Hostage to the Gallery
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow Hostage to the Gallery There is a new type of art object now crowding into the galleries. Not quite painting, not precisely sculpture, this new work is a hybrid of...
...Discontented with the floor, they scale the walls or hang from the ceiling...
...The point is that the only home for this renegade object was where its heart was from the beginning-in the protective arms of official art...
...Consider, by way of contrast, an example from a previous order of artistic values-a stainless steel sculpture by the late David Smith...
...One could look through the end of this arrangement and see a corridor of alternating bright and dark stripes of amber light...
...This is not a new issue: MoholyNagy once telephoned a commercial sign painter and ordered a geometric painting in three different sizes...
...There is, to begin with, constructed painting (the work of Sven Lukin and Charles Hinman, for example) which still holds to the wall, resisting the full status of sculpture in the round...
...Next, there is the work of the sculptors (Judd and Robert Morris are the ablest practitioners...
...In 1961, while still painting, he began to make three-dimensional constructions...
...Oldenburg, however, appears to be bucking current trends by translating industrial items back into a line of homemade soft-goods...
...While the materials for these works are conventional canvas and paint, they have discarded a basic premise of expressionist painting...
...Relinquishing the rectangular format, paintings now take on the shape of hexagonal doughnuts or develop angular projections that build out from the wall...
...Judd, certainly, represents the extreme solution...
...Lastly, there are the Pop variants...
...His career, in most respects, is typical of the young artists practicing in this mode...
...As Hilton Kramer noted in his New York Times review, Judd's show raised the philosophical question of what constitutes a work of art...
...Ten years ago, he showed abstract paintings that were vigorous and promising but unresolved in their formal directions...
...even in the gallery context, they are forced to seek out the locations where an ordinary light fixture would not be installed...
...The problem is not merely one of industrial materials and methods, nor one of the geometric simplicity of the forms...
...One set of boxes was fabricated in stainless steel...
...In this reversal of values, young painters-and young sculptors, too-discarded the subjective bias of an older generation of artists and set out to forge an art that was cool, hard, imperturbable...
...a very narrow artistic objective, but one which it carried off so well it received nearly 50 years of certification as a work of art...
...Oldenburg's hamburgers and ice-cream cones would have to be constructed on an architectural scale if they were to seem-out-ofdoors-anything more than inept versions of commercial signage...
...A series of large metal boxes was fixed at eye level along each of two gallery walls...
...Most of the object-makers take up a position somewhere between these two poles...
...The relationship was umbilical after all...
...New forms of sculpture display a similar restlessness...
...Not quite painting, not precisely sculpture, this new work is a hybrid of both which makes its stand upon a profound dissatisfaction with each of those traditional media...
...He is nonetheless on record as saying that "nothing made is completely objective, purely practical or merely present...
...Instead, the facets of a construction are painted anonymously in bright (and usually beautiful) hues of acrylic paint...
...There are, as well, objects which resist classification altogether...
...It is significant that one of the answers-that art is discovered in process-has come from painting, while the alternative-Judd's factory produced conceptions-is being formulated in sculptural terms...
...There is a further point to be made about these radical new objects...
...The fate of Duchamp's urinalthat kept object, par excellenceis instructive...
...In an art scene that was noticeably voluble (Pop Art was then coming into vogue) his work was decidedly taciturn...
...One took its measure at a glance and was forced to move around it, more as a perfect obstacle one had encountered than as an invitation to explore the unravelling of a personal statement...
...The steel boxesfour of them, spaced about seven inches apart-had sides of amber Plexiglass...
...In restricting art to the most basic choices imaginable, Judd has made another of those radical esthetic commitments that characterize the modern movement...
...One might almost say that at a certain moment-somewhere in the late '50s-the canvas began to appear to one young artist after another as an object to be reshaped and redesigned, no longer an arena in which to act...
...the other, in galvanized iron...
...yet, it offered none of the usual amenities of a large piece of sculpture...
...Most of these bewildering objects are the work of young artists who started their careers a decade ago, when the prestige of Abstract Expressionism was beginning to wane...
