Page 47 - Studio-International-January-1974

transformed artist, and the objects at One body made to fit on The
least were enormously popular among Master Chassis has stainless steel
visitors to the museum. blades that lift, to act as spoilers ; the
The Master Chassis, which has an other has narrow structures that echo
engine and radio controls, and has the cross-section view of an airfoil.
actually been operated on roads, is Potts took up meditation in the
the primary sculpture, 27 inches high course of making 'Му First Car', and
and looking like viscera in a steel now views his artistic pursuits as
framework. After Potts decided the akin to meditative acts. For me these
project was a test of his sensibilities exercises in art as building, and
and craftsmanship, he began to building as spiritual discipline, fall
complicate his design instead of between art-world strategies and
simplifying it; the result combines the traditional American obsessive
appeal of machine form with that of tinkering. Like some New-Realist
baroque exuberance. painters, Don Potts wishes to temper
The Basic Chassis is made of the arbitrariness of art, by making
unpainted spruce and lacks an objects that work as machines.
engine ; its basicness resides in its Although I am neither a maker nor a
material, I think, as if unpainted wood car-obsessive, I can readily perceive
Don Potts The Master Chassis 1973
were more basic than steel, although the urgency and wide appeal of his
its structure is complex enough to self-imposed task.
the dominant photographic tradition every photographer in Los Angeles is have the workshop-baroque quality Jerome Tarshis
has given us whole forests of sharply doing that, but since Heinecken and of the other three pieces.
rendered tree trunks. Curran, who organized themselves
Adál Maldonado, born in Puerto into their own show, both deal in
Rico in 1948, showed A Question of collage or dreamlike imagery, it is not
Relevance, a two-part series. amazing that some of the other
('Relevance' presumably refers to a twenty-two share that tendency.
connection between these works and There was a certain amount of
the struggle to improve the economic, straight photography : Anthony
social, and cultural condition of la Hernandez did well with pensive
raza, the hypothetical cosmic race of faces in a crowd ; John M. Divola Jr.
those whose lands were colonized by did a series of women with stiffened
Spain. Since Maldonado's subjects hair watering their lawns,
do not include white policemen or uncharitable but perhaps fair
landlords, or dark workers or comment; and Anthony Entin
peasants, their relevance is not Friedkin portrayed the gay freak
obvious to the simplest mind, and the scene with compassion but without
strain on Maldonado may be very glitter or lachrymose sentiment.
great.) Of the more noticeably avant-
Part I gives us persons wearing bag garde photographers, Heinecken
masks, posed in apartments or public showed several witty comments on
places. Looking like bowling pins or the photographic process, one of
De Chirico mannequins, but with them printed on a huge sheet of
articulated legs and torsos, they photographic film. It was funny
taught me how much of my fellow- enough, but many works in '24 From
feeling is predicated on being able to LA' make me wonder if Magritte's
see faces; the contour alone leaves writing 'This is not a pipe' has not led
me vaguely horrified at a kind of to widespread corruption of youth.
mutilation. Judging from these, it appears that
Part Il also played with presence artists whose primary medium is
and absence, this time using multiple photography are less given to
exposure or printing of figures against documenting the freeway-and-
bare walls ; the figure can be seen, hamburger-stand wilderness of LA
but it can also be seen through. Partly than Ed Ruscha has been, among
because of the uncluttered settings, other artists who came to photography
these photographs evoked an from traditional fine-arts media ; the
especially cerebral, antiseptic viewer seldom had any clue to where
response in me. the picture was made.
Arthur Trees, resident in New York Perhaps omphaloscopy is no longer
but widely travelled — one of his much practised outdoors in LA, and
earlier careers was ethnographic cosmopolitan or intra-psychic vision
photography— has been recreating is setting in. Or perhaps the
dreams. He has published a book of organizers' own preferences have
children's dreams, tape-recorded and been favoured. At any rate, the
then posed for with suitable props and pictorial tradition of paradox and
settings. That enterprise leads me to dream, quiescent in painting, still
wonder about the exploitation of lives in photography, and absolutely
children, which is a branch of luxuriates in the San Fernando
photographers' ethics in general, but Valley of California.
the pictures themselves are It is a commonplace that a good
enormously effective. Other teacher is his own best student.
photographs in the show dealt with Somewhat similarly, the Berkeley A sculpture by Shelley Fausset completed during the Summer Symposium at
adults' dreams, and I assume with the sculptor Don Potts considers that Portoroz, Yugoslavia, last year. Shelley Fausset was one of three sculptors (the
artist's own. the most important outcome of his other two were from Japan and Czechoslovakia) chosen out of 25 applicants.
'24 From LA' . six-year commitment to 'Mу First Car' At the same time three other sculptors, two Yugoslays andan Italian, were
a show organized for
the San Francisco Museum of Art by was not the production of a set of working in concrete at Maribor, an industrial city in northern Yugoslavia, where
Robert Heinecken and Darryl J. handsomely machined objects, but the participatory process in symposia is applied to specific sites in urban
Curran, included a large proportion of his own spiritual growth. At the development. The sculptors' expenses were paid and they were provided
work stylistically indebted to Dada University Art Museum, Berkeley, we with materials; their completed works became the property of the commune
and Surrealism. Which is not to say saw the objects rather than the where it had been made.
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