Page 40 - Studio International - December 1970

be seen, read, understood and digested in one culate finesse of their facture in every case. I tion essentially of a pictorial kind of flatness by
hundredth of a second flat, show colour in have been going on about the role of the hand being the recipient of these enormously
chains; colour forced to resign its natural space- in the processes of picture-making; it might simplified planes of acrylic colour.
creating function and become a mere map- be thought I should be critical of an idiom in Knowles's art is remarkable on several fronts
maker's stain for differentiating the various which the physical manifestations of the simultaneously, as it were. The great beauty
parts of a purely conceptual linear diagram. artist's vision, e.g., the eight-foot stainless steel of the incredible exactness of proportion and
We are also terribly aware, in these Protractor cylinders made to Knowles's specification, facture belongs to the aesthetically judgeable
paintings, of the separate stages of the paint- four of which formed the centre piece in his sphere of the visible work that is made to be
ing's making: first it's thought of— then it's exhibition this August at the Serpentine looked at. On this level he has been prolific in
drawn in—then painted in! No simultaneity of Gallery, were devoid of any marks made by finding an almost unending variety of image
action between hand and mind and eye. Con- hand. The fact is that Knowles has found the complications, all springing from the in-
ception and execution (even mechanical exe- exactly appropriate material for realizing his terplay and interpenetration of literally less
cution) are getting still further apart in such vision and that material precludes any tam- than half a dozen basic geometric images. In
American artists as Stella and Judd. One pering by hand. Why is it that the sheerness the construction he made for the school at
reason incidentally why the 'concept' is no of machine production in Knowles is so elo- Barnstaple, the three sixteen-foot-high wafers
substitute for the 'work' in painting or sculp- quent and elegant ? Elegance when it accom- of stainless-steel arranged, in plan, in a tight
ture is that you're lumbered with an object—a panies real underlying strength is nothing but but open-cornered triangle spring straight
big one, too—which remains stubbornly there an asset, of course; so let's hear less of the from the lawn; and whereas the surfaces
long after the initial half-second it took you to famous American sneer at English 'good taste'. facing outwards declare the medium, i.e.,
get the point. And this brings me back to Taste is judgement and its possession accrues stainless steel, the three surfaces facing in-
Judd for a moment; what are we intended to slowly and over generations. wards have been painted white. They might
be feeling, thinking, looking at, telling our- Knowles is of course one of the toughest, most be described as a light-trap into whose echoing
selves, while our eyes pause, slide on again, single-minded and most radically inventive light-resounding interior our eyes penetrate
pause again, slide back, on their scrutiny artists in Britain today—and here again though through the vertical, slit-like apertures at the
(however cool and casual) of the literal he has shown twice in New York and Milan, corners. The whole work is a masterpiece in
featurelessness of the mass-produced surfaces London so far from ever seeing his work in aesthetic economy, an enormously subtle and
of his boxes' sides and tops ? Where symmetry bulk has not even provided him with a one- complex experience being generated out of the
is not only dominant but was patently the man show at a dealer's yet. Five years ago, in a minimal physical components. Here indeed is
origin as well as the end result of a work such prolific outburst of extraordinary intensity, a work one might truly call minimal; it con-
as these, the eye has no journey of exploration Knowles produced a great series of shaped sists only of the three steel members sticking
ahead of it; the very second the work is first canvases (seen at Plymouth City Art Gallery up out of the ground and in no way linked
glimpsed, the total figure is immediately seen, in 1967) in which a minimal number of physically—only linked so close visually that
known and understood; and that's that. The colour-areas were dove-tailed in geometric they act as I suggested like a machine for
industrial sheet does not transmit a message on formats of the utmost simplicity; yet from the trapping light in. Yet 'minimal' has unfortu-
more than a single wavelength, and that says : beginning the thought involved was physically nately become a label for an idiom such
`metal sheet, ⅛ in. thick' : your meditative eye indicative of a literal three-dimensionality in as Donald Judd's. In other words it isn't
cannot possibly extract anything else from a sense that could only be fulfilled by resort to new. What is new about Judd's minimal art
this phenomenon however it may wish to. So physical depth in some shape or form, and this is something residing in the sphere of the
one looks to the configuration of the whole third dimension soon made its appearance literary concept; it is almost surreal. Whereas
structure, hoping in vain to find a single when he started using large fibreglass spheres, Knowles's Barnstaple construction, just as
instance of a newness of shape or proportion sharp wigwam-like pyramids, truncated cones minimal as a box, in fact more so, has created
however slight, some structural insight how- sliced down the middle, the two halves then a brand new image which is inseparable, con-
ever basic. But these things aren't there. Nor, coming together again, but out of alignment ceptually, from its physical realization there
despite the bigness of the whole operation, is (again and again the slipping out of place at Barnstaple on the lawn. However, from
there anything on the architectural level that along a line of fracture of two halves of a time to time, Justin Knowles displays a sort of
we haven't seen a thousand times before. All simple image, is an obsessional constructional extremism of intent which could indeed be
that is new is the bleak decision to exhibit device of Knowles). In all his three-dimen- considered in the category of the conceptual.
these objects in a situation where the carefully sional forms the surfaces become the recep- At the Serpentine Gallery he had four great
prepared context is that of 'high art'. But even tacle of straight or curved-edged areas of flat bars of reinforced concrete, measuring roughly
that isn't unique to Judd. acrylic—areas of white or yellow or red, the two feet in section and fourteen feet long, and
effect of which is to confuse again our straight placed on the grass in a raft-like formation,
Justin Knowles, the British painter/sculptor apprehension of the volumes of his three- side by side, the spaces between the bars
who in the past three years has moved from dimensional geometry by slicing across it in a appearing to equal the width of each bar.
what he called 'dimensional painting' into an multitude of fascinatingly unexpected direc- Now each of these bars had had one of its
idiom sufficiently three-dimensional perhaps tions. I always thought Knowles's own phrase, sides painted in white acrylic. Yet in the
to merit the term 'sculpture', has long been `dimensional painting', was brilliantly accu- position they were designed to occupy the
concerned with geometric forms every bit as rate because, whereas in the first place the painted side of each faced in a direction
stark and plain and simple as those of Donald literally three-dimensional image-forms grew unlike that of the painted side on any of the
Judd. The concept is frequently as elementary, out of a reading of the essentially flat but other three. That is to say, the first bar's white
geometrically speaking, as a minimal box by geometrically bounded colour-areas of his side faced in towards the second bar; the
Judd; but whereas part of the 'concept' in canvases (in no sense did he create three- second bar's white side faced the sky; the
Judd's case is the very idea, itself; that the dimensional forms and then decorate then third bar's painted side was turned down into
object can be mass-produced in a very indif- with colour as is happening with ninety per the grass (and was thus invisible) ; and the
ferent way and remain effective as art (which cent of contemporary sculptors), in the fourth bar's painted side faced in towards the
I dispute), the startling thing about Justin second place the literal three-dimensionality third bar. So here indeed was a purely concept-
Knowles's sheer wafers or cylinders or flat of nearly all his stainless-steel or fibreglass or ual device which had about it amongst other
discs of stainless steel is the incredibly imma- concrete forms is modified again in the direc- things a very definite element of humour. q