Page 45 - Studio International - May 1966

worthy of Oldenburg since he has long ago established that mobile-engine parts are sculpturally conceived, their
the ordinary is merely his means, while his ends are always stencilled canvas hides well shaped and their compositions
intended to be extraordinary. controlled. They are neither as aggressive as his old plastic
It is a long way from the dark little store where Olden- works nor as elegant as the current bathroom fixtures, but
burg first presented his cluttered vision of 'ordinary' things they tremble uneasily on the brink of pure aestheticism.
to the brightly-lighted Janis Gallery. Inevitably, the pre- Oldenburg's notion of the soft form is self-defeating. If
mise of Oldenburg's gesture becomes clouded. the objects recede to almost unidentifiable form, and if the
How, for example, is he to occupy that publicized realm soft shapes are thus laden with the whole expressive bur-
between the world of art and the world, when his by-now den, the want of tension becomes a fault. Oldenburg
elegant vinyl creations sit so shiny and spruce in the very rectifies it to some degree when he shades his canvas, but
same gallery where those magicians of the previous genera- the amorphous quality, so consistent throughout these
tion once held forth? Oldenburg's giant replica of a toilet works, prevails, so that the idea—a sagging form for a hard
in stuffed vinyl, very smart in its black, white, and blue form—begins to seem simplicist.
composition, does not seem ill at ease here. On the con- The basically uncomplicated nature of Oldenburg's
trary, whatever the connotations (toilets in Park Avenue aesthetic becomes even more noticeable in the drawings
living rooms?), they are well-softened—literally and figu- and water-colours in the Colossal monument series. In his
ratively—by Oldenburg's surprising refinements. notes, Oldenburg defines the series 'in which an object
Similarly, his investigation of the anatomy of an auto- from The street, The store or The home is magnified and set
mobile, part by part, enters the realm of aesthetics without into appropriate locations in the New York landscape.'
a clear intention. Several of Oldenburg's plays on auto- This idea is sketched in rather charming conventional
water-colours in which, for instance, a hot dog is ensconced
in the urban landscape, or an ice-cream cone, in gigantic
proportions. The shock of the scale, which is often so
intense in a comparable drawing by Magritte, is softened
by the gracious chiaroscuro handling of the water-colour.
These notations are tame indeed when viewed in the light
of Oldenburg's fiercely unconventional statements.
There is probably something of the same sort of condi-
tioned historic reaction at work in Frank Stella, whose
bold response to the preceding generation took the form
of a rigorous reversal of procedure. At a tender age Stella
determined that he would not follow the improvisatory
lead of his elders, but would work in strictly-controlled con-
ceptual terms. His passion for symmetry and order in the
first publicly exhibited works was clearly stated, and coolly
pursued. None of the vagaries resulting from improvisa-
tion were to be present in his oeuvre. He was interested, as
Michael Fried explained at length, in 'the thing-nature of
paintings.'
Gradually Stella's stern notion of rectangularity gave
way. His flawless logic in the early works, with their char-
coal-grey rectangles within rectangles, loosened to permit
challenging inconsistencies in later work. As soon as he
moved from neutrals to saturated colour, Stella began to
show evidence of a deliberate disordering of his a priori
programme.
This warping of geometric logic is pronounced in his new
work at the CASTELLI GALLERY. Although the invitation
Frank Stella to the exhibition was printed on graph paper (as are
Chocorua I 1966 dozens of invitations these days—the graph is in) and
Fluorescent alkyd and epoxy
paint on canvas although the geometric sections of Stella's shaped can-
120x 128 in. vases are lucid enough, there is a wilful, illogical undertone
Castelli Gallery to it all. Despite the suggestion that the module of the
graph is the basis for these asymmetrical compositions, the
paintings have an air of whimsy.
They are very large, and their stretchers are thick, so that
the massive paintings are very much in the 'thing-nature'
spirit that Fried described. The basic rectangular image is
still there, only it is played upon both in terms of the ex-
trusions (triangles, rhomboids, parallelograms, etc.) and
in terms of the painted echoes of the geometric shapes.
Stella's austerity is considerably mitigated by his tentative
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