SFAQ_issue_sixteen

PLAN DU CENTRE DE PARIS
À VOL D’OISEAU
Flying away to Milan
I look down and back at Paris
(as in that famous map
seen by a bird in flight)
and think of Allen yesterday
saying it was all ‘solidified nostalgia’—
houses monuments and streets
bare trees and parks down there
fixed in time (and the time is forever)
exactly where we left them years ago
our bodies passed through them
as through a transparent scrim
Early versions of ourselves
transmuted now
two decades later
And was that myself
standing on that far corner
Place Saint-Sulpice
first arrived in Paris—
seabag slung—
(fancying myself some seaborn Conrad
carrying Coleridge’s albatross?)
or was that myself walking
through the Tuileries in early snow?
And here Danton met Robespierre
(both later to descend into earth
through that Metro entrance)
And here Sartre lived with Beauvoir
above the Café Bonaparte
before death
shook them apart
(The myth goes on)
And here in the Luxembourg
I sat by a balustrade
in a rented iron chair
reading Proust and Apollinaire
while the day turned to dust
and a nightwood sprang up around me
Solidified nostalgia indeed—
the smell of Gaulois still hangs in the air
And in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise
the great stone tombs still yawn
with the solidified ennui of eternity
And, yes, here I knew such aloneness—
at the corner of another street
the dawn yawned
in some trauma I was living in back then
Paris itself a floating dream
a great stone ship adrift
made of dusk and dawn and darkness—
dumb trauma
Of youth!
such wastes of love
such wordless hungers
Mute neuroses
yearnings & gropings
fantasies & flame-outs
such endless walking
through the bent streets
such fumbling art
(models drawn with blindfolds)
such highs and sweet inebriations—
I salute you now
dumb inchoate youth
(callow stripling!)
and offer you my left hand
with a slight derisive laugh
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Previously published in: EUROPEAN POEMS AND TRANSITIONS, Over All the Obscene Boundaries. (New Directions, 1980). Courtesy of City Lights.
INVISIBLE PAINTING & SCULPTURE
By TOM MARIONI
April 24 - June 1, 1969
Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California
Invisible Painting and Sculpture show at Richmond Art Center 1969, curator Tom Marioni.
[Left to right] George Neubert & Wally Hedrick, Vietnam series all black painting.
Since World War II the creation and evolution of movements in the arts have
accelerated to such a degree that often it is difficult to trace their development. The
public enjoys a seemingly spontaneous show of wild innovation. This invisible show is
part of a tradition that’s first product may have been a commissioned sculpture for an
Egyptian tomb. The show isn’t literally invisible, nor is that the intent. The works are
all complete. It would be difficult to justify, much less install, completely unembodied
concepts, but more to the point, the quality of invisibleness is dependent on reality. The
works of the artists in this exhibition basically fall into two categories: the negation
of formal art, or a new Dada, and the process of reduction, or Minimal Art, leading to
partially invisible objects or the absence of an object completely.
Don Potts stated in a recent interview with Grace Glueck, “I got tired of doing one
little piece of art after another. I know what art is—it’s the development of a man. An
artist is not producing things, he’s evolving himself. I’m doing this not as art, but to live.
I know my dharma and it’s to build.” —New York Times, March 30, 1969.
When Claes Oldenburg was commissioned by the city of New York to do sculpture
in the parks, he hired two union gravediggers to dig regulation graves to expose the
underside of the ground to sunlight. He went beyond Andy Warhol’s Painting is Dead
show, where Warhol threw silver pillows out the window. Oldenburg was saying,
“Objects as art are dead.”
Christo has been wrapping things, even an entire museum, sealing them off completely.
Harold Paris ceremoniously sealed in a black Plexiglas box a sculpture and marked it:
“This sculpture was permanently sealed within this box on March 11, 1969, 8:16 p.m.”
William Wiley has burned old sculptures and saved the ashes in a glass jar; he has tied
up canvasses, painted side in, and exhibited them on pedestals as sculpture.
Bruce Nauman has made a sculpture with a mirrored bottom that lies flat on the floor,
mirror side down.
Robert Barry, who is doing literally invisible work, stated:
It’s a logical continuation of my earlier work. A few years ago, when I was painting, it seemed
that paintings would look one way in one place and because of lighting and other things would
look different in another place. Although it was the same object, it was another work of art.
