Robert Colescott, I Gets A Thrill Too When I Sees Dekoo, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 84 by 60 inches. Collection Rose Art Museum.

Like many others, I have often repeated the orthodoxy that the early 1980s saw a return to painting, a rediscovery of figuration, an embrace of dramatic content and an explicit engagement with art history. And, like everyone else who propagates this convenient formula, I have been deeply, unforgivably wrong. While it’s true that with the advent of Neo-Expressionism there was a much greater interest (at least for a little while) in figurative, art-history drenched, emotionally charged paintings, and more of such work being made, this simplistic. decadist version of events risks blinding us to the fact that several painters were working in this mode during the 1970s—wait, let me revise that last phrase—it risks making us forget (or never recognize in the first place) that several major painters of the period were already working in this mode during the 1970s. They included Malcolm Morley, Paul Georges, Peter Saul and, last but not least, Robert Colescott.

Robert Colescott, Down in the Dumps (So Long Sweet Heart, 1983, 84 by 72 inches, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Kravets/Wehby, New York.

Colescott, whom I regret never having met, strikes me as a painter of incredible courage. He seems to leap into every painting as if it will be his last, determined to leave no inch of the canvas unactivated, no social taboo unchallenged, no occasion for painterly bravura unseized. His compositions pulse and throb with tightly packed figures and areas of impacted opulent color as if the canvas, no matter how large, isn’t big enough to contain his pictorial energy, or his urgent need to tackle head-on huge subjects. Colescott’s wager was doubly or maybe even triply daring: Was it possible to make great paintings from the crassest racial stereotypes in the American psyche? Was it possible to be a broad social satirist and a color-mad celebrant of painterly excess at the same time? Was it possible to reconcile the high-art legacy of Europe and the flashy, fleshy, rambunctious, loud energy of American vernacular culture?

Robert Colescott, Saturday Night Special (I seen it on TV), 1988, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

Against all odds, Colescott won his artistic bets in canvas after canvas. Especially during the last 20 years of his life, he expertly deployed every possible device of painting with a Tarantino-like glee. Some viewers recoil from Colescott’s intensity, feeling equally uncomfortable with his racially (and sexually) charged scenarios and with his baroque, over-the-top style. Others relish this discomfort and are only too happy to let Colescott’s delirious pictorial power wash over them. The path by which Colescott arrived at his singular style was unusual. After the Second World War, he traveled from Berkeley to Paris to study with Fernand Léger, who encouraged him to forsake abstraction. In the mid 1960s he again left the States (he hadn’t stayed in Paris very long) for a fellowship at the American Research Center in Cairo. As he explained in 1985, “I spent a couple of years in Egypt and was influenced by the narrative form of Egyptian art, by 3,000 years of a ‘non-white’ art tradition, and by living in a culture that is strictly ‘non-white.’ I think that excited me about some of the ideas about race and culture in our own culture; I wanted to say something about it.” (I take this from Michael Lobel’s October 2004 Artforum article on Colescott; its original source is “Conversation with Robert Colescott” by Ann Shengold, in Robert Colescott: Another Judgment, Knight Gallery/Spirit Square Arts Center, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1985.) Interstingly, Colescott isn’t the only African-American painter to be deeply affected by visiting Egypt; abstract painter Stanley Whitney also credits a trip to Egypt as crucial for the development of his work. Speaking of geography, it’s surely significant that as Colescott’s career got underway he lived and worked not in New York or Los Angeles but in San Francisco, Portland and Tucson.

Robert Colescott, Ode to Joy, 1997, 90 by 114 inches, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Kravets/Wehby, New York.

As I write these lines it has been almost four years since Colescott died (in June, 2009), at the age of 83; 16 years since he represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale and 24 years since the last retrospective of his work (at New York’s New Museum). The only substantial museum show of his work in the last quarter century was a 10-year survey (1997-2007) curated by Peter Selz in 2007 for the San Francisco alternative space Meridian Gallery (this show traveled to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa). Kravets/Wehby Gallery in New York has also been a place to see Colescott’s work. The year of his death he was included in the Rubell Family Collection’s widely seen, much-discussed “30 Americans” exhibition. It certainly seems time for some major U.S. museum to mount a full Colescott retrospective.

As I sometimes do when I want to index the level of an artist’s standing in cool academic art history circles, I looked up Colescott in the second edition of Art Since 1900, that influential 1,000-page-plus history authored by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and David Joselit. The fact that Colescott isn’t given even a passing mention (Morley, Georges and Saul are similarly ignored) reminds me why I started The Silo in the first place, and why I feel there’s still much work to be done.

