Minimal1960-1990 Los Angeles

Cirrus 1990-91

1960-1990 Los Angeles Curated by: Jean Robert Milant

Cirrus 1990 & 1991

December 8, 1990-February 2, 1991

Minimal

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Deeply Thin and Superficially Thick

David Pagel

In contrast to its New York variant, Minimal art in Los Angeles articulates space. Rather than defining itself in opposition to painting’s intrinsic illusionism, like Donald Judd’s primary structures, Carl Andre’s metal rectangles, and Robert Morris’s spare sculptures, Californian art with an impulse toward reductivism plays out the fusion of painting and sculpture. Its diverse forms begin with Frank Stella’s seemingly straightforward insistence that “what you see is what you see,” and quickly demonstrate that reality cannot be grasped with such immediacy. Elusive, intangible, and consistently just out of focus, the works that make up Los Angeles’ version of Minimalism are never however, immaterial, otherworldly or transcendent. In the same way that they split the difference between painting and sculpture, they also come somewhere between the two most celebrated artistic movements associated with Southern California: the Light and Space group and the Finish Fetish school. These art historical categories, established in the 1960s to distinguish the art in Los Angeles from that in New York, have, since then, served to obscure more than they have functioned to reveal what is interesting about the

objects they purport to describe and analyze. Thinking about art in Los Angeles in terms of Minimalism is useful because it allows one to avoid the prevalent tendency to trace the non-representational art of this city either back to a boyishly unthinking fascination with the slick surfaces of custom cars and surfboards, or to a supposedly more adult sense of blessed out Zennish emptiness generated by one’s contemplation of “the void.” Although both approaches mesmerizingly combine the profound banality of consumerism with aesthetic effects verging on the sublime, they miss an essential aspect of art in Los Angeles. Paradoxically, these conventional categories- which otherwise celebrate the impact and importance of “pure” superficiality- do not dwell long enough on the surfaces of the objects they address. By looking at all forms of reductivist- inspired art made in Los Angeles over the past three decades, it becomes clear that what unifies this work is not its status as simulacra or commodity critique; nor its identity as a kind of actorless, three-dimensional theater; nor even its materialist condensation of the space between things. Instead, the manner in which the surfaces of these works sustain a peculiar type of illusionism establishes their

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Installation View Top: Lorzer Feitelson, John Miller, Penelope Krebs Bottom: Greg Mahony, Robert Zoell, John

McLaughlin

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Robert Irwin, Untitled (Disc)laquer on plastic with lights, 1969-7048” diameter

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familiar resemblance. They collapse significance onto the surface and then deflect attention away from the plane. Los Angeles Minimalism gains coherence and force because its works consistently employ two or three dimensions to articulate a space that belongs to neither. By inhabiting a realm not limited to the illusion of volumetric displacement, nor confined to the flatness of abstract painting, these works create an illusory space characterized by a potentially endless collusion best described as a flow. No one’s art, more than Robert Irwin’s, better brings the ideas that define Los Angeles Minimalism into focus. His legendary, impossible-to-focus-upon discs, which seem to effortlessly engineer a magisterial blankness, derive from the relationship his earlier, exactly calibrated paintings established with the walls on which they hung. Both bodies of work interrogate the issues of so-called formalist abstraction, such as shape, support, and framing edge. Together, they offer a remarkably clear scrutiny of painting’s boundaries, asking where an image of illusion begins, where it ends, and at which points a viewer may enter, engage, and depart from its orbit. Art historians have generally ignored the essential connection between Irwin’s two-dimensional works and his three-dimensional installations in order claim him as a founding member of the Light and Space movement and to downplay his eloquent exploration of issues central to Modernist painting. Reconcieving Irwin’s quasi-hallucinatory discs as mutant fusions of painting and sculpture reclaims them from the spaced-out muteness of some futuristic theater in which they utterly dematerialize into pure, disembodied light. Seeing them as instances of a particularly Californian Minimalism emphasizes their visual illusionism, a type of truthful deception in which

