerie Jean Chauvelin to see a fantastic show of Russian Constructivist art. We went afterwards to the Chauvelin’s country house where we met the painter Martin Barre.

 

MD: During 1977 and 1978, you participated in two group exhibitions and a solo show at P.S.1, one of the first spaces in the country exclusively showing contemporary art and a defining force in the alternative space movement. What was happening there at the time of your exhibitions? What projects did you realize there?

 

LF: P.S.1 was a wonderful old brick and sandstone building in very bad condition. Alana Heiss had a marvelous vision for the place and it began functioning as soon as the doors were able to be open. The most successful works in the beginning were those that somehow dealt with the wrecked walls and the crumbling spaces. Most of the spaces were school rooms. In keeping with that, I mounted certain papers on the wall, the blackboard, and asked four painters to do something with them. I collaborated with poet Stephen Paul Miller. I had a painting in a large exhibition called simply A Painting Show. It was one of the first shows in the newly fabricated gallery space. The exhibition brought together most of the abstract painters working downtown at the time. There was a companion exhibition A Sculpture Show.

 

MD: In 1980 you designed some sets for “Harrisburg Mon Amour” by David Shapiro and Stephen Paul Miller with Taylor Mead at The Kitchen in New York. How did you get involved with this project?

 

LF: I went out by bus to Kutztown a few times with Stephen Paul Miller to make a print with him at James Carroll’s project space at the college. We met John Cage there who was making a print too. We all contributed to his print — my contribution was a coffee cup ring.

The bus route ended up in Harrisburg, the site of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. Recording one of their bus trips to the college, Stephen and David used the distant reactor stacks at Harrisburg as a counterweight to their two-hour conversation about anything and everything. Taylor performed the verbatim script. He read on until sense was overwhelmed by inanity and began throwing unread pages away in exasperation. Taylor was the perfect tragic comic. Laurie Anderson did the music. I made some very large backcloths with giant atomic bugs on them. The whole thing was a kind of hapless shriek.

 

MD: In 1981 you participated in the exhibition “Drawing Distinctions, American Drawing of the Seventies,” which originated at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen and traveled throughout Europe. How did this show come about? How did the show’s curator, Alfred Kren, define what was distinctive about Americans drawing? Who else was included in the show? What was the response?

 

LF: I met Alfred at Hal’s. It was in 1977 during a group show called Moving. I was doing a big drawing on the gallery wall that changed over time and required me to do successive overlays at night when no one was in the gallery. Unbeknownst to me, Alfred, newly arrived from Germany, was staying there and watched me do the large free-hand arc. He loved drawing. It united information and painting. It was taking up more and more space in the canon. In Europe it was still mostly seen as studies or notes, although there were some terrific exceptions in the work of Francois Morellet, Henri Michaux, and Norwegian artist Jan Groth.

Some of the artists in the drawing show were Artschwager, Borofsky, Grosvenor, Le Va, Lundberg, Sandback, Shapiro, Sonnier, and Tuttle. There was a very good essay by Carter Ratcliff in the catalog.

Drawing is by its nature more intimate and I think Alfred was looking for the definition of self in them. Yet these works were independent of other objects. They were complete and self-referential in the same way as is painting or sculpture. His view was not encyclopedic, although it encompassed a plurality of ideas. He saw the common underlying imperatives.

He was interested in my work for the way in which it positioned the “given” against the “interpreted.” In 1979, I made a breakthrough to the subjects and methods that continue in my work now. I began making work that took information — photographs of galaxies and nebulae — and attempted to recreate the images by using analogous processes. The goal was knowledge.

The press in the countries to which the show traveled were interested in Alfred’s thesis. The German press was somewhat skeptical though for a number of reasons, but I think largely because there was a growing consciousness that contemporary “German“ art was driven by different realities than contemporary “American” art. The curators at the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich were very excited by the show, however, and made that very plain to me when I was there. I really liked meeting Arnulf Rainer there too and was impressed by his comments.

 

MD: Your work has been shown quite a bit in Europe, primarily in France and Denmark, but also in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and Italy. Do you think the kind of work you make is better understood there than here in the United States? What do you perceive are the differences?

 

LF: Perhaps not better understood, just better valued. But abstract art is more significant to Europeans. They see it as a lasting language, after all it was invented there. Perhaps it is viewed less as a material enterprise. I don’t really know. Here it’s much like jazz and blues. That is to say, it’s the giant in the room that one sees when one is able to get enough distance.

 

MD: Let shift our discussion now to talking about your work – where it comes from and how you make it. Your work over the past 25 years has stemmed from a personal dialogue with science, particularly the laws of physics and astronomy. How did you initially arrive at this subject?

