Page 61 - Studio International - July August 1968

gallery district and usually offers exhibitions that purples, as rich as the hearts of pansies, are played When he died, he apparently left several of these
augment and summarize contemporary events. It against the acid greens that seem peculiar to rolls of freshly painted, unprimed canvas. We are
has been a lively place for the past two seasons, acrylic paints. The forms splay out in a wilderness told that he also left specifications as to where they
and in a sense, this show is important, if only to that is no place, and boundless, and only a greyish were to be cut, and in which directions. But the
spell out, once and for all, the poverty of the idea of neutral square form stabilizes the painting. specifications are not on view.
destruction. Roth has also tried his hand at sculpture, fashion- What are exhibited are a group of horizontal
At the simplest level, it is obvious that all artists ing replicas of the forms in his paintings. In three studies, some with three to four bands of colour
have always been aware of the destructive elements dimensions, they lose all mystery and partake occluded in the centre, others slightly asymmetrical.
in creation. Paint had to be ground in a mortar, neither of sculptural nor painting values. Placed All are tastefully balanced, and neatly framed in
and once it was prepared, much of it wound up near the paintings, they only serve to underline elegant but sadly inappropriate shadow-boxed
scrapings on the floor. At a slightly more elevated the real basis of his art, which is the general moulding.
level, there are the speculations of artists such as 'a ambiance he creates rather than the objects within It is easy to see that the stripes were painted
painting is a sum of destructions' or, as the it. vertically, since they bear the marks of beginning
director of the exhibition cites in her catalogue, Peter Agostini continues, in his exhibition at the and ending in a downward drift. Whether Louis
poetic musings such as John Keats's 'Creations and RADICH GALLERY, his lusty play with plaster-cast intended for them to be horizontal—which is a
destroyings/ all at once/ pour into the wide hollows inner tubes. These tumescent sculptures, billowing recent vogue—or not is perhaps an academic
of my brain/ and deify me. ...' But these are hardly crazily, squeezed and tied off, tumbled and inter- question. The fact is that he never had the chance
the kind of observations that cover a conception woven, have a kind of joyous air about them, if to see them stretched up, and that he never had
of an art form. only because of their generous curves. But they the chance to edit them, or signify their completion
Simplistic rather, are the ideas behind the also lose a great deal because there is never a in any way.
Destruction in Art Movement. For a long time negative answer to the bounding curve. No short Their frailty, and their elegance in this exhibi-
sociology and psychoanalysis have provided con- stops or sharp edges interrupt their obstreperous tion, are questionable qualities. Louis was a
venient byways for artistically-inclined dilettantes. flow, and the eye slides all too easily over their delicate artist, it's true, but he had a strong sense
It seems a wholesome endeavour to provide a kind surfaces. It is perhaps time for Agostini to tame his for the point at which elegance becomes gratuitous
of group therapy session in which community is forms, or at least put obstacles before their mad and ornamental. From his earliest, turbulent
experienced via discomfort. The catharsis achieved proliferation. Pollock-like paintings, through the filmy, moody
by Ralph Ortiz with his much publicized rituals in works that preceded the stripes, Louis indicated his
which the destruction of anything from a musical There are some special and I think vexing prob- ability to make keen judgments, and to retain
instrument (Jimmy Durante did it first) to a live lems involved in the Morris Louis exhibition at the enough bite to fend off sheer decorative effect.
chicken is at a rudimentary level to say the least. ANDRÉ EMMERICH GALLERY. It was Louis's habit to Here, the easy and pretty effects are disturbing. It
It suffers from pedantic research, and is invariably work on raw canvas, rolling it out on the floor and might have been more fair to tack up the frayed-
justified in either psychoanalytic or anthropological working it somewhat in the manner of the Chinese edge canvases on boards, honestly indicating their
terms. scroll artist, from sequence to sequence. He ap- essentially unfinished status. Louis was too much
The exhibition, however, does not limit itself to parently worked out his ideas leaving large areas of an artist to have been indifferent to their
references to DIAS. It sucks up a whole range of free, and then cut the paintings off the roll, one presentation, and I think he would have balked at
art objects, many of which could just as easily be by one, judging the spaces around his striped forms the easy perfection this exhibition suggests.
seen as primarily aesthetic. The question of how a as he went. Dore Ashton
thing is made is really not interesting. When I look
for instance at a lovely rococo plastic relief by Mon
Levinson, with its unfurling flowerlike formations, Peter Agostini Baby Doll and Big Daddy 1967 plaster,
it is quite immaterial to me whether he did, in 80 x 50+ in. and 46 x 43 in. Stephen Radich Gallery, New York
fact, achieve this effect by means of fire. Similarly,
when Pol Bury plays off-register games with a
photograph of Bougereau's Venus, I think the
destructive impulse is so highly sublimated that it
hardly matters.
If aggressivity is one of the desiderata for destruc-
tive art, then Les Levine's roomful of electrically
charged wires, strung at arm's length across, and
looking like a laundry room, is the prime exhibit.
Hardy adventurers are invited to touch a wire and
receive a mild shock. I don't deny that the element
of shock is essential to art. I only wonder whether
such literalism is worth the elaborate effort.
In his recent exhibition at the MARTHA JACKSON
GALLERY, Frank Roth continues to work out his
sense of paradox by fusing machine-turned, hard
images with ambiguous and often mysteriously
nimbused spaces. The harshness of his forms is
stressed by their graded edges which always infer
a high, artificial light. Spindles, dynamos and
streamlined luggage suggest themselves, but always
tentatively since Roth is not at all interested in
descriptive painting.
In fact, his interests are largely abstract. He is at
his best when he works with few forms, suspended
queerly in spaces that are subtly shifted from light
to lighter, and cannot be localized or associated.
Because of the allure that such unearthly spaces
hold for us, it is always something of a disappoint-
ment when Roth stresses solids. This he does in the
most ambitious painting, 'Waiting', in which his
repertory of forms is made into a compendium
with no real spaces to aerate them.
On the other hand, when he accedes to his
romantic impulse, as he does in Fragment of a
Great Confession, he is in top form. Here, deep