shadows appear more tangible than objects, space simultaneously collapses and expands, and the gallery wall, rather than delimiting the effectiveness of the art, provides the only necessary point of departure for its graceful play of infinite vastness against delimited specificity. On surfaces that neither seem to bound volumes nor to define flatness, Irwin’s discs materialize a peculiarly impersonal space, one not characterized by insides or outsides, but quietly energized by its capacity to displace whatever separates form from formlessness. If Irwin’s hand-crafted paintings and machine-made discs condense and exemplify the central ideas that vitalize first generation Minimalism in Los Angeles, the paintings and sculptures by almost a dozen other artists fill out the picture. Included as sculptures – or, more precisely, as three-dimensional things whose objecthood is undermined by the visual illusions they maintain – are works by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken. Included as paintings – or, again as two dimensional objects whose refusals of pictorial illusionism give their perceptual glitches a decidedly physical dimension – are works by Lorser Feitelson and John McLaughlin, as well as Mary Corse, Jay McCafferty, John Miller, and Ed Moses. Peter Alexander’s cast polyester resin works from 1966-72 stand out for their singular articulation of ineteriority. His softly colored, quasi-translucent cubes, wedges, pyramids, plinths, and segmented wall-reliefs seem to freeze light in a mysterious, warm space, one continuous with, but somehow irreducible to, the exterior planes that define its boundaries. Alexander’s precise forms capture the subtle gradations of natural light in spaces discontinuous with, but not alien to the environment. Likewise, Ron Cooper’s double veils of solidified resin trap light in the

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John McCracken, Column polyester resin, fiberglass, plywood, 1986 120 x 44 x 32”

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shallow space that would otherwise define a conventional painting’s picture-plane. His tinted resin skins, with rough, uneven edges, and unfinished wood frames throw some reflections back into the gallery, but cast most inward, to a hollow interior filled only by reflections and shadows. Neither empty nor full, the space between his thin, “see-through” paintings comes into contact with, but remains distinct from the real space of the viewer. Craig Kauffman’s plastic wall-capsules from the late ‘60s also contain a strange inner glow, but one that suggests a slick new world of fluorescent and neon. Their more aggressive, synthetic iridescence evokes the presence of a chemically enhanced reality, one that might include unfocused hallucinations and fantastic distortions. In this surrogate world, no room remains for free-association or floating reverie: totally occupied by synthetic light, Kauffman’s interiors are given not to timelessness as much as to a mesmerizing numbness and ultimate immobility. His vacuum-molded plexiglass paintings from the ‘70s even more decisively abandon this

potentially subjective interiority for the charged depthlessness and exaggeration of Pop abstraction. Rather than reflecting the inner space of psychological stillness, they engage their surroundings in a dialogue of pure superficiality. Larry Bell’s pristine cubes also evacuate interiority in favor of the fleeting play of refracted and reflected light. His empty cubes hide nothing inside, instead enacting a perfectly surface-oriented game of clarity and transparency. Not even blankness or vacuity fill the vacuums defined by Bell’s sculptures. More clearly than any other minimal work, his cubes of light circumscribe precise sections of dimensionless space, marking this territory’s continuity with that of the gallery. With similar ends but different effects, John McCracken’s unnaturally colored and impeccably lacquered planks, plinths, and cubes literally define solid volumes only to deny the autonomy of the space they contain. His irregularly configured sculptures appear massive and monumental until any one of their sharply angled planes aligns with the viewer’s line of sight, causing the

Installation View1990/91

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Installation View1990/91

work’s volumetric presence to appear as unstable as the fleeting reflections mirrored in its glossy impenetrable surfaces. The minimalist painters of this generation also share more with these sculptors than with the historical precedents in their medium. Even so, two forebears anticipate the approaches, if not the styles, of Los Angeles Minimal painters who reached their maturity in the 60’s. In both Lorser Feitelson’s perverse marriages of Bauhaus rationality and Zen enigma, and John McLaughlin’s elegant distillations of Russian Constructivism’s off balanced energy, mundane experience takes precedence over abstract, transcendental truths. Fietelson’s oddly shaped, brightly colored, and often top-heavy forms bear fewer comparisons with the “magical space forms” of their titles than to carefully composed close-ups of silhouettes abstracted from objects of the ordinary world. His boldly graphic, sensuously contoured paintings seem to defy gravity, not in order to suggest the presence of outer-space , but to engender one’s suspicion that the real world might be weird enough, if one is sensitive to its truly alien nature. Likewise, McLaughlin’s paintings combine precision with gentleness, and extreme reductivism with almost infinite expansiveness in straight-edged compositions that are static but somehow able to float free of their rigorous materiality. His quiet, understated paintings demonstrate that they do not need to plumb the depths of reality to incite meaningful experiences, ones both unfathomable and familiar. Uncompromising but never conclusive, the paintings by John Miller and Mary Corse project formal conundrums onto their viewers. Miller’s images initially assault one with complex cacophonies of chaotic geometries before yielding – with effort and concentration – an unexpected serenity in which disjuncture gives way to eloquent forms of physical energy.

