Art Review
Planter of the Seeds Of Mind-Expanding
Conceptualism
By KEN JOHNSON
A notebook page by Lee Lozano for “No Title (Grass Piece)” (1969), a performance work for which she tried to stay stoned on marijuana for 30 days.
An image of Vito Acconci in his “Following Piece” (1969).
The show is not a conventional museum period survey.
Rather, it approximates how the rise of Conceptualism was seen, while it was
happening, by one person: the curator, critic and writer Lucy R.
Lippard. Ms. Lippard (born in 1937) is known today mainly as a feminist and
leftist activist, but in the years addressed by the exhibition — 1966 to 1973 —
she was an extraordinarily energetic participant in, and promoter of, what was
then seemingly a relatively apolitical trend.
Organized by Catherine Morris, curator of the museum’s
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Vincent Bonin, an independent
curator and writer, the exhibition is designed to reflect the chronological
structure of the seminal book Ms. Lippard published in 1973 to document her
involvement with the Conceptualist movement. Its lengthy, unlovely title is
worth citing in full, as it reflects the dauntingly cerebral tenor of much of
the art it describes: “Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from
1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries;
consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art
works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused
on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely
designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art,
occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with
occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.”
Yes, that is like a mouthful of sawdust, and a lot of
what is in the show is similarly dry and technocratic. There are charts, maps,
magazines, exhibition catalogs and pages of dense verbiage. Among dozens of
aesthetically indifferent photographs are examples from Douglas Huebler’s
impossible mission to take a picture of every person in the world, and images of
Vito Acconci performing his “Following Piece,” in which he tailed strangers on
the street until they went indoors. Notebooks by Lee Lozano are filled with
carefully hand-printed texts describing, for example, a performance work called
“No Title (Grass Piece),” for which she tried to stay continuously stoned on
marijuana for 30 days.
Some things are weirdly disconcerting, like Mr.
Nauman’s video of his hands kneading his own hairy thigh into different shapes.
Some are comical. William Wegman’s video “Spit Sandwiches” offers a close-up
view into the artist’s mouth as he sings a nonverbal, percussive tune. Bas Jan
Ader’s “Fall I, Los Angeles” is a 34-second film showing him tumbling off the
roof of a one-story house. Generally, though, there is not a lot of hilarity to
be found. And excepting a Minimalist diptych by Jo Baer, conventional painting
is entirely absent. It is not a visually ingratiating show.
Oddly, there is little acknowledgment of world events.
An exception is the famous poster
picturing victims of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, overlaid by the
text reading “Q. And babies? A. And babies,” which was distributed by the Art
Workers Coalition in 1970. But the overall impression is of a nearly
autistic, self-reflexive insularity.
Conceptualism’s political import is better understood
when considered against the background of the mainstream art world at the time.
Abstract painting, championed by the powerfully influential critic Clement
Greenberg, was ascendant, and the market for contemporary art was booming,
thanks to Pop Art. Young radicals viewed the commercial gallery system as a cog
in the capitalist machine that they believed responsible for the war in Vietnam.
Refusing to produce goods for sale to comfortable collectors and instead making
“dematerialized” works that sharpened and elasticized thought were construed as
forms of political resistance.
This helps to explain what seems in retrospect to be
the messianic nature of Ms. Lippard’s involvement. Between 1969 and 1973 she
organized a series of four exhibitions in four cities. This she did by traveling
to each place with many of the works in a suitcase in the form of artists’
instructions for realizing the pieces on site. Each show had for its title a
number signifying the population of the host city. One in Seattle in 1969, for
example, was called “557,087”; “2,972,453” took place in Buenos Aires in 1970.
She was, you could say, the Johnny Appleseed of Conceptual Art, planting germs
of mind-expanding thought that would grow and flourish around the world.
In the early ’70s Ms. Lippard’s commitments changed in
response to a pertinent question asked by some: Why were there so few female
artists among the cohort she was promoting? In 1973 in Valencia, Calif., she
organized her last numbered show, “c. 7,500,” which included Conceptual works by
26 women, including Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Yoko Ono. In the decade after
that she devoted herself to promoting female artists of all kinds. In some ways
this was a reversal of field, from a mandarin preoccupation with pure thought to
a populist concern for the economic and political conditions of living people in
the real world.