An excellent, even emblematic, instance of such artistic unpredictability can be seen in the development of American painter Norman Bluhm (1921-1999).  Who, looking at Bluhm’s slashing gestural abstractions of the late 1950s—the work that first brought him attention—would be able to foresee the paintings he created in the 1980s and 1990s: architectonic, intensely symmetrical compositions that owe as much to the art and architecture of Medieval and Renaissance Europe as to the Abstract Expressionist milieu in which Bluhm’s style was initially forged.

Despite the striking differences between the early and later decades of Bluhm’s oeuvre, the changes in his work always came gradually; there’s never a dramatic break. This means that it’s possible to track year by year, canvas by canvas, how he brought into his work new ideas, new motifs, new content, new approaches to paint handling.

Norman Bluhm, Easter Morning, 1979, oil on canvas, 96 by 284 inches. Courtesy Norman Bluhm Estate.

Surveying his career, we have the advantage of knowing how the story ends. (I must admit that this “we” is more aspirational than factual: as yet, too few viewers are familiar with Bluhm’s entire career—only one of his large-scale late paintings has been shown in New York since 1994.) It’s sometimes hard not to imagine that Bluhm, too, knew all along how the story would end, knew that he would finally arrive at an approach that combined his early architectural training, his debt to Abstract Expressionism, and his passion for old masters. But if he knew where he was going, he also knew that there were no shortcuts, at least not for someone who respected the integrity and craft of painting, who never wanted to reject his own past, whose work was always about reconciliation, even when the only thing he was reconciling was the painting he was working on and the painting he’d just completed.

Norman Bluhm, Byzantine Angel, 1989, oil on canvas, 72 by 84 inches. Courtesy Norman Bluhm Estate.

As long as Bluhm’s late work remains marginalized (if people do know of him, it’s usually only via his work of the 1950s and early ‘60s), the history of painting during the last 25 years of the 20^th century will remain seriously incomplete. In the 1970s, his introduction of serpentine forms and opulent color pioneered a new sensuality for abstract painting. In the 1980s, his embrace of bilateral symmetry and a range of historically and culturally diverse decorative traditions allowed him to embrace the abstract and the figural. In the 1990s, Bluhm’s multi-panel, mural-scale paintings offered a compelling summation of his own career (he never turned away from gestural painting, but daringly assimilated it into geometric structures) and, even more importantly, an audacious project to reconcile some five centuries of painting history, stretching from the Lorenzetti brothers in 14th-century Siena and passing through Botticelli, Rubens, Tiepolo, Cézanne, Matisse and de Kooning. I can’t help but wonder what a new generation of painters might make of this work . . . if they got the chance to actually see it.

Norman Bluhm, Cappella Ignota, 1997, 120 by 244 inches. Courtesy Norman Bluhm Estate.

Shirley Jaffe, The Gray Phantom, 2009, oil on canvas, 80 by 78 inches. Installation at Galerie Gerta Meert, Brussels, 2011-2012.

Shirley Jaffe emerged from the crucible of gestural abstraction with an approach to painting that has given her maximum formal freedom within fairly constant material conditions.  A smooth-edge (rather than hard-edge) painter, she fills each one of her canvases with arrays of flat, discontinuous shapes (geometric, biomorphic, linear, allusive, ideal, familiar, eccentric, graceful, clunky) in which the color experiments of classic 20^th century abstraction are pushed to new levels of creative discord and strange harmony.  Frequently inspired by momentary glimpses of urban landscapes, or visual memories, her paintings undergo a long process of correction and adjustment as shapes change contour and color, or disappear completely, until absolute autonomy and tight choreography coincide.

When I interviewed Jaffe for The Brooklyn Rail in 2010, she described her approach as a turn away from “singularity” in favor of a “general congestion of events.” This rejection of singularity, which I take to mean both paintings dominated by single forms and paintings built out of repeated elements, is evident even in Jaffe’s early work, the gestural paintings she made in the 1950s. Unlike many of the painters around her, who employed somewhat modular motifs, she was interested in a plurality of forms and mark-making.

Shirley Jaffe, Untitled, 1952, oil on canvas, 56 by 51 inches. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy, New York.

In the mid-1960s, during a sojourn in Berlin, Jaffe began to distance herself from gestural painting, thanks in part to her discovery of the music of contemporary composers such as Xenakis and Stockhausen. One thing she didn’t like about her gestural canvases was their suggestion of landscape. Since then, the built environment has been a central inspiration. But hers is a city transformed into an independent visual universe. Slow to be made (as French philosopher Yves Michaud has chronicled in a 1985 essay on Jaffe titled “Histoire d’un tableau”), Jaffe’s paintings also need time to be fully absorbed. (Michaud’s text has recently been reprinted by French publisher Lienart in L’art comme expérience: Shirley Jaffe & pratiques contemporaines, a collection of essays largely devoted to Jaffe’s work.) And maybe they can never be completely comprehended; something about the constantly shifting ensemble of parts and whole will always escape the viewer’s attempts to grasp it.