Not properly Op, nor precisely reductive, Miller’s extremely focused explorations of perception’s conflicting velocities maintain a singular intensity capable of suddenly and forcefully giving way to great expansiveness and breadth, if not depth. Likewise, Corse’s monochromatic canvases engender compellingly restrained, but no less moving experiences. Upon their surfaces she has embedded the kind of glass microspheres that give highway signs their endlessly reflective power. These innumerable orbs reflect light in ways that counteract the ghostly gestural strokes of the paintings. Corse’s canvases articulate the vast – but

sometimes indistinguishable- differences between the pure blankness of a white wall and its self-conscious manifestation in a painting. With her works, illusionism slips from the picture plane, to the wall, and into one’s mind, where it continues to shift with delicacy and decisiveness. Similarly, Ed Moses’s monochromatic fields of brilliant color neither seem to open onto the deep space of illusionism nor to restrict themselves to the picture plane. Applied in a disquietingly undefinable manner, the paint itself is neither atmospheric nor flat, but inhabits a space that is simultaneously mechanistic and humane, as if it just appeared, without agency, effort, or struggle. This sense of purposelessness animates Moses’s

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Craig Kauffman, Untitled (Washboard)vacuum formed plastic, acrylic paint, 19734.5 x 2.5’

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Robert Irwin, Ron Cooper, Craig Kauffman1990/91

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paradoxically purposeful paintings. Likewise, Jay McCafferty’s geometric arrangements of dots yield to nature’s underlying power – to pure light’s capacity for unlimited destruction. Made with a magnifying glass’s concentration of the sun’s rays, his gridded compositions literally transform light into an image, one into whose surface has been burned a record of the artist’s work and the sun’s movement. Originating out of the collusion between human manipulation and natural processes, McCafferty’s fragile constellations hover between accident and intention. Across these beautifully damaged skyscapes, human will momentarily dovetails with fate. The next generation of Los Angeles Minimalists consists almost entirely of painters. More than any others, James Hayward and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe return to and elaborate upon issues central to Irwin’s early works. In their beautifully simple paintings, they fuse Irwin’s dissection and dissolution of the picture plane with the traditional surface of painting. Hayward conflates single, high-key colors with thickly-layered, hyper-real, wax enhanced brush-strokes. His overlapping marks result in fields whose stunning immediacy remains intriguingly incommensurate with the immateriality of their intense colors. Gilbert Rolfe’s less dramatic and more time consuming paintings consist of dense accumulations of a single color’s chromatic variations partially bounded by thin vertical bands that wrap around the edges of the canvas. His modestly scaled expanses of impure color have the presence of much larger paintings. Simultaneously understood and excessive, their surfaces define a space that neither recedes into illusionistic depth nor remains bounded by the framing edges of the picture plane. On the wall but not of it, the works of both painters articulate a thought-provoking

illusionism, one not given to extra-pictorial incidents, but hardly taken in by formalism’s conventions. Fred Fehlau and Greg Mahoney employ displacement to make surfaces whose precise nature eludes the viewer. Fehlau’s Weave paintings literally locate one on what should be the work’s “inside.” Slightly angled out from the wall, their frontal surfaces consist of gesso (underpainting) evenly pushed through a screen to create the effect that you have come face-to-face with the normally invisible interface between a canvas’s woven fabric and the paint that should cover it. Mahoney’s paintings, made of evaporated salt water, dried white cement, and oxidizing steel, cast the space surfaces occupy in terms of nature’s ongoing processes. More industrial-strength than McCafferty’s instantiations of light’s physical power, Mahoney’s images evoke the presence of fossils and archaeological digs, suggesting that over great expanses of time, only transience remains constant. Both Fehlau and Mahoney engineer the illusion that their works suspend weighty masses in a space usually reserved for more intangible effects. If Fehlau and Mahoney abandon pictorial illusionism in favor of more physically engaging the bodies of their viewers, Tim Ebner, Robert Zoell, and Robert Therrien also displace painting by means of pre-fabricated surrogates, monstrously oversized graphic designs, and fragments of architecture. Ebner’s resin-coated, fiberglass stripes and re-arranged checkerboard paintings (complete with designer carrying cases), bring the surfboard and hot-rod references from the 60’s indoors, as mannered decorations indebted not to bad-boy athleticism. They make jokes at the expense of high-mindedness and good taste. Zoel’s bold enamels on canvas replace painterly gestures with sign-like simplifications or user-friendly

