Room 1 :: Room 2 :: Room 3 :: Room 4 :: Room 5 :: Projections :: Room 6 :: Room 7 :: Room 8 :: Room 9
Room 1
The exhibition opens with a room of works exploring the form of the cube. In the early part of the twentieth century, many artists associated with Constructivism – van Doesburg, Malevich and Mondrian – had used objective systems such as mathematics and physics to achieve compositional harmony and order in their work. These ideas continued to influence artists working in Europe and South America, and also contributed to the emergence of Minimalism in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. For Minimalist artists like Donald Judd the cube represented an ideal form: it stands as a simple system, governed by geometric principles that can be endlessly repeated.
In the mid 1960s artists began to treat the cube in a new way. Going beyond pure abstraction, they began introducing variables into the system. A classic example is German artist Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube, 1963-5. A sealed Perspex box, it contains a small amount of water. As light enters, the cube warms up and the water condenses on the inside walls. It then runs down to collect on the bottom, and the whole process is repeated ad infinitum. Haacke is using a biological system to create a work that depends entirely on its particular surroundings: the light and temperature of the gallery directly influence the process of condensation, placing the viewer and work in real time and space.
Reacting against the limitations of geometric structure as an end in itself, American artist Sol LeWitt explored narrative systems that would engage the viewer. Muybridge I, 1964, was inspired by the motion studies of the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. LeWitt counteracts the passive nature of the cube by inserting peepholes in his wooden box, where the viewer can see a sequence of photographs of a nude female figure, appearing closer in each successive image.
Room 2
If the artists displayed in Room 1 opened up the art object to engage the viewer and relate to the gallery space, then in Room 2 the gallery space itself becomes the art object. In Measurement: Room, first realised in 1969, American artist Mel Bochner turns the whole room into the cube, which he marks out using a system of measurement. He applies black tape and Letraset to the walls and to various features of the room, mapping out and indicating their height and length. The measurements serve to make viewers aware of their surroundings, and also to make them self-consciously aware that they are now the subject being framed: as if they are being literally sized up.
Bochner applied various intellectual systems to his work, using numbers, words and photographs to re-examine the nature of art. In contrast to the concrete reality of Minimalist sculpture, he focused on making works about the abstract systems that govern the physical world. Measurement interested Bochner because, while seeming an objective and rational system of knowledge, he saw it as essentially meaningless. He has said, ‘Measurement is one of our means of believing that the world can be reduced to a function of human understanding. Yet, when forced to surrender its transparency, measurement reveals an essential nothingness.’
Room 3
After the simple, abstract forms of Minimalism, Room 3 marks a return to the use of the human figure and a move towards a greater political and social engagement. With the increasing momentum of the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, American artists Adrian Piper and Martha Rosler, and the Austrian VALIE EXPORT, used photography and video to explore issues of identity and the body. Through a series of performances in which she herself became the art object, Piper analysed her social position as an artist, a woman and an African-American. For example, in Catalysis III, 1970, she strolled through the streets of Manhattan displaying the sign ‘WET PAINT’ on her white sweater, provoking disdainful reactions from passers-by, as a metaphorical enactment of xenophobia. EXPORT, in her series From the Portfolio of Doggedness, 1968, used her body in experiments aimed at unravelling conventional female and male roles. In Rosler’s video Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, a rebellious and humorous parody of a cooking demonstration, the artist investigates how the system of male, capitalist-dominated culture permeates everyday life. In her Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1977, a woman becomes an object to be systematically classified when she is measured, part by part, by a man in a white coat.
Room 4
This group of black and white photographs, occupying the entire room, was made by Anarchitecture, a collective of artists formed in 1974. The group aimed to explore architectural systems in a radical way. Their efforts make us rethink what constitutes architecture by drawing attention to the forgotten spaces and gaps of the urban environment. The results were displayed in the Anarchitecture Show, 1974, recreated here. Less an exhibition than a report of the group’s findings, the event was held at 112 Greene Street in New York’s Soho, the living space of Jeffrey Lew, a member of the group.
All the works in the show were in the same photographic format, 40cm x 50 cm, except those by Richard Nonas and Laurie Anderson who made drawings and Jene Highstein, who made a photo-collage. Everyone else (Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Bernard Kirschenbaum, and Richard Landry) worked on photographs and all the works were installed anonymously.
