Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

One of the familiar familiars on Anne Truitt is that she’s been an invisible figure, ignored by the critical discourse for years and years.

It’s certainly true that Truitt hasn’t been written about as widely as, say, Donald Judd. But there has been a slow drip of Truitt consideration over the years, including this fabulous, short piece by Newsweek’s Peter Plagens. This paragraph is probably the best description of Truitt’s work I’ve read:

Truitt’s work is deceptively simple. Take “Autumn Dryad” (1975), for instance. It’s a boxy wooden column, a little taller than most people, painted entirely orange except for a grayish mauve brand around the bottom. At first glance, it seems like a design fillip for a Scandinavian airport lobby. But as you continue to look at it (and you cannot help but look at it), you notice that the acrylic paint has been lovingly applied in untold coats. Simultaneously, the sculpture looks like it’s solid color, like butter is yellow all the way through. The piece makes your mouth water (which is, by the way, the test of all good abstract art). “Autumn Dryad” is visceral — as opposed to conceptual-minimalism. As Truitt puts it, “Everything is written on the body. Your experience stains your body like color dyes a canvas. [That's why] the paint sinks into the wood. It marries the wood.” In almost all the works on view, the bride and groom indeed live happily ever after.

But I also quote it for this: I’ve concluded that it’s impossible to write about Truitt’s work without quoting her from time to time. What artist has ever written so clearly about what they see, how they live and have lived and about how they translate that into what they make?

In yesterday’s examination of the Hirshhorn’s Anne Truitt retrospective I discussed how Truitt didn’t fit neatly into the categories that critics and scholars have built up around post-war art. Sure, Truitt’s a minimalist, but only kind of. Sure, Truitt made sculptures, but she didn’t do much sculpting. And so on.

As such, the Hirshhorn’s Truitt show provides an opportunity for a re-consideration of how we think about post-abstract-expressionist art. Typically we talk about the post-abex generation as being pop artists or minimalists or whatever. Sure, Truitt is some of those things. But mostly she makes work that is slow, that is slow to look at, that she made slowly and that draws the viewer into a slow visual absorption of the work. (Truitt painted and sanded and re-painted her surfaces dozens of times before they had the depth of color she wanted.)

Perhaps the right way to consider Truitt is as part of an unaffiliated group of artists who slowed art from the frenetic pace of the expressionists, both figurative-exers such as David Park and Willem de Kooning, and ab-exers such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

From the first gallery of the Truitt show forward I was conscious of the way in which individual sculptures trapped my eyes and slowed my looking. Truitt’s Watauga (1962) is a low-slung sculpture, longer than it is tall, a big rectangle sitting on a smaller rectangle. The smaller rectangle thrusts forward, toward the viewer. The left side of the sculpture is painted near-black, the right side is a ruddy brown. (All of Truitt’s colors seem to require two-word descriptions.) Just like a good Barnett Newman grabs the viewer’s eye and moves it around the canvas, Watauga held my eye, which involuntarily bounced between the big rectangle and the smaller, thrust-forward ‘base.’ I’d look away, return to Watauga, and would find myself trapped again.

Over and over, too. Insurrection (1962) held my eye between its two reds. Valley Forge (1963) bounced me between its red rectangles, turning my gaze into a participant in art Pong. A Wall for Apricots (1968, above) shuttled my eye up and down, from a pale blue to a pine-tree green to a dead yellow, and back up again. Landfall (1970) features a faded-denim blue with some small, overlapping blocks of darker blues at its base. My eye would wander up the plinth, and then would be snapped back down to the darker blues at the base, only to be drawn upward again by the expanse of light blue. And repeat. Truitts are easy to get lost in, to spend time on. If you walk by them you miss them. If you linger you are rewarded.

Truitt was hardly the only artist looking for ways to reclaim surface, technique, color, light, process and pretty much everything else form the abex-ers. Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell all reduced art down to light and each found ways to gave it enough physical space so that we could lose ourselves in it. As with Truitts, if you look at an Irwin or a Turrell quickly, you may not see anything. It takes time.

