Page 79 - Studio International - April 1968

At the WILLARD GALLERY, Philip McCracken, a and holes. In another hanging, boxed construction, been engaged in the problem of dealing with the
retiring artist from the Northwest, exhibits a group McCracken lays down a splendid blue sky and a human figure in the natural landscape. Among
of constructions through which he wishes to express gentle cloud shape on which beautiful starlike precedents for her style, I could name Medardo
what he calls 'key instants of experience'. In his reflections play from the bullet-shattered plexiglass Rosso.
brief introductory remarks, McCracken identifies that covers them. The terrifying irony, resulting In her recent work, Miss Frank takes us to the sea
these key instants as the instant someone tells you largely from McCracken's elegant method and in a series of plaster and bronze compositions often
they love you, the instant before an automobile sense of beauty, is stronger than if he had used extending in table-like shapes. Miss Frank has
accident, the instant you realize you are being violence and ugliness to speak of violence and carved out the undulating shapes that accompany
shot at. ugliness. the sea as it withdraws from the shore, answering
Though McCracken disclaims any specific social This is even more obvious in a large piece called them with the gentle vertical of the human figure
commentary, his work unavoidably and with stun- Burning Through in which a plastic wall bulges for- contemplating.
ning accuracy conjures specific events. For example, ward, forming a brass-coloured nozzle that could Given the lyrical urge behind all of Miss Frank's
there is Lights Out, in which five lamp sockets, four be, alternatively, a cosmic reference, or the sinister work, it is understandable that her warmest and
of which have had their bulbs shot out, are shape of a devastating new bomb. McCracken is most moving work is in plaster. Something of the
ensconced in a plastic box pierced by bullet holes. one of the rare artists who seems able to make a heat that mysteriously inhabits damp plaster re-
Obviously assassinations, and especially the Ken- social commentary without doing violence to his mains in these horizontal images. The light that
nedy assassination, can be the only association. sense of himself as an artist. softens the curving edges and reflects the soft edge
The more so since the fine plastic and pristine of her palette-knife strokes works optimally in the
Dore Ashton
interior contrast so starkly with the shattered bulbs Mary Frank at the ZABRISKIE GALLERY has long plaster.

Adja Yunkers: avoided in favour of a receding, equivocal relation Yunkers' inversion of traditional composition is
between the two layers of material. The ghostly not broken. That is, instead of a dominating cen-
contours, when we locate them, we experience tral image and a lessening intensity toward the
The eye's edge almost more as drawing than as relief, so intent is edges, Yunkers gives us weighted outer areas with
the artist on suppressing the corporeality of collage. his stronger colours and contours, and allows the
The physical cognizance we lean forward to take heart to remain apparently empty. (Actually,
of the self-absenting central form is further fore- there is no point at which we can safely call any
stalled by the way Yunkers pushes our eyes out to particular area positive or negative.) Rather than
the framing edges. Hardly nebulous are the fre- resting secure or turning in on itself, the picture
quent swathes and peninsulas of resonant blue, or space seems to open itself, to spread outward. The
sometimes yellow, in the Aegean pictures. But they eye becomes engrossed in trying to keep up with it.
are almost never to be found centrally; only at the Yet another optical activity we are drawn into is
Adja Yunkers' Aegean Series', shown recently in very top or bottom, or veering in from the sides. discriminating between painted and 'real' or cut-
New York at the ROSE FRIED GALLERY, is a Russian's Making strong claims on the attention, they dis- out edges. Only up close is it possible to do so, and
response in an American idiom to a Mediterranean concert the eye, almost playfully, in its attempt to even then, there is a cache of variations. For ex-
experience. Yet these large abstract collages (can- `pin down' the collaged canvas. Even if he refuses ample, a painted and cut edge may coincide and
vas and acrylics on canvas), almost all white with to be distracted, the viewer has nevertheless a run along together for a while, then separate. Or if
strips of ultramarine blue and an occasional, ex- gathering awareness of this peripheral activity the collaged canvas has been painted before being
tremely pale grey, yellow, or pink, are much less which is taking place, as it were, at the edge of cut, its perimeters are reinforced by the difference,
dependent on reference to traditions of sensibility consciousness. At times, the superior layer of can- however small, in colour; here, painted and cut
or on the associational value of subject matter than vas is tinted grey or pink, but so softly that edges do not coincide but are identical. Again,
on the purely optical experience they induce. It is Yunkers will make an area of paint slightly overlap
through what happens to his eye that the viewer is a physical contour, so that the latter becomes an
most persuaded by Yunkers' reticent but expan- episode within the painted plane, whose edge then
sive, simple but secretly complicated new pictures. assumes the function of demarcating the cut-out
Not that simile is excluded from them: their form. It is the growing assertion of such 'minute'
'Aegean-ness' is instantly apprehendable in the adjustments and variations that makes one feel
brilliant white light, the deep, 'wine-dark' blues, finally that his very ability to perceive has been
and the spare, horizontal landscape — and sea- increased. It is a feeling, needless to say, productive
scape — like configurations. But they are more than of exhilaration.
abstract versions of a particular geography; Yun- Their subtlety makes Yunkers' visual effects un-
kers' subtle deployment of his highly limited formal photographable, but also included in his recent
means impels the viewer to search the pictures as show were some smaller collages, paper and acrylic
slowly and carefully as he is able if he is not to miss on paper, which register more broadly. Though
a great deal of what is there. The act of looking, independent works, these often serve as sketches
sheer looking, becomes so central that one has a for the large canvas collages. Collage: Blue, White,
sense, when the painting has finally yielded itself Yellow, for example, contains the river and rivulet
up, of being somehow capable of seeing better than of white spilling down a medium blue field which
before. The vision has been expanded, the eye reappear in the big Blue and White canvas collage.
widened. At their core, the works in the Aegean The latter, however, has lost the ragged horizontal
Series operate metaphorically—they establish a yellow at the bottom of the paper collage, and so
unity between the literal (physiological) and figura- becomes an image of absolute verticality. Though
tive (psychological) levels of the experience of its extreme value contrast makes it untypical of
sight. the Aegean Series, Blue and White is like it in its
Yunkers' main sight-enlarging device is the big, demonstration of Yunkers' tendency toward
irregularly-curved form of cut-out white canvas radical elimination. The very number of pictorial
which he affixes to his white field. The colour or elements he retains counts as a visual factor in
value equality between figure and ground makes itself, multiplying as it does the import of what is
the central pendant difficult to grasp. Its edges left to look at. The two tiny, almost unnoticeable
keep disappearing and the eye has to focus in on triangles at the lower right of Aegean V gives some
the canvas weave itself to apprehend just what is idea of the series' fineness of inflection, as does the
on top of what, and where. Limits are elusive, Adja Yunkers Blue and white 1967 momentary coincidence of the edges of the dark
almost unreadable. Abrupt changes in physical paper collage and acrylic, 40 x 30 in. horizontal strip and the upward-bulging grey form.
substance, a usual feature of collage, are here Rose Fried Gallery, New York Scott Burton