While Jaffe’s work has long been highly visible in galleries (Tibor de Nagy in New York, Nathalie Obadia in Paris, Gerta Meert in Brussels), and in French museums, not nearly enough has been done to think about her work broader contexts. In the U.S., she is too often seen as “an American in Paris,” a label that may be historically accurate but one which misses possible connections to artists as diverse as Kim MacConnel, Tony Cragg, Bernard Piffaretti, Trevor Winkfield, Jessica Stockholder and Jonathan Lasker.  And even within the realm of expatriate American artists there is still much to be done around her work, especially to examine how Jaffe and two other artists who went to Paris after the Second World War (sculptor George Sugarman and painter Norman Bluhm) rethought the legacy of Matisse in three distinctive bodies of work.

Shirley Jaffe, New York Collage II, 2009, oil on canvas, 57 by 38 inches. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy, New York.

Considered as a whole or seen canvas by canvas, Jaffe’s art is a testament to “the human variety” (to borrow a phrase from postwar sociologist C. Wright Mills). While so many contemporary works of art seem to develop through closing off choices or sticking to a initial plan, Jaffe proceeds by keeping every option open until the last possible moment. And even once the painting is finished, a sense of dizzying complexity and joyous invention sustain this openness. For me, I usually know a painting is worth looking at when I feel an intense curiosity about every decision that has gone into its making. That’s how I feel in front of Jaffe’s work: tantalized by countless questions, patiently waiting for the painting to “answer” them, even as new curiosity-inducing relationships keep surging up, prolonging to apparent infinity this perfect fusion of thinking and looking.

Shirley Jaffe, X, encore, 2007-2008, oil on canvas, 82 by 63 inches. Courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris.

Thomas McEvilley, 2011. Photo © Lawrence Schwartzwald. (No reproduction without express permission.)

Like so many other great art critics before him (and, let’s hope, like more to follow), Tom McEvilley, who died March 2, 2013, stumbled into art criticism from other intellectual territory.  In his case, it wasn’t poetry in the Baudelaire-Apollinaire-O’Hara line, or philosophy like Arthur Danto, but classical philology.  One of the many admirable qualities of Tom’s criticism was the fact that he rarely, if ever, reminded his readers of his considerable classical training.  Indeed, I suspect that most of them had no idea of his academic background until, during the last decade of his life, he again took up his early passions in The Shape of Ancient Thought (a book arguing for the influence of Eastern—Indian, Persian—thought on Greek religion and philosophy, and hence on the entire development of Western culture) and translations of Greek poetry. Like that other renegade philologist Friedrich Nietzsche, Tom loved challenging his society’s most fundamental assumptions.

What marked all of Tom’s activities as an art critic was moral courage.  Many people are familiar with his 1984 Artforum article “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,” written in response to MoMA’s “Modern Art and ‘Primitivism’” show, and the subsequent exchange of letters he engaged in with the show’s curators. These are rightly acknowledged as the opening salvos in the cultural upheaval that dismantled Eurocentric esthetics and gave rise to the global artworld of today.  (They are also, in my opinion, the most important, influential works of art criticism of the last 50 years, transcending the limited domain of visual art to make a grand cultural statement.) What fewer readers may realize is that following “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,” Tom stayed true to his principles, to the position he so brilliantly, compellingly articulated. Turning his back on the New York gallery and magazine milieu that had anointed him as the great critic of the 1980s, he set out in search of the art of the rest of the world. McEvilley’s writings of the 1990s and 2000s follow an itinerary that took him everywhere from the “‘stans” of Central Asia to the deep vernacular traditions of the American south. (I was honored to be his editor for most of his writings in Art in America from around 1995 to 2007; and also to teach in the Art Criticism and Writing MFA program he founded at SVA.) It is rare for someone to willingly surrender such power as Tom had; he did so, I believe, because he thought it was the right thing to do, historically and ethically.

Yet he by no means renounced all his former associations. Indeed, the last Art in America article we worked on together concerned one of Tom’s oldest friends, an artist he had written about repeatedly: James Lee Byars. It was a harrowing piece of writing, recounting Byars’s lonely death in Cairo, Tom’s Egyptian-style shiva alongside the artist’s corpse, and a detailed, controversial account of an emblematic battle between art and commerce. As many times before, I was amazed at Tom’s ability to instantly craft new, perfectly constructed sentences as we worked on many drafts in person and over the phone. In this case, the editorial process also involved me visiting Tom’s Lower East Side apartment to view various Byars-related relics. I left the magazine before the article came out, but I heard reports that its publication had greatly upset the powers that be. Significantly, perhaps, it was the last piece of Tom’s published in Art in America.

