Lynda Benglis Joan Brown Luis Jimenez Gary Stephan Lawrence Weiner
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LYNDABENGUS JOAN BROWN LUIS JIMENEZ GARY STEPHAN LAWRENCEWEINER THE IEW MHSEUI LYNDA BENGLIS JOAN BROWN LUIS JIMENEZ GARY STEPHAN LAWRENCE WEINER LYNN GUMPERT NED RIFKIN MARCIA TUCKER THE NEW MUSEUM EARLYWORK THE NEW MUSEUM 65 Fiflh Avenue New York, NY 10003 April 3-June 3, 1982 Thisexhibition is supported by a grant lrom the STAFF Patrick Savin National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, O.C., Robin Dodds Herman Schwartiman a Federal Agency, and is made possible in part by Nina Garfinkel Marcia Tucker public runds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Lynn Gumpert John Jacobs ACTIVITIES COUNCIL Bonnie Johnson Isabel Berley Library ol Congress catalog No.: 61-61167 Ed Jones Marilyn Butler Copyright C> 1962 The New Museum Dieter Morris Kearse Arlene Dolt 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003 Marie Reidelbach Elliot Leonard Rosemary Ricchio Lola Goldring Joan Brown and Lawrence Weiner interviews copyright Ned Rifkin Nanette Leitman O 1982 Lynn Gumpert Maureen Stewart Dorothy Sahn Marcia Tucker Laura Skoler Lynda Benglis and Gary Stephan interviews copyright Jock Thuman C> 1982 Ned Rifkin OFFICE AND TECHNICAL Joanne Brackley Luis Jimenez interview copyright Jennifer Q. Smith INTERNS AND VOLUNTEERS O 1982 Marcia Tucker Sharon Quinn Lee Arthur Bill Black BOARD OF TRUSTEES Jeanne Breitbart Jack Boulton Sondra Celerraso Elaine Oannheisser Marvin Coats John Filling Susannah Hardaway Allen Goldring Jimmy llson Nanette Laitman Marcia Landsman Natalie Sandra Lang Gregg McCarty J, Patrick Lannan Elvira Rohr Vora G. List Ethel Singer Henry Luce III Marjorie Solow Denis O'Brien Carlos Sueiios Brian O'Ooherty Molissa Wolf Acknowledgments Like all exhibitions at The New Museum, E:orly Workcould not have taken place without the very able erforls and cooperation of many individuals. Among the staff al The New Museum, we would especially like to thank Robin Dodds and Nina Garfinkel for collaborating on the catalog production, and John Jacobs and Maria Reidelbach for arranging the shipping and installing the show, aided by faithful and tireless volunteers. We also would like to express our appreciation to Tim Yohn for editing the interviews, to Joe Del Valle for designing the catalog, and to Liz Brown for her conscientious research of bibliographic material. assisted by interns Lee Arthur, Gregg McCarty, and Marjorie Solow. Because of the nature of this exhibition, which focuses on work made over a decade ago, many pieoes were borrowed from private coHeciions. We wish to thank those lenders who prefer to remain anonymous and the following people who generously loaned work to the exhibition: John Alexander, Jim and Irene Branson, Burrill Crohn, Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Dootson, Joseph Kosuth, Dr. George Marsh, Monroe Meyerson, John Lane Paxton, Holly and Horace Solomon, Anton van Dalen, and Richard Wlckslrum. We are also Indebted to the following for their generous and thnely assistance: Patty Brundage of Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films, Phillip Bruno of Staemp£Ji Gallery, Leo Castelli of Leo Castelli Gallery, Paula Coopor of Paula Cooper Gallery, Allan Frumkin of Allan Frumkin Gallery, and Dorothy Goldeen of Hansen Puller Goldeen Gallery, We ore deeply grateful lo the National Endowment lor the Aris and lo the New York State Council on the Arts for their continued support. Most of all we would like to thank the five artists for enabling us, In looking back, to share with us their reflections on their earJy work. Lynn Gumpert Ned Rifkin Marcia Tucker 3 Introduction Jimenez. drew her subject matter from her immediate environ• ment, using home, family, pets, and domestic objects as dominant images in large paintings and smaller three The New Museum's inaugural exhibition, Eorly Work by Five dimensional pieces which, even in the San Francisco Bay Area Contemporary Artists, opened in November 1977. It was where a figurative tr-aditlonwas strong, were controversial. planned as the first in a series whose Intention was lo recoup Lynda Benglis and Cary Stephan, whose work was non• our recent history, to discover and enjoy key works, which had objective, were nonetheless experimenting with the use or not been seen by the public, by artists now in mid-career. These unconventional materials and forms. Stephan's paintings were works had remained unknown for a variety of reasons, either constructed by pouring resin into a framework from which it because the artists were not well-known at that tiine, or was later removed, so that the entire painting became its own because the work was considered to be outside the issues then support, and Benglis's poured two-dimensional latex floor under critical lnvesllgalion, or because the artists themselves pieces challenged traditional sculptural definitions in their simply were not interested in showing them at that moment. ln concern for painting issues. some cases the work had been seen, but by a limited audience. Since the way we