...Morris' work consists of boxes and slabs, usually painted a uniform color, which stand upright or lie flat along the floor...
...This work displays a good deal of formal ingenuity...
...As an object, the box was very much there...
...Take as an example the recent exhibition of Donald Judd at the Castelli Gallery...
...Lukin, for instance, recently exhibited a painting with a projection that descended to the floor and folded back upon itself in an S-shaped curve...
...A work of Smith's would speak with the authority of art wherever it was placed, whether in a gallery or on a vacant lot...
...they were straightforward, declarative, primarily concerned with the formal decisions of the work under examination...
...The top of the box was recessed by about four inches: one of the few indications of esthetic deliberation to be found...
...their dependence upon the art milieu...
...The effect was rather like an Albers' painting of receding squares...
...His recent sagging typewriters and bathroom washstands, recalling Dali's limp pianos, are plastic objects in the double sense -three-dimensional, and made of glossy vinyl stuffed with kapok...
...the artist who commits his ideas to the factory where they are turned out in mint condition...
...It is part of the rigor of his work (work which I admire for its adamant integrity) that he is testing the accuracy of that limit by very fine tolerances...
...The remark has all the concision and aggressive directness of his sculpture...
...Morris, it should be noted, also produces another, somewhat Dadaistic, breed of objects in sculptmetal...
...This was even more true of the major item in the exhibition, a huge aluminum box 40 inches high, 51 inches wide, and 60 inches long, located in the center of the gallery...
...There is also the example of Duchamp's urinal, a manufactured object that had the status of art conferred upon it by simple artistic fiat some 50 years ago...
...His first major showing, about three years ago, consisted of large wooden boxes and ramps painted a uniform light cadmium red...
...For the moment, it seems to me, this work is hostage to the gallery, the museum, the collector's salonthose settings which can provide the credentials of art...
...Claes Oldenburg, currently showing at the Janis Gallery, is the most prominent of the Pop objectmakers...
...If they remain standing, they become simple boxes, stubborn pedestals...
...Judd's work represents the most advanced example of this new objectivity...
...Dan Flavin's fluorescent light tubes are a more conspicuous example of the problem...
...The extremity of his case is marked by the fact that his current work (unlike the earlier wooden boxes) is being made to his specifications by a metal-working shop...
...Conceived in 1917 for an exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists, it was intended to shock the official art world...
...I take it to mean, among other things, that no work, even that produced by factory methods, can escape the artist's sensibility altogether...
...Judd's stainless steel boxes are so reductive in their means that placed in or near a building they might well be mistaken for structural components or housing for equipment...
...Placed on a ceiling, the connotation of art would disappear completely...
...there is no evidence of the painter's sensibility to be gained from the inflections of the brash...
...Its whole purpose seemed to be the declaration of some blunt quiddity and nothing more...
...Judd seems intent upon establishing the answer as one of strictly conceptual choice-a view directly opposed to Abstract Expressionist practice, which held that the creative act was only definable within the procedures of technique...
...His reviews were consistent with the premises of his work...
...A recent exhibition included fluorescent light tubes, glowing pink and yellow, installed on door jambs and baseboards...
...Now, however, the issue is being raised not as an isolated experiment but against a background of similar inquiries by a number of artists...
...What distinguishes Judd from his colleagues, perhaps, is the fact that he majored in philosophy and that he was, for several years, a regular critic for Arts magazine...
...Hinman has executed paintings which look vaguely like the rounded backs of mandolins...
...Ironically, the original no longer exists: It has been replaced by facsimiles...
...The boxes of galvanized iron were also spaced apart, but joined along the tops by a square-sided metal tube painted an intense shade of blue...
...These objects, like his muslin Chrysler automobile impaled upon a pedestal, are a kind of flaccid and abused sculpture...
...Pulling back from the formal exuberance one tends to expect in sculpture, this work insists upon a strict and minimal geometry...
...What we have, then, is a group of artists taking a distinctly conceptual approach to the making of art...
...Aside from the frosted appearance of the metal and the evenly applied coats of Harley Davidson motorcycle paint, there was little surface incident to catch the eye and little evidence of a governing sensibility...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 6