Then I made paintings which incorporated, as part of their design, the wall in which they hung.
I finally gave up painting for the wire installations. Each wire installation was made to suit
the place in which it was installed. It cannot be moved without being destroyed. Color became
arbitrary. I started using thin transparent nylon monofilament. Eventually, the wire became so
thin that it was virtually invisible. This led to my use of a material which is invisible or at least
not perceivable in the traditional way. Although this poses problems, it also presents endless
possibilities. It was at this time that I discarded the idea that art is necessarily something to
look at.
Certainly, it is not unusual to hear artists say today that they do not wish to make
objects anymore. Duchamp decided this for himself many years ago. He stopped
producing artworks and devoted his time to playing chess. Perhaps it’s important that a
negation of objects or things, mediums or materials, is a contemporary reality.
Negation isn’t without its opposites, like a trend towards visibility by employing
technology as in light sculpture. The Dan Flavin exhibition at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago, December to January 1967-1968, was entitled Pink and
Gold and consisted of fifty-four eight-foot fluorescent tube lights situated at five-foot
intervals throughout the museum’s first-floor galleries. The visitor to this exhibition
found himself in an immaculate light-filled continuum that reflected in the polished
floors of the museum and extended into a visual sensation of infinity.
Another loosely connected group is concerned with spatial relationships, both
in volume and in time. Often these works are returned to a new kind of abstract
expressionism. Many are only works of art as long as they are on exhibition. Carl
Andre’s sculptures of 144 pieces of zinc, arranged like tiles in a floor, would never have
been seen as a sculptural expression if it had been shown anywhere other than on the
floor of an art gallery. Robert Morris’s felt Anti-Forms can never be seen again as they
were shown, because of their formlessness.
George Neubert’s piece in this show points out space by scribing the edges of two
rectangular volumes. Because they are on an architectural scale, the viewer becomes
involved physically with the empty space between the volumes as he walks in and
around the work. Les Levine, on January 20, 1969, placed three hundred plastic
disposable curves in a vacant lot on Wooster Street in New York City. Each day for the
next thirty days, ten of the curves disappeared, never to be seen again. At the end of
the thirtieth day a vacant lot appeared.
Also in this exhibition, David R. Smith, a poet, has broken the word vacant into three
pieces — VA CA NT—and separated them so attention is focused on the spaces
between. Warner Jepson, who feels that he paints with sound, has composed electronic
music that includes prolonged periods of silence that become positive spaces within
the composition. This relates to Edward Albee’s play The Box, which uses the space on
the stage as a focal point while a voice offstage narrates seemingly unrelated ideas.
Larry Bell is doing sculptures that are glass boxes more about painting than sculpture
—they deal with illusion and color. Other artists through an invisible form are making
a social comment. Many artists are refusing to show in Chicago because of the police
violence at the Democratic Convention. In this exhibition, Wally Hedrick’s all-black
painting is part of a series entitled Vietnam.
Naturally, an invisible show presents problems. One wonders if its logical conclusion
will be a totally conceptual art—where work is discussed and planned but never
realized. It seems, however, that the trend is an affirmative one, if radical. Obviously,
many artists dealing with invisible ideas minimize the value of museums and galleries,
just as they do the value of objects or things.
In Michael Kirby’s anthology Happenings, New York 1966, Alan Kaprow states, “At that
point my disagreement with gallery space began. I thought how much better it would
be if you could just go out of doors and float an environment into the rest of your
life, so that such a caesura would not be there.” Perhaps the caesura Kaprow is talking
about is a separation or a rhythmic jolt between art and life, or between art and art. It
is obvious that all the arts are merging and overlapping.
“What is the nature of art when it reaches the sea?” —John Cage.
The artists in the exhibition were Larry Bell, Jerry Ballaine, Bruce Conner, Albert Fisher, Lloyd
Hamrol, Wally Hedrick, Warner Jepson, Harry Lum, George Neubert, Harold Paris, Michelangelo
Pistoletto, David R. Smith, and William T. Wiley. Each artist had two pages in the catalog. The
curator, Thomas Marioni, added an invisible work of his own: two blank pages in the catalog in the
spot where “M” would have occurred.