|
In its renunciation of the art
object as commodity, tread-lightly-on-the-land branch of ecology
and its field operation/organisation outside the art community,
Running Fence is emblematic of the conceptualist seventies. If conceptualist
art-making primarily involves the use of non-visual systems for
art-making purposes, Running Fence's most unique contribution may
have been in the area of community organising. (It is now possible
to see the residual effects). By involving hundreds of people in
its creation, by instigating new social arrangements in the area
and by challenging the local political powers to respond - all on
a relatively large scale - Running Fence staked out new artmaking
terrain. When the French documentation show opened at the Newport
Harbor Art Museum in Southern California in early 1980, dozens of
non-artist Sonoma Country residents involved in the fence-making
activities travelled 500 miles for the occasion, as they had travelled
5000 or so miles for the show's premiere in Amsterdam in 1977. Running
Fence had - and has - an apparent life of its own.
Running Fence is, however, only
the best known of the numerous, monumental, site specific artworks
created in California during the seventies. The state - particularly
the northern portion with which I am most familiar - has seen a
dizzying variety of conceptualist works ranging from laser projections
on downtown skyscrapers to herds of painted cows set to graze along
freeways. (More about specific projects later). Lately - strikingly
- a discernible institution centred revival of interest in the minimalist
mode seems to be challenging the conceptualist hegemony of the seventies.
This resurgence is surprising because monumental minimalist (outdoor)
sculpture, even in the sixties' heyday of Los Angeles 'slick'; has
never seemed quite suited to the relatively untheoretical California
temperament or to the prevailing low-rise architectural environment.
(Although the cutting edge of minimalist theory has been blunted
by minimalism's incorporation within the formalist lexicon of historical
style).
The architectural connection
is key because minimalist sculpture has always carried on an explicit
or implicit discourse with architecture, addressing questions of
both material and form. Behind this new found interest stands an
unprecedented building boom in California downtowns. What self-respecting
corporate edifice complex is complete without accompanying desires
for the classy and classic, machined-look of today's minimalist
art-work, expertly designed to complement any entryway plaza? Other,
less facetious questions come to mind: What does increased corporate
and institutional patronage signify for the eighties? What is the
state of public art? Why in the past has California proved peculiarly
receptive to conceptualist endeavours? And what in social terms
is the significance of minimalist vis-a-vis conceptualist art-making?
A glance backward in time provides the context for two recent works
by Michael Heizer and Maria Nordman which seem to epitomize two
different mainstream directions - stylistic and sociological - as
well as the current state and range of the art (not to mention the
contradictions embodied therein).
The history of permanent, grand-scale
sculpture in California is a checkered one. Quantities of works
are visible in only a few places, invariably relatively isolated
spots like the sculpture gardens at the University of California
at Los Angeles or the Syntex Corporation headquarters near San Francisco.
California's major cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego,
Long Beach, San Jose, Oakland and Sacramento), alas, boast no dramatic
outdoor sculpture approaching the mammoth scale of Chicago's Daley
Plaza Picasso. (Some might argue for the inclusion of Long Beach's
Queen Mary within this category, but I remain a purist in such matters).
As is the case with cities everywhere, the new urban scale tends
to render Lilliputian even medium-sized artworks like the Tony Smith
and Henry Moore pieces in San Francisco's Civic Center. And then
there is the question of what one can see from a car window. Only
San Francisco, of California's urban centres, is a pedestrian city.
Located at the tip of a peninsula, however, there is precious little
open land there for commercial or artistic development and a feeble
tradition of public sculpture due in large part to the stiff visual
competition meted out by the hills San Francisco Bay and ubiquitous
views of the spectacularly sculptured bridges.
Conceptualist works, on the
other hand, seem tailor-made to the Californian consciousness, a
state of mind open to experiment fantasy and the implementation
of dreams. 'California' is a mythical treasure island in a popular
Spanish romance of the 15th century. It is also the home of the
electronic media, film, epochal technological change (on the order
of the aerospace and electronics industry) and, perhaps conversely,
the gateway through which Eastern philosophies enter America. In
addition to futuristic technology the far-reaching implications
and influence of California lifestyles should be noted. (The term
'lifestyle' seems particularly well suited to the California mind
set in its self-conscious assertion of the possibility of fashioning
one's life as one might fashion a new wardrobe). The Los Angeles-based
Pop culture of the mid-sixties contributed to the virtual eradication
of the gap between art and life. Conceptualist performance (which
artist/curator Tom Marioni called 'performance sculpture') became
the preferred mode in California. When Chris Burden had himself
shot or Bonnie Sherk ate an elegantly catered meal in a cage in
the San Francisco zoo, art and life threatened to merge.