What marked all of Tom’s writings was his ability to balance a grand historical scope with a vivid sense of existing in the present, being what he called “a living critic.” I may not have always agreed with his brief against “value judgments” but I never doubted his prophetic power, even when it was undermining the very ground I stood on as a critic. Our first encounter came when I wrote a review for Arts Magazine of his 1991 book Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millennium. I still am grappling with certain sentences from that book: “The critic will see that he or she may investigate, analyze, interpret, compare, gather together and sever apart—but not attempt to enforce his or her value judgments on others; of all things, that will be the most direct betrayal of the reconsidered critical project. The purpose of criticism will no longer be to make value judgments for others, but to sharpen the critical faculty and its practice through all of culture.”

AMY GOLDIN [posted September 14, 2012]

It’s not so uncommon for an overlooked or forgotten artist to be rediscovered—lately, and not just on The Silo, there has been a growing interest in mining the recent past, bring renewed attention to artists such as Alina Szapocznikow, Al Taylor or Sven Lukin. Alas, this process of rediscovery almost never befalls art critics. Outside of academia, it is exceedingly rare for a critic’s body of work to be reissued and reassessed. Instead, the greater part of older art criticism remains largely unavailable to readers: many collections of essays and reviews are long out of print and, perhaps more importantly, there has been little effort to scan and post back issues of important art magazines (I’m thinking, for instance, of once-influential but now extinct magazines such as Arts and Art International, which are nowhere on the web; even existing major art magazines such as Art in America and Flash Art make very little of their past archives available.) Well, some people might say, that’s just as it should be: old art criticism is of little use or interest to anyone other than scholars. As art critic Jerry Saltz once observed, art criticism is very here and then very gone.

The case for why it’s worthwhile to rescue art criticism of the past (at least some of it) from obscurity is forcefully made by a recently published collection of writings by art critic Amy Goldin, Art in a Hairshirt: Art Criticism 1964-1978. Edited by artist Robert Kushner and published by Hard Press Editions (full disclosure: Hard Press has published several of my books of poetry and criticism), this book gathers some 25 of Goldin’s articles, reviews and previously unpublished writings along reminiscences and appreciations by eight critics and editors.

Cover of Amy Goldin, Art in a Hairshirt: Art Criticism 1964-1978

There are at least three reasons to read (or reread) Goldin’s writings. The first is because she was the critic who best articulated the concerns and achievements of the Pattern and Decoration movement, a mid-1970s group of loosely associated painters and sculptors who demolished some central taboos of modernism by embracing the decorative, craft (especially so-called women’s work) and non-Western art in a non-exploitative manner. Not only did Goldin write compellingly about such work, she was also a crucial early influence on two leading P&D artists, Robert Kushner and Kim MacConnel. In a 1975 Artforum piece titled “Patterns, Grids and Painting” Goldin perceptively spelled out why pattern painting had met with so much resistance, even by artists who practiced it:

“Pattern, for Americans, has never been an esthetic issue. Our artistic self-consciousness developed out of painting and, perhaps, architecture. Associated with decoration and the machine, pattern was always outside the area of legitimate artistic concern. The stylistic revisions of the last decade or so—remember the defense of boredom?—might have been expected to alter that situation. Yet to artists now working with pattern (especially women, who may feel it as something particularly their own), it still seems to imply a lack of inwardness and freedom, and they are often defensive about it. . . . Pattern itself remains unanalyzed, its salient characteristics unknown. Unlike painting, pattern has no mystique, and it has been underground so long that thinking about it reveals surprising complexities.”

Carefully analyzing pattern, rescuing it from its underground existence, was central to Goldin’s project. The context in which she carried out most of her analysis of pattern brings us to a second reason for reading Goldin: the attention she devoted to Islamic art, a subject no other Western art critic of her generation cared much about. So great was her passion that in 1974 she traveled through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to see firsthand monuments and manuscripts from the 14^th century Timurid Dynasty. Kushner, who accompanied her on the trip, says that afterwards her writings on Islamic art “took on a new perspective and urgency.”

One of the most personal pieces in the book is an unpublished 1972 text on rugs in which she speaks lovingly of her own favorite kelims, including a recently acquired Persian Sehna: “It’s new and I don’t know it well yet, but the pattern keeps coagulating and dissolving, pouring itself into different shapes and sizes. Impossible to follow the repeats because of the multiplicity of eddies. Ravishingly pale color rose and green, cultivated and fatigued. . .” In her published articles on Islamic, including long pieces on museum shows in New York and London, Goldin responds to carpets, calligraphic manuscripts and decorative artifacts with the same attention to visual dynamics that she brought to contemporary painting and sculpture. Reading through this collection one sees how Goldin’s interests dovetail into one another: her definitions of “deep” and “shallow” art, her brief against content, her interest in folk art and public sculpture gradually define a non-programmatic but remarkably consistent critical approach.

