Page 35 - Studio International - June 1972

attachment to his home and family life : which selected structure : and the piece's power was equally-lit projections from the past. A similar
itself includes watching TV, discussing local in its lengthy contemporary presence to people principle is evident in the masking-tape
politics, following soccer, playing with his unaccustomed to watching anything so natural demarcation of window-light contours at
daughter, not reading very much, listening to (see note 4), subtle, and 'dumb' as a fire for so specified times before exhibitions in Museum
recordings by the Andrews sisters, and dining long—let alone on their cherished TV tube. Haus Lange and Galerie Yvon Lambert in
with old friends. The juxtaposition of past and present time is 1969, where the present state of natural
Dibbets works best 'at home', in Amsterdam, the structure of those four works dealing with sunlight was itself exhibited in accentuation
in Holland. He works assiduously and The Shortest Day of the Year in 1970 in with its residual form from the past. And
regularly, becoming frustrated at long periods Dibbets's living room, Konrad Fischer's Dibbets's frequent use of gallery contexts as
of necessary travel or irrelevant hospitality. Gallery, Eindhoven's Van Abbe Museum, and material subject matter for the works which he
He works not just for himself, but for others : the Guggenheim Museum; in each case exhibits in those galleries is a continuing
helping some friends form a superb collection (always excepting the Guggenheim) that day instance of accentuating the viewer's sense of
of 'conceptual art' by advice and introductions; was documented by eighty coloured diapositives his own contemporary situation.
exchanging advice and information with taken at regular intervals through a window There is an easy acceptance of contemporary
dealers and critics; bringing artists to the from sunrise to sunset—and projected in life evident in Dibbets's media and use of them
attention of the galleries with which he shows. conjunction with those windows in future shows (see also note 5). Trained as a painter, he
For himself, his style of work is both at parallel times : providing an on-going moved more and more towards serialized
exploratory—particularly in technology and juxtaposition of contemporary views with and infinitely multiple works (like
types of organizational structure—and
extremely logical. While his best works have
been very wide-ranging in ideas and media, he
also has a tendency to work in step-by-step
series around each big idea. What in other
artists' oeuvres might be un-exhibited studies-for
or spin-offs rejected for their minute
differentiation, Dibbets completes as individual
`works' which are sometimes distinguishable
only by their translation into different media,
use of different subject matter, or application
to different contexts. And he exhibits these,
too: sometimes allowing one light-weight
spin-off stand as a whole gallery show.
His Achilles Heel seems to me to be working
and showing too much. As involved and
successful in the art-world as he currently is,
Dibbets's own character as a 'nice guy' who
`can't say no' to friendly dealers or shoddy
installations of his own productions might
finish him off as an artist, leaving yet another
golden-boy art-world super-star to haunt the
culture. By now, at least, he is aware of this.

3(Contemporary)
Dibbets's best work, like all good art, has a
particular reality contemporary to its
perception by anybody. Much of his work
isolates and uses that viewer's present-time as
important to the work's 'art'. His transformation
of umpteen television sets into 'fire places' by
transmitting twenty-four minutes of filmed
fire in 1969 used that visual distinction from
ordinary past and future programming as its

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