Since the mid-seventies the
gap has necessarily begun to widen again. This convergence might
be considered analogous on a social/political level with Ad Reinhardt's
modernist assault on art as we had known it.) Most significant,
in terms of both object-making and performance, has been a renaissance
of theatricality and a concomitant desire to 'go public'. New contexts
and new audiences have been aggressively sought. The Eyes and Ears
Foundation has sponsored billboard art shows since 1977 in high
traffic, Los Angeles and San Francisco locales. Through them, a
random urban audience is exposed to conventional 'high art' sited
in unconventional locations and scaled unconventionally large.
Judy Chicago's controversial
feminist statement, the Dinner Party, forged a network of collaborator/participants
and challenged the system to accommodate a front-line ideological
assault on sexism, past and present. Her difficulties with post-San
Francisco museum bookings (despite the fact that Dinner Party broke
attendance records during its 1979 premiere exhibition, outdrawing
retrospectives of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg!) suggests
that the museum establishment was ill-prepared to deal with the
Dinner Party's extra-aesthetic, overtly politicized content. Pious
proclamations of the vulgarity of Chicago's art seemed inappropriately
shrill in the light of typical museum fare. (This is not to say
that aesthetically the Dinner Party was not seriously flawed). The
opening of Chicago's Dinner party in March 1979 was nevertheless
the biggest American media art event between Running Fence and the
Picasso Retrospective.
It is against a backdrop of
relatively anti-formalist art-making that Maria Nordman and Michael
Heizer come into the picture, producing two radically different
works in two radically different contexts. They are unique mainly
for their scale and the extremity of the statements they make. In
June, 1969 Nordman rang down the curtain on the University's Art
Museum in Berkeley's Space As Support show, a sequential series
of installations created by Daniel Buren, Robert Irwin, Carl Andre
and Nordman, in December, 1980 the Oakland Museum installed Heizer's
Platform, the first site-specific work commissioned for the city
of Oakland's new sculpture garden.
Frankly, it is hard to imagine
a more unlikely pair of works. Virtually all that links them is
site specificity. While Platform is made of steel, Nordman's installation
utilized natural light reflected off a white, matte-finish plastic
adhesive applied to the floors of the museum. While Heizer's piece
was built to last - presumably as long as Oakland - Nordman's installation
was predicated on temporal change, lasting only from sunrise to
sunset on June 21, the summer solstice. Aesthetically (and perhaps
only aesthetically) they occupy opposite ends of a spectrum.
The site for Nordman's affecting
installation was the Mario Ciampi designed University Art Museum.
(Completed in 1970, I once described this extravagantly peculiar
cast concrete building as 'a cubist's vision of geological holocaust'.
The bunker-like facade of the world's largest university museum
conceals a cavernous interior in which six balconied galleries,
connected by zig-zagging angular ramps project into a vast central
space). Regarding Nordman's unnamed work, I quote from my diary:
'Nordman covered the floors of the museum's central space and its
auxiliary lower level gallery with a contact paper-like, white plastic
adhesive. On two sets of glass doors the affixed coloured acetate
(red, blue and green), while to a third she affixed black acetate.
All the doors in the museum were unlocked, creating in Nordman's
words, "an open place". (Her special treatment of the doors marked
them as the entrances to - and definers of - experience). During
the day the museum was unlit by artificial light and remained open
from approximately 5 a.m. until 9:15 p.m., a cycle begun and ended
in darkness.
With the day's first light,
the floor began to glow an arctic, pearly white. Reflected light
gradually made the upper galleries among the brightest spots in
the museum. As the sun rose higher, the floor became increasing
dissociated from the surrounding concrete architecture. All sorts
of romantic early morning associations - frozen moats, Bruegel snowscapes
- were vanquished by the bright, shadowless, midday light. The transition
from light to darkness was equally dramatic and highlighted by the
play of shadow, coloured acetate and nearby neon signs on architectural
surfaces.
The natural light caused perceptual
changes involving not only the museum structure and enclosed space,
but the permanent collection displayed in the upper galleries, as
well. Hofmann paintings grew more garish, a Bacon canvas more sinister.
Simple lessons in looking - such as the reflective/absorptive relationship
of light and pigment - abounded. The transformation of the museum
and the ostensible absence of art profoundly affected many viewers
disinhibiting some and engaging a surprising number of others.'
Nordman later told me that she
chose to work at the museum because she 'wanted to work on a building
where people would be at different heights in relation to each other'.
