In Terms Of

Tag: Formalism

  • Running in Circles

    This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Olivier Mosset in Conversation with Marie Heilich
    Wednesday, November 18, 2015
    Parapet/Real Humans, Saint Louis, MO

    The speakers, from left: Marie Heilich, Olivier Mosset, and Amy Granat (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Olivier Mosset was in town for the opening of his exhibition at Parapet/Real Humans, a project space run by Amy Granat in a storefront in the Fox Park neighborhood of Saint Louis. On view was a framed set of four lithographs of two thick black stripes on a square of white paper. The set, it turns out, was made for a Swiss Institute benefit in 2004. Granat said the work reminded her of September 11—I suppose any two vertical lines will do that. The artist compared them to an optometrist’s vision test. As someone who can’t see six inches past his nose without glasses or contacts (and who never skips his annual eye-doctor visit), that made more sense.

    With long gray hair and a long gray beard, Mosset easily looked the part of a sixties Euroactivist and biker outlaw—he has lived in Tucson, Arizona, since the mid-1990s. His interviewer was Marie Heilich, assistant director of White Flag Projects in Saint Louis, a slender brunette with bangs, dressed in all black and armed with an MA in curatorial studies from Bard College. Mosset’s talk—a rare speaking engagement for him, we were told—was largely a monologue. Heilich made intermittent comments and Granat, who was operating a smartphone that projected slides of the artist’s work on the wall beside the speakers, jumped in every so often.

    Heilich encouraged Mosset to revisit his early years, so he gave a brief history of BMPT, a group of four European artists (Mosset with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni) that came together in 1966. “The idea was to question what gives value to painting,” Mosset said, targeting uniqueness, personal expression, and color as culprits. His conception of art, however, began changing a few years earlier, when Mosset had been floored by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he saw at Kunsthalle Bern in 1962. “This was in,” he recalled his excitement, “This was happening.” Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), the sculpture of a shaggy taxidermied goat stuck in a car tire, “was quite a shock—is this art?” But Mosset still had classical modernism on the brain, as he twice emphasized the painted nature of Piet Mondrian’s work, declaring that reproductions of it are nothing like the real things. Though he wasn’t familiar with Russian Constructivism and Swiss Concrete art at the time, he acknowledged an affinity with them. I got the sense that Mosset is unburdened by tradition, not antagonistic toward it. Give painting autonomy, he even said at one point.

    Olivier Mosset, Sans titre, 2004, suite of four lithographs on Rives, 200 x 200 cm (artwork © Olivier Mosset; photograph by Christopher Howard)

    For Mosset, Rauschenberg taking home the Golden Lion, the top prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, marked the end of the importance of Paris, where he had moved two years before, at age eighteen. Previously the French avant-garde consisted of the Nouveau Réalisme movement: Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Piero Manzoni, and others. BMPT reacted against that group’s preferred materials: found objects and rubbish. Earning notoriety after its first event, BMPT was invited to participate in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where the artists painted their works—Buren’s stripe, Mosset’s circle, Parmentier’s fold, and Toroni’s brush mark—during the opening, not in advance. (They subsequently withdrew from the exhibition the next day.) At that and other events they projected slides, played audiotapes announcing “art is the enemy of freedom” and “art is the enemy of presence,” among other statements, and handed out their propaganda pamphlets. “Ideas are the art, not the paintings,” Mosset declared. Audiences soon came to recognize each member’s signature style, so the four agreed to do each other’s work.1 Mosset began painting stripes and later introduced color: gray stripes on white, then green on white, then white on color, and so on. After that he made monochromes (more specifically, they are single-hued paintings).

    Mosset continued his monologue, which by this point felt like someone reading a Wikipedia article—it was all factual recollection in a dry tone. Even in Paris, he said, people were talking about New York, so he traveled there in 1967, where he met Andy Warhol. After moving to the city ten years later, he sought out the painter Marcia Hafif after she wrote an essay on contemporary painting called “Beginning Again,” published in Artforum in 1978. With her and Joseph Marioni, he formed the New York Radical Painting group, which had exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1983 (New Abstraction) and at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1984 (Radical Painting). Mosset also got hip to a newer scene of artists, including Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, and Jeff Koons. In the 1990s, Mosset worked with John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Steven Parrino, and Cady Noland, but the artist barely mentioned these collaborations during tonight’s talk.

