Page 53 - Studio International - November 1971

on the walls. The gestures have been well usual LeWitt mystification on the wall label, only LeWitt has the true key. Or is he involved
studied. The two Gs look the part. The cane speak in a whisper in the thousands (I didn't in the Knight's Tour too ?
has a squeak on the end-the one small touch count) of spidery lines crossing and re-crossing Moving up to the top storey in our voyage
which saves. The sound track is admirable. The the fresh white walls of the new John Weber through the current art scene, or the downtown
repetitions wonderfully exact. Everyone Gallery. What these reclusive lines whisper synopsis of the uptown scene, we come to the
sat in wonderment. To think they do this all day about is the virtue of restraint, among other skylit demesne of the Emmerich Gallery, in
long. What endurance. What a gas. How very... things, and the dissolution of the object. which the familiar stillness of the work on a wall
how very entertaining. What a commentary on Theatre is not entirely absent since LeWitt is is much like the stillness galleries have
art, on nostalgia, on English gentlemen, on the art the director of his tableau (quite different from traditionally provided, no song, no dance to
world, on sculpture, on vaudeville. The voyage the tableau downstairs where the actors are their distract us, or to entertain us. Instead, rather
is extensive here. And the audience is given. own directors and the work is the sum of their large paintings on very large walls, and still
Time still preoccupies on the next floor, repeated actions). The actors, more like set more in a glass-walled inner sanctum to which
where Sol LeWitt's white cubic sculptures are designers, follow his detailed instructions in we are only invited on Saturdays. In the time
accompanied by one of his wall-drawing scoring the gossamer network, and are merely lag between the first and fourth galleries of the
scenarios. Time and space, accompanied by the agents in a complicated mental game to which synoptic loft building there is a certain poignant
finality. Downstairs, motion, sound; upstairs
4
dead silence. The extremes touch. If I thought
of Resnais, who so troublingly investigated
objects, time and space in Muriel and to whom
I would always return, as I watched in gallery
number one the pitiable chips that fell from his
monument, I could only think of a half-dozen
painters not in this gallery whose works would
not generate dead silence, but pregnant silence.
In the pure and perfect atmosphere at the top of -
the paradigm of the art world, the paintings
expire.
As I travelled outward, I met a painter in his
late twenties who engaged me in a conversation.
`Have you seen the show at the Modern ?' he
asked. 'What show ?"The big show, I forget
what it's called, but it's terrific.' What's in it ?'
`Matisse, Picasso, Léger, lots of stuff I'd never
seen.' (I had heard about it the week before
while visiting some younger painters' studios.
To my surprise, they sat around talking, picture
by picture, of the old masters and minor masters,
as I haven't heard painters talk about painting
for a long time.) I saw the show. A house show
selected by curator McShine with an acute eye
for what we've been missing, hung closely and
with excitement. Odd. Downtown they sit
talking about the quiet values of minor works
by masters, or masterful works by minors, in an
uptown museum that has just had a traumatic
struggle, partly with the downtown values,
while a few blocks away, uptown has installed
itself downtown with the reverse values. In this
Vaucanson machine of an art world, the gears
move in several directions, mostly predictably.
Connoisseurship is 'in' with the advanced
painters now, while showmanship has moved
out of the museum into the commercial
galleries. What a trip.
DORE ASHTON
2 Bruce Nauman
Art Makeup No. 1, White 1967/8
16 mm colour film (silent) to minutes long
Courtesy Leo Castelli, New York
3 Richard Serra
Frame 1969
16 mm black and white film with sound 798 ft
Courtesy Leo Castelli, New York
4 Joan Mir?)
Untitled 1933
Collage with three postcards, sandpaper,
reproductions and charcoal on paper.
421 x 28i in.
Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York
201