see a work of art and what we think about it These artists, each in their own way, exhibited a deep concern are determined in large part by the context in which it is with ideas and events outside the world of art. Their human• shown, it seems instructive to present, ten year-s later, some of istic attitudes seemed almost anachronistic in the light of the the pieces that were essential to the artists' subsequent more formal "'artfor art's sake" stance prevalent at the lime. development. Joan Brown's early work. with its seeming stylistic inconsls• tency, extreme romanticism, deliberately awkward rendering Lynda Benglis, Joan Brown, Luis Jimenez. Gary Stephan. and and black humor, was very much apart froin the mainstream. Lawr-enceWeiner are artists whose work of the late 1960s and She has drawn not only from direct personal experience but early '70s emerged, for the most part, outside of New York. also from other times and places as wel1. ''Taste," she says, "is With the exception or Jimenez, who has lived in Texas and New only what we're exposed to. What's commonplace in one Mexico for most of his career, all the artists spent a con culture is exotic in another." More recently, she has chronicled siderable amount of time in California. Brown, a native of San her experience as a long•distance swimmer and her travels in Francisco, has remained there: Weiner and Stephan worked such fa.r--offplaces as China and India. Brown's overriding and studied respectively in the Bay Area £or several years: and concern is that .. ,he subject matter is really a vehicle through Benglis worked in the Los Angeles area and traveled back and which to speak about larger issues, or the human condilion as I forth to the East Coast for years. see and experience it.'" Their recent work differs considerably, but their early work, Jimenez's and Brown's sensibilities are similar in their use or ranging from about 1963 lo 1974, is marked by its strongly figuration, and the fact that their work evolved in a critical idiosyncratic nature. None of the artists, who are for the most climate basically antithetical to the figurative esthetic. Jimenez, part in their late thirties or early forties, considered themselves however, unlike Brown, has been stylistically consistent, and to be part of a mainstream sensibility. Lawrence Weiner displays an extraordinary degree of technical virtuosity and comments upon the fact that his work was misunderstood in draughtsmanship in his pieces. ii is in their subject matter and the context of late 1960's minimalism, and that its cate• their pub1ic nature that Jimenez's early pieces demonstrate gorization as ..conceptual" art was incorrect. Luis Jimenez also their independence. His cast fiberglass sculptures, almost worked outside the prevalent eslhetic, making figurative, byzantine in their intensity of color, light, and surfac.e, ironi monumental fiberglass sculpture and drawings which indi cally became more accessible the larger they became. By cated strong political and social concerns. Joan Brown, like drawing upon the images and experiences of his own culture, 4 Jimenez was able to resolve what he saw as a basic conlradic construct and an object In the real world. The problem, as he tion between his political and social concerns, and his esthetic sees it, is how to "collapse the distance between fictive and interests. "Jf art has a function at all," he says, -H's to make active space," to stop "that terrible rupture between the mind people aware or what it's like to be living now, in this period of and the body." By making paintings which were not separated time, in this place." from "real" space by a frame, and in which the body of the work and the images created were identical. he attempted to bridge Lawrence Weiner's work takes the form or situations that elicit that dichotomy. What Stephan wanted was to make a "kind of responses, rather than that of objects. His early work, which ecstatic space." He sees the artist's task as one of"resurrecting was site�specific, often utilized ephemeral found materials, painting's function, taking it out of bourgeois democracy into a placed in inaccessible spaces, and addressed issues or kind of inspirational category again, making it an instrument language, philosophy and theater, as well as art. Weiner sees for transcendence." his refusal to work in the more lraditional painting and sculptural modes as anti-authoritarian, and has focused on the Perhaps most important is the understanding that, for these process or act or making work and on the changing context of artists, art serves a function and addresses a public larger than the materials as they are used. Art. for Weiner, has always been that or lhe art world. Since their first mature work evolved in about "the way human beings understand their relationships to an intellectual and esthetlc climate that nurtured a rigorous materials and objects." Although Weiner does not consider formal approach to art issues, these artists found themselves himself a humanist, his work addresses larger issues in its "swimming upstream," so lo speak, in terms of their processes.