    BMPT, Manifestation 1, January 3, 1967, 18th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. From right to left: Michel Parmentier, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Niele Toroni (photograph ©Bernard Boyer)

    Mosset affably stated that he has no strategy, does what he wants, and cannot control trends. “I’m basically interested in abstract painting,” he said, and somehow people are attracted to what he does. Heilich questioned him about his social and flexible practice, in which he diminishes his own authorship (evident, for example, in his work with BMPT), but Mosset construed the question differently. “The art practice is very selfish,” he responded, and exhibitions involve a community. “It’s personal when you do it; it’s social when you show it.” Mosset believes the gallery gives you the distance to see your work differently.

    During the Q&A, an audience member inquired about the meditative nature of his circle paintings that, she conjectured, might signify emptiness or completeness. Mosset deflected this impression and said he was thinking of the shapes found in works by Johns and Kenneth Noland, which have formalist, not symbolic, meanings. (He also recognized that he did invent the circle.) The questioner asked him if the circles got better and better as he made more of them. Yes, he replied with a smile, but they were still the same.

    Heilich asked, “Do you see any contemporary approaches that stand out to you, for better or worse?” He didn’t identify any artists or styles but instead considered the differences between then and now. “At the time in Paris, we could react against what was happening, whereas today, I don’t know exactly what you can react against. It’s a different era.” And who else to blame but the internet. A younger audience member argued that “artists will always respond to each other, and to each other’s work, but that kind of clear dialogue [from the sixties], I don’t think it’s actually possible now.” Today everyone has a voice and a platform, she continued, but with equity that voice is minimized. Mosset agreed—there are now more artists and more information. I feel sorry for them, overwhelmed by online communications, and am sure artists from forty to fifty years ago probably had the same anxieties about their own ballooning art world. The audience member was relieved that artists are becoming activists again. Culture is important, Mosset chimed in, especially after the recent terrorist attack in Paris.

    The audience at Parapet/Real Humans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Earlier Heilich had observed that Mosset’s practice—producing circles, stripes, and singular colors—united painting and the readymade in the same object. This idea made sense at the moment but unraveled the more I thought about it. His practice is actually artisanal and small batch, not mass production, and analogous to someone like Gilbert Stuart, whose cranked out 130 versions of the Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “A second painting might be a repetition,” Mosset said in a recent interview, “but it can never be a replica.”2 You can’t help but admire the audacity of painting the same type of picture for years, if not decades, while at the same time pity the paucity of ideas.

    Trying to vary the topics, Granat asked about Mosset’s interest in motorcycles, which he collects, rides, and occasionally exhibits with his paintings. While such lines of inquiry did not lead to interesting discussion, the effort was appreciated. And while I enjoyed hearing from an artist whom I have not previously studied, I was disappointed with the light moderation—Mosset did not get into much detail about the meaning of his work and with art itself. It seemed as if Heilich was too timid (or just too polite) to cross-examine this art-historical figure about any radical ideas he has or might have had, or to find out what makes him produce what appears to be redundant or complacent work.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Olivier Mosset made circle paintings from 1966 to 1974. Daniel Buren obviously never stopped with the stripes.

    2 Sara Stephenson, “Collaborative Reduction: Q+A with Olivier Mosset,” Art in America, February 10, 2011.

  • Male Critics Grilled and Toasted

    Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work
    Monday, June 2, 1975
    A.I.R. Gallery, New York

    This is the first of a pair of panels that well illustrate the dramatic change in attitudes toward “women’s art” that settled in during the next two years. The second event was in a grand institutional setting, and everyone felt as triumphant as, on this June night, they felt frustrated.1

    Moderator: Blythe Bohnen
    Panelists: Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Richard Martin, and Carter Ratcliff

    Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work – A.I.R. Panel,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2

    The fact that this panel of four male critics and editors drew the largest audience I have seen at any comparable woman’s event tells all about power and the perception of power in the art world today. Intellectual exchange was secondary, the audience being less interested in what the panel had to say than in what it had to say to the panel.

    Moderator Blythe Bohnen, perhaps better called moderator-advocate, was adroit and articulate, deftly catching some finely parsed qualifications on the fly and tossing them back in the same breath, asking point-blank, “What are critics going to do to increase women’s power in the art world? Can the decision-making that goes on be brought to consciousness? Can an equalization in articles and reviews be forced? Why is it that the women who have been developed as full artistic personalities are all dead, out of town, or nonexistent? Many young men have had the critical build-up to super-star status: why not women?”

    A similar insistent questioning came from the audience. May Stevens asked, “Why is there so little critical response to women’s art? This is a movement with tremendous energy and thrust. Do you think it isn’t intellectually or aesthetically significant? How do you justify remaining aside from this issue?”