Anarchitecture’s activities took the group out into the world, beyond the confines of the gallery space. Matta-Clark said, ‘The group’s architectural aim was more elusive than doing pieces that would demonstrate an alternative attitude to buildings…We were thinking more about metaphoric voids, gaps, leftover spaces, places that were not developed…for example, the places where you stop to tie your shoelaces, places that are just interruptions in your daily movements.’
Room 5
In this room installation, A Winter Garden, 1974, Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers uses the museum space to challenge traditional systems of display and the authority of the art institution. Modelled on the nineteenth-century palm court, once popular in European bourgeois homes, the work consists of an arrangement of real objects brought together to create a fictional scene. The rolled-up red carpet hints nostalgically at former glories. The palm trees, the engravings of different categories of animals, and the old fashioned display cases evoke an age of colonialism, characterised by a passion for collecting and classifying objects from around the world. It was an era that saw the birth of the museum as an institution. Here, Broodthaers makes a museum within a museum, a space so clearly artificial that it calls into question the validity of the objects on display. The presence of the video monitor, reflecting back the room and its visitors as part of the presentation, adds to the tension between fiction and reality.
Projections
The screening area between Rooms 5 and 6 includes two slide projections by American artists. Hotel Palenque, 1969, by Robert Smithson is a series of images of an old hotel in Mexico that is undergoing a cycle of simultaneous decay and renovation, with a sound track of the artist’s voice in an accompanying lecture. In Homes for America, 1966-67, Dan Graham finds Minimalist forms in the endless banality of suburban housing ‘tracts’. Both artists are moving away from the traditional art object and finding subjects and structures in the real world, while the use of slides exemplifies the interest in serialisation shared by many artists of the period, and their challenge to the aesthetics of photography.
Room 6
The Brazilian artists in this room, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, are exploring ideas of interactivity and viewer participation. Oiticica’s large installation Project FILTRO – for Vergara, New York 1972, invites the viewer to step inside. Oiticica invented his own personal classification system to replace traditional categories of painting, sculpture and so on. Project FILTRO belongs to a type of art that he classified as Penetrable: in translation, something that can be penetrated or entered into. Drawing on both the poverty and the vibrancy of the artist’s native Rio de Janeiro, Project FILTRO is a multi-sensory experience: the viewer moves through a labyrinth of exotic colours and textures, hearing recordings of poetry along the way, and even receiving a drink of orange juice at the end of the journey.
Like Oiticica, Clark explodes the idea of the art object as something for display only. Her Sensorial Objects, 1966, made up of soft, organic shapes and materials, are offered to the viewer to touch or wear. Dialogue Goggles, 1968, a pair of connected diving goggles, limits the visual field of the two participants to eye-to-eye contact, isolating sight from the other senses and enforcing an intense engagement with the other person. In these works, the object itself is of secondary importance to the sensory experience. The work can only exist when participants interact with the object provided: as Clark put it, the artist becomes a ‘proposer’ rather than the creator of a finished work. Since both these artists use inexpensive local materials and everyday objects in their work, they also raise questions about the commercial value of the art object.
Room 7
In his Condensation Cube displayed in Room 1, German artist Hans Haacke had explored biological systems. In this controversial documentary installation he turns to social systems. Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, is the product of Haacke’s research into the real estate holdings of the Shapolsky family in Manhattan. Harry Shapolsky had attracted Haacke’s attention because he was the landlord who owned more slum properties than any other landowner in New York. Haacke’s research – all culled from public records – reveals how Shapolsky’s business worked, different properties being held under different company names. The series of 142 photographs of the facades of tenement buildings, accompanied by typewritten data sheets, added up to a biting indictment of the monopoly of one family of wealthy proprietors over the slums of a particular area. Due to be displayed in an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York entitled Hans Haacke: Systems, the work was deemed ‘inappropriate’ by the museum’s management, and the Guggenheim decided to close down the exhibition. The curator, who defended the work, was fired. As a result of the ensuing furore, Shapolsky et al. became one of the most talked about works of the early 1970s.
Room 8
In the first section of this large room, artists are addressing issues of politics and history. The accordion-like album, Sitting-in-the-closet-Primakov, 1972, is one of a cycle of albums called 10 Characters by Ukraine-born artist Ilya Kabakov. Within the isolation and mistrust of the Soviet system, Kabakov created an alternative order, a world seen through the eyes of his fictional characters, which unfolds before the viewer like a film.
