Chamberlain Harris Matta-Clark Oppenheim Serra Smithson Weiner
I.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there are many who still believe the world is a solid and stable place. The fact that there continues to be an argument between those who propose that we all participate in a common reality and those who recognize that everything, even the recognizer, is in a state of transition makes this exhinition both challenging and timely. Connected in various ways to each other, as well as to the esthetic currents that proliferated between the late 1960’s and mid 1970’s, the artists whose works are included in this exhibition were among the first to dissect, analyze, and upend the reality we all supposedly shared. That they belong to different kernels of thoght and feeling should not, however,prevent us from beginning to see the various affinities, linesof though, dispositions, and attitudes that they shared. For behind the significant differences in their work were certain overlapping topologies: recial strife, sexual prejudices, the Vietnam War, Watergrate, the inability of America to either solve or hide its deepening socail inequities, and the disturbing realization that what we were given to see was not necessarily what was there.
The artists John Chamberlain, Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, Rober Smithson, and Lawrence Weiner have generally been understood in relationship to artistic movement and critical discourses such as Earth Art, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. While these terms may have been initially useful during the specific period in which they were first used to name is various actions and kinds of work, to continue to use them is to tilt this critical enterprise toward neat categories and the fixity of historical periods, esthetic modes of perception that at the very best are false and misleading. It is not only world, either this one now or the one that was then, that is contingent, but also our relationship to it. The world is always far messier and elusive than category we place on top of it. Rather, like Gordon Matta-Clark, who dug a hole in the floor of his gallery in an attempt to expose its foundation, an act of baring the very ground one stands on, it might best serve the purposes of this exhibition to uncover the affinities and relationships, while also respecting the spaces between those affinities and relationships.
Within the parameters suggested by the works included in this exhibition, John Chamberlain become a key figure. His early interest in gesture, which remains a central aspect of his current work, dveloped out of his strong feelings fr the ground breaking work of the Abstract-Expresionists. By working in sculputure, Chamberlain was able to shift gesture from a two dimensional domain to a three dimensional one. At the same time, his ise of car parts, their pliable metal shells and parts, anticipates a subsequent generations use of things found in the urban-industrial landscape, and, later, the use of the landscape as it was found. Certainly, both the things in this landscape and the landscape itself were central to younger artists, such as Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson.
Along with Chamberlain, Richard Serra, particularly in his early work, was infuenced by the Abstract-Expressionists, especially Jack Pollock, who was able to transform his entire bodys motions into arabesques of paint. Serras splashings of hot lead in the late 1960’s can be seen as both a brilliant restating Pollocks painterly methods as well as a bridge to a younger generation of artists. At the same time, his Lead Piece, 1969, is a form which underscores the flexibility of lead as well as evokes the principal elelment used in rationlistic architecture. For Serra, gesture was no longer seen as a record of transcendent yearning, but as self-reflexive thing. Moreover, the interplay between sculpture and site, which has characterized much of Serras work since his splashings, connects him to Harris, Matta-Clark, Oppenheim, and Smithson, all of whom made work which recontextualized a specific landscape, whether it was a pristine gallery space, an adandoned Manthattan peir, a frozen lake in upstate. And within this dance of possibilites, Weiners work brings the viewer back into the world, makes them reconsider their interaction with it.
Starting in the late 1960’s, a number of artists began questioning the framework in which art was seen. For some the framework was the gallery or museum, while others found the commondification of art disturbing. Conscious of the repressive nature of these various frames, artistis such as Matta-Clark, Oppenheim, Serra, Smithson, and Weiner made work which questioned the different, historically accepted frameworks in which art was placed. In making or placing work which proposed a relationship between the object, be it made of lead or words stenciled or painted on a wall, and the place it was in, these artists revealed the unstable and often repressive nature of all culturally accepted environments or context. Rather than making work which accepted the world as a collection of fixed places, they attempted to reveal the various ways the world is constantly in a state of flux, a state of decay and regeneration.
Smithson incorporated entropic processes into many of his works, Matta-Clark called what he was doing Anarchitecture, Oppenheim worked with changing landscape such as a farmers field or a frozen lake, and Weiner stenciled world. In this case, the veiwer becomes the artist, the one who much contextualize Weiners words, and in doing, relect upon ones gesture. Instead of making work which would be placed somewhere, on a wall or in a room park, there artists examined, undermined, and refocused aspects of the environment in order to point out, among other things, that art does not exist apart from the world, that the exalted notion that art is in and of itself self-sufficient and permanent is neither useful nor valid.
II.
Although the works in this exhibition are very different, there are certain properties which they share. For these artists, the physical or natural world is no longer seen as evidence of purity and spiritual presence. Their use of non-art materials stencils, car parts, lead sheets, glass mirrors, a portion of an office buildings floor and ceiling, and photographs convey something about the tangible world we inhabit, while also evoking an air of danger and instability. For example, the inherently fragile nature of glass in Suzanne Harris work and the possible danger raised by Matta-Clarks placement of one section of his place on the ceiling above the viewers head, tell the veiwer the world is constantly transforming itself in visible and invisible ways. In retrospect, one can now see that between the late 60’s and early 70’s, the crashing cascades of paint, scarred and scraped surfaces, and uncontainable fields, of expanding gesture that characterzed the paintings of Kline, de Koonin, and Pollock, had given way to an altogether different possibility.
III.
Common to all of the work in this exhibition is the artists clear sighted attempt to analyze, dissect, and reconstitute the physical structures and familiar paradigms of reality he or she (and by extension the viewer) live inside of. There is a feeling of discontent in the work, a sense that the artist find the culture institutions stifling environments for art making. Their insistent efforts to exert some control over the interply between art and its enviroment broadens our undertanding of art as well as the world we inhabit. Thus, whether these artists are overtly socially conscious or not, there is within theier work a challenge to see reality differently, not the reality of art or of art history, but of that which is common; the actual world.
It is this insistence on the actual, not as a pure form but as forms made out of impure materials, out of such things as mirrors, wooden floors, and words, that unites these artists. Serras lead piece and Harris pyramid are form derived from architectures vocabulary, while Chamberlain, Matta-Clark, Oppenheim and Smithson bring things from the world into the gallery. It is the world out there, one that all of these artists interact with through their work, that Weiner directs our attention to.
Although more than two decades have passed since much of this work was made, and much has happened in art since then, the dialogue between art and context these artistis establisted seem as timely, provocatives, and challenging as it did then. It is not simply that this work remaids us that not all is right with the world, but that it continues to reveal something about the condition we still occupy.
John Yau
November 1991