At the time Goldin’s work hardly went unnoticed: in 1975 she was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Ward for Art Criticism by the College Art Association, and she had a significant impact on some of her readers. In his contribution to this collection, New York Times critic Holland Cotter, who is known for his writing on nonwestern art, recalls coming upon one of Goldin’s article on Islamic art and becoming an instant fan.

The third (but by no means last) reason for reading Goldin is for the sheer artfulness of her prose, the daring of her arguments, the intellectual energy that pours off the page, even 40 years on. But don’t think that Goldin was only about enthusiastic praise for the art she loved: she could be quite combative (see her early attack on Harold Rosenberg), and even when writing about artists she supported she was willing to point out what she saw as shortcomings and failures.

Here are a few brief passages that convey the range and quality of Goldin’s criticism:

On Morris Louis: “He is an artist who projects a nameless something very purely and powerfully and directly. Something utterly common, nearly vulgar and rarefied—like Marilyn Monroe.”

On Expressionist painting: “There is no objective reason at all to suppose that a zig-zag line must be drawn with more feeling than a curve, or that a full heart will reach for a lemon yellow faster than it will for yellow ochre.”

On abstraction: “Assertions that abstract art is about anything, and particularly about abstractions like time, science, or Cubism, are nonsense—desperate attempts to preserve the old form-and content structure of artistic meaning.”

On Matisse’s late work: “From 1950 until his death in 1954, Matisse struggled to meet and define the new territory of decoration. In the face of grids and framing problems his mastery of draftsmanship counted for nothing—and he threw it away.”

On George Sugarman’s sculpture Two in One (1966), which graces the cover of the book: “This is a piece full of portents, crisis and wit. When the sense of a statement appears through rapid changes in tone from one element to the next, is this not the precise analogue, the essence of wit? As for crisis, when a rhythm is established and builds momentum only to find itself suddenly blocked, what else would you call it?”

Amy Goldin, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1971 © Naomi Schiff.

Sadly, Goldin’s career and life were cut short by cancer. She died in 1978, at the age of 52. We owe an enormous debt to her friend Robert Kushner for rescuing and effectively contextualizing her writing—every art critic should be so lucky to have such a devoted fan. (Mention should also be made of the late founder of Hard Press, Jon Gams, who didn’t live to see this book through to print.) Let’s hope that other enterprising publishers and editors will be inspired by this example to initiate similar projects of recovery.

Nahum Tevet, Seven Walks, 1997-2004, detail.

In the mid-1980s, geometrical abstraction was, for many, the artistic mode where the most exciting lines of thought, turns of style and artistic practices converged. It was the privileged locus of postmodernism’s critique of modernist idealism, the vehicle for the triumphal entry of theory into the heart of contemporary art, and the perfect way for baby boomers to indulge in some knowing nostalgia.  The artist who best articulated this moment in his writing, and most single-mindedly drove it home in his painting, was Peter Halley.  In a 1983 statement, Halley described how he used the “codes” of Minimalism, Color Field Painting and Constructivism “to reveal the sociological basis of their origins.” In the decades since, art that critiques modernist abstraction has become a seemingly permanent fixture, always finding new adherents (not unlike pop music subcultures such as hardcore punk that devolved from radical statements to stylistic options), while Neo Geo, the movement that brought Halley to prominence, has been installed in nearly every art historical account of the period.

Which brings me to my subject, Nahum Tevet, an Israeli artist who in the early 1980s also began to deploy the codes of bygone avant-garde movements, but under very different circumstances and with very different results.  Born in 1946, Tevet launched his career in the early 1970s with work that was notably Spartan, even within the context of Post-Minimalism. Period photos record some Ryman-like wall pieces held together by paper clamps, masking tape, and string, and larger, flimsy-looking plywood and aluminum structures. The most striking of these early pieces were Arrangement of Six Units (1973-74) and Corner (1974).  The “arranged units” are rectangles of thin plywood (roughly 2 by 5 feet each) resting on short wooden legs.  In photographs of their original installation (at Sara Gilat Gallery in Jerusalem in 1974) they are jammed up against a wall. These structures resemble tables, benches or sleeping cots, but it’s clear that they are too low to sit at, too fragile to sit on and too narrow and hard for sleeping.  Evoking an impoverished dormitory, they convey institutional regimentation (the institution could be educational, military or carceral). In Corner, Tevet gets by with even less: three plain wooden chairs and two pieces of plywood are configured to block off a corner of a room. One wonders to what extent the bleakness of these works reflects the mood in Israel following the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Nahum Tevet, Arrangement of Six Units, 1973-74.