    May Stevens, The Artist’s Studio (After Courbet), 1974, acrylic on canvas (artwork © May Stevens)

    Max Kozloff replied, “Feminism can’t be considered a movement in modern art.” Just as ethnic background or place of origin are factors in an artist’s work, sex is a factor which could only have “x” amount of relevance, he said. The feminist movement rightly insists on “the psychic origin of works of art,” but many other factors, including social, biographical, economic, and political ones, have also been slighted. Since they are in the majority, “it seems odd to have a separate category for women.” However, the effect of the movement is evident. “I look around this room and see work proudly exhibited that five years ago would have been called miniscule.” Moreover, “a consciously womanly style or feminine subject can cause an alteration of looking.”

    Perhaps one day, Kozloff suggested, “we’ll find ‘tough’ or ‘virile’ painting ugly, and say ‘what a tough painting—ugh!’’’ But, as he sees the issues, critics are not the ones to obtain “social justice” for women. Critics’ prime concern is “the laborious process of reacting to a work of art.” Look to curators and chairpersons of art departments for justice, he said.

    Carter Ratcliff: “I have shied away from political issues in art and I think feminism is a political issue…. I’ve written about a lot of women artists (e.g., Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, Joan Mitchell) but they were artists before the feminist movement. If women come along with a theory of what significance in women’s art is, it will be in order to get accepted, to get prestige. So far the definitions don’t stand up, but they may gain support and become self-fulfilling prophecies. The problem is to find a good self-fulfilling prophecy for those women who feel that their self-interest or self-fulfillment lies as members of a group…. Specifically feminist conventions may be building, but that would ‘conventionalize’ women’s art, as in art ‘conventions.’”

    Agnes Martin, Untitled #10, 1975 (artwork © Estate of Agnes Martin)

    Those critics who repudiate the old Greenbergian criticism would be more interested in women’s work, which is outside the power structure, than formalist critics, as Ratcliff saw it. “The sensibility that makes one suspect that whole ‘certification’ process would respond to feminist consciousness, which also unhooks one from the power structure. [B]ut I can’t think of any woman who presents herself as a woman artist who presents work that would seem to be of quality to a hardline formalist critic.”

    Richard Martin: “Being a Quaker, I was aware of the women’s movement before I was aware of art criticism.” The feminist movement was instrumental in breaking down the stereotype of the personal in art as “trivial.” However, “I would consider it a mistake to orient the magazine Arts toward one particular point of view. The priorities are to act as medium of record and to discriminate between various forms of art.” It isn’t possible to take a self-conscious equalizing attitude toward women, but “an ardent antifeminist would not be engaged to do reviews.” As Martin sees it, when women are properly represented with exhibitions, “recognition in other areas will follow.”

    Billy Al Bengston, Big Jim McLain, 1967, polyurethane and laquer on aluminum, 60 x 58 in. (artwork © Billy Al Bengston)

    Lawrence Alloway: “I hesitate to formulate general factors common to women’s art, perhaps a theory may come later. There are proposals for a feminist aesthetic, something inherently feminine. That used to be considered sexist—now the women are saying it!” Alloway pointed out that none of the proposed criteria applies to more than a few small groups, but what matters is what’s intended.

    For instance, “Judy Chicago’s painting reminds me of Billy Al Bengston first, and female genitalia second, but there can be specific feminist iconographies if women artists say they are.” In other words, “the circle has been sexualized or politicized, but these things don’t add up to an inherent sensibility.” Of course, “I think of women’s art in sociocultural terms, but I think of everyone’s art in sociocultural terms.” As for power, Alloway said, “I don’t think the writer is so insignificant. Not only does he have the power to write, but the power to withhold. I’m writing four pieces about women now. I’m preoccupied. If I had a brilliant idea about Brice Marden or Richard Serra, I wouldn’t write it.” And, on changing the system: “I’d like to see an expansion of co-ops.”

    Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work – A.I.R. Panel,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2

    Lucy Lippard’s question-statement from the floor addressed the paradox which haunts these discussions: “Women’s art is used as a synonym for feminist art, but they’re not the same thing…. Can you tell the difference?”

    The answer was not clear. Meanwhile, we see that when the women say, “Write about women’s art,” the men say, “There is no feminine aesthetic.” When the men say, “There is no feminine aesthetic,” the women say, “But the movement is what’s happening.” And then the men say, “Feminist art is of no formal interest.” So the women say, “Then write about more women artists.”

    Obviously, there’s enormous pressure to make “women’s art” into an aesthetic as well as a political development, and the more useful “women’s art” is as a political configuration, the more likely it is to become an aesthetic one. Some women would benefit enormously, but the rest would be worse off than before, having undertaken the struggle in the first place to escape stereotyping.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 A panel called “Contemporary Women: Consciousness and Content,” took place at the Brooklyn Museum on October 23, 1977.

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Grilled and Toasted” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 16–17. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.