Frequently her intimately scaled art works - installed in small,
non-art, mostly store front locations - involve a single, optimum
viewing point. Here the multiple points of view compounded, rather
than diminished, the intensity of the perceptual pleasures derived.
Through the most economical
of means Nordman created an arena for experience with all the existential
implications of such terminology. Inquiring into the relationship
of the individual and her environment, this work blurred the two,
typically (for Nordman) rendering reality the most subjective of
propositions. (This ultra-subjectivity suggests that perhaps existentialism's
pop cultural legacy has been the a-political, 'me-generation' of
the seventies).
While intellectual mediation
seemed literally the last of the viewer's conceivable responses
to Nordman's installation, Heizer's Platform elicited just this
traditional sort of response, inspiring meditation on the artist's
handiwork. Instead of personal experience one confronts civic art
policy.
Platform is located in Oakland's
sculpture garden, a serpentine, 22 acre corridor connecting Lake
Merrit, downtown, with Estuary Park on San Francisco Bay. In Estuary
Park, Heizer chose a grassy site about 20' from the water. Immediately
to the North stands a gleaming white block of new, luxury apartments.
Parking lots, docks and maritime
industrial facilities comprise views in the other directions. Depending
on visibility; water, sky and nearby Alameda Island dominate the
surrounding man-made structures.
If the Estuary Park waterfront
is a curious patchwork-quilt-of-an-environment, its inclusion as
part of the city's sculpture garden is more curious still. Instead
of selecting a well-trafficked, central location for its urban art
park, the city chose a newly developing area designed to provide
expensive housing and recreational facilities for residents interested
in living near downtown and/or the water. The sculpture garden functions
then as urban landscaping, as part of the gentrifying process of
redevelopment. Perhaps the biggest problem with the site is the
limited audience Platform and other artworks will enjoy. Conventional
wisdom suggests that one rationale for public art is the exposure
of a large and unsuspecting audience to works of art in non-art
locations. Estuary Park defies such conventional wisdom. (The University
Art Museum, with its constant flow of students and tourists conversely
attracts a much larger and more diverse audience).
Although Heizer made several
preliminary visits to Oakland, it is difficult to see how Platform
relates (see p. 13) to its site. Based on the module of the rectangle
(in four sizes), it is a three-tiered steel sculpture rising from
a 20 x 24' base to a maximum height of 71/2'. (Oddly enough its
most intriguing characteristic is its colour - a variegated rainbow
of dusky, pumpkin orange shades). Platform is dynamically positioned
on site, revealing itself to approaching viewers by the convergence
of two sides at a 90 degree angle rather than by a more monolithic
single side. Despite minor irregularities in the arrangement of
modular components conveying the slightest hint of randomness, the
effect is that a carefully stacked pile of wood awaiting use a construction
site.
Platform pits form against void
in Heizer's usual manner, with an unusual lack of finesse, especially
when seen in profile views. Also unusual here are Heizer's investigation
of a single form (the rectangle), the steel material itself and
a sense of density a confinement which convey the impression that
rather than embracing its surroundings, Platform might well implode.
The piece is neither monumental on its own terms nor in relation
to site which reduces it to one of many medium-sized objects along
the waterfront. Surprisingly, given its size, Platform is best seen
close up where its gorgeously oxidized surface seems to radiate
light, Rothko-fashion.
Platform's scale, size and cost
imply that it must be ($100,000 funded by the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Oakland Museum, and mostly private local donors).
A monument, but to what? Civic ambition? The planning behind Oakland's
sculpture garden seems out of touch with Oakland's distinguishing
features - its class and ethnic diversity (consisting of very large,
Black, Asian and Latino populations), its little noted picturesque
location between the Oakland Hills and San Francisco Bay and sprawling,
semi-suburban nature. Being attuned to its constituency and environment
has earned the Oakland Museum widespread and deserved local support.
Carving out a unique niche as
the 'Museum of California', it has combined museums of art, natural
science and history in a single institution, housed in Kevin Roche's
handsome, thoughtfully designed building (1969).
Sentiments of 'hometown boy
makes good' probably played some part in the selection of neighbouring
Berkeley-born Heizer for Oakland's initial sculptural commission.
And if Platform seems rather 'un-indigenous', there's certainly
no harm in that (to the contrary in fact). Compared to Heizer's
amalgam of boulders Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976) for Seattle,
Platform is a less controversial, if less riveting design. Four
years later, in an age of 'please everyone', consensual aesthetics
one senses the generalized if perhaps unconscious urge to play it
safe. (Based on several successful attempts by Bay Area politicians,
since the mid-seventies to essentially censor the commission or
installation of artworks by the likes of Mark di Suvero, William
Wiley and Robert Ellison, this urge should probably not be considered
paranoia).