And more: Robert Smithson made art that emphasized the long, slow passage of time. Ed Ruscha made paintings that only fully revealed themselves once you solved his word or picture games. Richard Long took walks, long walks. Ultimately, maybe we should think less about our beloved -isms and more about pacing.

Related: Anne Truitt and what I learned about her work by visiting Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Greg Allen flirted with some similar ideas.

• Nayland Blake sez, ‘Make a Halloween costume for your art!”
• Richard Lacayo tries to figure out why Miami Art Museum director Terry Riley resigned (?) so abruptly.
• When neurobiologissts meet art historians.
• When artist Steve Roden writes about seeing, you should read it.

Only rarely does an historical exhibition unveil a familiar artist as an unexpectedly major figure, as someone who was somehow overlooked. “Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection,” on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is one of those shows.

The exhibition, curated by Kristen Hileman, reveals the full scope of Truitt’s multi-disciplinary career and the remarkable, frankly surprising 40-year consistency of her oeuvre. It is a presentation that will leave even the most knowledgable critics, curators and historians wondering how they missed her. [Image: Installation of Return (2004), Elixir (1997) and Evensong (2004) at the Hirshhorn.]

Maybe Truitt has been skipped over because she is an artist who didn’t (and still doesn’t) fit into a post-ab-ex nomenclature that has confined artists to certain critical, curatorial or commercial boxes. Instead: Like Donald Judd, Truitt was a minimalist. Like David Smith, a sculptor. Like Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, a painter. Like Dan Flavin, a colorist. Like Lee Bontecou or Agnes Martin, a woman who dabbled in New York but who mostly stayed away (and who paid for it). Like David Hammons, an artist whose lack of market savvy and engagement has prevented her from being broadly embraced. Like Robert Irwin or Doug Wheeler, an artist who valued physical experience and perception.

But maybe the best explanation of how we’ve all missed the breadth of Truitt’s achievement is that she was uninterested in the commercial side of the art world. Truitt was never proactive in presenting herself to dealers and collectors She was more interested in her artistic practice than she was in participating in the market-guided establishment. As a result, Truitts are in few museum collections and as a result are not oft on
public view. This has had the effect of encumbering new consideration
of her work and has sealed her reputation in Greenbergian amber. The Hirshhorn’s exhibition should be a shot across the bow of the Chelsea-dominated establishment: When institutions and collectors rely on the trading floor to guide them to accomplishment, that they are effectively confining their worldview to sales brochures.

As a result of all this, the standard view of Truitt was that she was not on the cutting-edge of
anything. No more. The Hirshhorn exhibition of 49 sculptures, 26 works on paper and 12 paintings presents Truitt as an artist in the vanguard of multi-media practice. Truitt sculptures are paintings and vice versa. This is not latter-day curatorial or critical myth-making; Truitt herself identified her approach as a progressive conceptual strategy and was was hesitant to refer to her painted plinths as mere sculptures: “It is difficult to convey the idea that these structures are intrinsically paintings, as delicate of surface,” she wrote in her famed artist’s journal Daybook, the ‘work’ for which she is probably best-known. 

Before Truitt, artists certainly made both painting and sculpture. Witness Barnett Newman, who made paintings that were one of Truitt’s two principle motivating influences. Newman’s sculpture practice was distinctly different from his painting practice. The two never overlapped. A Newman painting was a painting and a Newman sculpture was a heroic thing in bronze.

Enter Truitt, who from the very beginning of her practice knew she was doing something different. “[E]arly in 1962, I realized that I was becoming obsessed with color as having meaning not only in counterpoint to the structures of fences and the bulks of weights,” she wrote in Daybook. “I was actually trying to… take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake.” Fast-forward to now, when Franz Ackermann-style three-dimensional painting and practice-blending is so common that an artist would no more think to separate her painting and sculptural practices than she would confine herself to just one.

Truitt was ahead of her time. The Hirshhorn exhibition reveals that Truitt’s practice-blending was not a one-off idea that worked for a while, it was a fundamental principle that drove her for over 40 years, from her first major work, 1961’s First [above, left], through the honestly, fatalistically-titled Evensong of 2004, the year in which she died.

