Out of Sight by William Hackman

Author:William Hackman [Hackman, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-412-2
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2015-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE BREAKTHROUGH PERIOD FOR THESE ARTISTS, roughly 1962 to 1968, was also the heroic age of minimalism in New York, and the parallels were immediately noted. “Minimalism” is, in its way, as slippery a term as “Pop”; the New York art world, as was its wont, engaged in verbal fisticuffs over what counted and what didn’t, as well as what it all meant. And as with any respectable philosophical rumble, the weapon first wielded involved defining your terms: “ABC art,” “specific objects,” and “primary structures” were some of the most frequently tossed around monikers for what nearly everyone seemed to agree was a “new aesthetic” that led beyond familiar categories of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both. And though most of the belligerents in this battle traded punches over developments in New York, a few did look to what was happening out West. DeLap, McCracken, and Bell were included in the important 1966 show Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York. And when the exhibition A New Aesthetic opened at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art a year later, four of the six artists presented — Bell, Davis, Kauffman, and McCracken — hailed from Los Angeles.

But if this was Minimalism, it was an erotically charged Minimalism. In contrast to much of the work to be found in New York galleries, which often seemed predicated on the notion that sensuous pleasure was to be resisted at all costs, the L.A. Look reveled in brilliant, lustrous color and sleek, seductive surfaces. And whereas the New York version of Minimalism could sometimes seem intimidating — as though its own ambiguous status were an implicit challenge to the viewer — the West Coast work was distinctly nonthreatening, inviting even. New York Minimalism seemed to defeat the viewer’s gaze; the L.A. variety rewarded it. But the debates that were so fierce in New York held little interest for the L.A. artists. “People out here found it convenient to move outside the role of what was traditionally called painting or sculpture,” Kauffman explained. That’s all there was to it: “It happened in a very unconscious way.”

That nonchalance seemed to make New York critics nervous. Fried, for instance, could give his blessing to Davis’s paintings because he could fit them into a conceptual framework alongside those of Stella, but the work of Bell, Irwin, and the others, Fried sniffed, counted for “nothing more than extraordinarily attractive objects.” This was more than just an aesthetic shortcoming for Kozloff; it was the embrace of “a desperate prettiness, as if sensuous delight will compensate for the shapelessness of the human situation.” Beware West Coast insouciance, Kozloff seemed to warn, it is the siren song: “For the Los Angeles artists, ‘pretty’ is as much a term of approval as in New York it is one of condemnation. The contrast illuminates how slight is the moral weight and polemical voltage given to works of art in the West as compared with the East.” The heart of the problem, Kozloff wrote in The Nation, was that L.

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