Although little known outside Israel, these early works of Tevet’s strike me as classics of Post-Minimalism, albeit a Post-Minimalism with distinctly Israeli inflections: in those cot-like structures one can read a metonymic history of a nation, from the grim bunks of the death camps to the socialist utilitarianism of the early kibbutzes, to the regimented discomforts of service in the armed forces. Yet these sculptures—or should I say “horizontally installed monochrome paintings”?—also include an element that signals their departure from Post-Minimalism, a feature that signals Tevet’s emerging engagement with the medium of painting and with art history.  I’m talking about the coat of white industrial paint applied to the exposed side of the plywood in both Corner and Arrangement of Six Units. Breaking, undramatically yet definitively with the “truth to materials” that was the rule for most Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculpture, Tevet opens the path that will lead him, eventually to the complex sculptural-painting installations that constitute his major achievement.

When Tevet first started playing with the legacy of Constructivism and other related early-20^th-century avant gardes in the mid 1980s, he was making multi-part wall reliefs with rather painterly surfaces. In these centrifugal compositions every element, which sometimes included found elements such as folding chairs, seemed to be moving away from a spinning core, as if cyclone had struck of gallery of works by Tatlin, El Lissitsky and Rodchenko. In the “Painting Lesson” series the centrifugal structures rose up from the floor. While Tevet’s work of the 1980s has striking similarities with art being produced in the U.S. at the same time by artists critically engaged with modernism there are points at which his work diverges from theirs, in its intent, its process and its meaning. Consider, for instance, Tevet’s relationship to the legacy of European modernism: as an artist born and raised in a nation where Bauhaus architecture was both symbolically and actually foundational, Tevet is obviously going to have a deeper, more invested relationship with his sources than artists living in a country whose architectural-ideological beginnings are Neo-Classical. There may be some big New York buildings designed by famous Bauhaus alumni but Tel Aviv, the city where Tevet has spent much of his working life (though he was born on a kibbutz) famously possesses more Bauhaus-style buildings than any other city in the world. What does this mean? For an American artist to fill his or her work with references to European modernism is something that generally comes without significant cultural or psychic cost; it’s a discretionary choice made from among the goods on offer in the cultural marketplace, rather than (as chez Tevet) the consequence of a decision to confront an important piece of one’s inescapable cultural patrimony.

Nahum Tevet, Painting Lesson No. 4, 1986.

By the mid 1990s, as Tevet continued to create floor-based sculptures, the paint had become flat and complex grids had tamed the centrifugal forces. It was now that the scale of the work began to grow dramatically, culminating in what may be the artist’s masterpiece, Seven Walks, a sprawling installation that Tevet worked on from 1997 to 2004. At first glance, his large-scale projects such as Seven Walks or A Page from a Catalogue (1998), a version of which was included in the 1999 Carnegie International, don’t come across as unified works of art. They feature dozens to hundreds of neatly made, evenly painted wood elements some of which stand upright on the floor, while others are stacked atop one another. Planar shapes predominate: boxes, sometimes with one side open; shelving units; miniature tables, often atop incredibly elongated legs; thin partitions; solid cubes; and here and there an anomalous more sculpted form such as a small boat hull.

Nahum Tevet, A Page from a Catalogue Nimes Version, 1998.

The ensemble looks like a random accumulation of parts waiting to be organized and assembled: think of the warehouse of a manufacturer of modernist furniture or a museum’s collection of unused pedestals and display units, or an unfinished scale-model of some crowded city of windowless tower blocks; Martin Kippenberger’s “Peter Sculptures” might also come to mind. Gradually, however, the logic (formal, structural, metaphorical) of Tevet’s method begins to emerge.  Visual rhythms and rhymes are established among the elements; structures take on anthropomorphic properties, especially in their interrelations; social issues are raised by the incessant divisions, enclosures, the ways in which the elements accommodate each other.  (In the catalogue of Tevet’s 1997 show at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, Lóránd Hegyi suggested that Tevet pursues a “dual strategy” by evoking the historical project of Constructivism while “deconstructing” it with “personal events and experiences.”) And yet, crucially, this structure never completely emerges. The artist has said that he intentionally creates works that can never been seen in their entirety, that resist visual and mental assimilation: “Things are happening in the works that you can analyze but can’t really grasp, because too many things are happening in them all at once, and you can’t identify all of them—if you focus on one thing you don’t see any of the others.” (Nahum Tevet: Works 1994-2006, edited by Sarit Shapira, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2007, p. 187) The best on-line resource for Tevet is his website: http://www.tevet.net.

Nahum Tevet, Seven Walks, 1997-2004.