 

LF: I always was interested in the sciences. There is great beauty in the ideas and concepts about the physical world. Sometimes I see them as rational metaphors for the irrational. It is probably not possible for me to be involved in society in a more obvious way. I don’t admire it all that much.

 

MD: Every article or review I’ve read about your work tries to either prove or disprove your use of science, how your work is a manifestation of science or how it is not. Do you employ a scientific process in the studio –i.e., hypothesis, experimentation, and conclusion? Do you welcome this ongoing critical discussion of your work?

 

LF: I suppose the way in which I work admits to what one might call conjecture. For example, I ask myself questions like this — if everything is made out of atoms and atoms are always moving then what would a stable form look like? Or more precisely, how could a stable form arise? My working method is a kind of experimentation. That is, I limit the variables in the work so I can see if some transformation occurs as a result of my operations.

As for science, per se, I am most obviously not a scientist and feel happy when I am able to understand the things that I try to read. My work is really intuition even though I think that it pertains to some of the ideas in cosmology, string theory and the like. In 1982, I did a show in Copenhagen of very large drawings, in which I attempted to pick out the structures embedded in certain spiral galaxies. I called the show The Order of Chaos mostly because I thought it funny that the word ‘chaos’ is defined as ‘disorder’. I had been reading Pirogine’s description of chaos, which really pointed out how orderly it is. Predictability is a different case.

 

MD: Have you had the opportunity in the past to show and discuss your work with actual scientists, not just artists and writers. How have they responded to your work? How has their response differed?

 

LF: I have not spoken enough to the scientists with whom I imagine I would like to have a conversation. I’ve been shy about it, but would love to have the opportunity. My work does have an admirer in a German biologist though who can understand the work from the standpoint of what he sees through an electron microscope. Many years ago, in a fit of illumination, I phoned the string theorist Abhay Ashtekar and went on about baseballs and motion in all directions at once. He just nicely asked me to send him some pictures, which, of course, I was then too embarrassed to do.

There have been a couple of very positive responses from mathematicians who are familiar with the arts and are able to decode my quirky relationship to numbers and space. I felt particularly good when one of them recognized ‘the three body problem’ in a drawing.

 

MD: Are there other sides to your work or process that are deliberate and obvious to you that viewers rarely or never pick up on?

 

LF: I think one would have to know or understand the possibilities to which I am alluding in order to know or get pleasure out of seeing the impossibilities that come up in the work. Yve-Alain Bois is the one person who has talked about that aspect of it.

 

MD: Supersymmetry – a concept straight out of physics – is probably the best point of entry into your working process. Dealer Nicholas Davies described it clearest in relation to your work stating “every fundamental particle of matter possesses a ‘shadow’ particle, as yet unobserved, which holds a force, and vice versa.” Your work exemplifies the principals of matter and force. Please explain.

 

LF: When I first started using chalk and eraser in the seventies, I thought of the chalk as matter and the eraser as force. I understood that the way to account for form or mass was to look at force. The character of the form depends upon the type of force exerted upon it. That is how I was able to make chaotic patterns by moving around chalk with eraser in certain curved trajectories.

Supersymmetry is a two-paneled painting, in which I tried to show how the same structure might look quite different depending upon what elements were visible in each case. That is actually an idea which informs most of my work.

 

MD: The appearance of your work can vacillate between the macrocosmic and the subatomic simultaneously. How important are these shifts in perception, these exponential shifts in scale?

 

LF: They are very important and I fully intend them.

 

MD: You’ve consistently used a geometric vocabulary in your work – aggregations of circles, ellipses, triangulations, quatrefoils, and pentagons, as well as arcs, waves, and spirals. Straight(ish) lines haven’t made an appearance in your work in the last 25 years, except in the rectilinear edges of your papers or panels. Tell me about the shapes, structures, and systems you use.

 

LF: The structures that I use come out of motion in curved space and the idea that every point on a curve is the same point. You can sort of see the possibility for time travel when you look at a spiral galaxy and see the arms propelled symmetrically from the center, but corkscrewed in opposite directions. From the time that I first looked at a photo of the great nebula in Andromeda, I knew that symmetry and curved space were what I wanted to explore. I understood that three dimensions were a kind of brain trick to enable us to orient our bodies in space and to be able to move through it. At the same time, I was aware that everything depends upon how we decode information — that flatness in painting is not any more real than three-dimensional constructs are. I remember looking at a Ryman and thinking that it didn’t matter if the three little screws on the surface were dots or holes or photographs, or whether one was looking at a painting that took pains to be read as a wall on a wall and actually was seeing, of necessity, windows. ‘Flatness’ for its own sake was not interesting.