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Larry Bell, 18 “ Cubecoated glass, chromium plated metal, 196918” x 18”

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Installation view 1990/91: Jerry Brane, A Typical 20th Century Painting casein on canvas, 1986, 8.5 x 33 x 2.75” (left)

Jay McCafferty, Roman Numerals V solar burns, paint on canvas, 1979, 58 x 58” (right)

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computer graphics. His abstract depictions use size to establish an architectural presence for simple shapes and quasi-representational symbols. Likewise, Therrien’s abstract tokens of the everyday, such as his stylized key-hole, snowman, hat, and arch, disperse visual illusions around the gallery, transforming pictorial incidents into allusive metaphors. In the space activated by his small objects, the terrain engaged is that of memory and association.

Edith Baumann-Hudson, Penelope Krebs, and Jerry Brane refuse such substitutions for the more traditional, but often undervalued effects of paint on canvas. A typical image by Baumann-Hudson consists of horizontal bands neatly arrayed in a field of slightly

deeper or lighter color. Their geometry appears harsh and first, then yields to a tough but subtle space that almost seems to breathe. Kreb’s paintings, by contrast, play four vertical bands of richly artificial colors against one another to create rhythms and intensities normally associated with music, with the free-play of spontaneous improvisation. Unlike these paintings, whose surfaces have an almost machine-made austerity, Brane’s monochromatic canvases are decidedly hand-made. In odd shapes, such as compressed lozenges or elongated ovals, their electrifying yet strangely natural colors conflate the synthetic with something less fake. The almost velvety surfaces of Brane’s paintings locate them at the mysterious, impossible-to-picture intersection between the world of objects and that of ideas. Roy Thurston’s human-scale paintings on plywood also inhabit a realm between nature and culture. Saturated with lacquer, the surfaces of his seductively elusive works are scored with tiny groves that travel in two directions at once. These innumerable, perfectly parallel valleys and ridges divide his single panels into off-center diptychs. They also cause the wood, whose grain and texture remain faintly visible, to absorb paint at different rates, creating a shimmering plane that simultaneously appear to be depthless and infinite. The soft reflections Thurston’s works cast do not travel out toward the viewer as much as they seem to be reabsorbed by the ingeniously simple – yet multi-faceted – surfaces of his paintings. As if they recycle the light they generate, Thurston’s images reveal that contemplation might require stillness, but never inactivity. The space articulated by Los Angeles Minimalism is not one that can be made physically present, nor referred to in its determinate absence, but one

Robert Thierren, No Title (Red Arch)oil on canvas and wood, 198572 x 48”

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that must be instantiated, negatively, by a concrete objects material specificity. Trying to conceptualize the real space manifested by these splendidly artificial objects is frustrating to the point of madness. By eliciting this experience, or setting up conditions that demand an impossible resolution, Minimal art in Los Angeles gives as precise (as possible) form to formlessness – to the gaps that divorce concepts from objects. In doing so, they give form to this disjuncture between the undeniable presentness of ongoing thought and the eternal deferral of history’s ongoing movement. They do not teeter on the abyss of meaningless so much as they demonstrate that this sentiment no longer makes sense. Moreso than the works of their New York counterparts, whose impersonal austerity is always overshadowed by the legacy of existentialism that has come to be present by way of Abstract Expressionism, Minimal art in Los Angeles remains historically free of such humanistic rhetoric. It is therefore in a better position to more effectively register the difficult-to-determine fact that what can be conceived cannot be exhausted by what can be seen. Its most compelling works do not stand in as metaphors for, or substitutions of, or literal demonstrations of thought running up against its limits. At their best, these sculptures and paintings present the possibility that representation does not wholly constitute meaning in art. More significantly, they convince us, by means of their elusive and indeterminate presences, that to think otherwise is arrogant and wrong-headed. If these works do not give us a picture of what knowledge looks like, they provide us with the more important possibility that we experience it for ourselves.

Roy Thurston, #90-5, 1990, Lacquer on plywood, 60”x28”

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Installation view 1990/91 (left to right): 1. Larry Bell, 18” Cube 2. Mary Corse, White Light Painting coated glass, chromium plated metal glass micro spheres in paint on canvas 1969, 18” x 18” 1989, 86 x 60”

3. Peter Alexander, Blue Wedge 4. Ed Moses, Abstract Painting #2 cast polyester acrylic on canvas 1969, 8’ x 8” x 8” 1976, 43.5 x 43.5”

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Catalog design: Nick Williams

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