To encounter such a work is like wandering through a city for the first time: each turning of a corner presents unexpected situations; moments of space-time remain disconnected, partial. In one sense, Tevet is the most sculptural of artists by making us so keenly aware of how the position of the viewer determines the perception of the work. Yet he also offers us something that is a notable property of painting: an infinity of possible trajectories through the work.  The viewer’s body moves around the work as if it were sculpture, while the eyes traverse it as if it were painting. In the past 20 years there have been a number of artists who have brilliantly engaged with both these mediums (Jessica Stockholder and Rachel Harrison come immediately to mind), but I can’t think of anyone who has so fully integrated them. Tevet has also pushed his work far beyond its initial premises, something that few, if any, of the one-time stars of the Neo-Geo ‘80s have managed to achieve. It’s time for more of us (the present writer included) to catch up with the work of this major artist.

KARIN DAVIE, PRESS RELEASE, 1999

Press release for Karin Davie solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, 1999.

I don’t keep very many gallery press releases but here’s one that I’ve held on to: the announcement for Karin Davie’s 1999 solo show at Marianne Boesky. This page of energetic sketches by Davie is as noteworthy for what it doesn’t contain as for what it does: no descriptions of the work, no mention of the artist’s past accomplishments, no attempts at interpretation. In the most economical way possible, Davie reminds us that art and what it expresses (form and content, if you will) are ultimately one and the same, that what an artist has to say is found primarily in the art itself, not in the discourse around it. She also makes a subtle political point by refusing to relinquish the presentation of her work to some anonymous gallery employee. By drawing her own press release, Davie takes a position similar to Martin Kippenberger, who believed that artists should take responsibility for all aspects of their careers.

I just asked Davie, via email, what inspired her unconventional press release. Here is some of her answer: “I didn’t think that I (or the gallery) could adequately describe the work or my ideas and create the right context for the work. I also thought that it was a somewhat contrived and tired idea to always write things for the press that sometimes ended up sounding forced and weren’t accurate or that meaningful. . . . I was hoping that it might keep things more open for the writers and critics to frame the work a bit differently and also allow them to see that my work really comes out of a need to say something that skews expectations. . . . “

This 13-year-old gallery mailing treats its recipients as autonomous individuals, as people who don’t need to be told what to think or how to look. That was refreshing then and is still inspiring. And so, too, are Davie’s paintings.

July 16, 2012

THE MARGINALIA OF RAYMOND HAINS

“If you want to understand what I do, you must gather a few documents, read and look, and then things will be clear.” Raymond Hains

It was in 2005 that I acquired this copy of the June 1962 edition of Critique, the wide-ranging, influential French journal then directed by Georges Bataille. My copy is noteworthy because of its marginalia, described thus by the Parisian book dealer who sold it to me (I translate): “14 lines of handwritten annotations by Raymond Hains on the last page concerning 4 pages of the review.” The article that attracted the annotator’s attention is Jean Roudaut’s “Les exercises poétiques au XVIIIe siècle.” Ostensibly a review of some recent editions of 18^th century French poetry, it is really an occasion for Roudaut to work out his ideas on the nature of language. Chief among the ancien régime authors he discusses is François-Georges Maréchal, Marquis de Bièvre (1747-1789), whose pun-filled verse drama Vercingetorix had recently been republished by J.-J. Pauvert.

What is particularly intriguing about these sparse pencil and ballpoint pen annotations (vertical lines in the margins of the article marking a few brief passages and, squeezed into the sides of an ad near the back of the issue, some page numbers and keywords) is that the Marquis de Bièvre played an important role in the development of Hains’s art. For most of the 1950s, Hains’s artistic practice consisted of removing torn posters from the streets of Paris and exhibiting them. Along with his friend and sometimes collaborator Jacques de la Villeglé, and later François Dufrêne and Mimmo Rotella, he was seen as practitioner of décollage, a term that risks obscuring the fact that he presented his ripped and defaced posters without alterations. But in the early 1960s, following his enlistment in the Nouveau Réalisme movement, Hains’s work underwent a radical transformation. First, he shifted his interest from torn posters to palissades (the billboards or lengths of plank fencing that posters were often pasted onto) that he found around the streets of Paris. The palissades gradually gave way to newly made (rather than found) sculptural objects such as a giant toy wooden horse wrapped in fabric (Néo-dada emballé ou l’art de se tailler en palisade, 1963) and enlarged painted-wood versions of matchbooks and matchboxes. Then, from the 1970s on, he moved into more conceptual territory, filing his shows with documentary photographs, vitrines displaying carefully selected objects (books, printed ephemera, items purchased in stores), and the occasional street find. From the time he stopped exhibiting torn posters, everything Hains presented in galleries and museums depended on chains of verbal puns and cross-references usually involving proper names. In the catalogue of the 2002 Hains show at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia (one of his few solo exhibitions in the U.S.), Christine Macel describes Hains’s discovery of this approach:

