Page 45 - Studio International - November 1968

Or perhaps it is the other way around?
History, or society, also intervenes in an exhibi-
tion at the WHITNEY MUSEUM called `Light: Object
and Image'. Although curator Robert Doty empha-
sizes the notion that 'much of the significant work
in the medium has been done by those artists who
applied artificial light to the problems of creating
an object or image', the implications of their work
go beyond this old individualist approach. Ever
since the revolutionary movements of the early
part of the century dallied with principles of
collectivity; of art once-removed from the struggle
of its creator, and possibly the result of an artists'
collaborative, the single object or image has been
in jeopardy. These light artists, in particular,
accommodate different approaches to the role of
art in society since they must, from the very
beginning, avail themselves of technological aids.
The nearest thing to an old-fashioned aesthete in
this show is Stanley Landsman, who fills black
boxes with small electric-light bulbs that are re-
flected ad infinitum by means of mirrors. In the
endless prospects he achieves, Landsman shares the
nostalgia of the most conventional romantic artist
working in deep perspective. Yet, these boxes are
intended for mass production, and have been pro-
duced, undoubtedly, with the help of technicians.
The use of extremely sophisticated electronic cir-
cuitry, and an imagery derived from the very
workings of the devices brought to bear, do, in
fact, cast these works of imagination into a new
role which hovers between the extravaganza ap-
proach and the outright theatrical approach. Many
of these artists require entire rooms for their works
which function in terms of sensuous engulfment.
Several orchestrate their lights in musical sequences,
and avowedly seek to invoke the fourth dimension
via the use of both sound and light and physical
isolation of the subject. In all instances, the object,
per se, is attacked by the energy of artificial light—
an historical attack which will possibly have
tremendous consequences for future generations. Top Stanley Landsman Albuquerque 1968
In a far less apparently revolutionary mode are Lent by Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
the paintings and drawings by Jesse Reichek at the
Above Howard Jones Time columns-the sound
BETTY PARSONS GALLERY. Reichek, who is a pro-
of light 1968
fessor of a vague subject called 'environmental
design' at the University of California at Berkeley,
has stubbornly maintained the self-sufficiency of
abstract painting, and its inexhaustible resources.
He still uses conventional paints and conventional
stretchers and doesn't even baulk at relatively
small formats. But his theory, which he has
expounded in various publications, departs radi-
cally from the received ideas generally circulating
around painting.
It is not unfair to deal with Reichek's painting in
terms of his articulated theory since he has no
pretensions to conventional painterliness. He uses
only red, blue and black in these paintings and
insists that they could be any three other colours.
It doesn't matter to him. He talks about his ideas
readily and he doesn't mind if his paintings are
apprehended as illustrations of these ideas. Paint-
ing, for him, is a form of behaviour and as such, not
to be evaluated by any fixed system of values.
Once you have heard Reichek, you cannot scruti-
nize his paintings for their relative merits as paint-
ings in the conventional sense, but only as greater
or lesser confirmations of his verbalized vision of
existence. I don't mean to suggest that Reichek's
paintings lack plastic ingenuity. He works with
the usual painterly devices for achieving spatial
illusion. He likes to suggest ambiguity, and often
in his vessel-like motifs, forms flow unaccountably
from one space to another, while yet taking their
place in an occultly balanced composition. He
tends to play with optical effects, making his reds
and blues touch each other off, and allowing his
blacks to seem green or silver due to the surround.
His subtle play with contingent forms that always
seem to be relating to still other forms, and his use
of curves to imply but not describe a third dimen-
sion, are authentic devices developed in the modern
tradition of abstract painting. But throughout
Reichek's work, and especially in his drawings,
there is a strong sense of the use of form and
colour as a language. Recent criticism has derided
the idea of painting as a language, yet there are
still a lot of painters who wield their colours and
forms as though painting were a kind of language
with a syntax and grammar and an excavatable
base in society.
This base in society, as obscure as it may seem in
terms of abstract painting, has great reality for
Reichek. He describes his activity—whether it be
political, as when he went and walked beside
James Meredith after Meredith had been shot on
his solitary march, or aesthetic—in terms of its
truth to his apprehension of the world. 'I am not
trying to invent anything', he often says. What he is
trying to do is to describe what he senses to be the
fundamental structure of experience. 'The big
question is: how do you describe the structure of
process?' he says. In his paintings, it is easy to
translate his question since the mutations of similar
and contingent forms do bespeak a process. In the
same way Paul Klee articulated his studies of
biological and botanical processes, Reichek articu-
lates an intuition of some key process, some para-
digm process abstracted from his experience.
The way Reichek moves from the extremely
abstract discussion of structure and life process to
specific social situations and their problems marks
him as a new breed of painter, related only distantly
to the Utopians such as van Doesburg and Mon-
drian, who, he says, were prescriptive, while he is
descriptive. His endeavour can be related to
workers in many disciplines ranging from lin-
guistics to topology without doing violence either
to his theory or his work. For instance, he is
interested, as is Prof. Thompson, in the black
struggle for cultural identity. He examines the
American structure and speculates that the plural-
istic society is not pluralistic at all, but a concensus
Lent by Howard Wise Gallery, New York society in which pressure groups cancel each other
out. His vision of structure, which he works out
in his paintings, is something that is put together,
but is not necessarily closed. His idea of process
has no unity characteristics, is ambiguous and
ubiquitous, and open at all times. Dore Ashton