Other artists used images of real figures from the media or history books to address systems of publicity and celebrity, and to explore ways in which public information and image can be manipulated. American artist Andy Warhol's Mao Tse-Tung dates from 1972, the year of President Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing. Warhol takes a contemporary icon, repeating the face in varying garish colours, just as the media relentlessly bombards the public with instant, superficial images of celebrity. German artist Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits, 1972, is a series of heads based on photographs of famous men found in an old encyclopaedia. The symmetrical layout of the portraits, and the uniformity of the images, combine to convey what Richter has called ‘the neutrality of the encyclopaedia, which neutralises everything and all ideology.’ He adds, ‘It is a fact: we make everything the same.’ By basing his paintings on these photographs, Richter unravels the credibility of the encyclopaedia and photography as two systems assumed to stand for ‘truth’.
Braco Dimitrijevic, a Yugoslavian artist based in Paris, emphasises our subjective view of history in his Casual Passer-By series, in which he documents his meetings with strangers, recording the exact time and place but not the date on which they met. He takes the resulting photographs, reproduces them in a large format, and pastes them up in public places, raising questions about the nature of portraiture and of public and private identity. Cildo Meireles challenges common perceptions about the world we inhabit. His Virtual Spaces, 1967-68, subverts our expectations of the fundamental concepts of Euclidian geometry. Viewed from a certain position, the sculpture looks like the corner of a room where two walls meet. In fact this is an illusion, as becomes apparent if it is seen from a different angle.
The two large works in the wide, open end of the room also have the effect of disorienting the viewer. Taking a Minimalist structure as its starting point, Public Space/Two Audiences, 1976, by the American Dan Graham, consists of two adjoining rooms, whose walls have different surfaces – glass, mirror and blank white – offering unexpected opportunities for observing oneself and others, and in turn being observed. The work of Los Angeles-based Charles Ray demands a double take. Untitled (Glass Chair), 1976, is a deadpan manipulation of Minimalist iconography. His geometric art object – a six feet square horizontal glass plane – is intersected by a banal item from everyday life: a chair, apparently hovering in space. In his photographs, Plank Piece I and II, 1973, he uses his own body as the art object, creating absurd variations on abstract sculptures. Ray has described his work as so abstract it becomes real and so real it becomes abstract. The games he plays with perception coerce the viewer into investigating and responding.
In the last section of this room, artists are engaging with the world in a less literal, more poetic way. Croatian artist Mangelos developed his own ‘anti-art’ practice, inspired more by philosophy than traditional visual art. His ideas revolve around ‘functional thinking’, a concept inspired by a post-war world dominated by technology. His series of globes, referencing thinkers from Pythagoras to Hegel, carry brief manifestos summing up his conclusions. Mangelos uses a range of descriptive systems, including alphabets and mathematical proofs; but the manifestos’ apparent rationalism is undermined by their obscurity of meaning: they are logic taken to the level of the absurd.
In Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti’s map of the world, Mappa, 1971, each country is embroidered with the design of its national flag, emphasising the political systems that divide nations. Embroidered by craft workers in Afghanistan, Mappa reveals Boetti’s democratic approach. Using materials not traditionally associated with art, and trying to reach as wide an audience as possible, Boetti sought to blur the boundaries between art and life.
The staged and documented actions of Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader often seem to be systematic records of failure. Films and photographs showing the artist falling out of a tree or into a canal foretell his last work, In Search of the Miraculous, in which he attempted to cross the Atlantic and was lost at sea in his one man boat. In one work, On the Road to a New Neo Plasticism Westkapelle Holland, 1971, Ader bids a poetic farewell to abstract artist Piet Mondrian’s utopian vision of order and control. For Ader, as for other artists in this exhibition, any system is a human construction and thus fallible and imperfect.
Room 9
Beginning with the formal perfection of the cube, the exhibition has shown how individual artists have challenged the whole notion of art as static object. Throughout the exhibition, works of art have revealed an engagement with the outside world; and, in turn, they have demanded a level of engagement from the viewer, both physical and psychological. Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, by American artist Bruce Nauman, seems to sum up this elusive encounter between art and life, object and viewer. Taking the cube and turning it into an architectural structure, Nauman creates a work that is both physically and intellectually disorienting. Video cameras and monitors on each corner record viewers as they negotiate the structure. Their contribution to the work is essential: they become the performers, the subject being filmed. However, Nauman denies them a view of their own participation: the camera is aimed at their back, so they can never quite catch up; they are always just out of sight. Like rats in an experimental maze, viewers become part of an interactive system that is an absurd enactment of frustration and failure.