“In 1959, shortly after presenting his first billboard piece, the Palissade des Emplacements réservés, at the first Parisian biennial for young artists, Hains looked into the window display of Editions Clartés and saw the publisher’s new encyclopedia open to the ‘Entremets de la Palissade,’ a dessert consisting of  ’an avalanche of confectioner’s custard held in by a palisade of ladyfinger biscuits.’ Following which, at a dinner party, he met Geneviève de Chabannes la Palice, the descendent of the Seigneur de la Palice, who gave his name to the pastries known as Les vérités de la Palisse (which Hains would photograph in 1988). In 1963, he came upon a poster advertising a show about the Seigneur de la Palice being put on in Lapalisse, in the department of Allier. He tried to make it there, but was late, and, in the end, happened upon a text about the Marquis de Bièvre, a famous punster, who would be the central figure in his 1986 show at the Fondation Cartier at Jouy-en-Josas—this being in the Bièvre valley.”

Hains, who died in 2005, said that it was one of his fellow affichistes who pointed him to de Bièvre: “It was thanks to François Dufrêne that I discovered the Marquis de Bièvre in 1963, at the time when I was making puns about palisades.” Throughout his life, Hains seeded his work with references to the 18^th-century wordsmith and reportedly kept a copy of Vercingetorix close to his bedside. Celebrated for his wit at Versailles, de Bièvre was also the author of the entry on puns (in French, calembours) for the supplement of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. (When the Revolution erupted, the Marquis quickly fled to Bavaria, where he died in 1789.) His punning was not limited to writing. On the grounds of his chateau he planted a row of six yew trees, where he would take women he hoped to seduce. Approaching the row of trees, he would announce that they had arrived at the “l’instant des six ifs.”  In French, the word for yew tree is if, and the phrase des six ifs sounds like the word décisif; de Bièvre and his target had arrived at “the decisive moment.” In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud cites another of Bièvre’s puns, a connection Hains acknowledged in a vitrine-work at his 1986 Cartier Foundation show that included several volumes by de Bièvre and a copy of the French translation of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The entire show was titled “Hommage au Marquis de Bièvre.”

Is Jean Roudaut’s article the “text about the Marquis de Bièvre” to which Christine Macel alludes? If so, do the annotations in my copy of Critique mark the moment when Hains’s interest in puns crystallized? The date, June 1962, means that it is possible for Dufrêne, who died in 1982, to have passed a copy to Hains in 1963, or dropped a hint that made Hains seek it out. Of course, it is also possible that Hains only came across this text years later, perhaps while preparing for his Bièvresque 1986 Cartier show. But whenever he read and annotated Roudaud’s article, one can easily see why it would have interested him: it offers compelling historical and philosophical arguments for the importance of exactly the kind of wordplay around which Hains structured his art.

Roudaud begins by acknowledging the widespread belief that no poetry of lasting importance was produced in 18^th century France. While insisting that he doesn’t intend to “rehabilitate” the verse of this period, Roudaud suggests that it has been misunderstood and, further, that the achievements of the Romantic poets of the early 19^th century depended, to some extent, on what was written in the 1700s. By “twisting” language with such seemingly frivolous techniques as puns, intentional Spoonerisms, elaborate riddles and metagrams (texts where verbal metamorphoses are accomplished by changing one letter of a word at a time), as well as more standard poetic devices such as rhyme, meter and alliteration, poets such as de Bièvre examined the nature of poetry, Roudaud says, “with a care and seriousness whose only equal is the 20^th century reflection on the legitimacy of the novel.” In a turn of phrase clearly indebted to Jean Paulhan’s Les Fleurs de Tarbes, ou, la Terreur dans les lettres (1941), Roudaut claims that it was only possible for certain Romantics to become “terrorists of thought” because they had been preceded by these “terrorists of language.”

For Roudaut, the aim of the poet is, through a “series of subterfuges,” to “make us notice the hidden relation between sound and sense, the word and the thing.” Unexpectedly, he finds among the relentless wordplay of the court poets of 18^th century France a “radicality” that he connects to Marcel Duchamp, whose punning titles and other word games pose similar challenges to existing mental habits. Oddly, Hains doesn’t highlight the sentences about Duchamp nor any of the passages in which Roudaut eloquently argues in favor of the fragmentation of meaning. Instead, what draws his attention are some of the vintage puns and anecdotes cited in the article, jeux des mots he may have filed away for future use.

Did Hains find in “Les exercises poétiques au XVIIIe siècle” confirmation of his own sense that puns were more than amusing games?  Did it introduce him to his beloved Marquis? What other questions, answerable or not, are posed by this yellowing, slightly marked-up, 50-year-old periodical?