At the Garden of Marian Goodman rear exhibition in Hollywood, a solid steel box, four feet and four -inch thickness, on the ground covered with gravel. “Dark” is a legendary statue of 1968, which caused a great panic when it was first shown in the annual purchase competition at South Western College in Chola Vista, south of San Diego, where it won $ 1900 The first prize.
It has been modified for inflation, which is more than $ 17,000 today – not a large part of the change in a technical competition in the 1960s.
Some were angry. An empty steel plate, apparently waiting for rust? The local sculptor, Frank James Morgan, whose traditional pictures and bronze women gained some notice, had no notice, and he denounced a sculpture as “undesirable” in a letter to the San Diego Federation. John John Balsari, a competition organizer, after that, where he got a traction to combat inspired by Dada, to his defense in a three -page text, 18 points.
Bruce Nauman, “Dark”, 1968; steel
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
In Goodman, “Bruce Nauman: Pasadena Years”, which is a modest wiping but the museum’s quality of its work from 1969 to 1979, is the abundant contract when the artist who was now praised in Los Angeles lived. (A resident of New Mexico since then, two clubs are 83 years). The title of the book makes a pun for “lair”, which is an evil place of danger or death, while its living, living images, most of which are monochromatic of the poisoned atmosphere remember the familiar colored field panels.
“Darkness” immediately moved from North California. The dust that followed between artists and critics was another indication that the region was continuing to mature as a center for the production of new provocative art.
“Darkness” does not seem much. The steel but shallow but weighing at 1.3 tons was reported, an example of the aesthetic of the recently emerging minimum. The last name of the artist is written in the letters of Block along one edge, but there is some confusion about whether the artist or school has later added it as an identifier. There was also the issue of the title of sculpture, “Dark”, which indicated the artist’s claim that the word was equipped on the bottom side of the brutal slab.
Was the word “dark” only to describe what was there-darkness, and the absence of light below a large piece of non-transmitted material? Was it included as Dada Reepe in the slit slusy opening of the art of light and space, the cognitive spatial clouds of Robert Erwin, Doug Wheeler and others who were designing the first fully original artistic form to appear from the southern California?
maybe. But confronting “darkness” now, there is something else that highlights: there is no way to view to know the certainty whether the word is really written on the underside, below all this hateful load. no one. It is unknown. The scenes, not only the gravel below the steel plate, in the dark.
Regardless of the general social embargo “Do not touch”, the social ban is hovering in the presence of any artistic being, the lifting of this heavy slab is impossible. You will simply have to take the artist’s word because the advertisement is written there. The confrontation with the Nauman statue is a fatal exercise in artistic faith – an expression of confidence between the artist and the audience, and an agreement to play together. If you cannot give it, you may have to stay away from art – this or anything else.
Installation offer for Bruce Naman, “Performance Corridor” at Marian Godman
(Elon Schoenholz)
This contemporary art may be a doubtful world by fraud, and Charlatans seems strange today, but once it was a standard assumption. There was from the beginning. In 1916, at the first large -scale American exhibition of modern American art held in New York City, the critic gave the arm in the Umma magazine the backward eyes to the demands of the artistic vanguard.
“Many people are seriously convinced that the world is flat”, and he looks at his nose, “the poor eggs in some southern regions seriously are that Clay is a delicious midwife.
Nauman, in a turbulent and confused period of political turmoil, was socially and technically, reaching the basics.
For the year 1968, which was called “the year that destroyed America”, such faith is at the heart of “darkness” – and a contract between strangers, and not less – not about it. No today. Civil rights, gender equality, Vietnam, student protest – many of the crises are now repeated, at our time in the progress of darkness, with the replacement of Ukraine and Gaza in Southeast Asia. The Nauman statue is completely unprecedented, but its social and unavoidable social dimensions are resonated.
The same applies to that “Performance Corridor”, which is a confusion when Nauman moved to Raymond Ave. The following year. He was 27 years old, with a wife and son, and participated in a coherent craftsman in a place close to the coordinator, artistic distributor Walter Hobbes, with the artist Richard Jackson. HOPPS was a wealth of information about the Dada Addfather Marcel Duchamp, which was now organized by the legendary in 1963 with a retrospective effect of the Pasadena Museum of Art. Nauman has shown a close interest in Duchap’s tendency to the art of puns and lines.
As a sculptor, the “Performance Corridor” may be more mute than “dark”, but it ends up in speech. The eight -feet length and 20 feet long, from the regular wall panel and open stents. One of the two parties is an flow on the wall of the exhibition, and looking at the unknown corridor from the open end is not promising. Almost the shoulder width, calls one person simultaneously to walk in the hall directly look forward.
Bruce Numan, “Performance Corridor, 1969; Wall and Wood Panel
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
Upon reaching the empty exhibition wall at the end of the restricted walk and calm, the perplexing thought is immediately, “Why am I here?”
And after all, this is the question, right? Performance Corridor’s performance is not something that Nauman is doing, as well as preparing any technical exhibition to be pushed to ask: Why am I here?
The existential investigation is an artistic essential element, but it usually tends towards large gestures and major advertisements-seeing exorbitant and self-abstract expressions in the late 1940s and fifties of the last century to obtain examples. Nauman, however, refreshing without delusions or excuses.
Also in 1969, although he was not part of the Findman Gallery, he drew a harmonious statue in writing the sky that was not implemented until after 40 years, when it was finally presented in 2019 from a small plane flying over Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. “Leave the Earth alone,” said a fast -wrapped Skywriting book in the stimulus of the strange smoke. The air feelings about the environmental deterioration below also calls for individual human deaths, when the last word of the last word is previously stopped.
Leave the Earth alone. Nauman’s Skywriting for a moment in the late summer breeze, then disappeared.
Marian Judman exhibition, 1120 Serawar Street, Hollywood, (310) 312-8294, until April 26. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.mariangoodman.com