Each sculptural plinth is really eight three-dimensional paintings in one. To see Truitt’s sculptures fully, a viewer has to look at all four sides, each of which may feature different colors and compositions. Then, to finish seeing each work, a viewer has to stand at each of the four corners, from which the viewer can see two sides of the plinth at the same time. Over a period of time and as you walk slowly around each object, it presents itself as a series of paintings. [Image: Elixir (detail), 1997.]

The exhibition is as perfect as a Truitt show is likely to be. I have only minor quibbles: The sculptures are slightly elevated on risers, which takes away from how they relate to the viewer’s body. It’s maddeningly impossible to walk 360 degrees around many of them. Even though the exhibition fills nearly an entire floor of the Hirshhorn, it turns out that the color that emanates from each sculpture demands so much space that the show feels crowded. Curators of future Truitt shows will struggle with these same issues; the Hirshhorn handled them as well as they could have been handled.

The only preventable error is the show’s catalogue, the first major monograph on Truitt. It includes only two essays, one by Hileman and the other by the minimalism and Truitt scholar James Meyer. Hileman’s essay reads like it was assembled by conflict-avoiding team of lawyers rather than by a scholar who was allowed to present and contextualize the artist. The catalogue makes little effort to extend the consideration of Truitt’s work among scholars or to bring new context to her achievements. It is a missed opportunity.

Truitt probably wouldn’t have minded. She knew that her work had to be experienced, not just seen. The Hirshhorn show closes Jan. 3, 2010. It will not travel.

MAN will feature several more posts examining “Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection.” Upcoming posts will examine Truitt as a colorist and as a ’slow artist.’

One of the major books of my college years was David Halberstam’s The Fifties. The conventional wisdom was that the book rescued the 1950s from its reputation for being Leave it to Beaver-style boring and that it presented the 1950s as the decade that wasn’t just before but that gave rise to the 1960s.

Well, that’s probably true. The Fifties did that. But it also did it while substantially ignoring the cultural life of the nation. The book doesn’t so much as mention Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns, two of the Americans who helped cement America’s place as the post-Parisian land of progressive art. (And nevermind Halberstam’s referencing Rauschenberg & Co. as being on the vanguard of what would become the gay liberation movement. Didn’t happen.)

So just in time for American museums’ justifiable obsession with exhibitions of Robert Frank’s 1959(ish) classic series ‘The Americans,’ journalist Fred Kaplan has written a book examining 1959. The book presents the year as a turning point in 20th-century America. Appropriately enough it includes cultural events, including Frank’s series, the Beats, erotic literature, the birth of the Guggenheim, the ascent of Rauschenberg, Johns and more. It’s a much more complete look at how the decade — especially 1959 — was important than Halberstam’s book.

Bonus: C-Monster just published a not-your-usual Q&A with Kaplan. Don’t miss either!

Related: Robert Frank speaks at the National Gallery.

• If you are an art critic and if you use the phrase “bovine poo,” then I will likely link to it. (Artist: Peter Shelton. Critic: Christopher Knight.)
• Knight dismantles a wingnut LAT op-ed about Shepard Fairey. Kind of leaves one wondering how such a flimsily researched piece made it into the paper.
• Speaking of the right-wing noise machine, Greg Cook has a nice roundup of its reaction to a Harvard exhibition about ACT UP’s history.
• For the NYT, Ted Loos notices that MoMA chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin has been changing things up. Good catch. I’ve enjoyed that the permanent collection galleries are looking more risk-willing, less same-old, same-old. (Not entirely, mind you, but some steps…)
• Maybe the Charles Russell retrospective at the Denver Art Museum is the greatest thing ever, but the liberal use of OMG! adjectives by the Denver Post’s Kyle MacMillan (“gripping,” “best,” “sweeping,” “great,” “highly accomplished,” “overdue,” “considerable” (twice), etc.) results in exhortation rather than a defense of (or discussion of) a considered position.
• In the Baltimore Sun, Tim Smith discusses the (promising!) scope of a major retrospective of Matisse prints at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
• The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Robert Pincus asks if Tara Donovan (on view at MCASD) is an alchemist.