This observer also found the
virtually private dedication of Platform troublesome. Attendance
at this presumably historic event was but a tiny fraction of the
2000 plus visitors who mobbed the January opening of the feminist-tinged
'American Quilts - a Handmade Legacy' exhibition. Publicity was
minimal, Is Heizer an unknown quantity here? It seems unlikely,
although he has never exhibited in the Bay Area still, the museum
has expressed no plans to fill this educational void with a show
devoted to Heizer's work, in either documentary or actual form.
One senses that Platform would cause a few ripples of either dissent
or acclamation. It is public and gone underground (by contrast,
Nordman's installation is underground art gone public!).
This allusive social commentary,
these observations on monumental artworks in California, hold more
than local significance because such developments are symptomatic
of American trends in general. (Unfortunately all too often, as
California goes, so goes America. With its system allowing for virtually
direct referendums on social issues - such as the death penalty,
ecological coastline management, the tax revolt embodied in Proposition
13 - California frequently 'gets there' first). One hardly needs
a crystal ball to predict that there will be fewer non-travelling,
non-audience generating, ephemerally oriented exhibitions like Space
as Support in an era of limited resources. There may well be more
civic and corporate monuments on the order of Platform, but they
will function as little more than urban decoration, symbolizing
an outmoded middle class vision of what constitutes 'art for the
people'.
Pressures applied recently to
the California Arts Council (CAC) also suggest what might be in
the offing nationally. The liberal CAC has not only been symbolically
tainted by Governor Jerry Brown's failure to gain confirmation of
his appointment of Jane Fonda to that body, but increasingly attacked
for money spent on ephemeral, conceptualist artworks. The double-barrelled
aesthetic and cost-effective brand of philistinism was - and will
continue to be - invoked. The incoming Reagan administration has
already been preparing to eliminate the distribution of federal
art money on geographical or multi-cultural bases. Only the most
conventional, 'high art' will be funded.
Corporate funding will become
increasingly important and will exert the same conservative influence
it exerts on public television. Money spent by corporations - on
historical and/or blue chip contemporary art for display in museums
and within corporate headquarters - will become increasingly visible.
Financially beleaguered museums are now soliciting corporate money
for operating costs in order to simply keep the doors open. Are
they likely to bite the hands that feed them? Would the average
corporate president respond positively to Maria Nordman's 16 hours,
white adhesive homage to the summer solstice?
The most clearcut indication
that the conceptualist seventies are over is the recent resurgence
of painting. One can assume that historical conditions will mitigate
against the emergence of sizable numbers of new artists with conceptualist
sensibilities. What of those already established? A few more predictions:
Nordman (along with other light-oriented,
Los Angeles-based technicians of perception - Robert Irwin, James
Turrell, Michael Asher, Eric Orr) will continue to function on establishment
fringes, to be appreciated by a small audience for the formal elegance
as well as the experiential basis of her work. Christo's independent
financing will allow him to maintain the status of eccentric, although
he is following trends in creating permanent works like the oil
barrel mastaba to be constructed in Abu Dhabi. Heizer's situation
is particularly poignant. Earthworks having acquired the status
and marketability of dinosaurs, he is already parodying his earlier,
more monumental works in projects like those for Oakland and Seattle.
With the imminent government annexation of his desert acreage for
the MX missile project, he recently spoke of self-imposed exile
sounding like a man without a country dispossessed in both space
and time.
I do not mean to suggest that
there will be no potent art-making (conceptualist or otherwise)
in the eighties. Clearly, turbulent times do lie ahead. In art,
the upcoming years will be a period of retrenchment, of refinement
and conservation on one hand, of post-modern realignment on the
other.
The dialectical nature of modernism
is embodied in the dual aspects of modernist purity: Actual purification
(visible in the movement which continued beyond two-dimensional,
non-illusionistic painting through the conceptual 'dematerialization'
of the art object) and the (creative) destruction inherent in such
a process of elimination and purification. In our post-modern, post-Duchampion
era, it is time to enlarge our aesthetic (moral) definitions to
make room for the aesthetically (politically) disenfranchised -
women, third world artists (whose traditions have been coopted in
such recent trends as pattern and decoration) and gays. If art is
to live a relevant, extra-commodity existence, if it is to even
approach monumentality, then it must be transformed into politics.
|