But as Ms. Lippard notes in an essay in the Brooklyn
exhibition’s excellent catalog, it was not a rejection of where she was coming
from: “Conceptual Art in the broadest sense was a kind of laboratory for
innovations in the rest of the century. An unconscious international energy
emerged from the raw materials of friendship, art history, interdisciplinary
readings and a fervor to change the world and the ways artists related to it.”
That energy can still be felt in this richly illuminating show.
WASHINGTON — Like a champion gymnast perfecting a
winning routine, Roy Lichtenstein developed a deft, tight, virtually foolproof
art style, one that was based on agility rather than brawn and, though narrow in
range, was capable of surprising variations and extensions. 
Among the pieces in the exhibition is “M-Maybe,” from 1965.
The look of this art isn’t big, but it’s smart; cool
and dry, but accessible. Connoisseurs and know-nothings alike can enjoy it, and
for some of the same reasons. And there’s the recognition factor: very high.
Once you’ve encountered his work, you’d know it anywhere. Catch a glimpse of a
Lichtenstein out of the corner of your eye from a moving cab, and it will
register, half-seen.
“Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” a traveling
exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art here, is the first major survey of
his work since his death, at 73, in 1997. It’s a big show and has a few slow
spots, but on the whole it moves right along. Its 14 thematic sections have been
edited with less-is-more dispatch. There aren’t many labels to detain you. Most
important, Lichtenstein’s large-featured images, with their Ben-Day dot
patterns; thick, black contours; and flat, bright colors are almost
ergonomically comfortable to the eye.
Lichtenstein, born and raised in Manhattan, was
focused on art from the start. Barely out of high school, he enrolled at the Art
Students League and studied painting with Reginald Marsh. After a three-year
Army stint during World
War II, he earned an M.F.A. from Ohio State University, and worked here and
there before moving to New Jersey in 1960, then back to New York City the
following year.
Like almost everyone else, he had been turning out
brushy paintings — there are a few in the show — in an Abstract Expressionist
vein. But by 1960, that model felt style-cramping and uncool. There had to be
other options, and he found one: he started painting cartoons.
The earliest example, “Look Mickey,” from 1961, is the
first thing you see in the exhibition: a picture of Donald Duck and Mickey
Mouse, adapted from a Disney children’s book.
Lichtenstein would later say that he painted it for
his kids. In reality, he painted it for himself, to get as far away as possible
from where he’d been.
He kept going in this new direction. He clipped
ordinary images — a hot dog, a pair of Keds, a manicured female hand doing
housework — from tabloid newspapers, comic strips and advertisements; made
drawings of the images; transferred those drawings, enlarged, to canvases; and
painted them. He set everything in the paintings against fields of Ben-Day dot
patterns to suggest the look of cheap commercial printing, initially creating
the patterns with a dog’s grooming brush dipped in paint.
What he was making, of course, was Pop Art. He didn’t
invent it, but he was quickly pegged as one of its defining exponents, and his
career took off. In 1961, through a fellow artist, he met the dealer Leo
Castelli, who agreed to represent him, and immediately added him to a group show
of other stars on the rise, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and
Frank Stella. Andy Warhol would soon join the team.
Lichtenstein’s first Castelli solo, in 1962, sold out
before it opened. He was clearly at the beginning of a heady ride, though he
experienced it largely from the perspective of his studio, where he spent most
of his time, refining and toning the formal aspects of his art and judiciously
expanding its repertory of themes. He became comfortable working in thematic
series, keeping several in progress at once.
In the early 1960s he continued to paint everyday
objects, but switched from color to black and white. He also moved from Disney
comics to a romantic genre produced by DC Comics, from which he adapted a line
of close-up images of the faces of lovelorn, emoting young women. The 1963
“Drowning Girl” become one of his best-known pictures.
By this time, too, he was attracting disapproval. His
work was criticized for being lightweight, nostalgic, uncritical, conservative:
pseudo-populist art for the carriage trade. With the Vietnam War moving into
high gear, and resistance at home on the boil, the perceived ideological defects
of his art seemed particularly glaring.
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