Throughout 2009, as I’ve written a series of posts that have examined the ways in which artists have addressed torture and related horrors, I’ve found myself thinking about Nancy Spero more and more. As I worked on those posts, I thought a lot about the humanity (or intentional lack thereof) of some of the work about which I was writing. I found myself mentally wandering toward Spero’s work, which is as human, urgent and direct as any art since George Grosz.

Most of all I thought about Spero’s art about war and violence. In many of her Vietnam War drawings, Spero used a helicopter as a symbol for both American militarism and for our nation’s distance from the conflict. In G.L.O.R.Y. (1967, detail at right), Spero runs her helicopter up a flagpole, making explicit the way in which the stars-and-stripes helicopter stands in for the United States and declaring American culpability for the results of indiscriminate bombing. Politicians are shy about pointing fingers. Artists, especially Spero, need not be as circumspect. G.L.O.R.Y. is about responsibility and accountability in a way that realizes art’s socio-political potential.

While many artists wallow in the space between art history and their art, in participating in a multi-generational discourse with previous artists, Spero was always more interested in the space between her art and contemporary events. It’s not that she wasn’t explicitly informed by art history, she just chose not to self-consciously bask in sizing herself up with the past. For Spero art history was not an oval around which she made left turns, but a straight road to now.

On Tuesday I called Connie Butler, the chief curator of MoMA’s drawings department. In 2007 Butler curated WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an audacious survey show of feminist art. We talked about Spero.

MAN: Thanks for chatting with me. I wanted to talk with you in particular because you just came through doing WACK! and I thought that maybe that experience might have given you the opportunity to re-examine a group of artists within the context of not just each other, but within a broader context. I wanted to know how you came out of that process thinking about Nancy Spero.

Connie Butler:  I ended up having a much deeper appreciation for the work after going through that process. I didn’t know the work so well before doing WACK! Even though I had seen the work over the years there hadn’t been many exhibitions in this country. I expected, as I got to know her, that I would find an incredibly formidable person there — and she was.  [Image: Search and Destroy (detail), 1967.]

I last saw her about six months ago. She had this incredible force of her politics and her belief in the importance of dealing with, really, the big issues of life and death, birth, sexuality. She was a hugely strong personality and that was a thrill to get to know. She had all those things — and in such a frail body in the last years.

She was one of my early visits for WACK! I was working on that show in 2002 when there was a show at Guild Hall on Long Island and at White Columns. Both were explicitly feminist exhibitions. There had just been a  great write-up in the NYT. So after seeing those two shows I visited Nancy to ask her to be in my show and to make a selection of her work.

She said to me, ‘What more could you possibly say about this feminist work that hasn’t been in those two exhibits there?’ There was also something about what she had set up for me to see in her studio – it was something relatively small, some work that she had pulled out of a drawer or such. I just had this feeling of how she was emblematic to me of the diminished expectations that a lot of women of her generation had, that she couldn’t see that no one had done a major exhibition on this topic and she couldn’t see that someone would – or should.

So in a way, at first, that puzzled me… but then, as it turned out, this was something I kept experiencing. I visited Nancy relatively early on in the process of working on WACK!, and as it turned out, I experienced this same thing over and over again. It was most marked with her because she’s one of the women in the show who had the biggest careers. And yet when I visited her, still she pulled out maybe four small fragments for me to see and I thought, ‘Come on! You’re a major, major figure! You should be telling me you want major real estate! An entire wall!’ It’s not like she wasn’t strong or that she was shy, you know. [Image: Cri du Coeur (detail), 2005.)

MAN: Your show had a major impact. I don't know how to put this, but she's been 'trending up,' it seems.

CB: She was certainly front-and-center in Rob Storr's Venice Biennale. As she became more and more frail she wasn't able to travel and see some of these shows that really celebrated her work. But yes, I think in recent years she began to get her due, particularly with the American audience. As there has been more interest recently in figuration and in the socio-political context of art there's been a move to broaden the consideration of her work.

MAN: Is there any part of her work that you've been thinking about lately or that you think deserves some extra thought now?