Those things, which add an element of psychological dilemma to reason, interest me. One thing I have been doing for the last ten years is equating a line drawn anywhere on a sphere with an edge or silhouette. The painting Pentagon is a good example of that. Also, Two Hexagons. This idea started with some drawings I showed in 1997 that came from thinking about the wobble of the earth in orbit and wondering whether one could actually translate that into a “flat” drawing. I did that in the drawing Equatorial Precession and a number of others. That was one of the drawings reproduced in Michael Brennan’s review of the show on Artnet.com.

 

MD: Smearing and erasing play a central role in your vocabulary as well. To me, they signal motion, vibration, resonance, or flux. Is this the reading you intend?

 

LF: Yes, but that is, however, the by-product of making and unmaking form.

 

MD: Do you see your work as entropic?

 

LF: No. That is, not as in the classical definition of entropy.

 

MD: Do you see your work as ironic or pessimistic?

 

LF: Absolutely not.

 

MD: Your drawings are almost always chalk on paper and are large in scale. Do you make preparatory studies for your drawings? How do you make a drawing?

 

LF: It would defeat my purpose to make studies. Really the drawings are a crap shoot. I most often don’t know what structure will come up. That is why I set limits in advance — a grid of spheres or circles for example. And then anything at all can happen.

 

MD: What role does the white paper ground play in the equation with science?

 

LF: A continuum. Or a convention — a piece of paper I can use to show you something.

 

MD: Although your works are largely black and white, you sometimes use specific key colors, such as red and blue. What are your concerns regarding color?

 

LF: Matisse said that you can tell a colorist by their use of black and white. It has been hard to see a use for color because my interest, for the most part, is in the structure. It seems that most color is either too naturalistic or too decorative. I use color when I think I can unite it with the structure, or when it can function as black or gray, or when I need to differentiate some part as one would with a word.

 

MD: Recently, you began making paintings again. Your paintings are exclusively oil on panel, which is undoubtedly a much slower process than your drawings. How do your paintings relate to your drawings, or not? What do they share in common? How are they different?

 

LF: I guess the activity of painting as opposed to drawing causes me to work differently. I am very aware of the architecture of the panels, the orientation of the horizontals and verticals in relation to external architecture, the palpability of the paint, the objecthood of the whole enterprise. I use a lot of diamonds because the oblique edge confounds conventional gravity-oriented space and seems to posit an endlessness. I like to play with their measurements against those of squares. I make a lot of what could be read as diagrams.

The structures I paint take into account the same givens as in the drawings and are, I hope, shown to the same net effect. Certainly the conclusions are the same.

 

MD: Your work, in general, seems to lie almost outside the realm of space/time, frozen snapshots of a cosmic continuum. In this respect, your work is a rigorous depiction of reality. Of course, not based on what we see, but rather based on what we know is true, proven through scientific inquiry. Do you think it’s fair to interpret your work as representational — yes, in the traditional sense, albeit from a completely different perspective?

 

LF: I remember once telling a realist that I was a realist too, if that is what you mean. But I was just joking. As in relationship to the idea of verisimilitude, it would be nice.

 

MD: Another interesting interpretation of your work was included in the review of your solo exhibition at Condeso/Lawler Gallery in 1997. Painter/writer Michael Brennan wrote “these drawings are elemental, not Minimal, nor reductive, and they function at the building block level of knowledge…they are constructed outside of any conventional rectilinear idea of art.” How does your work belong to art? How does it belong to science? Are issues of aesthetics part of your thinking, or not? Can scientific information be aesthetic?

 

LF: I was elated when I read that review. It was what I had hoped for in the work and was grateful that someone could perceive it that way and describe it so clearly. I don’t really know how the work belongs to art or science. I think of aesthetics — yes. But the best thing anyone can say to me is that the work is elegant. Perhaps in aesthetics that’s bad, but in science that is beautiful.

 

MD: I would like to talk to you for a moment about your solo exhibition – “Linda Francis: quanta” – currently on view at the University of Alabama, which features a lot of your recent work. How did you structure the show? Which works did you include in it? What ideas were you trying to convey? How did you arrive at the title?

 

LF: Quanta are units or parts. I like to think the work does some quantifying.

I suggested that we choose work that pointed up the relationship between the paintings and drawings. I’ve actually never had the opportunity to do that before because I work from a whole a priori conception that generates lots of simultaneous forms and ideas. I don’t think linearly. I’ve noticed anyway that the idea of a ’series,’ which stems from Newman’s work, is often perverted to justify a commercial design exercise.

There were seven paintings in the show and ten drawings. We started with some work from 1997 and included work from almost each year up to 2004. Most of the older work had been shown in NYC, but three paintings and five drawings had never been shown before.

Hartmut Böhm, Quadratrelief 32, 1968
Plexiglas, 127 x 127 x 5.5 cm
Peter C. Ruppert Collection
Museum im Kultur-speicher, Würzburg, Germany

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.