CB: I think 'Torture of Women' is certainly one of her most important bodies of work, but lately and maybe since the [Galerie Lelong] show in the spring I’ve been thinking about the early war drawings. I think they’re so gut wrenching and so incredibly simple and minimal in terms of their gesture and composition but so, so powerful. I think they’re kind of extraordinary.

MAN: Did Nancy Spero become so identified as a feminist or as a ‘political’ artist that she became hard to consider as just an artist?

CB:This is going to maybe sound weird or perhaps it’s an experience that’s too personal to my own history. I didn’t come to her first as a feminist artist. My feeling is that she really emerges into the consciousness of the art world is really in the 1980s, and not really within the context of feminism, where she’d been active since the late 1960s. You might be right, but maybe that’s because in more recent years that the work has been associated with feminism.  [Ed.: After Butler and I did this Q&A, I noticed that the NYT headlined its obituary: "Nancy Spero, Artist of Feminism, is Dead at 83."] In addition to those in Europe such as Catherine de Zegher or Manuel Borja-Villel and Rosario Peiró, she’s been championed by a number of wonderful American curators who weren’t necessarily associated with feminism, curators such as Ro
bert
Storr, Elizabeth Smith and Susan Harris.

That’s an interesting turn of events if you think about the arc of her career. Turning her back into a feminist is interesting. If you go back to the Vietnam War drawings, her feminism emerges out of her political feelings about a range of other issues: the Vietnam war and civil rights and such. She and Leon Golub were actively protesting on a lot of fronts before she began making explicitly feminist work into the 1970s.

MAN: Maybe it’s just that the curators and people I talk to tend to be around my age, and that’s a generation of folks that grew up after the 1988 Elizabeth Smith show at MOCA and so on. [Ed.: MOCA's exhibition archive is down. When it's up, I'll insert a link to the show.] I mean, when I’ve seen Spero it’s hit me in the gut. But perhaps in recent years the Vietnam stuff and other work has been on view in museums less than the feminist work? Most of the Spero I’ve seen in the last couple years has been at MoMA, in fact. And it’s been really meaningful to me.

CB: What you’re getting at is right though. It’s maybe partly because you’re younger than I am and I did see the shows in the late ’80s when, for my generation of curators and scholars, the 1970s and feminist art were the distant past and still unmined territory. But I think probably what you’re getting at is right–because the work is figurative and because it’s figurative in a very particular way. In fact, not only that, it’s also the kind of mythologies she’s dealing with, such as the female goddess mythology which was, in a way, verboten in the 1980s.

It’s possible that more to the point is her work being political at all – maybe if it’s had a more gradual build and reception it’s partly because of that. Not unlike Leon’s work, which was explicitly political and sexual and often very raw. I think political art has always had trouble reaching broad critical reception, possibly until right now.

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In response to the ongoing debate over whether it is appropriate for art museums to stage single-private-collection exhibitions, the executive director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, Sally Block, released this statement today:

The AAMC’s broad-based membership represents the curators of a diverse number of fields of art and types of art museums in North America. As such, the AAMC is always cognizant of the complexities involved in loans for exhibitions whether from institutions or individuals. In exhibitions, art museum curators seek to present new information on works of arts based on scholarly research that can extend through the modern history of the works. An art museum curator’s involvement in a private collector show is to interpret and determine how to present the collection in question. If a collection merits exposure, and fits the program and mission of the host museum, its presentation can be a great benefit to museum visitors by providing access to otherwise inaccessible works of art. Like its sister organizations, the AAMC reviews its opinions and standards on an ongoing basis.

My take: AAMC is not exactly planting the flag of scholarly independence or curatorial discretion. (I remain uncomfortable with the idea that there’s meaningful merit/fulfillment of mission in merely “providing access” to a rich person’s accumulations.) Also notable: AAMC is also leaving itself (and its membership) room to consider the issue anew…

• Holland Cotter wrote the NYT’s Nancy Spero obituary.
• The Met has put together an exhibition-specific blog for its American Stories show. It’s a thick read, but definitely a good one. 
• An art history mystery, Brueghel + telescopes (?) edition. 
• Yesterday I linked to a big-think Martha Schwendener essay about photography. On the occasion of these shows at SFMOMA, curator Lisa Sutcliffe asks photographers about their medium.